Collins and Kristof

In “Waiting for Somebody” Ms. Collins says the new documentary “Waiting for Superman” gives a heartbreaking depiction of the sorry state of American education.  Mr. Kristof, in “Chronicle of a Genocide Foretold,” says another bloody war and genocide is brewing in Sudan in the coming months. The Obama administration needs to take a tougher stance.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

Let’s talk for a minute about education.

Already, I can see readers racing for the doors. This is one of the hardest subjects in the world to write about. Many, many people would rather discuss … anything else. Sports. Crazy Tea Party candidates. Crop reports.

So kudos to the new documentary “Waiting for Superman” for ratcheting up the interest level. It follows the fortunes of five achingly adorable children and their hopeful, dedicated, worried parents in Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C., as they try to gain entrance to high-performing charter schools. Not everybody gets in, and by the time you leave the theater you are so sad and angry you just want to find something to burn down.

My own particular, narrow wrath was focused on the ritual at the heart of the movie, where parents and kids sit nervously in an auditorium, holding their lottery numbers while somebody pulls out balls and announces the lucky winners of seats in next fall’s charter school class. The lucky families jump up and down and scream with joy while the losing parents and kids cry. In some of the lotteries, there are 20 heartbroken children for every happy one.

Charter schools, please, stop. I had no idea you selected your kids with a piece of performance art that makes the losers go home feeling like they’re on a Train to Failure at age 6. You can do better. Use the postal system.

On a more sweeping level, the film has sparked a great debate about American education. The United States now ranks near the bottom of the industrialized countries when it comes to reading and math. It’s not so much that schools here have gotten worse. It’s just that for the last several decades, almost everybody else has gotten better. Finland, what’s your secret?

The director of “Waiting for Superman,” Davis Guggenheim, says he’s not offering an answer: “It’s not ‘pro’ anything or ‘anti’ anything. It’s really: ‘Why can’t we have enough great schools?’ ”

But plot-wise, the movie seems to suggest that what’s needed is more charter schools, which get taxpayer dollars but are run outside the regular system, unencumbered by central bureaucracy or, in most cases, unions. However, about halfway through, the narrator casually mentions that only about a fifth of American charter schools “produce amazing results.”

In fact, a study by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes found that only 17 percent did a better job than the comparable local public school, while more than a third did “significantly worse.” I’m still haunted by a debate I stumbled across in the Texas Legislature a decade ago in which conservatives repelled any attempt to impose accountability standards on the state’s charter schools, even after only 37 percent of the charter students passed state academic achievement tests, compared with 80 percent of the public schoolchildren. There’s something about an unfettered school that lifts the hearts of the Born Free crowd.

Then there’s the matter of teachers’ unions. Guggenheim is the man who got us worried about global warming in “An Inconvenient Truth.” In his new film, the American Federation of Teachers, a union, and its president, Randi Weingarten, seem to be playing the role of carbon emissions. The movie’s heroes are people like the union-fighting District of Columbia schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, and Geoffrey Canada, the chief of the much-praised, union-free Harlem Children’s Zone.

“I want to be able to get rid of teachers that we know aren’t able to teach kids,” says Canada.

That’s unarguable, and the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program has turned out to be a terrific engine for forcing politicians and unions and education experts to create better ways to get rid of inept or lazy teachers. But there’s no evidence that teachers’ unions are holding our schools back. Finland, which is currently cleaning our clock in education scores, has teachers who are almost totally unionized. The states with the best student performance on standardized tests tend to be the ones with the strongest teachers’ unions.

Older teachers tend to respond to calls for education reform with cynicism because they’ve been down this road so many times before. In 1955, a best seller, “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” stunned the country with its description of a 12-year-old who suffered from being “exposed to an ordinary American school.” Since then, the calls for reform have come as regularly as the locusts. Social promotion has been eliminated repeatedly, schools have been made bigger, then smaller.

But dwelling on that won’t get us anywhere. Right now, the public is engaged. The best charter schools are laboratories for new ideas. But the regular public schools are where American education has to be saved. We can do better. Superman hasn’t arrived. But we may be ready to fly.

Now here’s Mr. Kristof:

The global refrain about genocide is “Never Again,” but we may be watching how that slips into “One More Time.”

The place is southern Sudan, and the timetable is the next few months. The South, which holds more than 75 percent of Sudan’s oil, is scheduled to hold a referendum on Jan. 9 on seceding from the rest of Sudan. Here’s how one more time might unfold:

DEC. 10, 2010 Word trickles out of massacres and widespread rapes by tribal militias from the North in the boiling borderlands between North and South. The North denies responsibility.

DEC. 15 The chairman of the referendum commission (from the North) calls on the South to postpone the vote for “just one month,” pointing to insecurity and to inadequate preparations for voting. The South insists that the referendum will go on as scheduled. The North angrily responds that the vote would then be illegal.

JAN. 9, 2011 The referendum is held in secure areas of South Sudan. But it is poorly planned, and there are widespread irregularities. There is no voting in Abyei, an oil-rich area at the border of North and South, partly because the North has moved in 80,000 Misseriya Arabs who must be allowed to vote, it says, swamping the permanent residents.

JAN. 18 The South declares that 91 percent of voters have chosen secession. The North denounces the vote, saying it was illegal, tainted by violence and fraud, and invalid because the turnout fell below the 60 percent threshold required.

JAN. 20 The South issues a unilateral declaration of independence.

JAN. 25 Tribal militias from the North sweep through South Sudan villages, killing and raping inhabitants and driving them south. The governor of a border state in the North, Ahmad Haroun, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and organizing the janjaweed militia in Darfur, denies that he is now doing the same thing in the South.

JAN. 28 Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, dispatches armed forces to seize oil wells in the South. “The breakdown of security impels us to take this action to protect the nation’s natural resources,” Mr. Bashir says. “We will continue to share revenue with the South while seeking peaceful solution of our disagreements.”

FEB. 10 With hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the attacks, South Sudan collapses into chaos. “How can those people think that they can run a country?” asks Mr. Bashir. He calls for “peaceful negotiation with our brothers to resolve these problems and restore unity.”

FEB. 15 Warfare ripples through the Nuba Mountains and then Darfur as well. Militias now cover up massacres by hiding bodies in wells to reduce the risk of war crimes prosecutions.

O.K., my one prediction is that events won’t unfold precisely like that. But President Bashir seems emboldened, and I fear we’re on a track toward Sudan being the world’s bloodiest war in 2011.

The Obama administration is, belatedly, now heavily engaged in Sudan. I met Mr. Obama and his aides last week to talk about Sudan, and the White House seems as focused on Sudan as on any international issue, with daily meetings on how to avoid war. That’s terrific.

The carrots being offered to Khartoum by Mr. Obama are juicy and smart. The White House has lined up other countries to apply pressure on North and South, and it now is twisting arms for a deal on Abyei. All this is a huge step forward.

But there’s a fatal flaw: I see no evidence of serious sticks. Put yourself in President Bashir’s shoes. It may still be in his interest to plan a genocidal strategy in the coming months if that will enable him to keep the oil. Even privately, we haven’t laid out strong enough disincentives.

In contrast, the Bush administration mapped out exactly what would happen to Sudan if it did not share intelligence on Osama bin Laden. C.I.A. officers met in a London hotel with two top Sudanese leaders. An excellent new book from Yale University Press, “Sudan,” reports that the C.I.A. officers explained that America would use bombers or cruise missiles to destroy the oil refinery at Port Sudan, the port itself and the pipeline carrying oil to the port.

Sudan decided to cooperate.

Likewise, a former special envoy for Sudan, Ambassador Richard Williamson, suggested in memos to the Bush White House a series of other tough sticks to gain leverage. The Obama administration still hasn’t picked them up.

Why shouldn’t we privately make it clear to Mr. Bashir that if he initiates genocide, his oil pipeline will be destroyed and he will not be exporting any oil?

Yes, that would be a dangerous and uncertain game. But the present strategy appears to be failing, and the result may be yet another preventable genocide that we did not prevent.

Friedman, solo

MoDo is off today.  The Moustache of Wisdom had a spasm of what passes for cleverness for him and produced “The Tea Kettle Movement” in which he says the Tea Party you’ve read about is just letting off steam. The one you haven’t is still looking for a leader with a real plan for action.  He actually seems to believe there’s still a creature called a “moderate Republican.”  Someone please tell him they’ve been extinct for at least 2 years now…  Here he is:

There are actually two Tea Party movements in America today: one you’ve read about that is not that important and one you’ve not read about that could become really important if the right politician understood how to tap into it.

The Tea Party that has gotten all the attention, the amorphous, self-generated protest against the growth in government and the deficit, is what I’d actually call the “Tea Kettle movement” — because all it’s doing is letting off steam.

That is not to say that the energy behind it is not authentic (it clearly is) or that it won’t be electorally impactful (it clearly might be). But affecting elections and affecting America’s future are two different things. Based on all I’ve heard from this movement, it feels to me like it’s all steam and no engine. It has no plan to restore America to greatness.

The Tea Kettle movement can’t have a positive impact on the country because it has both misdiagnosed America’s main problem and hasn’t even offered a credible solution for the problem it has identified. How can you take a movement seriously that says it wants to cut government spending by billions of dollars but won’t identify the specific defense programs, Social Security, Medicare or other services it’s ready to cut — let alone explain how this will make us more competitive and grow the economy?

And how can you take seriously a movement that sat largely silent while the Bush administration launched two wars and a new entitlement, Medicare prescription drugs — while cutting taxes — but is now, suddenly, mad as hell about the deficit and won’t take it anymore from President Obama? Say what? Where were you folks for eight years?

The issues that upset the Tea Kettle movement — debt and bloated government — are actually symptoms of our real problem, not causes. They are symptoms of a country in a state of incremental decline and losing its competitive edge, because our politics has become just another form of sports entertainment, our Congress a forum for legalized bribery and our main lawmaking institutions divided by toxic partisanship to the point of paralysis.

The important Tea Party movement, which stretches from centrist Republicans to independents right through to centrist Democrats, understands this at a gut level and is looking for a leader with three characteristics. First, a patriot: a leader who is more interested in fighting for his country than his party. Second, a leader who persuades Americans that he or she actually has a plan not just to cut taxes or pump stimulus, but to do something much larger — to make America successful, thriving and respected again. And third, someone with the ability to lead in the face of uncertainty and not simply whine about how tough things are — a leader who believes his job is not to read the polls but to change the polls.

Democratic Pollster Stan Greenberg told me that when he does focus groups today this is what he hears: “People think the country is in trouble and that countries like China have a strategy for success and we don’t. They will follow someone who convinces them that they have a plan to make America great again. That is what they want to hear. It cuts across Republicans and Democrats.”

To me, that is a plan that starts by asking: what is America’s core competency and strategic advantage, and how do we nurture it? Answer: It is our ability to attract, develop and unleash creative talent. That means men and women who invent, build and sell more goods and services that make people’s lives more productive, healthy, comfortable, secure and entertained than any other country.

Leadership today is about how the U.S. government attracts and educates more of that talent and then enacts the laws, regulations and budgets that empower that talent to take its products and services to scale, sell them around the world — and create good jobs here in the process. Without that, we can’t afford the health care or defense we need.

This is the plan the real Tea Party wants from its president. To implement it would require us to actually raise some taxes — on, say, gasoline — and cut others — like payroll taxes and corporate taxes. It would require us to overhaul our immigration laws so we can better control our borders, let in more knowledge workers and retain those skilled foreigners going to college here. And it would require us to reduce some services — like Social Security — while expanding others, like education and research for a 21st-century economy.

In other words, it will require a very smart, subtle and focused plan to use our now diminishing resources in the most efficient way possible to get back to our core competency. That is the only long-term solution to our problem — to grow our way out of debt with American workers who are more empowered and educated to compete.

Any Tea Party that says the simple answer is just shrinking government and slashing taxes might be able to tip the midterm elections in its direction. But it can’t tip America in the right direction. There is a Tea Party for that, but it’s still waiting for a leader.

Brooks, Cohen and Herbert

Bobo, who was born in Toronto, grew up in New York, went to college in Chicago, and lives in Bethesda, has decided he’s an expert on California.  In “Tom Joad Gave Up” he has a question:  Remember what good government looks like? He gurgles that revisiting California’s golden age might help.  Typical Bobo crap.  Mr. Cohen, in “The New American Normal,” says as the U.S. descends into tribal division, expect the “animal spirits” to keep on hoarding.  Mr. Herbert asks “What Is Paladino About?”  He says the Republican candidate for governor in New York has a lot more explaining to do before Election Day.  Here’s Bobo:

Sometimes it’s hard to remember what good government looks like: government that disciplines itself but looks to the long term; government that inspires trust; government that promotes social mobility without busting the budget.

That kind of government existed for decades right here in California. Between 1911 and the ’60s, California had a series of governors — like Hiram Johnson, Earl Warren, Goodwin Knight and Pat Brown — who were pro-market and pro-business, but also progressive reformers.

They rode a great wave of prosperity, and people flocked to the Golden State, but they used the fruits of that prosperity in a disciplined way to lay the groundwork for even more growth. They built an outstanding school and university system. They started a series of gigantic public works projects that today are seen as engineering miracles. These included monumental water projects, harbors and ports, the sprawling highway system and even mental health facilities.

They disdained partisanship. They continually reorganized government to make it more businesslike and cost effective. “Thus,” the historian Kevin Starr has written, “California progressivism contained within itself both liberal and conservative impulses, as judged by the standards of today.”

Most important, California progressives focused on the middle class. By the end of these years, California enjoyed the highest living standards in the country. The core of the state’s strength was in the suburbs. Between 1945 and 1950 alone, the San Fernando Valley doubled in population. In one 12-month period, between 1959 and 1960, Valley residents applied for 6,000 swimming pool permits.

In fits and starts, California’s progressive model has been abandoned. The state’s current economic decline and political stagnation is a result of that abandonment. Now California government has all the dysfunctions that mark national government, but at a more advanced stage.

Both parties helped kill off California’s pro-market progressivism. Some assaults came from the left. First, there was the growing power of the public sector employee unions. These unions began lobbying for richer salaries and pensions. That, of course, is their job. But in the 1970s, governors started caving in. Money that could have gone into development went into prison guard benefits. Infrastructure spending, for example, has dropped from 20 percent of the state budget to 3 percent.

Then there was the growing power of the environmental movement. In the 1960s, environmental groups protested against the excesses of the infrastructure boom. Many of their complaints were absolutely legitimate. But over the years, environmental concern transmogrified into a “small is beautiful” ideology. A new cadre of activists arose — hostile to suburbia, skeptical of capitalism and eager to impose greater regulations and costs on small businesses.

As Joel Kotkin of Chapman University has pointed out, the interests of the affluent class along the coasts began to crowd out the interests of the middle-class suburbanites and agricultural workers further inland. “The result,” he writes, “is two separate California realities: a lucrative one for the wealthy and for government workers, who are largely insulated from economic decline; and a grim one for the private-sector middle and working classes, who are fleeing the state.”

Another assault on California progressivism came from the right. Conservatives refused to acknowledge the public sector’s role in creating the state’s prosperity. With Proposition 13 and other measures that cut taxes, they cut off revenue and pushed through structural reforms, making it hard for future administrations to raise funds. Many on the right became unwilling to think creatively about using government to promote prosperity.

The result is a state in crisis. Eighty-two percent of Californians say they believe their state is heading in the wrong direction, according to this week’s University of Southern California/Los Angeles Times survey. State growth has lagged behind national growth. Unemployment is at 12.4 percent statewide and at catastrophic levels in the Central Valley. More people are leaving California for Oklahoma and Texas than came here during the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s. Tom Joad is giving up.

Meanwhile, the political set is an embarrassment. As jobs disappear, legislators are fixated on transgender rights and deals for lobbyists. Legislators are polarized and gridlocked. The pension system is $300 billion in the red, and the state hops from one fiscal crisis to the next.

The answer is to return to the tradition of pro-market progressivism that built modern California in the first place. Except this time, it can’t be about building up the ’50s-style suburbs. It needs to focus on supporting the immigrant entrepreneurs, averting state bankruptcy and unleashing the industrial and agricultural base.

The antigovernment conservatives and the unions have built institutions and bases of support. The heirs to the pro-market progressive tradition have not. What’s needed is not a revolution, but a restoration and a modernization of what California once had.

Here’s Mr. Cohen, writing from London:

The “animal spirits” of which Keynes spoke are on the prowl across the United States. Their mood is ugly. The spirits are wary and troubled. Corporations and individuals are hoarding cash, when they have any, because they’re not buying into the recovery.

On a weeklong visit, I found a mood of deep unease in an America that seems to have descended into tribalism — not ethnic, but political, economic and social. Uncertainty is pervasive. The government’s rescue of Wall Street combined with the acute difficulties of a middle class struggling to get by on stagnant or falling incomes has sharpened resentments.

This is not a momentary phenomenon. Nobody seems to think unemployment is going to fall significantly from 9.6 percent — a level more often associated with France — in the near future. Get used to the new normal.

I spoke to a retired Wall Street executive who got out a few years back and set up a small business where he had to make payroll (sobering), but was freed from the debilitating short-termism of financial institutions that, over his career, had become dominated by traders “who look at economic opportunity rather than economic conditions.”

He said the final straw came in 2002. Top executives at the bank where he worked gathered to discuss their bonuses. The issue before them was whether to maintain those bonuses in a time of economic contraction, which would require firing 5 percent of the workforce, or take a 25 percent bonus cut, which would allow those jobs to be kept.

“The guy running the meeting asked for a show of hands on who would accept a reduced bonus,” he said. “There were 30 of us in the room. Three raised their hands. I was one of them.”

The job losses went through, this executive left, and the bank today is still trying to claw out from its uncontrolled excess.

America is a land of associations. Solidarity has not vanished from the land. But it’s in retreat. None of those guys who wanted all their yummy money was anything but rich.

Fragmentation holds sway. The stock market used to be a fair proxy for the state of the economy. Now it’s a market of traders, not investors. They want to know what the spread is today and tomorrow; they can make money on the way up or down; they care far less about U.S.A. Inc.

So the market goes where it goes — up of late but largely directionless (which makes it harder on those up-or-down traders) — while out on Main Street the struggle to make family payroll continues. People work longer hours, they juggle how to cover their kids’ needs, how to de-leverage just a little — and they’re still meant to “consume” for the economy’s sake.

The share of national income held by the top 1 percent of American families has doubled in recent decades to 20 percent. That’s a huge shift. I spoke to Doug Severance, a Vietnam vet who’s a hotel employee in Aspen, Colorado. “When I moved here in 1984 we were all family,” he said. “Now either you arrive in a Lear Jet or you’re a servant.”

Obama hope has dissipated in short order. He’s not entirely to blame and he’s not blameless. The exclamation from Velma Hart, a black Obama supporter, at a recent town hall meeting — “I’m exhausted of defending you,” — struck a national chord because so many people feel the same thing.

Arriving from the U.K., it was the uncertainty that was most striking. That’s about the worst thing for an economy. As one Chicago executive put it to me, people who are creative rise above a consistently applied set of rules. Opacity kills.

Britain has similar post-binge economic problems — of personal and national debt and spiraling deficits. But Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron and his Liberal Democrat partners have actually put bipartisanship to work — did any Republicans notice? They are looking to lock in five years of stability through a new law and push through painful cuts across government departments.

Five years is a decent stretch. In America today, quarter-to-quarter concerns hem in even a visionary chief executive.

The policy debate in the United States is head-spinning. Nobody knows if there’s going to be more fiscal stimulus, after the first $787 billion, or how a row over taxes will end. Under an Obama proposal, Bush-era tax cuts are due to expire at year-end for affluent couples and small business owners earning over $250,000. Republicans are digging in, saying it’s crazy to raise taxes in a faltering economy.

It’s not crazy. Ending the tax cuts for the rich is a minimum signal for a divided land, a statement that the two Americas are acquainted with each other. But with Obama facing a stinging midterm defeat, it looks like a long shot. What is needed above all is some clarity and sense of direction — the kind Cameron has given in London and booming China consistently applies.

Without that expect the animal spirits to keep on hoarding, an inward-looking America bent on retrenchment, and a new normal that lasts and lasts.

Lord, I’m glad I’m an old fart and don’t have children…  Here’s Mr. Herbert:

Is the Republican candidate for governor of New York a racist, sexist, pornography-loving creep? Or are there other, more benign, explanations for the stomach-turning e-mails distributed by Carl Paladino?

One of the things that can happen in the news business is that some portion of a story becomes so vile, so offensive, it is virtually impossible to effectively recount or describe. Reporters keep their distance. Editors lunge for the delete button.

Such is the case with the images and videos forwarded by Mr. Paladino to a wide variety of people. The public should know about these mailings, and Mr. Paladino should give a full, thoughtful explanation of why he trafficked in such filth.

Example: A photo showing a group of black men trying to get out of the way of an airplane that is apparently moving across a field. The caption reads: “Run niggers, run.”

Example: A doctored photo of President and Mrs. Obama showing the president in a stereotypical pimp’s costume holding the hand of the first lady, who is dressed as a prostitute in a grotesquely revealing outfit.

Example: A video clip of a nude couple engaged in intercourse with the title: “Miss France [expletive].” Mr. Paladino characterized it as “a keeper.”

Example: An image showing a woman performing a sexual act on a horse.

There are many more. Mr. Paladino has acknowledged forwarding the e-mails, which he said was evidence of “poor judgment” on his part. But that’s not sufficient. The e-mails raise legitimate questions about the fitness of the sender to hold the highest office in the state, and Mr. Paladino should feel an obligation to put those questions to rest.

The images and videos are so blatantly hostile to blacks and women that it’s fair to wonder whether Mr. Paladino is prejudiced against them. He’s made it clear that he’s fully capable of mindless stereotyping — letting us know, for example, that people from Manhattan, who tend to be “smug” and “elitist,” are his least favorite New Yorkers.

Questions about possible prejudice are germane whenever a candidate aspires to public office. In Mr. Paladino’s case, the questions are entwined with some of his specific policy positions. He believes that space in prisons should be turned into work camps in which poor people would get, among other types of training, classes in personal hygiene. The camps would be part of Mr. Paladino’s proposed “Dignity Corps,” the inference being that the poor lack dignity in the first place, along with their presumed lack of cleanliness. (It’s a good bet that Mr. Paladino is oblivious to the extreme irony of someone who sends out racist and pornographic e-mails counseling others about personal dignity.)

But while aiming to bolster the sagging dignity of poor New Yorkers, Mr. Paladino would simultaneously hack away at their health care. He has said that one of his first acts as governor would be to cut Medicaid — which provides health services to the poor — by $20 billion.

On an issue of particular concern to women, Mr. Paladino is opposed to abortion in virtually all instances, including cases of rape and incest. The only exception, according to a spokesman, would be if the life of the woman was at stake.

Michael Caputo, Mr. Paladino’s campaign manager, said the candidate is sorry for sending the e-mails and has apologized a number of times. But when asked to explain why his boss engaged in this pattern of distributing such offensive material, he could only repeat, as Mr. Paladino has: “Bad judgment.”

This does not give voters any insight into how Mr. Paladino really feels about blacks and other minorities; or about women, who just happen to make up half the population of the state that he would be governing; or about the most extreme forms of hard-core pornography.

As for the poor, Mr. Caputo said that Mr. Paladino has at times not fully explained his expansive plans for welfare recipients, failing public school students, and men and women who receive unemployment benefits. He said a Governor Paladino would ask parents of struggling students to send them to state-sponsored boarding schools, which would also house children taken from their parents “because of social service or child welfare reasons.”

He said all recipients of long-term unemployment insurance or welfare services (except for the disabled and mothers with small children) would be required to work (or be re-trained) in government programs in order to get their benefits. This would include, he said, those who are already very well educated.

I don’t think voters quite know what they might be getting with Mr. Paladino. New Yorkers need to hear much more from him.

The Pasty Little Putz and Krugman

The Pasty Little Putz has a question about “The Seduction of the Tea Partiers:” Will the rhetoric of the House Republicans’ Pledge to America win over Tea Party members?  In “Structure of Excuses” Prof. Krugman says “structural” unemployment is a fake problem, which mainly serves as an excuse for not pursuing real solutions.  Here’s the Putz:

On the surface, the Pledge to America that House Republicans unveiled last week, in obvious imitation of Newt Gingrich’s famous Contract With America, feels like a triumph for the Tea Party.

Whereas the Gingrich-era contract was a terse, 865-word list of legislative priorities, the 2010 pledge reads like an expansive, even radical manifesto. It runs to almost 8,000 words, bristles with charts and graphs and inspiring quotations, and includes a lengthy preamble modeled on the Declaration of Independence. And whereas the original contract’s language was carefully poll-tested to appeal to squishy moderates, the pledge has the aggressively small-government tone of a Rand Paul stump speech, complete with attacks on “self-appointed elites,” praise for Americans’ speaking out “in town halls and on public squares,” and pledges “to honor the Constitution as constructed by its framers.”

But style can be deceiving. House Republicans have adopted the atmospherics of the Tea Party movement, but they’ve evaded its most admirable substance.

The Tea Party is a grass-roots movement — wild, woolly and chaotic — which sometimes makes it hard to figure out exactly what it stands for. But to the extent that the movement boasts a single animating idea, it’s the conviction that the Republicans as much as the Democrats have been an accessory to the growth of spending and deficits, and that the Republican establishment needs to be punished for straying from fiscal rectitude.

The Tea Partiers have a point. Officially, the Republican Party stands for low taxes and limited government. But save during the gridlocked 1990s, Republican majorities and Republican presidents have tended to pass tax cuts while putting off spending cuts till a tomorrow that never comes.

Conservatives have justified this failure with two incompatible theories. One is the “starve the beast” conceit, which holds that cutting taxes will force government spending downward. The other is the happy idea that tax cuts actually increase government revenue, making deficit anxieties irrelevant.

The real world hasn’t been kind to either notion. Cutting taxes without cutting spending, the Cato Institute’s William Niskanen has shown, may make voters more likely to support big government, because spending feels like a free lunch. And while some tax cuts can raise government revenue, the income-tax cuts of the Bush years emphatically did not.

To their credit, the House Republicans don’t invoke starve-the-beast in their 2010 pledge, or pretend that renewing the Bush tax cuts would single-handedly push the nation into the black. But their fiscal vision practices the same kind of free-lunchism that the Tea Party supposedly abhors: it promotes low taxes without coming close to identifying the spending cuts required to pay for them.

There’s a sound political rationale for this, of course. Reducing spending is always difficult, and a Republican Party coasting toward a midterm victory has little incentive to stake out controversial positions. And as everybody knows, the only way to really bring the budget into balance is to reform (i.e., cut) Medicare and Social Security, a topic that nobody in Congress — save the indefatigable Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan — is particularly eager to touch.

But that means that the pledge is ultimately less about the triumph of the Tea Partiers, and more about their potential co-option by Republican politics as usual.

That would be unfortunate. Their eccentric elements notwithstanding, the Tea Parties have something vital to offer the country: a vocal, activist constituency for spending cuts at a time when politicians desperately need to have their spines stiffened on the issue. But it’s all too easy to imagine the movement (which, after all, includes a lot of Social Security and Medicare recipients!) being seduced with rhetorical nods to the Constitution, and general promises of spending discipline that never get specific.

It wouldn’t be the first time a mass protest movement won a rhetorical victory without achieving a lasting policy shift. The antiwar movement, for instance, seemed to effectively take over the Democratic Party in the middle years of the Bush administration. But here we are, two years into a Democratic presidency, and Gitmo is still open, the U.S. is still in Iraq, and Barack Obama has escalated the war in Afghanistan.

Whether the Tea Party’s zeal for limiting government meets a similar fate may depend on the class of Republicans elected in November. From Sharron Angle in Nevada to Joe Miller in Alaska to Marco Rubio in Florida, many of the party’s insurgent candidates have gone further than the Republican leadership in acknowledging the painful necessity of entitlement cuts — and it hasn’t yet cost them their chances at high office.

Democrats are eager to paint these candidates as dangerously extreme. But on the evidence of last week’s pledge, a little more extremism in the defense of fiscal responsibility is exactly what the Republican Party needs.

Oh, that’s fracking rich.  Fiscal responsibility?  Republicans?  The terms are mutually exclusive, unless you think what happened under Bush II was “responsible.”  Asshole.  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

What can be done about mass unemployment? All the wise heads agree: there are no quick or easy answers. There is work to be done, but workers aren’t ready to do it — they’re in the wrong places, or they have the wrong skills. Our problems are “structural,” and will take many years to solve.

But don’t bother asking for evidence that justifies this bleak view. There isn’t any. On the contrary, all the facts suggest that high unemployment in America is the result of inadequate demand — full stop. Saying that there are no easy answers sounds wise, but it’s actually foolish: our unemployment crisis could be cured very quickly if we had the intellectual clarity and political will to act.

In other words, structural unemployment is a fake problem, which mainly serves as an excuse for not pursuing real solutions.

Who are these wise heads I’m talking about? The most widely quoted figure is Narayana Kocherlakota, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, who has attracted a lot of attention by insisting that dealing with high unemployment isn’t a Fed responsibility: “Firms have jobs, but can’t find appropriate workers. The workers want to work, but can’t find appropriate jobs,” he asserts, concluding that “It is hard to see how the Fed can do much to cure this problem.”

Now, the Minneapolis Fed is known for its conservative outlook, and claims that unemployment is mainly structural do tend to come from the right of the political spectrum. But some people on the other side of the aisle say similar things. For example, former President Bill Clinton recently told an interviewer that unemployment remained high because “people don’t have the job skills for the jobs that are open.”

Well, I’d respectfully suggest that Mr. Clinton talk to researchers at the Roosevelt Institute and the Economic Policy Institute, both of which have recently released important reports completely debunking claims of a surge in structural unemployment.

After all, what should we be seeing if statements like those of Mr. Kocherlakota or Mr. Clinton were true? The answer is, there should be significant labor shortages somewhere in America — major industries that are trying to expand but are having trouble hiring, major classes of workers who find their skills in great demand, major parts of the country with low unemployment even as the rest of the nation suffers.

None of these things exist. Job openings have plunged in every major sector, while the number of workers forced into part-time employment in almost all industries has soared. Unemployment has surged in every major occupational category. Only three states, with a combined population not much larger than that of Brooklyn, have unemployment rates below 5 percent.

Oh, and where are these firms that “can’t find appropriate workers”? The National Federation of Independent Business has been surveying small businesses for many years, asking them to name their most important problem; the percentage citing problems with labor quality is now at an all-time low, reflecting the reality that these days even highly skilled workers are desperate for employment.

So all the evidence contradicts the claim that we’re mainly suffering from structural unemployment. Why, then, has this claim become so popular?

Part of the answer is that this is what always happens during periods of high unemployment — in part because pundits and analysts believe that declaring the problem deeply rooted, with no easy answers, makes them sound serious.

I’ve been looking at what self-proclaimed experts were saying about unemployment during the Great Depression; it was almost identical to what Very Serious People are saying now. Unemployment cannot be brought down rapidly, declared one 1935 analysis, because the work force is “unadaptable and untrained. It cannot respond to the opportunities which industry may offer.” A few years later, a large defense buildup finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy’s needs — and suddenly industry was eager to employ those “unadaptable and untrained” workers.

But now, as then, powerful forces are ideologically opposed to the whole idea of government action on a sufficient scale to jump-start the economy. And that, fundamentally, is why claims that we face huge structural problems have been proliferating: they offer a reason to do nothing about the mass unemployment that is crippling our economy and our society.

So what you need to know is that there is no evidence whatsoever to back these claims. We aren’t suffering from a shortage of needed skills; we’re suffering from a lack of policy resolve. As I said, structural unemployment isn’t a real problem, it’s an excuse — a reason not to act on America’s problems at a time when action is desperately needed.

Dowd, Friedman and Kristof

Mr. Rich is off today.  MoDo, in “Slouching Towards Washington,” says the chimeras of politics are spellbinding hybrids who could change the direction of the country.  The Moustache of Wisdom looks at “Their Moon Shot and Ours” and says the United States needs to be in a race with China, not just Al Qaeda. Let’s start with electric cars.  Mr. Kristof, in “Birth Control Over Baldness,” says new contraceptives, still in trials, could be a powerful tool in fighting global poverty.  Here’s MoDo:

Holy Roddy McDowall.

Christine O’Donnell doesn’t understand why monkeys can’t turn into people right before her eyes.

Bill Maher continued his video torment of O’Donnell by releasing another old clip of her on his HBO show on Friday night, this time showing one in which she argued that “Evolution is a myth.”

Maher shot back, “Have you ever looked at a monkey?” To which O’Donnell rebutted, “Why aren’t monkeys still evolving into humans?”

The comedian has a soft spot for the sweet-faced Republican Senate candidate from Delaware, but as he told me on Friday, it’s “powerful stupid to think primate evolution could happen fast enough to observe it. That’s bacteria.

“I find it so much more damaging than the witch stuff because she could be in a position to make decisions about scientific issues, like global warming and stem cells, and she thinks primate evolution can happen in a week and mice have human brains.”

In the Republican primary, O’Donnell beat Congressman Mike Castle, who had the temerity to support stem-cell research and acknowledge global warming. O’Donnell’s numbers are dropping, while Castle is still beating the Democratic candidate, Chris Coons, by almost 20 points in a theoretical matchup.

In 2007, O’Donnell frantically warned Bill O’Reilly, “American scientific companies are crossbreeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains.”

The field of human-animal experiments is dubbed “chimera” research, named for the she-monster in Greek mythology that has a lion’s head, a goat’s body and a serpent’s tail.

Dr. Irving Weissman, director of Stanford’s Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, did the first experiments injecting human brain-forming stem cells into the brains of immune-deficient mice 10 years ago.

He assured me that the mice did not suddenly start acting human. “There were no requests for coffee from Minnie,” he said. “The total number of human brain cells in the mouse brain was less than one in a thousand. I don’t think we would get a mouse with a full human brain. And even if the mouse made it to a human mouse it would still have a mouse-brain offspring.”

Dr. Weissman is sensitive to ethical questions and has tried to ensure that “the nightmare scenario” won’t happen: putting embryonic stem cells into mice at the earliest stages, which could give rise to every tissue in the body including human sperm and eggs, which could lead to two mice mating and the early formation of human fetuses in the body of a mouse.

He is working toward breakthroughs on multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, spinal cord injuries, strokes, breast cancer and a host of other diseases, and is worried by the retrogressive attitude about science and medicine among the new crop of Tea Partiers.

Sarah Palin will believe global warming is a hoax until she’s doing aerial hunting of wolves underwater. And in a 2009 clip, Sharron Angle, the Republican Senate candidate from Nevada, suggested that autism — a word she uttered with air quotes — is a phony rubric. She suggested that people are taking advantage of such maladies to get extra health benefits, adding that she doesn’t see why she should have to subsidize maternity benefits for other people either, especially since, as she said, she’s not having any more babies.

Dr. Weissman said, “The question they should be asked is, if it were their child or wife or selves or parents and there was this whole list of diseases treated by stem cells, would they deny these therapies?”

Maybe the problem is not so much chimeras in science as chimeras in politics.

We seem beset with spellbinding hybrids with the looks of Fox News anchors, the brains of mice and the power of changing the direction of the country.

President Obama was supposed to be a giant leap forward in modernity, the brainy, rational first black president leading us out of the scientific darkness of the W. years. But by letting nutters get a foothold, he may usher us into the past.

Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, John Boehner, Jim DeMint and some Tea Party types don’t merely yearn for the country they idealize from the 1950s. They want to go back to the 1750s.

Joe Miller, the Palin-blessed Republican nominee for Senate in Alaska, suggests that Social Security is unconstitutional because it wasn’t in the Constitution. The Constitution is a dazzling document, but do these originalists really think things haven’t changed since then? If James Madison beamed down now, he would no doubt be stunned at the idea that America had evolved so far but was hemming itself in by the strictest interpretation of his handiwork. He might even tweet about it.

Evolution is no myth, but we may be evolving backward. Christine O’Donnell had better hope they don’t bring back witch burning.

Goodness.  MoDo called the tea partiers nutters.  (As an aside, FYWP.)  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

China is doing moon shots. Yes, that’s plural. When I say “moon shots” I mean big, multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing investments. China has at least four going now: one is building a network of ultramodern airports; another is building a web of high-speed trains connecting major cities; a third is in bioscience, where the Beijing Genomics Institute this year ordered 128 DNA sequencers — from America — giving China the largest number in the world in one institute to launch its own stem cell/genetic engineering industry; and, finally, Beijing just announced that it was providing $15 billion in seed money for the country’s leading auto and battery companies to create an electric car industry, starting in 20 pilot cities. In essence, China Inc. just named its dream team of 16-state-owned enterprises to move China off oil and into the next industrial growth engine: electric cars.

Not to worry. America today also has its own multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing moon shot: fixing Afghanistan.

This contrast is not good. I was recently at a Washington Nationals baseball game. While waiting for a hot dog, I overheard the conversation behind me. A management consultant for a big national firm was telling his colleagues that his job was to “market products to the Department of Homeland Security.” I thought to myself: “Oh, my! Inventing studies about terrorist threats and selling them to the U.S. government, is that an industry now?”

We’re out of balance — the balance between security and prosperity. We need to be in a race with China, not just Al Qaeda. Let’s start with electric cars.

The electric car industry is pivotal for three reasons, argues Shai Agassi, the C.E.O. of Better Place, a global electric car company that next year will begin operating national electric car networks in Israel and Denmark. First, the auto industry was the foundation for America’s manufacturing middle class. Second, the country that replaces gasoline-powered vehicles with electric-powered vehicles — in an age of steadily rising oil prices and steadily falling battery prices — will have a huge cost advantage and independence from imported oil. Third, electric cars are full of power electronics and software. “Think of the applications industry that will be spun out from electric cars,” says Agassi. It will be the iPhone on steroids.

Europe is using $7-a-gallon gasoline to stimulate the market for electric cars; China is using $5-a-gallon and naming electric cars as one of the industrial pillars for its five-year growth plan. And America? President Obama has directed stimulus money at electric cars, but he is unwilling to do the one thing that would create the sustained consumer pull required to grow an electric car industry here: raise taxes on gasoline. Price matters. Sure, the Moore’s Law of electric cars — “the cost per mile of the electric car battery will be cut in half every 18 months” — will steadily drive the cost down, says Agassi, but only once we get scale production going. U.S. companies can do that on their own or in collaboration with Chinese ones. But God save us if we don’t do it at all.

Two weeks ago, I visited the Coda Automotive battery facility in Tianjin, China — a joint venture between U.S. innovators and investors, China’s Lishen battery company and China National Offshore Oil Company. Yes, China’s oil company is using profits to develop batteries.

Kevin Czinger, Coda’s C.E.O., who drove me around Manhattan in his company’s soon-to-be-in-production electric car last week, laid out what is going on. The backbone of the modern U.S. economy was locally made cars powered by locally produced oil. It started us on a huge growth spurt. In recent decades, though, that industry was supplanted by foreign-made cars run on foreign oil, so “now every time we buy a car we’re exporting $15,000 of capital, paying for it with borrowed money and running it on foreign energy sources,” says Czinger. “We’ve gone from autos being a middle-class-making-machine to a middle-class-destroying-machine.” A U.S. electric car/battery industry would reverse that.

The Coda, 14,000 of which will be on the road in California over the next year and can travel 100 miles on one overnight charge, is a combination of Chinese-made batteries and complex American-system electronics — all final-assembled in Oakland (price: $37,000). It is a win-win start-up for both countries.

If we both now create the market incentives for consumers to buy electric cars, and the plug-in infrastructure for people to drive them everywhere, it will be a win-win moon shot for both countries. The electric car industry will flourish in the U.S. and China, and together we’ll tackle the next challenge: using auto battery innovations to build big storage batteries for wind and solar. However, if only China puts the gasoline prices and infrastructure in place, the industry will gravitate there. It will be a moon shot for them, a hobby for us, and you’ll import your new electric car from China just like you’re now importing your oil from Saudi Arabia.

Now here’s Mr. Kristof:

Over the next decade, some astonishing new technologies will spread to fight global poverty. They’re called contraceptives.

This is a high-tech revolution that will affect more people in a more intimate way than almost any other technological stride. The next generation of family planning products will be cheaper, more effective and easier to use — they could be to today’s condoms and diaphragms what a smartphone is to the bricklike cellphones of 20 years ago.

Contraception dates back to ancient Egypt, where amorous couples relied on condoms made of linen. Yet after three millennia, although we can now intercept a missile in outer space, we’re often still outwitted by wandering sperm.

Largely, that’s because research on contraception is pitifully underfunded; if only family planning were treated as seriously as baldness! Contraception research just hasn’t received the resources it deserves, so we have state-of-the-art digital cameras and decades-old family planning methods.

The situation is particularly dire in poor countries, where some 215 million women don’t want to get pregnant yet can’t get their hands on modern contraceptives, according to United Nations figures. One result is continued impoverishment and instability for these countries: it’s impossible to fight poverty effectively when birthrates are sky high.

Yet impressive new contraceptive technologies are in trials and should address this problem. These new products are expected to hit the market in the coming years, in the United States as well as in the developing world.

One is a vaginal ring that releases hormones. There is already such a ring on the market, but it lasts only one month. The new one lasts a year and is being developed by the Population Council, an international nonprofit that researches reproductive health.

This new ring has completed phase III trials on more than 2,200 women in the United States and abroad, and is highly effective, according to Ruth Merkatz, who directs clinical development of the ring for the Population Council. She said that women found it easy to insert the ring themselves, which is crucial in poor countries where there are few health workers. The women’s sexual partners were often unaware of the ring in the trials, and if aware they were untroubled by it, Ms. Merkatz said.

Just as important for accessibility, the rings are likely to be cheap. John Townsend, director of the reproductive health program at the Population Council, estimated that the cost in developing countries would eventually be $5 to $10 for a year of contraception.

Researchers are also beginning to test the rings with other medications. For example, adding a microbicide to the rings may help prevent the spread of H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted infections. Also, researchers are testing whether adding a slow-release compound to a vaginal ring could reduce the risk of certain cancers. Population Council researchers are experimenting with one compound that they say seems to protect breast tissue from cancer.

Another new contraceptive that could have far-reaching impact is the Sino-implant (II), a tiny pair of rods inserted just under the skin (typically in the arm) to release hormones. Other implants are widely used, but one great advantage of the Sino-implant is that it can last four or five years and costs $3 a year or less.

This implant is already on the market in China and Indonesia — 100,000 units were distributed last year — with no safety issues so far. The only drawback is that it requires a trained health worker to insert and remove the implant.

My hunch is that at this point, female readers are seething and muttering something like: Where’s the progress if a woman still has to pump herself full of hormones to avoid pregnancy? Where’s the burden-sharing with men?

That’s a fair point, for the pharmaceuticals developed for men in the reproductive health arena are less about responsibility and more like …Viagra.

Still, I’m happy to report that there are some nifty new technologies in the works for men. One from India is a reversible sterilization. It’s an injection that hardens to create a plug in the duct carrying sperm. To reverse it, a health worker injects a solvent that dissolves the plug. The plan is to introduce this on a broad scale in the next few years.

Meanwhile, researchers in France are developing special male underclothing to raise the testes snug against the body and elevate their temperature, in effect cooking the sperm so that they are infertile. A report for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation says that these “suspensories” provided “long-acting, reliable contraception in multiyear clinical trials, with no impact on testosterone.”

Family planning has long been a missing — and underfunded — link in the effort to overcome global poverty. Half a century after the pill, it’s time to make it a priority and treat it as a basic human right for men and women alike around the world.

Collins and Herbert

Mr. Blow is off today.  Ms. Collins, in “Unhold Us, Senators,” says this country needs one great museum to chart the amazing story of women’s history. A bill now stalled in the Senate would provide exactly that.  Mr. Herbert says “We Haven’t Hit Bottom Yet,” and that while data zealots have declared the end of the Great Recession, its pain is still very real for millions of Americans.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

Congress is staggering toward recess. I’m going to go way out on a limb and guess that they’re not going to accomplish anything major before they leave. But as long as they’re still in town, taking up space, the least they could do is approve the National Women’s History Museum bill.

Honestly, I would not be making this plea if everybody was knee-deep in the budget or reforming the tax structure. But they can barely summon the will to open the mail. And the museum bill always has been uncontroversial. It’s a great idea; it doesn’t cost any money; and virtually everybody in office has already supported some version of it in the past.

The legislation would simply allow a private group, conveniently named National Women’s History Museum, to buy an unlovely piece of federal land on Independence Avenue for the site. “We will pay fair market value and pay for construction,” said Joan Wages, the president. The bill allows five years to raise the money and break ground. If the group fails, the land would revert back to the government, which would get to keep the purchase price.

The problem, Meryl Streep pointed out at a fund-raiser for the museum this week, is getting the government to take the money. At the gala, Duane Burnham, the former chairman of Abbott Laboratories, announced a donation of $1 million in honor of his four granddaughters. Streep then put up $1 million herself.

“I was a little mad that a man did it first,” she later said to me. “I was just jumping on his caboose.” She was en route to London to play Margaret Thatcher in a movie and was inspired to make a grand, albeit non-Thatcherian, gesture.

As Streep likes to point out, Washington already has a postal museum, a textile museum, a spy museum and the Newseum. You may be wondering why there is any problem getting Congressional support for a women’s history museum. Especially since the bill has already passed the House unanimously and come out of its Senate committee with unanimous approval. And since the bill, which is sponsored in the Senate by Susan Collins of Maine, has 23 co-sponsors from both parties. The Senate itself passed a different version of the plan unanimously a few years ago when the museum people were hoping to lease a government building rather than construct a new one.

The answer — and, people, how many times have you heard this story? — is that two senators, Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, have put holds on the bill. A hold is one of those quaint Senate traditions that ensures that each individual member of the chamber will have the power to bring all activity to a screeching and permanent halt.

The bill’s supporters seem to feel that DeMint, who is now famous as a leader of the new Republican far right, is the chief obstacle to getting the project sprung. He was raised by a single mother who helped support her family by running a dance studio. He also has daughters. Perhaps he just puts holds on things as a matter of habit, like a compulsive twitch, and does not have any actual objection to celebrating the American women’s story in the nation’s capital. Perhaps he will call up Collins on Monday and tell her it was all a terrible mistake.

Coburn’s office said the senator was concerned that taxpayers might be asked to chip in later and also felt that the museum was unnecessary since “it duplicates more than 100 existing entities that have a similar mission.”

The office sent me a list of the entities in question. They include the Quilters Hall of Fame in Indiana, the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Texas and the Hulda Klager Lilac Gardens in Washington.

There also were a number of homes of famous women and some fine small collections of exhibits about a particular locality or subject. But, really, Senator Coburn’s list pretty much proved the point that this country really needs one great museum that can chart the whole, big amazing story.

Beginning in the late 1960s, the restrictions and prejudices that had hobbled my sex since the beginning of Western civilization began to be questioned, repudiated and overturned. It happened so fast that it was easy to forget all the women who had dreamed and fought for that moment but never lived to see it. And it was easy for the next generation to grow up unaware of what happened.

I lived through what was perhaps the greatest social shift in the history of our culture. You all did, too, unless you’re young enough to have been born into a brand-new platform of gender equality that was created, really, just for you. There will never be a time more appropriate to celebrate this great fact.

Here’s Mr. Herbert:

Marcus Vogt is 20 years old and homeless. Or, as he puts it, “I’m going through a couch-surfing phase.”

Mr. Vogt is a Wal-Mart employee but he was injured in a car accident and was unable to work for a couple of months. With no income and no health insurance, he quickly found himself unable to pay the rent. Even meals were hard to come by.

(His situation is quite a statement about real life in the United States in the 21st century. On the same day that I spoke with Mr. Vogt, Forbes magazine came out with its list of the 400 most outrageously rich Americans.)

I met Mr. Vogt at Master’s Manna, a food pantry and soup kitchen here that also offers a variety of other services to individuals and families that have fallen on hard times. He told me that his cellphone service has been cut off and he has more than $3,000 in medical bills outstanding. But he was cheerful and happy to report that he’s back at work, although it will take at least a few more paychecks before he’ll have enough money to rent a room.

Other folks who make their way to Master’s Manna are not so upbeat. The Great Recession has long since ended, according to the data zealots in their windowless rooms. But it is still very real to the millions of men and women who wake up each morning to the grim reality of empty pockets and empty cupboards.

Wallingford is nobody’s definition of a depressed community. It’s a middle-class town on the Quinnipiac River. But the number of people seeking help at Master’s Manna is rising, not falling. And when I asked Cheryl Bedore, who runs the program, if she was seeing more clients from the middle class, she said: “Oh, absolutely. We have people who were donors in the past coming to our doors now in search of help.”

The political upheaval going on in the United States right now is being driven by the economic upheaval. It’s sometimes hard to see this clearly amid the craziness and ugliness stirred up by the professional exploiters. But the essential issue is still the economy — the rising tide of poor people and the decline of the middle class. The true extent of the pain has not been widely chronicled.

“The minute you open the doors, it’s like a wave of desperation that’s hitting you,” said Ms. Bedore. “People are depressed, despondent. They’re on the edge, especially those who have never had to ask for help before.”

In recent weeks, a few homeless people with cars have been showing up at Master’s Manna. Ms. Bedore has gotten permission from the local police department for them to park behind her building and sleep in their cars overnight. “We’ve been recognized as a safe haven,” she said.

In two of the cars, she said, were families with children.

It’s not just joblessness that’s driving people to the brink, although that’s a big factor. It’s underemployment, as well. “For many of our families,” said Ms. Bedore, “the 40-hour workweek is over, a thing of the past. They may still have a job, but they’re trying to survive on reduced hours — with no benefits. Some are on forced furloughs.

“Once you start losing the income and you’ve run through your savings, then your car is up for repossession, or you’re looking at foreclosure or eviction. We’re a food pantry, but hunger is only the tip of the iceberg. Life becomes a constant juggling act when the money starts running out. Are you going to pay for your medication? Or are you going to put gas in the car so you can go to work?

“Kids are going back to school now, so they need clothes and school supplies. Where is the money for that to come from? The people we’re seeing never expected things to turn out like this — not at this stage of their lives. Not in the United States. The middle class is quickly slipping into a lower class.”

Similar stories — and worse — are unfolding throughout the country. There are more people in poverty now — 43.6 million — than at any time since the government began keeping accurate records. Nearly 15 million Americans are out of work and home foreclosures are expected to surpass one million this year. The Times had a chilling front-page article this week about the increasing fear among jobless workers over 50 that they will never be employed again.

The politicians seem unable to grasp the immensity of the problem, which is why the policy solutions are so woefully inadequate. During my conversations with Ms. Bedore, she dismissed the very thought that the recession might be over. “Whoever said that was sadly mistaken,” she said. “We haven’t even bottomed-out yet.”

Brooks and Krugman

Bobo’s gabbling on about “The Responsibility Deficit.”  He says over the next two years we’ll probably see political gridlock on stilts. But there are creative ways to reverse it.  And we all know how creative Bobo is…  Prof. Krugman, in “Downhill With the G.O.P.” says these days one of America’s two great political parties routinely makes nonsensical promises. Banana republic, here we come.  Here’s Bobo:

One of the oddities of the current moment is that the country wants a radical change in government but not a radical change in policy.

On the one hand, voters are completely disgusted with Washington. On the other hand, they have not changed their fundamental views on the issues. There has been some shift to the right over the past two years, but the policy landscape looks mostly the way it did over the last few decades. We’re still a closely divided nation; it’s just that we’re angrier about it.

The result is that over the next two years we’ll probably see gridlock on stilts. The energized Republicans will try to reduce the size of government, but they won’t be able to get their bills past President Obama. The surviving Democrats will try to expand government programs, but they will run smack into a closely divided Senate and possibly a Republican-controlled House.

Unable to do anything in the short term, both parties will devote their energies to nothing but campaign gestures for 2012. The rhetoric will fly. Childishness will mount. Public nausea will hit an all-time high.

Somewhere in the country, though, there is a politician who is going to try to lead us out of this logjam. Whoever that person is, I hope he or she is listening carefully to what the public is saying. Because when you listen carefully, you notice the public anger doesn’t quite match the political class anger. The political class is angry about ideological things: bloated government or the predatory rich. The public seems to be angry about values.

The heart of any moral system is the connection between action and consequences. Today’s public anger rises from the belief that this connection has been severed in one realm after another.

Financiers send the world into recession and don’t seem to suffer. Neighbors take on huge mortgages and then just walk away when they go underwater. Washington politicians avoid living within their means. Federal agencies fail and get rewarded with more responsibilities.

What the country is really looking for is a restoration of responsibility. If some smart leader is going to help us get out of ideological gridlock, that leader will reframe politics around this end.

Philip K. Howard has thought hard about the decay of responsibility and what can be done to reverse it. In a series of books ranging from “The Death of Common Sense” to “Life Without Lawyers,” Howard has detailed the ways our political and legal systems undermine personal responsibility.

Over the past several decades, he argues, a thicket of spending obligations, rules and regulations has arisen, which limits individual discretion, narrows room for maneuver and makes it harder to assign responsibility.

Presidents find that more and more of their budgets are precommitted to entitlement spending. Cabinet secretaries find that their agenda can’t really be enacted because 100 million words of existing federal rules and statutes prevent innovation this way and that. Even when a new law is passed, it’s very hard to tell who is responsible for executing it because there is a profusion of agencies and bureaucratic levels all with some share of the pie.

These things weaken individual initiative, discretion and responsibility. But the decay expands well beyond Washington. Teachers don’t really control their classrooms. They have to obey a steady stream of mandates that govern everything from how they treat an unruly child to the way they teach. Doctors don’t really control their practices but must be wary of a capricious malpractice system that could strike at any moment. Local government officials don’t really govern their towns. Their room for maneuver is sharply constrained by federal mandates and by the steady stream of lawsuits that push them in ways defying common sense.

What’s needed, Howard argues, is a great streamlining. He’s not calling for deregulation. It’s about giving teachers, doctors and officials the power to actually make decisions and then holding them accountable. Some of their choices will be wrong, Howard acknowledges, but it is better to live in an imperfect world of individual responsibility than it is to live within a dehumanizing legal thicket that seeks to eliminate risk through a tangle of micromanaging statutes.

Howard proposes expanding specialized health courts, which would be more predictable than the malpractice system. He would lift controls on teachers and civil servants — giving them more freedom but then ending tenure and holding them accountable. He would create commissions to eliminate obsolete laws. He would expand judges’ discretion and end mandatory sentencing.

Howard’s agenda raises some thorny issues. But he has seized the crucial theme of the moment. If bad government undermines responsibility then it should be restructured. And he’s offering one tool a creative politician could use to break through the logjam and help us avoid a truly awful few years.

Now here’s Prof. Krugman:

Once upon a time, a Latin American political party promised to help motorists save money on gasoline. How? By building highways that ran only downhill.

I’ve always liked that story, but the truth is that the party received hardly any votes. And that means that the joke is really on us. For these days one of America’s two great political parties routinely makes equally nonsensical promises. Never mind the war on terror, the party’s main concern seems to be the war on arithmetic. And this party has a better than even chance of retaking at least one house of Congress this November.

Banana republic, here we come.

On Thursday, House Republicans released their “Pledge to America,” supposedly outlining their policy agenda. In essence, what they say is, “Deficits are a terrible thing. Let’s make them much bigger.” The document repeatedly condemns federal debt — 16 times, by my count. But the main substantive policy proposal is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, which independent estimates say would add about $3.7 trillion to the debt over the next decade — about $700 billion more than the Obama administration’s tax proposals.

True, the document talks about the need to cut spending. But as far as I can see, there’s only one specific cut proposed — canceling the rest of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which Republicans claim (implausibly) would save $16 billion. That’s less than half of 1 percent of the budget cost of those tax cuts. As for the rest, everything must be cut, in ways not specified — “except for common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops.” In other words, Social Security, Medicare and the defense budget are off-limits.

So what’s left? Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has done the math. As he points out, the only way to balance the budget by 2020, while simultaneously (a) making the Bush tax cuts permanent and (b) protecting all the programs Republicans say they won’t cut, is to completely abolish the rest of the federal government: “No more national parks, no more Small Business Administration loans, no more export subsidies, no more N.I.H. No more Medicaid (one-third of its budget pays for long-term care for our parents and others with disabilities). No more child health or child nutrition programs. No more highway construction. No more homeland security. Oh, and no more Congress.”

The “pledge,” then, is nonsense. But isn’t that true of all political platforms? The answer is, not to anything like the same extent. Many independent analysts believe that the Obama administration’s long-run budget projections are somewhat too optimistic — but, if so, it’s a matter of technical details. Neither President Obama nor any other leading Democrat, as far as I can recall, has ever claimed that up is down, that you can sharply reduce revenue, protect all the programs voters like, and still balance the budget.

And the G.O.P. itself used to make more sense than it does now. Ronald Reagan’s claim that cutting taxes would actually increase revenue was wishful thinking, but at least he had some kind of theory behind his proposals. When former President George W. Bush campaigned for big tax cuts in 2000, he claimed that these cuts were affordable given (unrealistic) projections of future budget surpluses. Now, however, Republicans aren’t even pretending that their numbers add up.

So how did we get to the point where one of our two major political parties isn’t even trying to make sense?

The answer isn’t a secret. The late Irving Kristol, one of the intellectual godfathers of modern conservatism, once wrote frankly about why he threw his support behind tax cuts that would worsen the budget deficit: his task, as he saw it, was to create a Republican majority, “so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.” In short, say whatever it takes to gain power. That’s a philosophy that now, more than ever, holds sway in the movement Kristol helped shape.

And what happens once the movement achieves the power it seeks? The answer, presumably, is that it turns to its real, not-so-secret agenda, which mainly involves privatizing and dismantling Medicare and Social Security.

Realistically, though, Republicans aren’t going to have the power to enact their true agenda any time soon — if ever. Remember, the Bush administration’s attack on Social Security was a fiasco, despite its large majority in Congress — and it actually increased Medicare spending.

So the clear and present danger isn’t that the G.O.P. will be able to achieve its long-run goals. It is, rather, that Republicans will gain just enough power to make the country ungovernable, unable to address its fiscal problems or anything else in a serious way. As I said, banana republic, here we come.

Um, Prof. Krugman, the Republicans already have the power and are making the country ungovernable because an extraordinarily inept Senate Majority Leader has handed them the power on a plate.

Collins and Kristof

Ms. Collins, in “Don’t Ask, Don’t Debate,” says that as Lady Gaga rallied crowds in Maine, the Senate (including a senator whom Gaga was appealing to) got lost in procedural debate this week.  Mr. Kristof, in “Boast, Build and Sell,” says it’s been 10 years since world leaders created eight antipoverty goals to be achieved by 2015. He has three suggestions to aid and inspire the process.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

The legislative process is almost never uplifting. But if you watch the United States Senate in action these days, you come away convinced that the nation has jumped the shark.

On Tuesday, the Senate failed to override a Republican filibuster of a defense authorization bill. This is a new record for dysfunction. Until now, even when politics was at its worst, Congress did manage to vote to pay the Army.

The bill did contain a lot of controversial pieces. It eliminated the “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule for gays serving openly in the military. And the majority leader, Harry Reid, tacked on a provision that would allow undocumented immigrants who were brought to the country as children to win a path to citizenship if they serve in the military or go to college.

So the debate was about … parliamentary procedure.

“I cannot vote to proceed to this bill under a situation that is going to shut down debate and preclude Republican amendments,” said Senator Susan Collins of Maine. She supports repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” but neither that nor pay raises for the troops could compare to the principle of unfettered amending.

Perhaps Collins was frightened by Tea Party talk in her home state. Perhaps she had been unnerved by Lady Gaga’s decision to go to Maine and hold rallies on behalf of the bill. As a rule, moderate Republicans from swing states are not likely to be moved by a celebrity comparing gay rights to the dress made of meat she wore to an awards show. (“Equality is the prime rib of America.”)

Cynical minds might presume that Collins was just caving in to her party’s determination to keep the Democratic majority from accomplishing anything before the elections and grabbing at a convenient, if incoherent, cover. If so, she had plenty of company.

Orrin Hatch of Utah, who had supported the immigration proposal three years ago, said he was voting against it this time because: “They don’t go through committees like they should in the Senate. They don’t give the minority any chance at all to bring up even legitimate amendments, and this stuff has to stop.”

Democrats said they had offered the Republicans ample opportunity to propose changes to the bill but that they weren’t going to give them a blank check. The Republicans, with many references to the founding fathers, demanded the same open-ended system that was used when the Senate debated the financial reform bill, a process that ate up eight weeks of floor time.

Who is right?

People, it makes no difference. Never pay attention to procedural debates. They will make you crazy. It’s like arbitrating a border agreement between two countries whose representatives keep fighting about who did what at the Battle of the 10 Skulls in 1284.

Plus, anybody who claims to be voting solely in the defense of legislative precedent is fibbing or delusional.

Senator John McCain, for instance, was nearly apoplectic about the fact that Reid was attaching unrelated amendments to the defense appropriations bill, like the one allowing illegal immigrants to become citizens after serving in the military. He had never seen such a thing “for as long as I have been privileged to be a member of this body.” Except that he had, including Republican proposals on everything from allowing people to carry concealed weapons across state lines to banning Internet gambling.

McCain himself once successfully attached a campaign finance reform amendment to a defense appropriations bill, arguing that it was relevant because better campaign finance would give our men and women in uniform more confidence in the democracy they were fighting for. But that was the old John McCain, before he was kidnapped by space aliens and reprogrammed.

The only people more patently evasive about their motives than the procedural-purity Republicans were the two Democrats who refused to vote to end the filibuster. Both are from Arkansas, and they said they were impelled to break with their party because, um, the system is broken.

“I have heard my constituents loud and clear, and I will continue working to ensure that we do things in an open and transparent way. I opposed the motion to proceed because we all need to listen to our constituents and provide time to fully debate and consider the issues they care about,” Senator Blanche Lincoln said in a statement.

She is in a very tough race for re-election and must have been trying to show Arkansas voters that she is an independent thinker. But it was a terrible plan. The poor woman is way, way behind in the polls. Give it up, Blanche! This is not the moment to try to woo the alienated independents with a strange and obscure press release. You should have voted with your heart, spoken your mind and gone out with a bang.

Ah, well, there’s always the procedural whimper.

Now here’s Mr. Kristof:

World leaders have flown in first class to the United Nations this week to discuss global poverty over cocktails at the Waldorf Astoria.

The U.N. set eight landmark antipoverty objectives in 2000, so this year’s General Assembly is reviewing how we’re doing after a decade. We’re off-track on most of these Millennium Development Goals, so let me offer three suggestions for how the humanitarian world might do better in framing the fight against poverty:

First, boast more.

Humanitarians have tended to guilt-trip people and governments into generosity by peddling emaciated children with flies on their eyes. But relentless negativity leaves the inaccurate impression that Africa is an abyss of failure and hopelessness. And who wants to invest in a failure?

In fact, here’s the record: antipoverty work saves around 32,000 children’s lives each day. That’s my calculation based on the number of children who died in 1960 (about 20 million) and the number dying now (about 8 million a year).

Twelve million lives saved annually — roughly one every three seconds — is a reminder that global poverty needn’t be a depressing topic but can be a hopeful one. Ancient scourges like Guinea worm, river blindness and polio are on their way out. Modern contraception is more common than a generation ago. The average Indian woman has 2.6 children now, compared with 5.5 in 1970.

That doesn’t mean overselling how easy it is to defeat poverty. In their zeal to raise money, activists sometimes elide the challenges of corruption and dependency — and mind-boggling complexity. Helping people in truth is far harder than it looks.

For example, it’s easy to build a school, but it can be tough to make sure that teachers actually show up afterward; they may live 100 miles away in the capital, receiving their pay for doing nothing. Or kids may be “enrolled” but miss months of school during the harvest. Or they may attend school but lack pencils, paper or books. Or they may be too malnourished or anemic from intestinal worms to learn anything. And Western aid to education sometimes just displaces domestic resources, which are then diverted to buy weapons instead.

In short, building an educational system in which students actually learn is difficult, and it takes more than money poured into broken systems. But it’s also true that literacy rates and school attendance are rising sharply. More than three-quarters of African youngsters are now enrolled in primary school, up from 58 percent in 1999.

My second suggestion is to focus not just on poverty relief but also on wealth creation. The best way to overcome poverty isn’t charity but economic growth, trade rather than aid. That’s why East Asia has raised its living standards so much.

There, too, there’s progress. We’re seeing economic engines revving up from Africa to India. For the last decade, per capita G.D.P. growth in Africa has averaged more than 3 percent per year — faster than in America or Europe.

Wealthy countries could encourage prosperity creation by opening their markets wider to exports from poor countries. The United States has a program, the African Growth and Opportunity Act, or AGOA, that is an important step in that direction and should be expanded.

My third suggestion: punchier marketing. Humanitarians tend to flinch at the idea of marketing, thinking that’s what you do with toothpaste. But it’s all the more important when lives are at stake.

This United Nations summit meeting is marked by the publication of tedious reports on poverty that almost no one will read, when it might gain more support with, say, a music video. After all, one of the most powerful tools to spread the word about educating girls was a “Girl Effect” video designed by the marketing geniuses at Nike. The first Girl Effect video went viral and has been watched by about 10 million people; its successor was released this week.

My hunch is that the most effective way to market antipoverty work in coming years will be by rebranding it, in part, as a security issue. Rich country budgets are so strained that it’s unrealistic to think that governments will approve much new money — or endorse the excellent suggestion of a financial transactions tax to pay for global health programs — just to ease suffering.

But hundreds of billions of dollars will be spent fighting terrorism and bolstering fragile countries like Afghanistan, Yemen and Pakistan. We should note that schools have a better record of fighting terrorism than missiles do and that wobbly governments can be buttressed not just with helicopter gunships but also with school lunch programs (at 25 cents per kid per day).

International security is where the money is, but fighting poverty is where the success is.

Dowd and Friedman

MoDo, in “Truly Madly Purely Jimmy,” says Christine O’Donnell has accomplished the impossible: She’s made Jimmy Carter look like a libertine.  The Moustache of Wisdom is still in Tianjin, China.  In “Too Many Hamburgers?” he says on his visit to China he’s getting a good look at how the Chinese view us Americans.  Here’s MoDo:

Christine O’Donnell has accomplished the impossible: She’s made Jimmy Carter look like a libertine.

The last time the phrase “lust in your heart” swept through American politics was in 1976 when Carter admitted to Playboy that, while he had always been faithful to soul (and sole) mate Rosalynn, he had committed adultery in his heart.

“I dropped 15 percentage points, and I almost lost the election,” Carter, about to turn 86, recalled in a chat during his book tour in Manhattan this week, adding with some wry hyperbole: “It was the most copies of Playboy ever sold.”

O’Donnell’s stance on the auto-erotic is auto-idiotic. “The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery,” she once said. “So you can’t masturbate without lust.”

Carter, who liked to recite the Bible in Spanish with Rosalynn just for fun, told me that while the Old Testament story of Onan warns against wasting thy seed on the ground, he doesn’t agree with O’Donnell.

It’s not easy being Jimmy.

When Carter brags about how his “role as a former president is probably superior to that of other presidents,” Pat Buchanan mocks him on MSNBC for making a “very gauche and very offensive” comment. When he bites old rivals, accusing Teddy Kennedy of squashing his health care plan and crediting Mikhail Gorbachev’s “enlightened administration” rather than Ronald Reagan for toppling the Berlin Wall, former Carter aides shrug, calling such bluntness “pure Jimmy.”

One of his military commanders admiringly called Carter “tough as woodpecker lips.” His former strategists still cringe when they recall the flash of contemptuous blue steel the president would level at them when they would go into the Oval Office to suggest a politically expedient move. Famously and infamously candid, Carter is just as hard on himself, writing in an afterword that he could have been “somewhat less rigid” and “autocratic,” that he was not “a natural politician” and that he’s sorry he alienated Jews and the press.

In the last 30 years, Carter has accomplished many grand and important things in the world. Yet it must hurt, I say, that his name is synonymous with presidential ineptitude. Before he got elected, Barack Obama praised Reagan as a “transformative” president. Now in a slump, Obama morphs into Carter, an eat-your-peas president for an ice-cream-sundae nation.

Carter agrees that unfavorable comparisons are odious, before protesting: “But I don’t think I failed.”

In an era of Protean populist pols who can go from fresh face to sorceress to scofflaw in a matter of days, Jimmy Carter is who he is. In 1976, the former peanut farmer from Georgia exploded out of his shell, buoyed by the same sort of antiestablishment frenzy — or “malaise,” as he puts it, recycling the word that caused him so many problems — that we see now.

Carter does not consider the Tea Party to be racist, noting “strangely enough, my approach to politics is very similar to what the Tea Party is doing.” But he does worry about anti-intellectualism becoming “a political advantage,” and about kowtowing to extremism.

“I think the Newt Gingrich of five years ago would be embarrassed by the Newt Gingrich of today,” he says of his fellow Georgian.

He thinks Gingrich’s wacko Kenyan rant and Carl Paladino’s e-mail to friends showing an African tribal dance with the caption, “Obama Inauguration Rehearsal,” are “slightly concealed racism.”

Carter says Obama has it worse than he did because of the psycho-polarization and because for most of his presidency there was no cable news. “Fox News deliberately lies about Obama’s religion and about his beliefs and about what he has in mind for the country and about his racial background,” Pure Jimmy says, adding that Fox has kept up an anti-Islamic drumbeat as well. (Continuing his nonsensical insinuations against Obama, Newt said the U.S. should pass a bill that outlaws Shariah, or Islamic law.)

I asked about the strange evangelist feel of the Beck-Palin rally on the Mall. “I worship the Prince of Peace,” Carter said, emphasizing the peace part. “But I think nowadays faith is being used by Glenn Beck and Ms. Palin and others as a political ploy.”

Bill Clinton calls Sarah Palin “somebody to be reckoned with.” But when I ask Carter if he thinks she will run for president, he responds crisply: “I don’t think she should. I don’t think she will.”

He said he believes that “the strange series of mishaps” that upended his attempt to rescue the American hostages in Iran upended his presidency, but he is still disappointed that we have not been communicating with Iran.

“I think it’s always best to have diplomatic relations with countries with whom we have differences of opinion,” he says. “America, more than any other country, doesn’t do that. If we have a falling out with a particular faction that’s in authority, we sever all relations with them. I think to constantly threaten Iran with atomic attack is one of the incentives that might lead them to move toward a nuclear arsenal, even if they weren’t otherwise inclined to do so.”

Finally, he wants you to know, as he told Jon Stewart: He was never a teenage witch.

Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

To visit China today as an American is to compare and to be compared. And from the very opening session of this year’s World Economic Forum here in Tianjin, our Chinese hosts did not hesitate to do some comparing. China’s CCTV aired a skit showing four children — one wearing the Chinese flag, another the American, another the Indian, and another the Brazilian — getting ready to run a race. Before they take off, the American child, “Anthony,” boasts that he will win “because I always win,” and he jumps out to a big lead. But soon Anthony doubles over with cramps. “Now is our chance to overtake him for the first time!” shouts the Chinese child. “What’s wrong with Anthony?” asks another. “He is overweight and flabby,” says another child. “He ate too many hamburgers.”

That is how they see us.

For the U.S. visitor, the comparisons start from the moment one departs Beijing’s South Station, a giant space-age building, and boards the bullet train to Tianjin. It takes just 25 minutes to make the 75-mile trip. In Tianjin, one arrives at another ultramodern train station — where, unlike New York City’s Pennsylvania Station, all the escalators actually work. From there, you drive to the Tianjin Meijiang Convention Center, a building so gigantic and well appointed that if it were in Washington, D.C., it would be a tourist site. Your hosts inform you: “It was built in nine months.”

I know, I know. With enough cheap currency, labor and capital — and authoritarianism — you can build anything in nine months. Still, it gets your attention. Some of my Chinese friends chide me for overidealizing China. I tell them: “Guilty as charged.” But have no illusions. I am not praising China because I want to emulate their system. I am praising it because I am worried about my system. In deliberately spotlighting China’s impressive growth engine, I am hoping to light a spark under America.

Studying China’s ability to invest for the future doesn’t make me feel we have the wrong system. It makes me feel that we are abusing our right system. There is absolutely no reason our democracy should not be able to generate the kind of focus, legitimacy, unity and stick-to-it-iveness to do big things — democratically — that China does autocratically. We’ve done it before. But we’re not doing it now because too many of our poll-driven, toxically partisan, cable-TV-addicted, money-corrupted political class are more interested in what keeps them in power than what would again make America powerful, more interested in defeating each other than saving the country.

“How can you compete with a country that is run like a company?” an Indian entrepreneur at the forum asked me of China. He then answered his own question: For democracy to be effective and deliver the policies and infrastructure our societies need requires the political center to be focused, united and energized. That means electing candidates who will do what is right for the country not just for their ideological wing or whoever comes with the biggest bag of money. For democracies to address big problems — and that’s all we have these days — requires a lot of people pulling in the same direction, and that is precisely what we’re lacking.

“We are not ready to act on our strength,” said my Indian friend, “so we’re waiting for them [the Chinese] to fail on their weakness.”

Will they? The Chinese system is autocratic, rife with corruption and at odds with a knowledge economy, which requires liberty. Yet China also has regular rotations of power at the top and a strong record of promoting on merit, so the average senior official is quite competent. Listening to Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China tick off growth statistics in his speech here had the feel of a soulless corporate earnings report. Yet he has detailed plans for his people’s betterment, from universities to high-speed rail, and he’s delivering on them.

Orville Schell of the Asia Society, one of America’s best China watchers, who was with me in Tianjin, put it perfectly: “Because we have recently begun to find ourselves so unable to get things done, we tend to look with a certain overidealistic yearning when it comes to China. We see what they have done and project onto them something we miss, fearfully miss, in ourselves” — that “can-do,” “get-it-done,” “everyone-pull-together,” “whatever-it-takes” attitude that built our highways, dams and put a man on the moon.

“These were hallmarks of our childhood culture,” said Schell. “But now we view our country turning into the opposite, even as we see China becoming animated by these same kinds of energies. I don’t idealize China’s system of government. I don’t want to live in an authoritarian system. But I do feel compelled to look at China in an objective way and acknowledge the successes of this system.” That doesn’t mean advocating that we become like China. It means being alive to the challenge we are up against and even finding ways to cooperate with China. “The very retro notion that we are undisputedly still No. 1,” added Schell, “is extremely dangerous.”

Brooks, Cohen and Herbert

This week Bobo’s being a literary critic.  In “The ‘Freedom’ Agenda” he gurgles that Jonathan Franzen is sure to launch a thousand book club discussions over his take on American life. But his novel says more about America’s literary culture than about America itself.  I’m sure Bobo will lead a discussion of the book at his local Applebee’s salad bar…  Mr. Cohen, in “Democracy Still Matters,” says in the first decade of the 21st century, the line between democracy and tyranny grew more opaque. But democracy is an idea still worth fighting for.  Mr. Herbert, in “Neglecting the Base,” points out that black voters clearly seem to be less than thrilled with the so-called postracial political landscape.  Here’s Bobo:

Very few novels make clear and provocative arguments about American life anymore, but Jonathan Franzen’s important new book, “Freedom,” makes at least two. First, he argues that American culture is overobsessed with personal freedom. Second, he portrays an America where people are unhappy and spiritually stunted.

Many of his characters live truncated lives. There’s a woman who “had formerly been active with the SDS in Madison and was now very active in the craze for Beaujolais nouveau.” There are people who devote their moral energies to the cause of sensitive gentrification. One of the “heroes” experiences great fits of righteous outrage when drivers ahead of him change lanes without the proper turn signals.

The central male character, Walter, is good but pushover-nice and pathetically naïve. His bad-boy rival, Richard, is a middle-aged guy who makes wryly titled rock albums and builds luxury decks to make ends meet. He is supposed to represent the cool, dangerous side of life, but he’s strictly Dionysus-lite.

One of the first things we learn about Patty, the woman who can’t decide between them, is that she is unable to make a moral judgment. She invests her vestigial longings into the cause of trying to build a perfect home and family, and when domesticity can’t bear the load she imposes, she falls into a chaos of indistinct impulses.

In a smart, though overly biting, review in The Atlantic, B.R. Myers protests against Franzen’s willingness to “create a world in which nothing important can happen.” Myers protests against the casual and adolescent language Franzen sometimes uses to create his world: “There is no import in things that ‘suck,’ no drama in someone’s being ‘into’ someone else.” The result, Myers charges, “is a 576-page monument to insignificance.”

But surely this is Franzen’s point. At a few major moments, he compares his characters to the ones in “War and Peace.” Franzen is obviously trying to make us see the tremendous difference in scope between the two sets of characters.

Tolstoy’s characters are spiritually ambitious — ferociously seeking some universal truth that can withstand the tough scrutiny of their own intelligence. Franzen’s modern characters are distracted and semi-helpless. It’s easy to admire Pierre and Prince Andrei. It’s impossible to look upon Walter and Richard with admiration, though it is possible to feel empathy for them.

“Freedom” is not Great Souls Seeking Important Truth. It’s a portrait of an America where the important, honest, fundamental things are being destroyed or built over — and people are left to fumble about, not even aware of what they have lost.

“Freedom” sucks you in with its shrewd observations and the ambitious breadth. It’ll launch a thousand book club discussions around the same questions: Is this book true? Is America really the way he portrays it?

My own answer, for what it’s worth, is that “Freedom” tells us more about America’s literary culture than about America itself.

Sometime long ago, a writer by the side of Walden Pond decided that middle-class Americans may seem happy and successful on the outside, but deep down they are leading lives of quiet desperation. This message caught on (it’s flattering to writers and other dissidents), and it became the basis of nearly every depiction of small-town and suburban America since. If you judged by American literature, there are no happy people in the suburbs, and certainly no fulfilled ones.

By now, writers have become trapped in the confines of this orthodoxy. So even a writer as talented as Franzen has apt descriptions of neighborhood cattiness and self-medicating housewives, but ignores anything that might complicate the Quiet Desperation dogma. There’s almost no religion. There’s very little about the world of work and enterprise. There’s an absence of ethnic heritage, military service, technical innovation, scientific research or anything else potentially lofty and ennobling.

Richard is an artist, but we don’t really see the artist’s commitment to his craft. Patty is an athlete, but we don’t really see the team camaraderie that is the best of sport.

The political world is caricatured worst of all. The environmentalists talk like the snobbish cartoons of Glenn Beck’s imagination. The Republicans talk like the warmonger cartoons of Michael Moore’s.

The serious parts of life get lopped off and readers have to stoop to inhabit a low-ceilinged world. Everyone gets to feel superior to the characters they are reading about (always pleasant in a society famously anxious about status), but there’s something missing.

Social critics from Thoreau to Allan Bloom to the S.D.S. authors of The Port Huron Statement also made critiques about the flatness of bourgeois life, but at least they tried to induce their readers to long for serious things. “Freedom” is a brilliantly written book that is nonetheless trapped in an intellectual cul de sac — overly gimlet-eyed about American life and lacking an alternative vision of higher ground.

Here’s Mr. Cohen, writing from London:

One mystery of the first decade of the 21st century is the decline of democracy. It’s not that nations with democratic systems have dwindled in number but that democracy has lost its luster. It’s an idea without a glow. And that’s worrying.

I said “mystery.” Those who saw something of the blood expended through the 20th century to secure liberal societies must inevitably find democracy’s diminished appeal puzzling. But there are reasons.

The lingering wars waged partly in democracy’s name in Iraq and Afghanistan hurt its reputation, however moving images of inky-fingered voters gripped by the revolutionary notion that they could decide who governs them. Given the bloody mayhem, it was easy to portray “democracy” as a fig leaf for the West’s bellicose designs and casual hypocrisies.

While the democratic West fought, a nondemocratic China grew. It emerged onto the world stage prizing stability, avoiding military adventure and delivering 10 percent annual growth of which Western democracies could only dream.

China’s “surge” was domestic. It was unencumbered by the paralyzing debate of democratic process. When the West’s financial system imploded in 2008, the Chinese response was vigorous. A “Beijing consensus” gained traction.

The borderline between democracy and authoritarianism grew more opaque. The dichotomy between freedom and tyranny suddenly seemed oh-so 20th century. The new authoritarianism of China or Russia was harder to define and therefore harder to confront.

“Regimes like the one in Russia are stabilized by the fact that they have no ideology,” said Ivan Krastev, a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. “There is really no ideological means to attack them.”

They also derive resilience from the fact that their borders are open. “The middle class is not interested in changing the system because if they don’t like it they can fly to London,” Krastev noted.

Having grown up in Communist Bulgaria, he believes democracy was oversold in the 1990’s. All good things, at the Cold War’s end, were shoveled into the democratic basket: prosperity, growth, peace. When democracy stopped delivering in these areas, it suffered. Too little was said about democratic values, including freedom.

Meanwhile technology kicked in with what the author Jonathan Franzen has called its “trillion little bits of distracting noise.” People, synched with themselves, retreated into private networks and away from the public space — the commons — where democratic politics had been played out.

Democracies seemed blocked, as in Belgium, or corrupted, as in Israel, or parodies, as in Italy, or paralyzed, as in the Netherlands.

There were exceptions, particularly the heady mass movement that brought Barack Obama to power in 2008. But Obama soon found himself caught in the gridlock of the very partisan shrieking he had vowed to overcome. Less than halfway through his presidency the prospect of legislative paralysis looked overwhelming. The world’s most powerful democracy, its promise so recently renewed, seemed mired once more in its frustrations and divisions.

So what? So what if money trumped democracy and stability trumped open societies for hundreds of millions of people? So what if the rule of law or individual freedom was compromised, the press muzzled, and media-controlling presidents thought they could use “democracy” to rule for life with occasional four-year breaks.

So what if people no longer thought their vote would change anything because politics was for sale? Perhaps liberal democracy, along with its Western cradle, had passed its zenith.

Wrong. It’s important to stanch the anti-democratic tide. Thugs and oppression ride on it.

If anyone needs reminding of that, read the remarkable Tony Judt, the historian who brought the same unstinting lucidity to his death last month from Lou Gehrig’s Disease as he did to the sweep of 20th-century European history. Judt was a British intellectual transposed to New York whose rigorous spirit of inquiry epitomized Anglo-American liberal civilization. Nobody knew better the repressive systems that create captive minds. Nobody wrote more persuasively about the struggle against them for pluralism, liberty and justice.

Judt died as I moved the other way, from New York to London. It’s a move across a continuum of language — even if I can’t get used to “letter box” or “white” coffee — but also, still, across the continuum of Anglo-American civilization, the civilization of Locke and Adam Smith and Isaiah Berlin, however marginalized those dead white men may appear in the dawning Asian century.

So I’m grateful to Timothy Garton Ash, in his tribute to Judt in The New York Review of Books, for finding in the words of a 17th-century Englishman, Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, a quintessential expression of the democratic idea:

“For really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he: and therefore truly, sir, I think it’s clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government.”

From that utterance in 1647 to Lincoln at Gettysburg in 1863 — “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth” — is a natural progression. And democracy is still an idea worth the fight.

Now here’s Mr. Herbert:

Maybe it was just a coincidence, but it was striking, nevertheless.

The mayor of Washington, Adrian Fenty, one of the so-called postracial black leaders, suffered a humiliating defeat in his bid for re-election last week when African-American voters deserted him in droves. The very same week President Obama, the most prominent of the so-called postracial types, was moving aggressively to shore up his support among black voters.

Mr. Obama, who usually goes out of his way to avoid overtly racial comments and appeals, made an impassioned plea during a fiery speech Saturday night at a black-tie event sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus. “I need everybody here,” he said, “to go back to your neighborhoods, to go back your workplaces, to go to the churches and go to the barbershops and go to the beauty shops. And tell them we’ve got more work to do.”

It’s no secret that the president is in trouble politically, and that Democrats in Congress are fighting desperately to hold on to their majorities. But much less attention has been given to the level of disenchantment among black voters, who have been hammered disproportionately by the recession and largely taken for granted by the Democratic Party. That disenchantment is likely to translate into lower turnout among blacks this fall.

The idea that we had moved into some kind of postracial era was always a ridiculous notion. Attitudes have undoubtedly changed for the better over the past half-century, and young people as a whole are less hung up on race than their elders. But race is still a very big deal in the United States, which is precisely why black leaders like Mr. Fenty and Mr. Obama try so hard to behave as though they are governing in some sort of pristine civic environment in which the very idea of race has been erased.

These allegedly postracial politicians can end up being so worried about losing the support of whites that they distance themselves from their own African-American base. This is a no-win situation — for the politicians and for the blacks who put their hopes and faith in them.

Mr. Fenty was cheered by whites for bringing in the cold-blooded Michelle Rhee as schools chancellor. She attacked D.C.’s admittedly failing school system with an unseemly ferocity and seemed to take great delight in doing it. Hundreds of teachers were fired and concerns raised by parents about Ms. Rhee’s take-no-prisoners approach were ignored. It was disrespectful.

Blacks responded last week by voting overwhelmingly for Mr. Fenty’s opponent, Vincent Gray, who is also black. This blowback undermined whatever Ms. Rhee and Mr. Fenty had hoped to achieve. Thanks to their ham-handed approach to governing and disregard of the sensibilities of their constituents, both of them will soon be gone. But the children they claimed to care so much about will still be locked in a lousy school system.

Black voters across the country are not nearly as discontented with Mr. Obama as blacks in Washington were with Mr. Fenty. But neither do they have the same enthusiasm that they had in the historic 2008 election.

Mr. Obama has seldom addressed black concerns directly, although many of his initiatives have benefited blacks. What has taken a toll is the perception that the president has consistently seemed more concerned about the needs and interests of those who are already well off, who are hostile to policies that would help working people and ethnic minorities, and who in many cases would like nothing better than to see Mr. Obama fail.

Most blacks are reluctant to publicly express their concerns about the president because they are so outraged by the blatantly unfair and often racist attacks against him from the political right. But many blacks are unhappy that Mr. Obama hasn’t been more forceful in the fight to create jobs. And there is disappointment over the dearth of black faces in high-profile posts in the administration.

The Shirley Sherrod fiasco fed the belief that the Obama administration was excessively concerned about the racial sensibilities of whites. The secretary of agriculture fired Ms. Sherrod without even giving her a hearing after an excerpt from a video appeared to show that she had discriminated against a white farmer. She had done no such thing, and she would later decline an offer to rejoin the administration.

There is real danger here for black people. In many cases, because of an excess of caution, policies that would help people in need are never even seriously considered, much less implemented. Forces that are hostile to blacks are not aggressively confronted, which, of course, empowers them. Perhaps more important, when you have to tiptoe around absolutely anything that has to do with blacks, it can leave the insidious impression that there is, in fact, something wrong with being black, something to be ashamed of.

We need to be careful not to corrode the joy and pride felt by blacks in the triumphs of African-American leaders.