The Pasty Little Putz and Krugman

In “The Devil We Know” The Pasty Little Putz has a question:  Has Hosni Mubarak’s rule made America safer, or less safe?  Prof. Krugman, in “A Cross of Rubber,” says the Fed and the European Central Bank are under a lot of pressure from bankers to do the wrong thing and raise interest rates.  Here’s the Putz:

As the world ponders the fate of Egypt after Hosni Mubarak, Americans should ponder this: It’s quite possible that if Mubarak had not ruled Egypt as a dictator for the last 30 years, the World Trade Center would still be standing.

This is true even though Mubarak’s regime has been a steadfast U.S. ally, a partner in our counterterrorism efforts and a foe of Islamic radicalism. Or, more aptly, it’s true because his regime has been all of these things.

In “The Looming Tower,” his history of Al Qaeda, Lawrence Wright raises the possibility that “America’s tragedy on September 11 was born in the prisons of Egypt.” By visiting imprisonment, torture and exile upon Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Mubarak foreclosed any possibility of an Islamic revolution in his own country. But he also helped radicalize and internationalize his country’s Islamists, pushing men like Ayman Al-Zawahiri — Osama bin Laden’s chief lieutenant, and arguably the real brains behind Al Qaeda — out of Egyptian politics and into the global jihad.

At the same time, Mubarak’s relationship with Washington has offered constant vindication for the jihadi worldview. Under his rule, Egypt received more American dollars than any country besides Israel. For many young Egyptians, restless amid political and economic stagnation, it’s been a short leap from hating their dictator to hating his patrons in the United States. One of the men who made this leap was an architecture student named Mohamed Atta, who was at the cockpit when American Airlines Flight 11 hit the World Trade Center.

These sound like good reasons to welcome Mubarak’s potential overthrow, and the end to America’s decades-long entanglement with his drab, repressive regime. Unfortunately, Middle Eastern politics is never quite that easy. The United States supported Mubarak for so long because of two interrelated fears: the fear of another Khomeini and the fear of another Nasser. Both anxieties remain entirely legitimate today.

The first fear everyone understands, because we’re still living with the religious tyranny that Ayatollah Khomeini established in Iran in 1979, in the wake of a spontaneous revolution not unlike the one currently sweeping Cairo and Alexandria.

The second fear is less immediately resonant, because Gamal Abdel Nasser is now 40 years in the grave. But the last time a popular revolution in the land of the pharaohs overthrew a corrupt regime, the year was 1952, Nasser was the beneficiary — and Washington lived to rue the day he came to power.

Nasser was not an Islamist: he was a secular pan-Arabist socialist, which in the 1950s seemed to put him on history’s cutting edge. But under his influence, Egypt became an aggressively destabilizing force in Middle Eastern politics. His dream of a unified Arab world helped inspire convulsions and coups from Lebanon to Iraq. He fought two wars with Israel, and intervened disastrously in Yemen. His army was accused of using poison gas in that conflict, a grim foreshadowing of Saddam Hussein’s domestic tactics. And his pursuit of ballistic missiles was a kind of dress rehearsal for today’s Iranian nuclear brinkmanship — complete with a covert Israeli campaign to undermine his weapons programs.

The memory of Nasser is a reminder that even if post-Mubarak Egypt doesn’t descend into religious dictatorship, it’s still likely to lurch in a more anti-American direction. The long-term consequences of a more populist and nationalistic Egypt might be better for the United States than the stasis of the Mubarak era, and the terrorism that it helped inspire. But then again they might be worse. There are devils behind every door.

Americans don’t like to admit this. We take refuge in foreign policy systems: liberal internationalism or realpolitik, neoconservatism or noninterventionism. We have theories, and expect the facts to fall into line behind them. Support democracy, and stability will take care of itself. Don’t meddle, and nobody will meddle with you. International institutions will keep the peace. No, balance-of-power politics will do it.

But history makes fools of us all. We make deals with dictators, and reap the whirlwind of terrorism. We promote democracy, and watch Islamists gain power from Iraq to Palestine. We leap into humanitarian interventions, and get bloodied in Somalia. We stay out, and watch genocide engulf Rwanda. We intervene in Afghanistan and then depart, and watch the Taliban take over. We intervene in Afghanistan and stay, and end up trapped there, with no end in sight.

Sooner or later, the theories always fail. The world is too complicated for them, and too tragic. History has its upward arcs, but most crises require weighing unknowns against unknowns, and choosing between competing evils.

The only comfort, as we watch Egyptians struggle for their country’s future, is that some choices aren’t America’s to make.

Now here’s Prof. Krugman:

Last Saturday, reported The Financial Times, some of the world’s most powerful financial executives were going to hold a private meeting with finance ministers in Davos, the site of the World Economic Forum. The principal demand of the executives, the newspaper suggested, would be that governments “stop banker-bashing.” Apparently bailing bankers out after they precipitated the worst slump since the Great Depression isn’t enough — politicians have to stop hurting their feelings, too.

But the bankers also had a more substantive demand: they want higher interest rates, despite the persistence of very high unemployment in the United States and Europe, because they say that low rates are feeding inflation. And what worries me is the possibility that policy makers might actually take their advice.

To understand the issues, you need to know that we’re in the midst of what the International Monetary Fund calls a “two speed” recovery, in which some countries are speeding ahead, but others — including the United States — have yet to get out of first gear.

The U.S. economy fell into recession at the end of 2007; the rest of the world followed a few months later. And advanced nations — the United States, Europe, Japan — have barely begun to recover. It’s true that these economies have been growing since the summer of 2009, but the growth has been too slow to produce large numbers of jobs. To raise interest rates under these conditions would be to undermine any chance of doing better; it would mean, in effect, accepting mass unemployment as a permanent fact of life.

What about inflation? High unemployment has kept a lid on the measures of inflation that usually guide policy. The Federal Reserve’s preferred measure, which excludes volatile energy and food prices, is now running below half a percent at an annual rate, far below the informal target of 2 percent.

But food and energy prices — and commodity prices in general — have, of course, been rising lately. Corn and wheat prices rose around 50 percent last year; copper, cotton and rubber prices have been setting new records. What’s that about?

The answer, mainly, is growth in emerging markets. While recovery in advanced nations has been sluggish, developing countries — China in particular — have come roaring back from the 2008 slump. This has created inflation pressures within many of these countries; it has also led to sharply rising global demand for raw materials. Bad weather — especially an unprecedented heat wave in the former Soviet Union, which led to a sharp fall in world wheat production — has also played a role in driving up food prices.

The question is, what bearing should all of this have on policy at the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank?

First of all, inflation in China is China’s problem, not ours. It’s true that right now China’s currency is pegged to the dollar. But that’s China’s choice; if China doesn’t like U.S. monetary policy, it’s free to let its currency rise. Neither China nor anyone else has the right to demand that America strangle its nascent economic recovery just because Chinese exporters want to keep the renminbi undervalued.

What about commodity prices? The Fed normally focuses on “core” inflation, which excludes food and energy, rather than “headline” inflation, because experience shows that while some prices fluctuate widely from month to month, others have a lot of inertia — and it’s the ones with inertia you want to worry about, because once either inflation or deflation gets built into these prices, it’s hard to get rid of.

And this focus has served the Fed well in the past. In particular, the Fed was right not to raise rates in 2007-8, when commodity prices soared — briefly pushing headline inflation above 5 percent — only to plunge right back to earth. It’s hard to see why the Fed should behave differently this time, with inflation nowhere near as high as it was during the last commodity boom.

So why the demand for higher rates? Well, bankers have a long history of getting fixated on commodity prices. Traditionally, that meant insisting that any rise in the price of gold would mean the end of Western civilization. These days it means demanding that interest rates be raised because the prices of copper, rubber, cotton and tin have gone up, even though underlying inflation is on the decline.

Ben Bernanke clearly understands that raising rates now would be a huge mistake. But Jean-Claude Trichet, his European counterpart, is making hawkish noises — and both the Fed and the European Central Bank are under a lot of external pressure to do the wrong thing.

They need to resist this pressure. Yes, commodity prices are up — but that’s no reason to perpetuate mass unemployment. To paraphrase William Jennings Bryan, we must not crucify our economies upon a cross of rubber.

Interest rates will go up in 5, 4, 3, 2…

Dowd, Friedman, Kristof and Rich

MoDo is back, with “No Axe to Grind,” in which she says a band of brothers parts ways for more campaign glory.  The Moustache of Wisdom is in Singapore, and sends us “Serious in Singapore” in which he says if Singapore has one thing to teach America, it is about getting governance right.  Mr. Kristof says “Watch Out!  The Assault Vehicle is Loose!” and has a question: What if we treated firearms the way we treat cars, as a public health challenge? Vehicle regulations save lives and are a model for gun regulations.  Go sell that to the NRA…  Mr. Rich, in “The Tea Party Wags the Dog,” says the Republicans, who sold themselves as the uncompromising champions of Tea Party-fueled fiscal austerity, have discovered that most Americans prefer compromise to confrontation.  Here’s MoDo:

There are other historic bromances in the news. King George VI and Lionel Logue. Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin. LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh.

But rarely has there been a partnership that rocked the world the way the Chicago odd couple did. The lean, neat One and the hefty, messy one accomplished what seemed impossible: Getting a black man the nation’s worst job, as The Onion memorably put it.

So it was a parting of sweet sorrow this weekend for The Brand and The Keeper of The Brand.

The unsentimental Barack Obama and the sentimental David Axelrod said goodbye Friday night over an intimate dinner in the White House residence. (Along with their wives.)

The adviser will return to Chicago — to his family; his beloved deli, Manny’s; the re-election ramp-up; and to his pal, Rahm. Obama and Axelrod agreed the West Wing team had gotten too insular. “As one of my colleagues said, the White House is a bit like working in a submarine: it’s better to come up for air,” Axelrod recalled Friday in his small office in a White House consumed with Cairo fires and pelted with Washington snow.

The 55-year-old former newspaperman and political consultant became an early muse to the young poet who bewitched a nation. It was a coup de foudre for the idealistic strategist. “I’ve not made any bones about my feelings about him,” he says, when asked if he’s too adoring. Robert Gibbs jokingly dubbed Axe “the guy who walks in front of the president with rose petals.”

But once Obama got deluged with a torrent of presidential crises, the poetry stopped, and the adviser in charge of the message got some blame.

“Yeah, we were too prosaic,” he said. “We all got sort of dragged down, you know; we were a triage unit. I think all of us have been guilty of neglecting that really important part of the presidency, where you’re operating in the world of ideals and values and vision.”

He continued: “There were a lot of hands on the words, a lot of concern about every nuance. And it is true that this is a place where an errant clause can send markets tumbling and armies marching, and you’re always aware of that.”

The vaunted change gave way to the usual logrolling. “It was, so, you need this guy’s vote and therefore, perhaps we shouldn’t emphasize that issue because they will be less apt to support us on the recovery plan and the country could slip into a depression,” Axelrod said.

The president recaptured some inspirational force in Tucson, his heart clearly touched by 9-year-old Christina Green. Her parents told Obama that their daughter had gotten interested in politics partly because she was drawn to him.

The president is “happier” taking a more optimistic, big-picture approach, Axelrod said, noting, “He’s in the zone in which he’s most comfortable.”

Packing boxes leaned against the office wall. David Plouffe, a more orderly, reserved type — a man who shows his affection for Obama by studying the turnout models for Congressional swing districts — is moving in Monday.

Though Axe can wax endlessly about Washington’s wayward ways, he admitted to friends that it’s harder leaving than he thought, and he plunged into bon voyage parties and dinners. Asked about the cascade of “exclusive” exit interviews he was giving, he warned drolly: “Don’t turn on the Shopping Network!”

“The White House is like fantasy camp for him,” said his charming assistant, Eric Lesser. “He could go to an Afghan war council in the Situation Room, meet Sandy Koufax and have a baseball signed, and have lunch with Caroline Kennedy.”

Axelrod’s final Friday began with Lesser bringing the usual oatmeal. (Now that the boss has lost 25 pounds, Lesser permits him a sprinkling of brown sugar again.) Pointing to some “victimized” ties hanging on the door, the strategist noted: “The one thing I learned on this job is, don’t eat your oatmeal standing up.”

The avid punster offered a parting pun at the 8:30 a.m. meeting — urging everyone to “plow forward” on a plan for genetically produced alfalfa.

Axelrod is not tech-savvy. There was that time he was in such a rush for an early campaign bus that he mistook a bar of hotel soap for his BlackBerry, later pulling the soap out of a pocket to check his e-mails. And the time he killed a BlackBerry with glaze from a donut.

So it was a surprise Friday when he said he was going to open a Twitter account so he could “leap into the debate from time to time.”

I asked Axelrod what he’d like to steal on the way out. Nodding toward the Oval Office, he replied conspiratorially, “He has the Emancipation Proclamation in there. That would be a nice going-away present.”

Now here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

I am in the Gan Eng Seng Primary School in a middle-class neighborhood of Singapore, and the principal, A. W. Ai Ling, has me visiting a fifth-grade science class. All the 11-year-old boys and girls are wearing junior white lab coats with their names on them. Outside in the hall, yellow police tape has blocked off a “crime scene” and lying on a floor, bloodied, is a fake body that has been murdered. The class is learning about DNA through the use of fingerprints, and their science teacher has turned the students into little C.S.I. detectives. They have to collect fingerprints from the scene and then break them down.

I missed that DNA lesson when I was in fifth grade. When I asked the principal whether this was part of the national curriculum, she said no. She just had a great science teacher, she said, and was aware that Singapore was making a big push to expand its biotech industries and thought it would be good to push her students in the same direction early. A couple of them checked my fingerprints. I was innocent — but impressed.

This was just an average public school, but the principal had made her own connections between “what world am I living in,” “where is my country trying to go in that world” and, therefore, “what should I teach in fifth-grade science.”

I was struck because that kind of linkage is so often missing in U.S. politics today. Republicans favor deep cuts in government spending, while so far exempting Medicare, Social Security and the defense budget. Not only is that not realistic, but it basically says that our nation’s priorities should be to fund retirement homes for older people rather than better schools for younger people and that we should build new schools in Afghanistan before Alabama.

President Obama just laid out a smart and compelling vision of where our priorities should be. But he did not spell out how and where we will have to both cut and invest — really intelligently and at a large scale — to deliver on his vision.

Singapore is tiny and by no means a U.S.-style democracy. Yet, like America, it has a multiethnic population — Chinese, Indian and Malay — with a big working class. It has no natural resources and even has to import sand for building. But today its per capita income is just below U.S. levels, built with high-end manufacturing, services and exports. The country’s economy grew last year at 14.7 percent, led by biomedical exports. How?

If Singapore has one thing to teach America, it is about taking governing seriously, relentlessly asking: What world are we living in and how do we adapt to thrive. “We’re like someone living in a hut without any insulation,” explained Tan Kong Yam, an economist. “We feel every change in the wind or the temperature and have to adapt. You Americans are still living in a brick house with central heating and don’t have to be so responsive.” And we have not been.

Singapore probably has the freest market in the world; it doesn’t believe in import tariffs, minimum wages or unemployment insurance. But it believes regulators need to make sure markets work properly — because they can’t on their own — and it subsidizes homeownership and education to give everyone a foundation to become self-reliant. Singapore copied the German model that strives to put everyone who graduates from high school on a track for higher education, but only about 40 percent go to universities. Others are tracked to polytechnics or vocational institutes, so the vast majority graduate with the skills to get a job, whether it be as a plumber or a scientist.

Explained Ravi Menon, the Permanent Secretary of Singapore’s Ministry of Trade and Industry: “The two ‘isms’ that perhaps best describe Singapore’s approach are: pragmatism — an emphasis on what works in practice rather than abstract theory; and eclecticism — a willingness to adapt to the local context best practices from around the world.”

It is a sophisticated mix of radical free-market and nanny state that requires sophisticated policy makers to implement, which is why politics here is not treated as sports or entertainment. Top bureaucrats and cabinet ministers have their pay linked to top private sector wages, so most make well over $1 million a year, and their bonuses are tied to the country’s annual G.D.P. growth rate. It means the government can attract high-quality professionals and corruption is low.

America never would or should copy Singapore’s less-than-free politics. But Singapore has something to teach us about “attitude” — about taking governing seriously and thinking strategically. We used to do that and must again because our little brick house with central heating is not going to be resistant to the storms much longer.

“There is real puzzlement here about America today,” said Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, “because we learned all about what it takes to build a well-functioning society from you. Many of our top officials are graduates of the Kennedy School at Harvard. They just came back home and applied its lessons vigorously.”

Next up we have Mr. Kristof:

Americans are infatuated with guns. And when you’re infatuated, you sometimes can’t think straight. Maybe that’s why, three weeks after the Tucson shootings that shook the nation, we’re still no closer to banning oversize magazines like the 33-bullet model allegedly used there. Maybe it will help clarify issues if we imagine an alternate universe — one in which Americans exhibit their toughness not with assault weapons but with assault vehicles, a world in which our torrid libertarian passion is not for our guns but for our cars. That alternate universe might look like this:

The powerful National Automobile Association warned today that vehicle regulation, such as a ban on assault vehicles, would be “the first step toward totalitarianism.”

“Autos don’t kill people,” declared Hank Magic, a N.A.A. spokesman. “People kill people.” As part of a campaign against auto registration, the N.A.A. has started selling new bumper stickers: “They’ll register my car when they pry the steering wheel from my cold, dead fingers.”

The N.A.A. defends assault vehicles as essential for self-defense and also “loads of fun.”

Taken aback by the furor, the White House denied any interest in banning assault vehicles or registering all vehicles. The White House said that the president was considering more modest steps, such as banning repeat drunken drivers from the roads, prohibiting televisions mounted on the steering wheel and curbs on lethal car accessories that serve no transportation purpose — such as bayonets mounted on the front and back bumpers.

Mr. Magic warned: “Now the White House is trying to prevent Americans from enjoying themselves and defending themselves.” He cited a driver in Florida in 1997 who had been threatened by a carjacking but was able to impale the attacker on his bumper. “Bumper bayonets save lives,” he asserted.

The president also distanced himself from a proposed Transportation Department directive that would curb private tanks on the basis that they are damaging roads and, with road rage on the rise, sometimes rolling over other vehicles. The N.A.A. has denounced the proposal, warning: “Without tanks, how can we keep our children safe?”

“The solution is more tanks, not fewer tanks,” Mr. Magic told a rally yesterday. “If tanks are banned, then only criminals will have tanks!”

Auto safety advocates say that tens of thousands of lives could be saved annually if the president and Congress would register vehicles, require seat belts and require licenses to drive cars. “It’s tough because our country’s history is steeped in automobiles,” said one advocate. “But with political leadership, we can rise above that, as every other civilized country in the world has done.”

O.K., O.K. That’s the end of our alternate history. In reality, of course, we have taken a deadly product — motor vehicles — and systematically made them quite safe. Scientists have figured out how to build roads so as to reduce accidents and have engineered innovations such as air bags to reduce injuries. Public campaigns and improved law enforcement have reduced drunken driving, and graduated licenses for young people have reduced accident rates as well. The death rate per 100 million vehicle miles traveled has fallen by almost three-quarters since the early 1970s, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The trade-off is that we have modestly curbed individual freedom, but we save tens of thousands of lives a year. That’s a model for how we should approach guns as a public health concern.

Granted, the Second Amendment complicates gun regulation (I accept that the framers intended for state militias, and possibly individuals, to have the right to bear flintlocks). But even among those favoring a broader interpretation, the Second Amendment hasn’t prevented bans on machine guns. There are still lines to be drawn, and a prohibition on 33-bullet magazines would be a useful place to start.

If we treat guns as we do cars and build a public health system to address them, here’s what we might do: finance more research so that we have a better sense of which gun safety policies are effective (for example, do gun safes or trigger locks save lives?); crack down on gun retailers who break laws the way we punish stores that sell cigarettes to kids; make serial numbers harder to erase; make gun trafficking a law enforcement priority; limit gun purchases to one per person per month; build a solid database of people who are mentally ill and cannot buy firearms; ban assault weapons; and invest in new technologies to see if we can design “smart guns” that require input of a code or fingerprint to reduce accidents and curb theft.

Particularly after a tragedy like Tucson, why can’t we show the same maturity toward firearms that we show toward vehicles — and save some of the 80 lives a day that we lose to guns?

Beats the hell out of me…  Here’s Mr. Rich:

Any lingering doubts about Barack Obama’s determination to appropriate Ronald Reagan’s political spirit evaporated just before the State of the Union. No American brand is more associated with Reagan than General Electric, and it was that corporation’s chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, who popped up as the president’s new wingman when the White House rolled out its latest jobs initiative on Jan. 21. Obama’s speech on Tuesday, with its celebration of the nation’s can-do capitalist ingenuity, moved him still closer to Reagan’s sweet spot as a national cheerleader. The president even offered a remix of the old Reagan-era G.E. jingle “We bring good things to life” — now traded up to the grander “We do big things.”

Obama’s rhetorical Morning in America is exquisitely timed to coincide with the Gipper’s centennial — and, of course, the unacknowledged start of his own 2012 re-election campaign. It’s remarkable how completely the G.O.P. has ceded the optimism of its patron saint to the president just as the country prepares for a deluge of Reaganiana. Obama’s post-New Year’s surge past a 50 percent approval rating — well ahead of both Reagan’s and Bill Clinton’s comeback trajectories after their respective midterm shellackings — may have only just begun.

There was no drama to Obama’s address — just a unifying theme, at long last, as he reasserted the role of government in rebooting and rebuilding the country for a new century and putting Americans back to work. The president wisely left any theatrics to his adversaries, and, as always, they were happy to oblige.

This time we were spared a “You lie!” But once Obama segued into a rambling laundry list and the “prom night” bipartisan photo ops lost their comic novelty, the night’s storyline inevitably shifted to the reliable diva antics of Michele Bachmann, the founder of the House’s Tea Party Caucus. For all the Republican male establishment’s harrumphing, it couldn’t derail her plan to hijack the party’s designated State of the Union response with one of her own. More Katherine Harris than Sarah Palin, Bachmann is far more riveting television bait than Paul Ryan, the bland congressman officially assigned the Bobby Jindal memorial slot after the New Jersey governor Chris Christie was savvy enough to take a pass.

The G.O.P. grandees’ consternation was palpable. Earlier in the day Bachmann had dispatched an e-mail announcing that her speech would be carried live by Fox News. But when the time came, Fox relegated the live feed to its Web site, forcing viewers to scurry to CNN, of all places, and delaying its own television recap until after prime time in the East. Rupert Murdoch’s other major organ, The Wall Street Journal, toed the same line, burying Bachmann’s speech in a half-sentence in its print edition the next morning. By then, John Boehner, seconding the disdain of Eric Cantor, was telling reporters that he hadn’t watched Bachmann because of “other obligations.”

What were they all afraid of? The answer cuts to the crux of the right’s plight less than three months after its supposed restoration. Having sold itself in 2010 as the uncompromising champion of Tea Party-fueled fiscal austerity, the enhanced G.O.P. caucus arrived in Washington in 2011 to discover that most Americans prefer compromise to confrontation and favor balanced budgets in name only.

A CNN poll this month found that just one American in five regards deficit reduction as pressing enough to justify cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Only one in four would choose balancing the budget if it meant reducing education programs. Indeed, a new Gallup poll reveals that there’s exactly one category of government spending that a majority of voters favors slicing — foreign aid (which amounts to some 1 percent of the budget). Incredible as it sounds, even current government outlays to science, the arts, farmers and antipoverty programs still enjoy 50 percent-plus support.

Bachmann, like such other newly empowered Tea Party tribunes as Rand Paul and Jim DeMint, rattles G.O.P. leaders because she doesn’t pull punches in specifying how she would wield an ax. The only public opinion she cares about is that of her base. But as it turned out, Bachmann specified no cuts on Tuesday night, if only because she was too busy attacking Obama with unreconstructed pre-Tucson vitriol. In the end, her substance differed little from Ryan’s. She chastised government spending six times (vs. Ryan’s 13), and, like him, mentioned the twin federal money pits — Social Security and Medicare — not once. For a night anyway, these G.O.P. fiscal hawks were actually less forthright about entitlements than the Democratic president, who at least paid lip service to someday finding “a bipartisan solution to strengthen Social Security.”

This couldn’t last — and didn’t. Within 48 hours, other congressional Republicans were filling in some of the blanks left by Bachmann and Ryan, from privatizing Medicare to eliminating the government agency that regulates product safety. Perhaps the fresh crop of G.O.P. revolutionaries has been too busy revisiting 1776 to study the history of Newt Gingrich’s swaggering revolution of 1995. In January of that year, 49 percent of Americans approved and 22 percent opposed the incoming Republican Congress’s plans, according to the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll at the time. But as soon as the plans’ details emerged, those numbers started to flip. By October 35 percent approved of G.O.P. policies and 45 percent did not. That was a month before the first of the two government shutdowns that put Clinton back on top.

But in 2011, it’s not just the revelation of cuts to specific popular programs that threatens to turn Americans against the Republican Congress. New polls show that Americans don’t even buy the principles behind these specifics. To hear the G.O.P. wail about it, you’d think the entire country was obsessed with the federal debt — cited 12 times in Ryan’s under-11-minute speech. But only 18 percent of Americans chose the deficit as a top priority for Washington in the most recent NBC/Journal survey and only 14 percent did in the New York Times/CBS News poll. Job creation was by far the top choice — at 43 percent (Times/CBS) and 34 percent (NBC/Journal).

Health care was a low-ranked priority too in those polls. And for all the right’s apocalyptic rants about the national horror of “Obamacare,” most polls continue to show that Americans are evenly divided about the law and that only a small minority favors its complete repeal (only one in four Americans in the latest Associated Press/GfK survey). The surest indicator that voters are not as inflamed about either the deficit or “Obamacare” as the right keeps claiming can be found in Karl Rove’s Wall Street Journal musings. To argue that Americans share his two obsessions, Rove now is reduced to citing polls from either Fox or a Brand X called Resurgent Republic, which he helpfully identifies as “a group I helped form.”

Obama must be laughing about how the party that spent a year hammering him for focusing on health care over jobs is now committing the same supposed sin. And one can only imagine his astonishment on Tuesday night, when the G.O.P. respondents to his speech each played Jimmy Carter to his Reagan by offering a grim double-feature of malaise and American decline. Hardly had the president extolled record corporate profits and a soaring stock market in his selectively rosy spin on the economy, than Ryan, who has the television manner of a solicitous funeral home director, was darkly warning that America could be the next Greece. Bachmann channeled Glenn Beck to argue that we are living in a nascent police state where government “tells us which light bulbs to buy” (G.E.’s, presumably).

The most revealing moment in either Republican response, though, came from Ryan, who, as chairman of the House Budget Committee, implicitly threatened another government shutdown, or catastrophic fiscal meltdown, if the House majority doesn’t get its way. “The president is now urging Congress to increase the debt limit,” he said with distaste, referring to the vote required possibly as soon as March to allow the Treasury to keep paying its bills. Should the House majority hold that vote hostage to its vision of the budget, it will throw the markets into turmoil and upend our still-embryonic recovery.

It tells you all you need to know about Ryan’s tilt to the right that, for all his professed disapproval of increasing the debt limit during an Obama administration, he voted to do so twice himself during the gushing deficits of the Bush years. Funny he didn’t mention that Tuesday night. It tells you all you need to know about the G.O.P.’s overall tilt to the right that not just the Tea Party is making barely veiled threats to play dangerous political games with the debt limit. Mitch McConnell and Cantor did so last weekend, as have a plethora of potential 2012 presidential candidates, from Tim Pawlenty to Gingrich. The Bachmann-Beck-Palin tail is now firmly wagging the Republican dog.

Like virtually every other week since the shellacking, the State of the Union week was another salutary one for Obama. But the state of the union itself could yet be in the hands of radicals whose eagerness to see the president fail is outstripped only by their zeal to make an ideological point, even if it forces America into default.

 

Blow and Collins

Mr. Herbert is off today.  Mr. Blow, in “Hard-Knock (Hardly Acknowledged) Life,” says one part of President Obama’s State of the Union made a bit of history: his failure to mention poverty or the poor.  Ms. Collins, in “Don’t Know Much About History,” says not just anybody switches political parties over a historical novel, but Michele Bachmann did.  Figures.  The woman’s a moron.  Here’s Mr. Blow:

President Obama made history on Tuesday.

It was only the second time since Harry S. Truman’s State of the Union address in 1948 that such a speech by a Democratic president did not include a single mention of poverty or the plight of the poor.

The closest Obama got to a mention was his confirmation for “Americans who’ve seen their paychecks dwindle or their jobs disappear” that, indeed, “the world has changed. The competition for jobs is real.” I’m sure they appreciated that.

The only other Democrat not to mention poverty in the speech was Jimmy Carter in 1980, but even he was able to squeeze in one reference to at least a portion of the poor and disenfranchised, stressing the continuation of jobs programs to “provide training and work for our young people, especially minority youth.” (Carter did mention the poor in a written version that he submitted to Congress.)

John F. Kennedy didn’t say the specific words “poor” or “poverty” in his first State of the Union, but he talked at length about providing “more food for the families of the unemployed, and to aid their needy children,” securing “more purchasing power for our lowest-paid workers by raising and expanding the minimum wage” and of a new housing program to address the problem of “cities being engulfed in squalor.”

So how is it that this Democratic president has the temerity to deliver a State of the Union address that completely neglects any explicit mention of the calamitous conditions now afflicting his staunchest supporters: the poor?

(In 2008, Obama won 73 percent of the vote of those earning less than $15,000 a year, 60 percent of those earning between $15,000 and $30,000 and 55 percent of the vote of those earning $30,000 to $50,000. Those were his widest margins of victory of any income group and helped to propel him to victory.)

He talked at length about education (the most inspiring part of the speech) and about civility and his repackaged bromides of global competitiveness and investments in the future. And, of course, there were cautious mentions of programs that benefit seniors and the need to protect and secure them. Can’t forget the plea to the old people.

Protecting programs for seniors strikes the right chord morally and politically, but the data show that seniors are not the ones feeling the majority of the pain these days.

According to data from the Census Bureau, the percent of people ages 18 to 64 who were living in poverty in 2009 was higher than it had been in any year since 1959, while the percent of seniors living in poverty was lower than it had been in any year since at least 1959.

(By the way, voters over 65 were the only age group that Obama lost in 2008.)

I, for one, refuse to believe that this is an either-or proposition. We can make smart choices about protecting seniors and supporting younger Americans in need at the same time. We don’t have to ignore the Annies among us to court the Miss Daisys.

For the poor, this is the Obama Conundrum. He was obviously the best choice in 2008. And judging by the current cast of Republican presidential contenders, he could well be the best choice in 2012. But does that give him license to obviate his moral responsibility to his electoral devotees? Can and should they take his snubs as a necessary consequence of political warfare as he makes every effort to tack back to the middle and reconnect with those whose opinion of him vacillates between contempt on a bad day and sufferance on a good one? Does keeping him in the White House dictate keeping them in the shadows?

And things could get even worse for the poor if the president feels the need to cut too many deals with the new Republican-led House in order to appear more centrist.

According to Brian Miller, the executive director of the nonpartisan and Boston-based group United for a Fair Economy and co-author of the group’s report entitled “State of the Dream 2011: Austerity for Whom?” released earlier this month, “austerity measures based on the conservative tenets of less government and lower taxes will ratchet down the standard of living for all Americans, while simultaneously widening our nation’s racial and economic divide.”

As Miller put it, deficits that tax cuts for the rich helped to create “are being used to justify a host of austerity measures that will harm Americans of all races but will hit blacks and Latinos the hardest.”

According to Miller, “With 42 percent of blacks and 37 percent of Latinos lacking the funds to meet minimal household expenses for even three months should they become unemployed, cutting public assistance programs will have devastating impacts on black and Latino workers.”

(Obama won 95 percent of the black vote and 67 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2008.)

Even as my respect for this president as a shrewd politician has begun to rebound, my faith in him as a fervent crusader for the poor and disenfranchised has taken yet another nose dive. One’s tone-deafness — or blatant indifference — to the poor has to be at Black American Express status to brag that “the stock market has come roaring back” and “corporate profits are up” and not even mention the unemployment rate or the continuing foreclosure crisis.

I want to believe that President Obama’s speech omissions were oversights, not acts of arrogance. But I’m not sure.

President Truman wrote in 1953 that, “ultimately, no President can master his responsibilities, save as his fellow citizens — indeed, the whole people — comprehend the challenge of our times and move, with him, to meet it.” But, it is sometimes hard to follow — indeed, to chase — a president who appears to be moving, often at a full sprint, away from the people who once carried him.

And we wonder why we bothered a lot of the time.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

Is Michele Bachmann the new Sarah Palin?

And do we really need a new Sarah Palin? Shouldn’t the first one be made to go away before we start considering replacements?

Bachmann, the superconservative member of Congress from Minnesota, made a big splash on Tuesday night with her Tea Party response to the State of the Union address. True, the placement of the cameras made her look as if she was talking to an invisible friend, and her eye makeup had a peculiar zombie aspect to it. But the next day all the attention was on her and not the official Republican response by Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman.

And the Republicans were afraid to complain! One congressman from Utah told Politico that he thought “to try to upend Paul Ryan was just wrong.” Hours later he issued a retraction — through Bachmann’s office.

On one level, Bachmann is just a third-term representative who only gets attention whenever she does something newsworthy, like claiming the Constitution says she doesn’t have to tell a census taker anything but how many people live in her home. She was passed over in a try for a minor post in House leadership.

Yet, at her invitation, Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court came trotting over to the Capitol to lecture the House freshmen this week about the true meaning of the Constitution. And she makes the leaders who snubbed her quake with terror. What if she rallies her fellow Tea Partiers into a rebellion over, say, raising the debt limit, and the economy collapses?

She does have a history of single-mindedness. Back when Bachmann was a state senator in Minnesota, her colleagues complained that they couldn’t get a budget done because she insisted on bringing everything to a screeching halt to argue about same-sex marriage. It was a controversy marked by her usual flair. “In 2005, she claimed to have been held against her will in a restaurant bathroom by two critics of an amendment banning same-sex marriage; they said they’d merely buttonholed her to talk,” reported The Minneapolis Star Tribune in a profile. “Then foes claimed that Bachmann hid behind some bushes to spy on a gay-rights rally; she said she was merely checking the turnout.”

Bushes aside, Bachmann is a much more serious person than Palin, whose response to the State of the Union address was to focus on the title, “Winning the Future.” (“There were a lot of W.T.F. moments throughout that speech.”) If Palin and Bachmann were your co-workers, Palin would be the one sneaking out early to go bowling, while Bachmann would stay late to reorganize the office seating chart to reflect her own personal opinion of who most deserves to be near the water cooler.

History is superimportant to Bachmann, who claims that she left the Democratic Party when she was a college senior, after reading “Burr,” Gore Vidal’s caustic historical novel. “He was kind of mocking the founding fathers, and I just thought ‘what a snot,’ ” Bachmann told The Star Tribune. It was, she said, a transformational moment so critical to her worldview that she can still remember what she was wearing. (“A tan trench coat, blue pin-striped shirt, like a tailored shirt, and dress slacks.”)

It’s not everybody who switches political parties over a historical novel, but Bachmann’s vision of the past is the core to her ideology. The men who created the Constitution were perfect heroes, so infallible that they fully understood the right to bear arms would someday include semiautomatic pistols capable of firing 30 bullets in 10 seconds.

Last week, Bachmann was in Iowa, setting off alarm bells about her possible presidential ambitions and delivering a speech in which she claimed that the founding fathers had “worked tirelessly” to eradicate slavery. She then cited John Quincy Adams, who was not a founding father.

Bachmann is not a zealous fact-checker, as we learned when she claimed the president’s trip to India would cost the taxpayers $200 million a day, based on an Indian newspaper report quoting an unnamed provincial official. In the real world, many founders, like Thomas Jefferson, expressed reservations about slavery but still kept hundreds of slaves, who were the basis of their personal wealth. Others, like John Adams, never owned slaves and opposed the institution but compromised on the matter of all men actually being created equal in order to bring the southern states into the union. And not a single one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence envisioned in any way, shape or form a democracy in which people of Michele Bachmann’s gender would sit in the halls of Congress.

But Bachmann was speaking to the lore of the far right, which strips the founding fathers of their raw, fallible humanity and ignores the fact that, in some ways, we’re wiser.

Maybe she’ll make Sarah Palin look good.

If anyone could do that it would be Bachmann…

Brooks and Krugman

Better late than never…  (Our intarwebz tubez died this morning.)  MoDo has gone to ground, so Bobo has taken up the task of writing fiction for the op-ed page.  Today, in “Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Burke,” he fantasizes about two of the greats debating the president’s State of the Union address.  Yes, it’s leaden…  Prof. Krugman, in “Their Own Private Europe,” says American conservatives have long used the myth of a failing Europe to argue against progressive policies in America.  Here’s Bobo:

Every Thursday my gurus, Mr. Burke and Mr. Hamilton, get together at the Heavenly Rest to drink and talk politics. Mr. Burke prefers a whiskey and water, while Mr. Hamilton likes a good strong Sex on the Beach. This week, they ended up talking about President Obama.

Burke: I congratulate you. Your president is most prudent and wise. He has decided to focus on three things: education reform, infrastructure investment and scientific innovation. He’s not wasting money on desperate schemes to pump up the employment rate before the next elections. He’s thinking about the long-term prosperity of the nation.

Moreover, his State of the Union address demonstrated an admirable sense of moderation and continuity. His competitiveness initiatives build intelligently on the ones Bill Clinton spoke of in 1996 and the ones George W. Bush mentioned in 2006. They also demonstrate an exquisite realism. With your nation so divided, he has plucked out the proposals on which there is some agreement. By working together on these things now, your leaders can establish the trust necessary to tackle bigger and tougher issues during Obama’s second term.

Hamilton: You’re mad, Burke! Obama has completely misread the national situation. The United States is careening toward disaster. The deficit this year is the highest in history: $1.48 trillion. In a mere eight years, the national debt will hit 90 percent of G.D.P. Interest payments alone on the debt will be $1 trillion! And he goes before the country with nostalgic happy talk and decides to spend the next two years treading water?

He pats himself on the back for a spending freeze projected to save $400 billion over 10 years. That’s an infinitesimal sliver of the $45 trillion the government will be spending over that time.

Is he aware of the national bankruptcy rushing ever closer? Doesn’t he see that the nation wants a fundamental change in Washington, not a few more tax credits for solar panels?

Obama is going to go down in history as the Nero who fiddled as Rome burned. He reformed health care without changing the ruinous incentives that were bankrupting the system. He submitted budgets that hastened the national collapse. The Republicans accuse him of being a socialist, but, the fact is, he’s Mr. Status Quo.

Burke: My dear sir. He’s an officeholder, not a think-tank Johnny. I know intellectuals are perpetually exercised by the crisis du jour, but the current deficits are not really that big. A tad more revenue and a normal bit of spending restraint will take care of them. Besides, look at Japan and Europe. They’re in much worse fiscal shape. The world is happy to keep lending you money.

Obama has to deal with the country as it is. The electorate does not want entitlement cuts, which is why even the Republicans don’t dare mention the word “Medicare” except to promise even more money for it. Do you know how many Republican activists support Medicare reforms? According to a survey by Conservative Home, it is 3 percent!

I’d say Obama is a practical realist, building gradually on America’s present prosperity, not venturing out rashly in the grip of some abstract plan.

Hamilton: You vastly underestimate the structural problems leading to slowing growth rates, higher unemployment and higher inequality. I advise you to read Tyler Cowen’s new e-book, “The Great Stagnation,” in which he argues that Americans have already picked the low-hanging economic fruit and now face an entirely set of difficult decisions. You also underestimate the dysfunction of the nation’s government.

We’re in the middle of a global race to see who can most intelligently reform the welfare state. The Simpson-Bowles commission put everything on the table, and far from seizing the opportunity to lead a national discussion on big things like fundamental tax and entitlement reform, he gave them the most cursory of mentions.

Besides, where is his vision? Is his entire philosophy encapsulated in the phrase, “Light Rail?” Does he realize that by being so modest he is ceding all momentum to the Republicans in Congress?

Burke: Ideologies are for theoreticians. President Obama will emerge as the mature moderate while the Republicans will seem unstable and dangerous. He will talk about realistic concrete improvements, like higher teacher salaries, while the Republicans will talk of unpopular and devastating spending cuts that never materialize. He will be optimistic while they will offer austerity and alarm. Have you seen that only 34 percent of Americans approve of the G.O.P. agenda, according to a PSRA/Pew poll.

Hamilton: You are wrong. Obama talks of a Sputnik moment as if NASA were a model for the future. He will be regarded as the embodiment of a government that is no longer working. As the unemployment rate hovers around 9 percent, and as problems accumulate, he will come to realize that he has sealed his doom.

He’s so tiresome, and so very, very, very predictable.  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

President Obama’s State of the Union address was a ho-hum affair. But the official Republican response, from Representative Paul Ryan, was really interesting. And I don’t mean that in a good way.

Mr. Ryan made highly dubious assertions about employment, health care and more. But what caught my eye, when I read the transcript, was what he said about other countries: “Just take a look at what’s happening to Greece, Ireland, the United Kingdom and other nations in Europe. They didn’t act soon enough; and now their governments have been forced to impose painful austerity measures: large benefit cuts to seniors and huge tax increases on everybody.”

It’s a good story: Europeans dithered on deficits, and that led to crisis. Unfortunately, while that’s more or less true for Greece, it isn’t at all what happened either in Ireland or in Britain, whose experience actually refutes the current Republican narrative.

But then, American conservatives have long had their own private Europe of the imagination — a place of economic stagnation and terrible health care, a collapsing society groaning under the weight of Big Government. The fact that Europe isn’t actually like that — did you know that adults in their prime working years are more likely to be employed in Europe than they are in the United States? — hasn’t deterred them. So we shouldn’t be surprised by similar tall tales about European debt problems.

Let’s talk about what really happened in Ireland and Britain.

On the eve of the financial crisis, conservatives had nothing but praise for Ireland, a low-tax, low-spending country by European standards. The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom ranked it above every other Western nation. In 2006, George Osborne, now Britain’s chancellor of the Exchequer, declared Ireland “a shining example of the art of the possible in long-term economic policy making.” And the truth was that in 2006-2007 Ireland was running a budget surplus, and had one of the lowest debt levels in the advanced world.

So what went wrong? The answer is: out-of-control banks; Irish banks ran wild during the good years, creating a huge property bubble. When the bubble burst, revenue collapsed, causing the deficit to surge, while public debt exploded because the government ended up taking over bank debts. And harsh spending cuts, while they have led to huge job losses, have failed to restore confidence.

The lesson of the Irish debacle, then, is very nearly the opposite of what Mr. Ryan would have us believe. It doesn’t say “cut spending now, or bad things will happen”; it says that balanced budgets won’t protect you from crisis if you don’t effectively regulate your banks — a point made in the newly released report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which concludes that “30 years of deregulation and reliance on self-regulation” helped create our own catastrophe. Have I mentioned that Republicans are doing everything they can to undermine financial reform?

What about Britain? Well, contrary to what Mr. Ryan seemed to imply, Britain has not, in fact, suffered a debt crisis. True, David Cameron, who became prime minister last May, has made a sharp turn toward fiscal austerity. But that was a choice, not a response to market pressure.

And underlying that choice was the new British government’s adherence to the same theory offered by Republicans to justify their demand for immediate spending cuts here — the claim that slashing government spending in the face of a depressed economy will actually help growth rather than hurt it.

So how’s that theory looking? Not good. The British economy, which seemed to be recovering earlier in 2010, turned down again in the fourth quarter. Yes, weather was a factor, and, no, you shouldn’t read too much into one quarter’s numbers. But there’s certainly no sign of the surging private-sector confidence that was supposed to offset the direct effects of eliminating half-a-million government jobs. And, as a result, there’s no comfort in the British experience for Republican claims that the United States needs spending cuts in the face of mass unemployment.

Which brings me back to Paul Ryan and his response to President Obama. Again, American conservatives have long used the myth of a failing Europe to argue against progressive policies in America. More recently, they have tried to appropriate Europe’s debt problems on behalf of their own agenda, never mind the fact that events in Europe actually point the other way.

But Mr. Ryan is widely portrayed as an intellectual leader within the G.O.P., with special expertise on matters of debt and deficits. So the revelation that he literally doesn’t know the first thing about the debt crises currently in progress is, as I said, interesting — and not in a good way.

Collins and Kristof

Ms. Collins, in “Utah’s Gun Appreciation Day,” says a new brand of crazy in the land has politicians scrambling to introduce guns into every conceivable part of American life.  Mr. Kristof writes about “Tussling Over Jesus,” and a bishop, a nun, a hospital and a holy war.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

This week in Washington, Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey introduced three very modest gun regulation bills, including one making it more difficult to sell guns to people on the terror watch list.

Meanwhile, in Salt Lake City, the State Legislature is considering a bill to honor the Browning M1911 pistol by making it the official state firearm.

Guess which idea has the better chance of passage? Can I see a show of hands? Oh, you cynics, you!

Yes, a committee in the Utah House of Representatives voted 9 to 2 this week to approve a bill that would add the Browning pistol to the pantheon of official state things, along with the bird (seagull), rock (coal) and dance (square). Also, although it really has nothing to do with this discussion, I have to mention that the Utah Legislature has provided its citizens with an official state cooking pot, and it is the Dutch oven.

“This firearm is Utah,” Representative Carl Wimmer, the Browning bill’s sponsor, told The Salt Lake Tribune. He is an energetic-looking guy with a huge forehead who has only been in office four years yet has, according to one of his videos, “sponsored and passed some of the most significant pieces of legislation in Utah history.”

Capitol observers say the Browning bill has an excellent chance of becoming law. Meanwhile, Lautenberg will be lucky to get a hearing. The terror of the National Rifle Association is so pervasive that President Obama did not want to poison the mood of his State of the Union address by suggesting that when somebody on the terror watch list tries to buy a gun, maybe we should do an extra check.

“But people are now commenting on the fact that the president didn’t talk about it in his speech. That hasn’t happened for years,” said Paul Helmke of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, whose job really does require an inordinate amount of optimism.

Lautenberg’s bills are extremely mild, and no one seems eager to argue in public against the one that would end easy access to 30-bullet magazines that allow someone with a semiautomatic pistol to mow down a parking lot full of people in a matter of seconds. Instead, they just refuse to come to the phone or toss out platitudes.

“The people that are going to commit a crime or are going to do something crazy aren’t going to pay attention to the laws in the first place. Let’s fix the real problem. Here’s a mentally deranged person who had access to a gun that should not have had access to a gun,” said Senator Tom Coburn on “Meet the Press.”

Another of Lautenberg’s bills would tighten a loophole in current law so a mentally deranged person who should not have access to guns could not go to a gun show and buy one without the regular security check. But never mind.

On Monday, the Utah State Capitol celebrated Browning Day, honoring John Moses Browning, native son and maker of the nominee for Official State Firearm. There were speeches, a proclamation, a flyover by a National Guard helicopter, and, of course, a rotunda full of guns. “We recognize his efforts to preserve the Constitution,” Gov. Gary Herbert said, in keeping with what appears to be a new Republican regulation requiring all party members to mention the Constitution at least once in every three sentences.

It is generally not a good policy to dwell on the strange behavior of state legislators since it leads to bottomless despair. If I wanted to go down that road, I’d give you Mark Madsen, a Utah state senator who tried to improve upon the Browning Day celebrations by suggesting they be scheduled to coincide with Martin Luther King Day since “both made tremendous contributions to individual freedom and individual liberty.”

But it’s a symptom of a new streak of craziness abroad in the land, which has politicians scrambling to prove not just that they are against gun regulation, but also that they are proactively in favor of introducing guns into every conceivable part of American life. National parks. Schools. Bars. Airports.

“There is abundant research suggesting in cities where more people own guns, the crime rate, especially the murder rate, goes down,” Utah’s new United States senator, Mike Lee, told CNN.

Actually, there’s a ton of debate about this, which is hard to resolve given the fact that, as Michael Luo reported in The Times, the N.R.A.’s crack lobbyists have managed to stop almost all federal financing for scientific research on gun-related questions. But Lee has definitely made the list of most creative commentators on these matters, ever since he dismissed calls for a calmer political rhetoric after the Tucson massacre by arguing that “the shooter wins if we, who’ve been elected, change what we do just because of what he did.”

Feel free to say whatever you like about the senator’s thinking. Be frank. Otherwise, the shooter wins.

Now here’s Mr. Kristof:

The National Catholic Reporter newspaper put it best: “Just days before Christians celebrated Christmas, Jesus got evicted.”

Yet the person giving Jesus the heave-ho in this case was not a Bethlehem innkeeper. Nor was it an overzealous mayor angering conservatives by pulling down Christmas decorations. Rather, it was a prominent bishop, Thomas Olmsted, stripping St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix of its affiliation with the Roman Catholic diocese.

The hospital’s offense? It had terminated a pregnancy to save the life of the mother. The hospital says the 27-year-old woman, a mother of four children, would almost certainly have died otherwise.

Bishop Olmsted initially excommunicated a nun, Sister Margaret McBride, who had been on the hospital’s ethics committee and had approved of the decision. That seems to have been a failed attempt to bully the hospital into submission, but it refused to cave and continues to employ Sister Margaret. Now the bishop, in effect, is excommunicating the entire hospital — all because it saved a woman’s life.

Make no mistake: This clash of values is a bellwether of a profound disagreement that is playing out at many Catholic hospitals around the country. These hospitals are part of the backbone of American health care, amounting to 15 percent of hospital beds.

Already in Bend, Ore., last year, a bishop ended the church’s official relationship with St. Charles Medical Center for making tubal ligation sterilizations available to women who requested them. And two Catholic hospitals in Texas halted tubal ligations at the insistence of the local bishop in Tyler.

The National Women’s Law Center has just issued a report quoting doctors at Catholic-affiliated hospitals as saying that sometimes they are forced by church doctrine to provide substandard care to women with miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies in ways that can leave the women infertile or even endanger their lives. More clashes are likely as the church hierarchy grows more conservative, and as hospitals and laity grow more impatient with bishops who seem increasingly out of touch.

Catholic hospitals like St. Joseph’s that are evicted by the church continue to operate largely as before. The main consequence is that Mass can no longer be said in the hospital chapel. Thomas C. Fox, the editor of National Catholic Reporter, noted regretfully that a hospital with deep Catholic roots like St. Joseph’s now cannot celebrate Mass, while airport chapels can. Mr. Fox added: “Olmsted’s moral certitude is lifeless, leaving no place for compassionate Christianity.”

To me, this battle illuminates two rival religious approaches, within the Catholic church and any spiritual tradition. One approach focuses upon dogma, sanctity, rules and the punishment of sinners. The other exalts compassion for the needy and mercy for sinners — and, perhaps, above all, inclusiveness.

The thought that keeps nagging at me is this: If you look at Bishop Olmsted and Sister Margaret as the protagonists in this battle, one of them truly seems to me to have emulated the life of Jesus. And it’s not the bishop, who has spent much of his adult life as a Vatican bureaucrat climbing the career ladder. It’s Sister Margaret, who like so many nuns has toiled for decades on behalf of the neediest and sickest among us.

Then along comes Bishop Olmsted to excommunicate the Christ-like figure in our story. If Jesus were around today, he might sue the bishop for defamation.

Yet in this battle, it’s fascinating how much support St. Joseph’s Hospital has had and how firmly it has pushed back — in effect, pounding 95 theses on the bishop’s door. The hospital backed up Sister Margaret, and it rejected the bishop’s demand that it never again terminate a pregnancy to save the life of a mother.

“St. Joseph’s will continue through our words and deeds to carry out the healing ministry of Jesus,” said Linda Hunt, the hospital president. “Our operations, policies, and procedures will not change.” The Catholic Health Association of the United States, a network of Catholic hospitals around the country, stood squarely behind St. Joseph’s.

Anne Rice, the author and a commentator on Catholicism, sees a potential turning point. “St. Joseph’s refusal to knuckle under to the bishop is huge,” she told me, adding: “Maybe rank-and-file Catholics are finally talking back to a hierarchy that long ago deserted them.”

With the Vatican seemingly as deaf and remote as it was in 1517, some Catholics at the grass roots are pushing to recover their faith. Jamie L. Manson, the same columnist for National Catholic Reporter who proclaimed that Jesus had been “evicted,” also argued powerfully that many ordinary Catholics have reached a breaking point and that St. Joseph’s heralds a new vision of Catholicism: “Though they will be denied the opportunity to celebrate the Eucharist, the Eucharist will rise out of St. Joseph’s every time the sick are healed, the frightened are comforted, the lonely are visited, the weak are fed, and vigil is kept over the dying.”

Hallelujah.

 

Our Lucky Day

MoDo is nowhere to be found (YAY!) and The Moustache of Wisdom is out doing local morning TV shows flogging his book so we’re spared whatever they would have had to say about last night’s SOTU.  Count your blessings.

Brooks and Herbert

Bobo’s trying to be helpful again.  He’s not any good at it, but he keeps on trying.  Today, in “The Talent Magnet,” he gurgles that President Obama’s State of the Union address should paint a vision of America being the crossroads nation of the 21st century.  It’s typical Bobo crap.  Mr. Herbert, in “Raising False Alarms,” says attacking Social Security is cruel and unnecessary, and it has to stop.  But it won’t.  Here’s Bobo:

President Obama will be talking about economic growth and competitiveness in the State of the Union address Tuesday night. It will be interesting to see if he talks about it in the standard way or in a visionary way.

The conventional way would be fine — expanding exports, reforming education, adjusting corporate tax rates to help firms compete. But it wouldn’t really give the country what it hungers for. The country wants a more precise vision of what a thriving America is going to look like in the 21st century. It also wants Obama to define, once and for all, his vision of government’s role.

A visionary speech might begin with the fact that America’s position in the world is changing. In the 20th century, America was the Big Dog nation. We had more money, more resources and more skilled labor, and we could outcompete our rivals by dominating the inputs and the outputs — by pouring in more talent, greater investments and more resources.

In the 21st century, the U.S. will no longer be the Big Dog. Human capital will be more broadly dispersed. There will be an array of affluent nations fully engaged in the global economy. Therefore, competitiveness will be more about organizing relationships than amassing force. To thrive, America will have to be the crossroads nation where global talent congregates and collaborates.

Parents in middle-class nations around the world should want to send their kids to American colleges. Young strivers should dream of working in Hollywood or Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurs from Israel to Indonesia should be visiting venture-capital firms in San Francisco or capital markets in New York. Global engineers should want to learn the plastics techniques in Akron and retailers should learn branding and distribution in Bentonville and Park Slope.

In this century, economic competition between countries is less like the competition between armies or sports teams (with hermetically sealed units bashing or racing against each other). It’s more like the competition between elite universities, who vie for prestige in a networked search for knowledge. It’s less: “We will crush you with our efficiency and might.” It’s more: “We have the best talent and the best values, so if you want to make the most of your own capacities, you’ll come join us.”

The new sort of competition is all about charisma. It’s about gathering talent in one spot (in the information economy, geography matters more than ever because people are most creative when they collaborate face to face). This concentration of talent then attracts more talent, which creates more collaboration, which multiplies everybody’s skills, which attracts more talent and so on.

The nation with the most diverse creative hot spots will dominate the century.

If this is the nature of competitiveness, what is the role for government? Well, government will be a bit like the administration of a university. A university president is nominally the head of the institutions. He or she lives in the big house. But everybody knows a university president is a powerful stagehand.

The professors, the researchers, the tutors, the coaches and the students are the real guts of a university. They handle the substance of what gets done. The administrators play vital but secondary roles. They build the settings. They raise money. They recruit and do marketing. They help students who are stumbling.

The administrators couldn’t possibly understand or control the work in the physics or history departments. They just try to gather talent, set guidelines and create an atmosphere where brilliance can happen.

So it is with government in an innovation economy. Entrepreneurs, corporate executives, line workers and store managers handle the substance of the economy. Government tries to nurture settings where brilliance can happen.

First, government establishes an overall climate, with competitive tax rates and predictable regulations and fiscal balance. Tax rates don’t have to be rock bottom. Companies will pay more if there are other amenities to compensate. But everything should be structured to nurture new business formation.

Then government actively concentrates talent. City governments are used to thinking in this way, while national governments lag. For example, Robert Steel, the deputy mayor of New York City, gave an excellent speech on Dec. 16 on how to build a bioscience center in Brooklyn and how to build an engineering center on Staten Island or Roosevelt Island. The speech was about using government to build hubs.

Finally, the government has to work aggressively to reduce the human capital inequalities that open up in an innovation economy. That means early and constant interventions so everybody has a chance to participate.

President Obama exists because his father was drawn to study in the United States. Obama embodies America’s nascent role as the crossroads nation. Let’s see if he can describe the next phase of American greatness.

Here’s Mr. Herbert:

If there’s a better government program than Social Security, I’d like to know what it is.

It has gone a long way toward eliminating poverty among the elderly. Great numbers of them used to live and die in ghastly, Dickensian conditions of extreme want. Without Social Security today, nearly half of all Americans aged 65 or older would be poor. With it, fewer than 10 percent live in poverty.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities tells us that close to 90 percent of people 65 and older get at least some of their family income from Social Security. For more than half of the elderly, it provides the majority of their income. For many, it is the only income they have.

When you see surveillance videos of some creep mugging an elderly person in an elevator or apartment lobby, the universal reaction is outrage. But when the fat cats and the ideologues want to hack away at the lifeline of Social Security, they are treated somehow as respectable, even enlightened members of the society.

We need a reality check. Attacking Social Security is both cruel and unnecessary. It needs to stop.

The demagogues would have the public believe that Social Security is unsustainable, that it is some kind of giant contributor to the federal budget deficits. Nothing could be further from the truth. As the Economic Policy Institute has explained, Social Security “is emphatically not the cause of the federal government’s long-term deficits, since it is prohibited from borrowing and must pay all benefits out of dedicated tax revenues and savings in its trust funds.”

Franklin Roosevelt couldn’t have been clearer about the crucial role of the payroll taxes used to finance Social Security. They gave the beneficiaries a “legal, moral and political right” to collect their benefits, he said. “With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my Social Security program.”

There has always been feverish opposition on the right to Social Security. What is happening now, in a period of deficit hysteria, is that this crucial retirement program is being dishonestly lumped together with Medicare as an entitlement program that is driving federal deficits. Medicare costs are a serious problem, but that’s because of the nightmarish expansion of health care costs in general.

Beyond Medicare, the major drivers of the deficits are not talked about so much by the fat cats and demagogues because they were either responsible for them, or are reaping gargantuan benefits from them, or both. The country is drowning in a sea of debt because of the obscene Bush tax cuts for the rich, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have never been paid for and the Great Recession.

Mugging the nation’s grandparents by depriving them of some of their modest, hard-earned Social Security retirement benefits is hardly an answer to the nation’s ills. And, believe me, those benefits are modest. The average benefit is just $14,000 a year, which is less than the minimum wage would pay. With employer-provided pensions going the way of the typewriter and pay telephones, the income from Social Security is becoming more precious by the day.

“If we didn’t have Social Security, we’d have to invent it right now,” said Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future. “It’s perfectly suited to the terrible times we’re going through. Hardly anyone has pensions anymore. People’s private savings have taken a huge hit, and home prices have been hit hard. So the private savings that so many seniors and soon-to-be seniors have counted on have just been wiped out.

“Social Security is still there, and it’s still paying out retirement benefits indexed to wages. It’s the one part of the retirement stool that is working.”

The deficit hawks and the right-wingers can scream all they want, but there is no Social Security crisis. There is a foreseeable problem with the program’s long-term financing, but it can be fixed with changes that do no harm to its elderly beneficiaries. One obvious step would be to raise the cap on payroll taxes so that wealthy earners shoulder a fairer share of the burden.

The alarmist rhetoric should cease. Americans have enough economic problems to worry about without being petrified that their Social Security benefits will be curtailed. A Gallup poll taken recently found that 90 percent of Americans ages 44 to 75 believed that the country was facing a retirement crisis. Nearly two-thirds were more fearful of depleting their assets than they were of dying. The fears about retirement are well placed — most Americans do not have enough to retire on. But there should be no reason to believe that Social Security is in jeopardy.

The folks who want to raise the retirement age and hack away at benefits for ordinary working Americans are inevitably those who have not the least worry about their own retirement. The haves so often get a perverse kick out of bullying the have-nots.

No shit, Sherlock…

The Pasty Little Putz and Krugman

The Pasty Little Putz, in “Reforming the Reform,” addresses the issue of how Republicans can transform Obamacare from within.  He’s all thrilled because the Republicans had the votes in the House to repeal it, and haz a sad because that icky Senate got in the way.  Prof. Krugman, in “The Competition Myth,” says it’s a misdiagnosis to say that America’s economic problem is a lack of competitiveness.  Here’s The Putz:

Last week, the Republican Party proved that it has the votes to repeal health care reform — but only in the House of Representatives. (Unfortunately for conservatives, the Senate and the White House also have a say in the matter.) The House vote on Wednesday may be remembered as a first step toward actual repeal, or as a futile exercise in fist-shaking. It all depends on whether Republicans can find a strategy for undoing the health care legislation that doesn’t involve an immediate frontal assault.

One option is for Congressional Republicans to hold hearings, stage more symbolic votes, and hope that the 2012 election delivers them a Senate majority, a new occupant in the White House and a chance at full repeal. But of course there’s no guarantee that Obama will be defeated — and even if he is, by 2013 health care reform may be more entrenched, and the Democratic Party more united than ever in its determination to defend it. (The filibuster, lately a Republican weapon, could become the means by which supporters of Obamacare ensure that it endures.)

Another option would be to attack the law piecemeal by going after its least popular provisions — the new taxes, the Medicare cuts and the fine for Americans who don’t buy insurance. This strategy might be good short-term politics but would do little to lay the groundwork for an actual conservative alternative. Worse, in the unlikely event that the piecemeal attacks succeeded, Obamacare would be transformed from a notionally deficit-neutral bill into a straightforward budget-buster. And heightening a program’s contradictions in the hopes that it falls apart is an approach better suited to Marxists than conservatives.

What Republicans need is a different kind of incremental approach, one that uses the strongest conservative critiques of the health care bill as a framework for a reform of the reform. If Obama is defeated in 2012, this framework could easily be adapted into a full scale repeal-and-replace effort. But in the event that he’s re-elected, it would offer a Republican Congress a blueprint for improving the law without doing away with it entirely.

Here are three such conservative critiques: first, that Obamacare entrenches the very model of health care financingthat drove costs sky-high to begin with — a model in which every insurance plan has to be comprehensive, every significant payment is made by a third party, and consumers have no idea what their treatments actually cost.

Second, the new subsidies for the uninsured are so expansive that they may encourage employers to stop offering insurance altogether, offloading their employees into the new health care exchanges and swiftly overwhelming the federal budget.

Third, the mandate to buy health insurance infringes on American liberties: never before has Washington required that private citizens purchase a particular product from a particular set of private companies.

To address the first problem, Republicans should work to deregulate the new health care exchanges, so that high-deductible, catastrophic coverage can be purchased as easily as comprehensive plans. To address the second, they should propose capping the subsidies for the uninsured, so that they don’t dramatically exceed the value of the existing tax subsidy for employer-provided insurance.

The mandate is a harder puzzle, since it works in tandem with the requirement — popular enough to have many Republican supporters — that insurers cease denying coverage to customers with pre-existing conditions. If you repealed the mandate without repealing that requirement, people could simply wait until they were sick to buy insurance, driving everyone’s prices up.

But Republicans could propose dealing with the same problem in a less coercive way. One alternative would establish limited enrollment periods (every two years, for instance) when people with pre-existing conditions could buy into the new exchanges without being denied coverage. Anyone who failed to take advantage wouldn’t be able to get coverage for a pre-existing condition until the next enrollment period arrived. This would reduce the incentive to game the system, without directly penalizing Americans who decline to buy insurance.

None of these changes would be as sweeping and satisfying as repealing the health care bill outright. And many conservatives are loath to send President Obama anything that he might actually sign, lest he use the cover of bipartisanship to evade responsibility for health care reform’s unpopularity.

But in the unlikely event that the president did embrace a reform of the reform, conservatives would have an opportunity to transform Obamacare from within. With the right changes, the new health care law could expand access to insurance in a more cost-effective, less coercive and more market-oriented way. Which is to say, it could become the kind of reform that conservatives claim to have been looking for all along.

Even the Putz seems to be beginning to see what’s in front of his face — hence the use of the word “claim” in his last sentence.  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

Meet the new buzzword, same as the old buzzword. In advance of the State of the Union, President Obama has telegraphed his main theme: competitiveness. The President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board has been renamed the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. And in his Saturday radio address, the president declared that “We can out-compete any other nation on Earth.”

This may be smart politics. Arguably, Mr. Obama has enlisted an old cliché on behalf of a good cause, as a way to sell a much-needed increase in public investment to a public thoroughly indoctrinated in the view that government spending is a bad thing.

But let’s not kid ourselves: talking about “competitiveness” as a goal is fundamentally misleading. At best, it’s a misdiagnosis of our problems. At worst, it could lead to policies based on the false idea that what’s good for corporations is good for America.

About that misdiagnosis: What sense does it make to view our current woes as stemming from lack of competitiveness?

It’s true that we’d have more jobs if we exported more and imported less. But the same is true of Europe and Japan, which also have depressed economies. And we can’t all export more while importing less, unless we can find another planet to sell to. Yes, we could demand that China shrink its trade surplus — but if confronting China is what Mr. Obama is proposing, he should say that plainly.

Furthermore, while America is running a trade deficit, this deficit is smaller than it was before the Great Recession began. It would help if we could make it smaller still. But ultimately, we’re in a mess because we had a financial crisis, not because American companies have lost their ability to compete with foreign rivals.

But isn’t it at least somewhat useful to think of our nation as if it were America Inc., competing in the global marketplace? No.

Consider: A corporate leader who increases profits by slashing his work force is thought to be successful. Well, that’s more or less what has happened in America recently: employment is way down, but profits are hitting new records. Who, exactly, considers this economic success?

Still, you might say that talk of competitiveness helps Mr. Obama quiet claims that he’s anti-business. That’s fine, as long as he realizes that the interests of nominally “American” corporations and the interests of the nation, which were never the same, are now less aligned than ever before.

Take the case of General Electric, whose chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, has just been appointed to head that renamed advisory board. I have nothing against either G.E. or Mr. Immelt. But with fewer than half its workers based in the United States and less than half its revenues coming from U.S. operations, G.E.’s fortunes have very little to do with U.S. prosperity.

By the way, some have praised Mr. Immelt’s appointment on the grounds that at least he represents a company that actually makes things, rather than being yet another financial wheeler-dealer. Sorry to burst this bubble, but these days G.E. derives more revenue from its financial operations than it does from manufacturing — indeed, GE Capital, which received a government guarantee for its debt, was a major beneficiary of the Wall Street bailout.

So what does the administration’s embrace of the rhetoric of competitiveness mean for economic policy?

The favorable interpretation, as I said, is that it’s just packaging for an economic strategy centered on public investment, investment that’s actually about creating jobs now while promoting longer-term growth. The unfavorable interpretation is that Mr. Obama and his advisers really believe that the economy is ailing because they’ve been too tough on business, and that what America needs now is corporate tax cuts and across-the-board deregulation.

My guess is that we’re mainly talking about packaging here. And if the president does propose a serious increase in spending on infrastructure and education, I’ll be pleased.

But even if he proposes good policies, the fact that Mr. Obama feels the need to wrap these policies in bad metaphors is a sad commentary on the state of our discourse.

The financial crisis of 2008 was a teachable moment, an object lesson in what can go wrong if you trust a market economy to regulate itself. Nor should we forget that highly regulated economies, like Germany, did a much better job than we did at sustaining employment after the crisis hit. For whatever reason, however, the teachable moment came and went with nothing learned.

Mr. Obama himself may do all right: his approval rating is up, the economy is showing signs of life, and his chances of re-election look pretty good. But the ideology that brought economic disaster in 2008 is back on top — and seems likely to stay there until it brings disaster again.

 

Kristof and Rich

MoDo is off today, and The Moustache of Wisdom is still out flogging his book.  Mr. Kristof, writing from Beijing, says his microblog was “Banned in Beijing!”  He says to measure the democratizing effect of the Internet on China, he conducted a little experiment. He survived. But will his blog?  In “The One-Eyed Man is King” Mr. Rich says “True Grit” has unalloyed faith in values antithetical to those of the 21st century America so deftly skewered in “The Social Network.”  Here’s Mr. Kristof:

Psst. Don’t tell the Chinese government, but I started a Chinese-language blog here in China, and it contains counterrevolutionary praise of dissidents. It’s at http://blog.sina.com.cn/jisidao.

Now let’s count — 1, 2, 3 … — and see how long my blog stays up. My hunch is that State Security will “harmonize” it quickly. In Chinese, Web sites are mockingly referred to as “harmonized” when the government vaporizes them so as to nurture a “harmonious society.”

China now has about 450 million Internet users, far more than any other country, and perhaps 100 million bloggers. The imprisoned writer Liu Xiaobo, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, has said, “The Internet is God’s gift to the Chinese people.” I tend to agree, but it’s also true that Chinese cyberspace remains a proletarian dictatorship. In November, the government sent a young woman, Cheng Jianping, to labor camp for a year for posting a single mocking sentence.

My teenage kids accompanied me on this trip, and they’re used to being dragged around to witness one injustice or another. But my daughter has rarely been more indignant than when she discovered that Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are blocked in China.

So I decided to conduct my latest experiment in Chinese Internet freedom. I began this series of experiments in 2003 by seeing what I could get away with in Chinese Internet chat rooms.

On this visit, I started with blogging and with microblogging, the Chinese version of Twitter. But, in an ominous sign, I discovered that the Chinese authorities had tightened the rules since my last experiments. These days, anyone starting an online account must supply an ID card number and cellphone number. That means that the authorities can quickly track down nettlesome commentators.

Once I got started, though, the censors were less aggressive than I had expected, apparently relying more on intimidation than on actual censorship. Even my microblog posts about Mr. Liu, the imprisoned dissident, went up. A similar post mentioning the banned Falun Gong movement triggered an automatic review, but then a moderator approved it.

(A Chinese moderator once explained to me that grunt-level censors are mostly young computer geeks who believe in Internet freedom and try to sabotage their responsibilities without getting fired.)

Still, there are limits. I posted a reference to the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen massacre. It went up automatically, and then was removed by a moderator 20 minutes later.

The challenge for the authorities is that there is just too much to police by moderators, and automatic filters don’t work terribly well. Chinese routinely use well-known code phrases for terms that will be censored (June 4 might become June 2+2, or May 35). Likewise, Chinese can usually get around the “great firewall of China” by using widely available software, like Freegate, or by tunneling through a virtual private network.

Most Chinese aren’t overtly political — seeking out banned pornography is typically regarded as more rewarding than chasing down tracts about multiparty democracy. Still, Internet controls are widely resented. My bet is that more young Chinese are vexed by their government’s censorship than by its rejection of multiparty democracy.

Michael Anti, a prominent Chinese blogger, says that the central government may increasingly allow Chinese netizens to criticize abuses by local governments, even as it blocks disparagement of the central leadership. Since the worst human rights abuses are often by local authorities, that would be a modest step forward.

A recent book by Evgeny Morozov, “The Net Delusion,” argues that Westerners get carried away by the potential of the Internet to democratize societies, failing to appreciate that dictators can also use the Web to buttress their regimes. A fair point. But like Mr. Liu, I see the Internet as a powerful force to help remold China.

Frankly, my own experiments had mixed results. My microblog quickly attracted notice, partly because a Chinese friend with more than one million followers directed readers to it. An hour later, it had been harmonized.

Meanwhile, I published my separate Chinese blog (at the web address mentioned above). It was just as edgy and included a slightly veiled birthday greeting to Mr. Liu in prison. But I didn’t promote it, so the authorities didn’t care, or didn’t notice. It has remained up for several weeks — but now that I’ve mentioned it in this column, it’s presumably doomed.

To me, the lesson of my experiments is that the Chinese Internet is too vast for the government to monitor fully. It can toss individuals in prison. But it can’t block the information revolution itself.

Mr. Liu may be in prison, but my hunch is that his judgment will be vindicated: the Internet will one day be remembered as helping to transform China, byte by byte. Let a billion blogs bloom.

Now here’s Mr. Rich:

A month before John Wayne won the 1969 Best Actor Oscar for “True Grit,” Richard Nixon wrote him a “Dear Duke” fan letter from the Oval Office: “I saw it in the W.H. with my family and for once we agree with the critics — you were great!” Some four decades later, his rave was echoed by another Republican warrior, this time in praise of the “True Grit” remake with Jeff Bridges in the role of the old, fat, hard-drinking, half-blind 19th-century United States marshal Rooster Cogburn. Shortly after New Year’s, Liz Cheney told The Times that her parents saw “True Grit” at the Teton Theater in Jackson, Wyo., and gave it “two thumbs up.”

The double-barreled success of “True Grit,” then and now, spreads well beyond those conservative gunslingers. In our current winter of high domestic anxiety, as in the politically tumultuous American summer of 1969, it is a hit with the national mass audience and elite critics alike. The new version is doing as well in New York and Los Angeles as in red Cheneyland.

That “True Grit” still works is first a testament to the beauty of the remake, as directed by the Coen brothers, and to the enduring power of both films’ source, a 1968 novel by Charles Portis that refracted a Western yarn through a scintillating and original comic voice. But the latest “True Grit” juggernaut also has something to say about Americans yearning at a trying juncture in our history — much as it did the first time around.

The original film opened at Radio City Music Hall on July 3, 1969, the same day that antiwar protestors incited a melee at the adjoining Rockefeller Center, shutting down Fifth Avenue. In that climate, the movie’s success was hardly foreordained. The previous year, “The Green Berets,” Wayne’s jingoistic Vietnam potboiler, had divided audiences, been ridiculed by the press and shunned by the Oscars. The Western, like the war movie, was seen as a dying genre, usurped by darker and ever more violent takes on frontier mythology like the 1967 “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Wild Bunch,” which opened just a week before “True Grit.” July of ’69 would also bring “Easy Rider,” the iconic ’60s dope-and-biker movie in which Dennis Hopper, who played a villain in “True Grit,” would reinvent himself as an era’s archetypal cultural antihero. The “Easy Rider” ad copy ran: “A man went looking for America. And couldn’t find it anywhere.”

Such was the dyspeptic mood of a nation deep into a fruitless war and a year after a summer of assassinations and riots. Yet “True Grit” was warmly received, including by the Times critic, Vincent Canby, who put it in a year-end list of bests dominated by such antiestablishment fare as “The Wild Bunch,” “Easy Rider,” “Midnight Cowboy” (that year’s Best Picture Oscar winner) and the ultimate anti-Western, Andy Warhol’s sexually transgressive “Lonesome Cowboys.” Canby described “True Grit” as “a classic frontier fable that manages to be most entertaining even when it’s being most reactionary.”

He was right. Its story and themes could hardly have been more retro. A 14-year-old girl from Yell County, Ark., named Mattie Ross hires Rooster to help track down an outlaw who murdered both her father and a Texas state senator before fleeing into Chocktaw territory. Though Mattie is a stickler for the law, she’s not averse to frontier justice if that’s required to avenge her dad. But to the grizzled old Rooster’s dismay, the girl insists on joining him on the trail to make sure the job gets done.

Like classic Hollywood Westerns before it, “True Grit” in all its iterations has an elegiac lilt. Uncivilized hired guns like Rooster may have helped tame the West and dispatched bad guys, but they were also capable of lawlessness and atrocities. As a young Confederate soldier, Rooster had joined in the 1863 Lawrence, Kan., massacre. Ultimately, law, religion and domestic institutions like marriage — which Rooster failed at — had to prevail if America was to grow up. The Matties had to outlive the Roosters. And so they did. For a weary mainstream 1969 audience, and not just a reactionary one, the restoration of order in “True Grit,” inevitably to be followed by Rooster’s ride off into the sunset, was a heartening two-hour escape from the near-civil-war raging beyond the theater’s walls.

In 2010, expectations for the new “True Grit” may have been lower than they were for the first. The Western has once again been written off as an endangered species. The Coens’ critically admired filmmaking has never generated blockbuster box office. An added indignity was the complete shutout of “True Grit” from Golden Globe nominations — a measure of a movie’s advance buzz, if nothing else.

Nonetheless, it is already the biggest draw of any Coen brothers film — poised to at least double the business of “No Country for Old Men,” their biggest previous hit. Revealingly, I think, it is attracting an even larger audience than “The Social Network,” a movie of equal quality with reviews to match and more timely cultural cachet. It turns out that “True Grit” is as much an escape for Americans now as it was in the Vietnam era.

Our age is hardly identical to that one, whatever the resonances between the Afghanistan and Vietnam wars, and whatever our own bouts of domestic violence. The new “True Grit” took off before the Tucson cataclysm in any event, and the movie’s broad appeal, like the demographics of its audience, transcends our running right-left debate. What is most stirring about “True Grit” today — besides the primal father-daughter relationship that blossoms between Rooster and Mattie — is its unalloyed faith in values antithetical to those of the 21st century America so deftly skewered, as it happens, in “The Social Network.”

At its core, the new “True Grit” is often surprisingly similar to the first, despite the clashing sensibilities of their directors (Henry Hathaway, a studio utility man, did the original) and the casting of an age-appropriate Mattie (Hailee Steinfeld) in lieu of the 21-year-old Kim Darby of 1969. But what leaps out this time, to the point of seeming fresh, is the fierce loyalty of the principal characters to each other (the third being a vain Texas Ranger, played by Matt Damon) and their clear-cut sense of morality and justice, even when the justice is rough. More than the first “True Grit,” the new one emphasizes Mattie’s precocious, almost obsessive preoccupation with the law. She is forever citing law-book principles, invoking lawyers and affidavits, and threatening to go to court. “You must pay for everything in this world one way or another,” says Mattie. “There is nothing free except the grace of God.”

That kind of legal and moral cost-accounting seems as distant as a tintype now. The new “True Grit” lands in an America that’s still not recovered from a crash where many of the reckless perpetrators of economic mayhem deflected any accountability and merely moved on to the next bubble, gamble or ethically dubious backroom deal. When Americans think of the law these days, they often think of a system that can easily be gamed by the rich and the powerful, starting with those who pillaged Lehman Brothers, A.I.G. and Citigroup and left taxpayers, shareholders and pensioners in the dust. A virtuous soul like Mattie would be crushed in a contemporary gold rush even if (or especially if) she fought back with the kind of civil action so prized by the 19th-century Mattie.

Talk about Two Americas. Look at “The Social Network” again after seeing “True Grit,” and you’ll see two different civilizations, as far removed from each other in ethos as Silicon Valley and Monument Valley. While “Social Network” fictionalizes Mark Zuckerberg, it mines the truth of an era — from the ability of the powerful and privileged to manipulate the system to the collapse of loyalty as a prized American virtue at the top of that economic pyramid.

In contrast to Mattie’s dictum, no one has to pay for any transgression in the world it depicts. Zuckerberg’s antagonists, Harvard classmates who accuse him of intellectual theft, and his allies, exemplified by a predatory venture capitalist, sometimes seem more entitled and ruthless than he is. The blackest joke in Aaron Sorkin’s priceless script is that Lawrence Summers, a Harvard president who would later moonlight as a hedge fund consultant, might intervene to arbitrate any ethical conflicts. You almost wish Rooster were around to get the job done.

“The Social Network” is nothing if not the true sequel to “Wall Street.” The director, David Fincher (no less brilliant than the Coens), makes the atmosphere almost as murky and poisonous as that of his serial killer movies, “Seven” and “Zodiac.” In “Social Network,” the landscape is Cambridge, Mass., but we might as well be in the pre-civilized Wild West. Instead of thieves bearing guns, we have thieves bearing depositions. Instead of actual assassinations, we have character assassinations by blog post. In place of an honorable social code, we have a social network presided over by a post-adolescent billionaire whose business card reads “I’m CEO … Bitch!”

This hits too close to home. No one should have been surprised that those looking for another America once again have been finding it in “True Grit.”

Eeeew.  Mr. Rich used the name “Liz Cheney.” Now I need another shower.

Collins, Blow and Herbert

In “The Week of Speaking Pleasantly” Ms. Collins says as the new Congress gets to work, we get a look at the new breed of politician who came up through reality TV.  Mr. Blow, in “Obama’s Gun Play,” says President Obama’s base has high expectations on gun control. Will he openly support sensible restrictions in the State of the Union next week?  Yeah, Mr. Blow, that’ll calm down the rabid crazies on the right who are convinced he’s out to take their guns away.  Good move!  Mr. Herbert, in “The Loss of a Good Man,” says Sargent Shriver, who died this week at 95, had a splendid vision of America.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

Congress really has been looking a little more civil. Not quite Athens in the age of Pericles, but it’s very possible that this year we’ll get through the State of the Union address without anybody jumping up to scream insults at the president.

Going for baby steps.

The Senate has had no comity issues whatsoever because everybody went home after a single meeting early this month under rules that require time to come to a halt. It’s officially still the first day of the year in Harry Reid Land, demonstrating once again how closely the United States Senate resembles the second season of the original “Star Trek.”

But the House has been busy. First, the members read the Constitution out loud, which gave us a welcome opportunity to recall the time last fall that John Boehner gave a speech in which he bragged that he carried the document everywhere, pulled it out of his pocket, waved it around, and then started to recite passages from the Declaration of Independence.

Then came the first bill of the year, which directed the Government Printing Office to stop producing hundreds of copies of bills and resolutions that people can just look up online.

It passed unanimously! Who says Republicans and Democrats can’t work together? True, since the entire House printing budget is only about $7 million a year, this is not going to make much of an impact on the deficit. But trees will be saved, waste paper reduced and Washington parks will no longer be littered with fluttering resolutions commemorating National Frozen Food Day.

Good start, guys.

Then, of course, the new Republican majority took their symbolic vote to repeal the health care reform law. The debate really wasn’t that bad. In a welcome break from the past, the Republicans refrained from claiming that God was personally rooting for the collapse of Obamacare. And while the Democrats said that people would die if the law was repealed, they did not suggest that this would make the Republicans happy.

I’m picking up good vibrations … …

“I look forward to working with my friends not only on the right but also my colleagues on the left to craft a bill that’s going to work for the American people,” said Sean Duffy, a new Republican from Wisconsin. He is the one who used to be in the reality show “The Real World.” He met his wife on another reality show, “Road Rules All-Stars,” and they now have six children.

I believe Sean Duffy is the progenitor of a new breed of American politicians who will begin their careers by being chosen to live, on camera, with a bunch of strangers in a large apartment, or competing for valuable prizes on a remote island, or losing enormous amounts of weight on national television. Then they can announce their candidacy for Congress.

No longer will it be necessary to go to law school. Actually, Duffy did both, but he is like one of those cross-species babies in science-fiction movies who pave the way for a whole new life form.

When they weren’t being polite to one another, the Democrats spent much of the debate time holding up pictures of seriously ill constituents who would lose their health coverage if the law went away, while Republicans made their victims out of small business.

“I want to tell you about the owner of the Pizza Hut in Headland, Ala., who will be forced to close his doors due to the costs associated with this law,” warned Martha Roby, one of the freshmen who defeated an incumbent Democrat and, therefore, got special first-day positioning.

The new law’s opponents don’t generally say in so many words that they’re fighting for employers’ God-given right to refuse to provide health insurance for their workers. But that seems to be the bottom line.

The worst moment for the Democrats came when one of their own, Representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee, broke the march toward civil discourse by comparing the Republican talking points to Nazi propaganda. This was during a brief speech in which he also managed to work in the term “blood libel.”

The only possible consolation for his fellow party members was that in this week’s competition for worst remark by a politician, Cohen was pitted against the new governor of Alabama, who announced in his Martin Luther King Day speech that any constituent who had not accepted Jesus Christ as his savior was “not my brother.”

That would be worse, particularly if you were a Jew or a Muslim living in Birmingham.

But, all in all, not a bad record. Maybe civility will become a serious trend. Everything would be better. All the screaming heads would lose their cable TV shows to be replaced by a bunch of pleasant House members who can talk both about the issues, and their plans to appear on “Survivor CCLV.”

Now here’s Mr. Blow:

President Obama is under renewed pressure from his base to demonstrate that he is, indeed, a principled man of unwavering conviction rather than a pliant political reed willingly bent and bowed by ever-shifting winds.

This time the issue is gun control.

Pre-presidency, Obama had been a strong supporter of gun-control initiatives. Since then, however, he has remained curiously quiet on the issue in general and following the Tucson shooting in particular.

The question now is: which Obama will show up at the State of the Union?

Obama, the politician, must be hesitant. He’s enjoying a surge in the polls following a successful lame-duck session of Congress in which a few concessions bought substantial gains. And his handling of the shooting seemed to strike the right balance with the overwhelming majority of Americans. He’s on a roll!

Furthermore, according to a 2005 Gallup poll, gun owners are almost twice as likely to be white as nonwhite, are more than three times as likely to be male as female and are more likely to live in the South and Midwest than in the East or West. Yes, you guessed it: This fits the profile of the voters Obama has lost and needs to win back if he wants to be re-elected.

And no one wants to upset the powerful gun-rights lobby, whose campaign-finance clout dwarfs that of the gun-control lobby. According to data from the nonpartisan campaign finance watchdog group the Center for Responsive Politics, the gun-rights lobby has contributed more than $24 million in election cycles from 1990 to 2010. About 85 percent went to Republicans. By comparison, the gun-control lobby donated less than $2 million in the same period, mostly to Democrats.

That said, Obama the gun-control supporter surely knows how anomalous we are among comparable nations. We are a violent society whose intense fealty to firearms has deadly consequences. Sensible restrictions on the most dangerous weapons could go a long way toward making us safer.

According to 2005 data from the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, a comparison of member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development for which data were available showed that the U.S. is in a league of its own, and not in a good way. We have nearly 9 guns for every 10 people, and about 9 out of every 10 of our homicides are committed with one of those guns. No other country even comes close.

At the moment, there is popular support for more restrictions. According to a NBC/Wall Street Journal survey, 52 percent of Americans asked believed that laws covering the sale of guns should be made more strict. Will Obama seize the sentiment? This is a test of character: Will the president choose what is right over what is convenient and speak out for what he believes in?

Next week we will see which Obama emerges: a stalwart of conviction, an exemplar of expediency or someone still stuck in the ambiguous middle of conciliation and pseudocourage.

Now here’s Mr. Herbert:

It was like reading fiction. Scott Stossel, in his book, “Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver,” described a harrowing World War II sea battle that erupted off Guadalcanal on the night of Nov. 14, 1942:

“The foremast was hit. Electrical fires erupted continuously, all around Shriver. Whole gun crews were killed by flying shells. The ship began to slow down, and more Japanese rounds ripped across the deck, killing an officer in the radar plotting room. Three rounds exploded in another battle station, killing a half dozen more men. Steam lines were severed, and the hot, hissing steam scalded numerous sailors. Ladders between decks got knocked out, making putting out fires and attending to the growing scores of wounded much more difficult. Shriver himself was wounded when metal shrapnel from an explosion lodged itself in his shoulder, a wound for which he was later to be awarded a Purple Heart.”

It was such a different time, an era when it was considered shameful for men to run and hide when their nation was at war. Now we send other people’s children off to war willy-nilly, and the rest of us go shopping. (At least until someone steeped in the business philosophy of Neutron Jack Welch takes our jobs away.)

R. Sargent Shriver, one of America’s great good men, died this week at the age of 95. He was best known as the brother-in-law of John F. Kennedy. Married for 56 years to Kennedy’s sister, Eunice, who died in 2009, he was also the father of Maria Shriver, the former television personality who is married to Arnold Schwarzenegger. That Mr. Shriver was not better known for his own extraordinary accomplishments, and for his rock-solid commitment to the ideals that this nation ought to stand for, is not just unfortunate, but discouraging.

He was the founding director of the Peace Corps, the signature success of Kennedy’s New Frontier. He founded Head Start, created the Job Corps and Legal Services for the Poor, and gave us Volunteers in Service to America, which was the domestic version of the Peace Corps. He served as president and chairman of the Special Olympics, which was founded by Eunice Shriver. Indefatigable and unrepentantly idealistic, Mr. Shriver may have directly affected more people in a positive way than any American since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

He was the flip side of the cruelty and ugliness that has come to dominate so much of American public life. The U.S. has once again fallen into the hands of the forces who, rather than trying to help, would relieve the middle class and the poor of every last shred of economic security. Not only have millions been thrown out of work, but the squeeze is on to prevent them from getting the safety net assistance that might cushion the awful blow of joblessness.

Public services are being dismantled throughout the republic in the name of austerity — school systems, libraries, police forces, transportation services, and so on. Any talk of raising taxes on the rich is verboten. Shared sacrifice? Not if you’re wealthy.

Sargent Shriver had a different view of America — warmer, richer and more humane. A young Bill Moyers, who joined Mr. Shriver at the Peace Corps and eventually became its deputy director, said a crucial component of the corps was Mr. Shriver’s deep commitment to the idea of America “as a social enterprise … of caring and cooperative people.”

Here’s an example: In 1964, as leader of the Office of Economic Opportunity in the Johnson administration, Mr. Shriver came across studies that showed connections between poor nutrition, lower I.Q. scores and arrested social and emotional development. He wondered whether early childhood intervention “could have a beneficial effect on the children of poor people.” Head Start followed in incredibly short order.

Mr. Shriver was the point man, the driving force of Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty. Between 1964 and 1968, nearly one of every three poor Americans left the poverty rolls, the largest drop in a four-year period ever recorded. Mr. Shriver’s idealism was not of the dreamy sort. It was geared toward concrete results.

He was also a fighter for the rights and dignity of black people and other ethnic minorities. It was Mr. Shriver who suggested that John Kennedy, during his campaign for the presidency, make a phone call to Coretta Scott King, expressing his concern and offering assistance at a time when her husband, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., had been sentenced to a four-month prison term at hard labor for a bogus traffic-related arrest in Georgia.

Real courage, idealism, a commitment to service and a willingness to sacrifice — Sargent Shriver had all of that and more. In an interview several years ago, he told me, “We made an effort during that time to find out what was true, and what was needed by way of improvement.”