Brooks and Nocera

In “It’s Not About You” Bobo says America needs to adjust its message to college graduates.  Actually, you schmuck, it would be sweet if those graduates could find JOBS, doncha think?  Mr. Nocera, in “The Good Banker,” introduces us to an insider who’s willing to tell the truth about banking.  Here’s Bobo:

Over the past few weeks, America’s colleges have sent another class of graduates off into the world. These graduates possess something of inestimable value. Nearly every sensible middle-aged person would give away all their money to be able to go back to age 22 and begin adulthood anew.

But, especially this year, one is conscious of the many ways in which this year’s graduating class has been ill served by their elders. They enter a bad job market, the hangover from decades of excessive borrowing. They inherit a ruinous federal debt.

More important, their lives have been perversely structured. This year’s graduates are members of the most supervised generation in American history. Through their childhoods and teenage years, they have been monitored, tutored, coached and honed to an unprecedented degree.

Yet upon graduation they will enter a world that is unprecedentedly wide open and unstructured. Most of them will not quickly get married, buy a home and have kids, as previous generations did. Instead, they will confront amazingly diverse job markets, social landscapes and lifestyle niches. Most will spend a decade wandering from job to job and clique to clique, searching for a role.

No one would design a system of extreme supervision to prepare people for a decade of extreme openness. But this is exactly what has emerged in modern America. College students are raised in an environment that demands one set of navigational skills, and they are then cast out into a different environment requiring a different set of skills, which they have to figure out on their own.

Worst of all, they are sent off into this world with the whole baby-boomer theology ringing in their ears. If you sample some of the commencement addresses being broadcast on C-Span these days, you see that many graduates are told to: Follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams and find yourself. This is the litany of expressive individualism, which is still the dominant note in American culture.

But, of course, this mantra misleads on nearly every front.

College grads are often sent out into the world amid rapturous talk of limitless possibilities. But this talk is of no help to the central business of adulthood, finding serious things to tie yourself down to. The successful young adult is beginning to make sacred commitments — to a spouse, a community and calling — yet mostly hears about freedom and autonomy.

Today’s graduates are also told to find their passion and then pursue their dreams. The implication is that they should find themselves first and then go off and live their quest. But, of course, very few people at age 22 or 24 can take an inward journey and come out having discovered a developed self.

Most successful young people don’t look inside and then plan a life. They look outside and find a problem, which summons their life. A relative suffers from Alzheimer’s and a young woman feels called to help cure that disease. A young man works under a miserable boss and must develop management skills so his department can function. Another young woman finds herself confronted by an opportunity she never thought of in a job category she never imagined. This wasn’t in her plans, but this is where she can make her contribution.

Most people don’t form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling.

The graduates are also told to pursue happiness and joy. But, of course, when you read a biography of someone you admire, it’s rarely the things that made them happy that compel your admiration. It’s the things they did to court unhappiness — the things they did that were arduous and miserable, which sometimes cost them friends and aroused hatred. It’s excellence, not happiness, that we admire most.

Finally, graduates are told to be independent-minded and to express their inner spirit. But, of course, doing your job well often means suppressing yourself. As Atul Gawande mentioned during his countercultural address last week at Harvard Medical School, being a good doctor often means being part of a team, following the rules of an institution, going down a regimented checklist.

Today’s grads enter a cultural climate that preaches the self as the center of a life. But, of course, as they age, they’ll discover that the tasks of a life are at the center. Fulfillment is a byproduct of how people engage their tasks, and can’t be pursued directly. Most of us are egotistical and most are self-concerned most of the time, but it’s nonetheless true that life comes to a point only in those moments when the self dissolves into some task. The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself.

Oh, if only Bobo would get lost…  Here’s Mr. Nocera:

Not long ago, as I was leaving a business lunch, my luncheon companion handed me a thin manila envelope. He didn’t tell me what was in it or why he had given it to me, but as soon as I opened it up, I immediately understood.

It contained a copy of the 2010 annual report to shareholders by a bank executive I’d never met: Robert G. Wilmers. For nearly 30 years, Wilmers has run the M&T Bank, based in Buffalo. When he took it over, M&T had $2 billion in assets; today, its assets exceed $68 billion, and it’s one of the most highly regarded regional bank holding companies. It has also been one of the best performing stocks in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index; indeed, M&T was one of only two banks in the S.& P. 500 that didn’t cut its dividend during the financial crisis.

Wilmers’s report, however, was less about the company’s numbers than about the dismal state of his beloved profession. Wilmers, it turns out, is that rarest of birds: a banker willing to tell harsh truths about banking. That, for instance, much of the money the big banks earn comes from trading profits “rather than the prudent extension of credit that furthers commerce.” That derivatives had helped bring about the crisis and needed to be regulated. That bank executives were wildly overpaid. That the biggest banks — the Too Big to Fail Banks — were operating, as he put it, an “unsafe business model.”

My first thought upon finishing the report was: I need to meet this guy. So, a few weeks ago, I did.

In person, Wilmers does not immediately strike one as a rabble-rouser. At 77, he is soft-spoken, a bit reticent, and almost excessively polite. “I personally believe that there isn’t a more honorable profession than the banking industry,” he began. “Most bankers are very involved in their communities, and they can stand up and be counted. I saw a poll recently,” he continued, “that showed we are now considered the third worst profession. That bothers me.”

On the other hand, it didn’t exactly surprise him. In the run-up to the financial crisis, the giant national banks — which he viewed as a distinct species from the typical American bank — had done things that deserved condemnation. And, he added, “They are still doing things that I don’t think are very good.”

Such as? “It has become a virtual casino,” he replied. “To me, banks exist for people to keep their liquid income, and also to finance trade and commerce.” Yet the six largest holding companies, which made a combined $75 billion last year, had $56 billion in trading revenues. “If you assume, as I do, that trading revenues go straight to the bottom line, that means that trading, not lending, is how they make most of their money,” he said.

This was a problem for several reasons. First, it meant that banks were taking excessive risks that were never really envisioned when the government began insuring deposits — and became, in effect, the backstop for the banking industry. Second, bank C.E.O.’s were being compensated in no small part on their trading profits — which gave them every incentive to keep taking those excessive risks. Indeed, in 2007, the chief executives of the Too Big to Fail Banks made, on average, $26 million, according to Wilmers — more than double the compensation of the top nonbank Fortune 500 executives. (Wilmers made around $2 million last year.)

Finally — and this is what particularly galled him — trading derivatives and other securities really had nothing to do with the underlying purpose of banking. He told me that he thought the Glass-Steagall Act — the Depression-era law that separated commercial and investment banks — should never have been abolished and that derivates need to be brought under government control. “It doesn’t need to be studied for two years,” he said. “I would put derivative trading in a subsidiary and tax it at a higher rate. If they fail, they fail.”

As Wilmers continued on in this vein, I found myself nodding in agreement. I also couldn’t help thinking back on remarks I’d heard Jamie Dimon give at a recent Chamber of Commerce event. Dimon, who made more than $20 million last year at JPMorgan Chase, is widely viewed as the best of the big bank chief executives. But he’s also become the most vocal defender of the status quo. “To people who say the system would be safer with smaller banks doing traditional banking, well, the system would be safer if we also went back to horse and buggies,” he told the Chamber audience. “That is a quaint notion that won’t work in the real world.”

At the M&T annual meeting earlier this year, Wilmers told the company’s shareholders that the bank’s mission was to “find ways to continue to attract deposits, make sound loans and grow in accordance with our historic credit quality standards.”

How quaint, indeed. And how refreshing.

 

The Pasty Little Putz and Krugman

The Pasty Little Putz says we should “Trust but E-Verify,” and gurgles on about what Arizona — and, yes, Canada — can teach us about immigration.  Prof. Krugman, in “Against Learned Helplessness,” says we unemployment.  Here’s The Putz:

The Arizona immigration law was controversial from the beginning. Critics said it was ripe for abuse, implicitly discriminatory and probably unconstitutional as well. Business groups and liberal activists joined forces to oppose it.

But now that it’s been implemented, it might just be a model for nationwide reform.

No, I’m not talking about the Arizona law that empowers local police to check the immigration status of anyone they detain, which generated a wave of boycotts and a surfeit of Gestapo analogies last spring. I mean the 2007 Arizona law requiring businesses to confirm their employees’ legal status with the federal E-Verify database, which was upheld last week in a 5-to-3 decision by the United States Supreme Court.

The E-Verify law was never as polarizing as last year’s police-powers legislation, but it still attracted plenty of opposition. Arizona business interests called it unfair and draconian. (An employer’s business license is suspended for the first offense and revoked for the second.) Civil liberties groups argued that the E-Verify database’s error rate is unacceptably high, and that the law creates a presumptive bias against hiring Hispanics.

If these arguments sound familiar, it’s because similar critiques are always leveled against any attempt to actually enforce America’s immigration laws. From the border to the workplace, immigration enforcement is invariably depicted as terribly harsh, hopelessly expensive and probably racist into the bargain.

Not to mention counterproductive: advocates for “comprehensive” reform, the holy grail of liberal Democrats and moderate Republicans alike, have long implied that it’s essentially impossible to prevent illegal immigrants from finding their way to eager employers. Instead, they argue, we have no choice but to ratify the status quo — i.e., mass low-skilled immigration from Mexico and Central America — by creating a vast new guest-worker program and offering citizenship to illegal immigrants already here.

So far, though, Arizona’s E-Verify law seems to be providing a strong counterpoint to this counsel of despair. According to a recent study from the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, the legislation reduced Arizona’s population of working-age illegal immigrants by about 17 percent, or roughly 92,000 people, in just a single year. (This effect was entirely distinct from the Great Recession’s broader impact on immigration, the study argues.) And the swift attrition was mainly achieved through voluntary compliance: the number of employers prosecuted under the law can be counted on one hand.

These results suggest that maybe — just maybe — America’s immigration rate isn’t determined by forces beyond any lawmaker’s control. Maybe public policy can make a difference after all. Maybe we could have an immigration system that looked as if it were designed on purpose, not embraced in a fit of absence of mind.

At least in the short term, there’s no good reason for such a system to include any kind of amnesty. This was a dubious idea even during the last decade’s economic boom. It would be folly (and a political nonstarter) in this economic climate, which has left Americans without high school diplomas (who tend to lose out from low-skilled immigration) facing a 15 percent unemployment rate.

But eschewing amnesty doesn’t require shutting down immigration. Quite the opposite: With increased enforcement (to date, only a few states have Arizona-style E-Verify laws on the books, though the Obama White House seems to be stepping up prosecutions of employers), the United States could welcome as many immigrants as we do today. But instead of shrugging as low-skilled workers jump the border to compete with the struggling American working class, our immigration policy should focus on recruiting well-educated migrants, opening the door to greater legal immigration from Asia, Africa and Europe.

As it happens, a system along these lines exists right now — in Canada. A recent report from the Manhattan Institute found that the United States still assimilates immigrants more successfully than many Western European countries. But culturally and economically, we lag well behind our northern neighbor when it comes to integrating new arrivals.

In part, this is because Canada fast-tracks immigrants to citizenship. But it’s also because Canada does more to recruit highly educated émigrés than the United States — and the Dominion’s more international, geographically diverse immigrant population probably discourages balkanization and self-segregation. (No single country or region dominates Canada’s immigration numbers to the extent that Mexico and the rest of Latin America dominate immigration to the United States.)

The result is a system that welcomes newcomers but serves the national interest as well. America isn’t close to that sweet spot at the moment, but it’s what we should be aiming for. By learning from Arizona, and becoming more like Canada, we might finally have an immigration policy worthy of the U.S.A.

Now here’s Prof. Krugman:

Unemployment is a terrible scourge across much of the Western world. Almost 14 million Americans are jobless, and millions more are stuck with part-time work or jobs that fail to use their skills. Some European countries have it even worse: 21 percent of Spanish workers are unemployed.

Nor is the situation showing rapid improvement. This is a continuing tragedy, and in a rational world bringing an end to this tragedy would be our top economic priority.

Yet a strange thing has happened to policy discussion: on both sides of the Atlantic, a consensus has emerged among movers and shakers that nothing can or should be done about jobs. Instead of a determination to do something about the ongoing suffering and economic waste, one sees a proliferation of excuses for inaction, garbed in the language of wisdom and responsibility.

So someone needs to say the obvious: inventing reasons not to put the unemployed back to work is neither wise nor responsible. It is, instead, a grotesque abdication of responsibility.

What kinds of excuses am I talking about? Well, consider last week’s release of the latest report on the economic outlook by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D. The O.E.C.D. is basically an intergovernmental think tank; while it has no direct ability to set policy, what it says reflects the conventional wisdom of Europe’s policy elite.

So what did the O.E.C.D. have to say about high unemployment in its member countries? “The room for macroeconomic policies to address these complex challenges is largely exhausted,” declared the organization’s secretary general, who called on countries instead to “go structural” — that is, to focus on long-run reforms that would have little impact on the current employment situation.

And how do we know that there’s no room for policies to put the unemployed back to work? The secretary general didn’t say — and the report itself never even suggests possible solutions to the employment crisis. All it does is highlight the risks, as it sees them, of any departure from orthodox policy.

But then, who is talking seriously about job creation these days? Not the Republican Party, unless you count its ritual calls for tax cuts and deregulation. Not the Obama administration, which more or less dropped the subject a year and a half ago.

The fact that nobody in power is talking about jobs does not mean, however, that nothing could be done.

Bear in mind that the unemployed aren’t jobless because they don’t want to work, or because they lack the necessary skills. There’s nothing wrong with our workers — remember, just four years ago the unemployment rate was below 5 percent.

The core of our economic problem is, instead, the debt — mainly mortgage debt — that households ran up during the bubble years of the last decade. Now that the bubble has burst, that debt is acting as a persistent drag on the economy, preventing any real recovery in employment. And once you realize that the overhang of private debt is the problem, you realize that there are a number of things that could be done about it.

For example, we could have W.P.A.-type programs putting the unemployed to work doing useful things like repairing roads — which would also, by raising incomes, make it easier for households to pay down debt. We could have a serious program of mortgage modification, reducing the debts of troubled homeowners. We could try to get inflation back up to the 4 percent rate that prevailed during Ronald Reagan’s second term, which would help to reduce the real burden of debt.

So there are policies we could be pursuing to bring unemployment down. These policies would be unorthodox — but so are the economic problems we face. And those who warn about the risks of action must explain why these risks should worry us more than the certainty of continued mass suffering if we do nothing.

In pointing out that we could be doing much more about unemployment, I recognize, of course, the political obstacles to actually pursuing any of the policies that might work. In the United States, in particular, any effort to tackle unemployment will run into a stone wall of Republican opposition. Yet that’s not a reason to stop talking about the issue. In fact, looking back at my own writings over the past year or so, it’s clear that I too have sinned: political realism is all very well, but I have said far too little about what we really should be doing to deal with our most important problem.

As I see it, policy makers are sinking into a condition of learned helplessness on the jobs issue: the more they fail to do anything about the problem, the more they convince themselves that there’s nothing they could do. And those of us who know better should be doing all we can to break that vicious circle.

 

Dowd, Friedman and Kristof

MoDo, in “For Office Civility, Cherchez la Femme,” has a question:  Can a woman who made it in a man’s world go to a man’s world and make it safe for women?  She’s developed a schoolgirl crush on Christine Lagarde, who’s poised to take over running the IMF.  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “Pay Attention,” says the Egyptian revolution is not over. It is now in the utterly vital phase of deciding who gets to write the rules for the new government.  Mr. Kristof, in “Slums Into Malls,” says watch out, China: With its liberated news media and booming economy, India could nibble your lunch.  Here’s MoDo, all atwitter in Paris:

On the way up to Christine Lagarde’s office high above the Seine, you pass through a lobby filled with wall after wall of black-and-white photos of her predecessors as French finance minister: all men.

They include a former president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing; a current president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and a former favorite to be president, Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

DSK, as he’s known here, is holding a pen, beaming with confidence.

His photo on the front page of Le Figaro on Lagarde’s coffee table looks far different: the humbled former International Monetary Fund chief flanked by two New York detectives at his house-arrest pad in TriBeCa, a $50,000-a-month apartment so “luxueuse,” as the paper says, that it is giving the Socialist Party “malaise.”

Another black-and-white expanse greets you when you enter Lagarde’s office: the zebra-patterned carpet she put in so she wouldn’t always be facing “men in gray suits on a gray rug.”

The attractive, 55-year-old Lagarde — 5-foot-10 and lithe with short silver hair and blue-green eyes — is gliding around on the zebra rug in her nude patent Christian Louboutin high heels. The woman has panache.

What else would you expect from someone who became a synchronized swimmer on the French national team after watching Esther Williams movies as a girl?

“She was a little bit plumpy, which was lovely,” Madame Minister says of the ’50s movie star, adding that she does a bit of her old practice, in addition to working on her rose garden and cooking, when she’s at her home in Normandy. “I love the sea. I think I must have been a dolphin in a previous life.”

Synchronized swimming taught her teamwork and how to hold her breath when world economies dived underwater.

She was, she says, “born independent.” When she was 4, she confides in her melodic low voice, her “totally irresponsible” parents would put her and her infant brother to bed and sneak out to the theater and concerts. One night they came back and found all the lights on. Christine was ensconced in a big chair in the living room, reading her book. “Next time,” she nonchalantly told her parents, “just let me know when you go.”

France’s first female finance minister got a boost in her bid to become the first female head of the I.M.F. at the G-8 meeting in Deauville when Sarkozy lobbied President Obama, Hillary Clinton offered a girl-power endorsement, and Dmitri Medvedev proclaimed a near-consensus. Lagarde asserts that après le DSK déluge, leadership skills count more for the world’s banker than “super-duper training and degrees in economics.”

She says she’s ready to personally go woo China, India and other countries angry over the prospect of yet another European getting a job that they feel should be the prize of a developing country. She heads to Brazil on Monday.

She feels deeply that “with an institution with so many different people with different backgrounds, there’s a need for respect and tolerance. I know what it’s like to walk into a room where you are just by yourself, and everybody else is wearing dark suits, and you feel for a few seconds slightly intimidated and not always welcome.”

She dismisses the charge that she overstepped to get a $408 million legal settlement for a Sarkozy pal, the controversial businessman Bernard Tapie, calling it “a politically driven initiative by the Socialist Party.”

France is soul-searching in the wake of DSK’s DNA stains, debating whether the press is too protective of predatory politicians, whether there are too many liaisons dangereuses between journalists and officials, and whether sexism is taken seriously enough.

Lagarde agrees with The Times’s veteran Paris correspondent Elaine Sciolino that this is an Anita Hill moment for France.

“I think there will be a pre-DSK and a post-DSK,” she says. “And things that may have been tolerated or generally accepted as O.K. will no longer be. I think women will take some confidence and pride out of whatever happens.”

Because the story came out “so brutally and without notice,” she says, the French had a hard time understanding “adversarial” American justice and went into “a huge denial.”

“Rightly or wrongly, a lot of people in the media and the establishment had assumed that he was not only persona grata, but that he was going to be the next president of France,” Lagarde says. “So they had taken him to the pinnacle and then suddenly he was down in the cellar, the gutter. In the denial phase, they had to go through that victimization of the man, while ignoring the real victim, and it led to unacceptable and disgusting comments by some of his friends. Male friends, of course.”

The journalist Jean-François Kahn said he was “practically certain” that DSK was not trying to rape the Sofitel maid, but was merely engaging in “troussage de domestique,” lifting the skirt of the servant. Jack Lang, a former government minister, cracked, “It’s not like anybody died.”

Lagarde has never been the darling of the French elite. When she became minister of finance, she says, “people were not particularly nice to me and the media was very keen to point at mistakes or being too blunt or not using the politically correct phrases. I did what I always do. I just gritted my teeth and smiled and got on with it.”

In 2007, she made a speech suggesting that her countrymen abandon their “old national habit” of over-intellectualizing. “Enough thinking, already!” she urged. “Roll up your sleeves.”

As she told me on Friday, “I said they’d done enough thinking to fill in shelves of libraries of the entire world. I said it was time they got on with action.”

Sciolino writes about the howling that followed in her new book, “La Seduction”: “For the men, here was a French woman brainwashed by too many years in America who was trying to castrate the intellectuals of France!”

The male elite hit back. Bernard-Henri Lévy (who has been vociferously defending his pal DSK) disdainfully noted: “This is the sort of thing you can hear in cafe conversations from morons who drink too much.”

Lagarde shrugs. “I have no regret,” she says. “I was bashed. But the messages got through, I would hope. I don’t mind too much a little Parisian circle that says: ‘Hmmph, she’s not part of us. She’s spent too much time on the other side.’ ”

Like her dynamic boss, Sarkozy, Lagarde is known as “L’Americaine” — not a compliment here. The divorced mother of two grown sons, who now dates a hunky Marseilles real estate developer, attended Holton-Arms high school in the Washington area in an exchange program and spent two decades as a lawyer at Baker & McKenzie in Chicago.

During the financial crisis, her much-criticized tendency to dispense with French protocol allowed her to soar. Her public response to the Lehman collapse was “Holy cow!” She was fast, blunt and able to speak English without a translator.

Even before DSK’s vertiginous fall, Lagarde, who has three younger brothers and who elbowed her way to the top male tier of the City of Broad Shoulders, had warned about the dangers of too much “hairy-chested” testosterone. In Chicago, she says, she had “boys on my team. And I could see them, especially when they were a little bit amongst themselves and I was just in the background, and it was about, ‘Oh, I can do better than you. I’ve got more of this and more of that. And I’ve got more billable hours.’ It’s complete nonsense.”

She noticed, when she worked on big termination packages after mergers, that men would feel their worlds were collapsing while women’s egos were “more diversely invested.”

She believes that women in the mix — “if they accept to just be themselves and not play boys’ games” — can “make it a bit more civilized, bring it back to normality.”

Lagarde’s role models were her mother, a professor of French, Latin and ancient Greek who was widowed when Christine was 16, and an older female partner at Baker & McKenzie, a “solid professional” who put on a little lipstick before seeing clients.

“Neither overplayed their femininity,” she says. “They did not try to charm or lift their skirt to show their knees. But they were women.”

Perhaps a woman who dominates without being domineering is just what is needed at the I.M.F., a macho island outside U.S. law with the sexual norms of a libidinous pirate ship.

The French are reconsidering the line between seduction and aggression. I asked Lagarde how she would delineate it.

“You know when you receive a big slap in the face,” she says, “or when someone says ‘No.’ ”

Has she ever felt sexually harassed?

“No, I’m too tall. I’ve been in sports for too long,” she says, smiling and flexing the muscle under her black Ann Taylor jacket.

“They know that I could just punch them.”

Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom, writing from Cairo:

I had some time to kill at the Cairo airport the other day so I rummaged through the “Egyptian Treasures” shop. I didn’t care much for the King Tut paper weights and ashtrays but was intrigued by a stuffed camel, which, if you squeezed its hump, emitted a camel honk. When I turned it over to see where it was manufactured, it read: “Made in China.” Now that they have decided to put former President Hosni Mubarak on trial, I hope Egyptians add to his indictment that he presided for 30 years over a country where nearly half the population lives on $2 day and 20 percent are unemployed while it is importing low-wage manufactured goods — a stuffed camel, no less — from China.

That’s an embarrassment for Mubarak and America, which has donated some $30 billion in aid to modernize Egypt’s economy over the last 30 years — and President Obama just promised a couple billion more. Egypt’s economy has nose-dived since the uprising, and the new government really does need the money to stay afloat. But I only hope that Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton understand that right now — right this second — Egypt needs something more from Washington than money: quiet, behind-the-scenes engagement with Egypt’s ruling generals over how to complete the transition to democracy here.

Here’s why. After the ouster of Mubarak in February, his presidential powers were shifted to a military council, led by the defense minister. It’s an odd situation, or as the Egyptian novelist Alaa Al Aswany, author of “The Yacoubian Building,” put it to me: “We have had a revolution here that succeeded — but is not in power. So the goals of the revolution are being applied by an agent, the army, which I think is sincere in wanting to do the right things, but it is not by nature revolutionary.”

To their credit, the Egyptian generals moved swiftly to put in place a pathway to democracy: elections for a new Parliament were set for September; this Parliament will then oversee the writing of a new Constitution, and then a new civilian president will be elected.

Sounds great on paper, and it was endorsed by a referendum, but there’s one big problem: The Tahrir Square revolution was a largely spontaneous, bottom-up affair. It was not led by any particular party or leader. Parties are just now being formed. If elections for the Parliament are held in September, the only group in Egypt with a real party network ready to roll is the one that has been living underground and is now suddenly legal: the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.

“Liberal people are feeling some concerns that they made the revolution and the Muslim Brotherhood can now take it. This is not true,” Esam el-Erian, one of the party’s leaders, insisted to me.

But that is exactly what the urban, secular moderates, who actually did spearhead the Tahrir revolt, fear. They are only now forming parties and trying to build networks that can reach the millions of traditional Egyptians living in the countryside and persuade them to vote for a reform agenda and not just: “Islam is the answer.”

“The liberal parties need more time to organize,” said Naguib Sawiris, an Egyptian billionaire who’s heading the best organized of the liberal parties, and is urging all the liberal groups to run under a single banner and not divide their vote.

If elections happen in September and the Muslim Brotherhood wins a plurality it could have an inordinate impact on writing Egypt’s first truly free Constitution and could inject restrictions on women, alcohol, dress, and the relations between mosque and state. “You will have an unrepresentative Parliament writing an unrepresentative Constitution,” argued Mohamed ElBaradei, the former international atomic energy czar who is running for president on a reform platform.

“Because the Muslim Brotherhood is ready, they want elections first,” adds Osama Ghazali Harb, another reform party leader. “We as secular forces prefer to have some time to consolidate our parties. We must thank the army for the role it played. But it was our revolution, not a coup d’état. … If there are fair elections, the Muslim Brotherhood will only get 20 percent.”

Free elections are rare in the Arab world, so when they happen, everybody tries to vote — not only the residents of that country. You can be sure money will flow in here from Saudi Arabia and Qatar to support the Muslim Brotherhood.

America, though, cannot publicly intervene in the Egyptian election debate. It would only undermine the reformers, who have come so far, so fast, on their own and alienate the Egyptian generals. That said, though, it is important that senior U.S. officials engage quietly with the generals and encourage them to take heed of the many Egyptian voices that are raising legitimate concerns about a premature runoff.

In short, the Egyptian revolution is not over. It has left the dramatic street phase and is now in the seemingly boring but utterly vital phase of deciding who gets to write the rules for the new Egypt. And how Egypt evolves will impact the whole Arab world. I just hope the Obama team is paying attention. This is so much more important than Libya.

And now here’s Mr. Kristof, who’s in Kolkata, India:

I first visited Kolkata, better known as Calcutta, in 1982 as a backpacking law student. I stayed at a hostel in the Howrah slums and regretted that my camera could record only images, not the equally memorable stench.

In my visits over the next 25 years, Kolkata — and much of India — seemed little changed. China, where the national bird was jokingly said to be the crane, would be transformed every year or two, while Kolkata was always the same: a decrepit city where barefoot men pulled rickshaws beside fetid canals.

That’s why India has been a bit of an embarrassment for those of us who believe in democracy, especially when compared with China. The Communist Party in China did a much better job fighting poverty than democratically elected Indian governments. India tolerated dissent, but it also tolerated inefficiency, disease and illiteracy.

But after my trips to India and China this year, I think all that may be changing. Despite the global economic slowdown, India’s economy is now hurtling along at more than 8 percent per year. Yep, India is now a “tiger economy.”

The technology zones around Bangalore in southern India have been booming for years, but what is changing is that the rise is gaining traction across the country — even here in Kolkata. It’s stunning to see the new high-rise towers in Kolkata, new air-conditioned shopping malls, new infrastructure projects, new businesses.

In elections this month, the longtime Communist Party government here in the state of West Bengal was ousted, and the new chief minister is a woman and a dynamo, Mamata Banerjee. After the latest elections, she’s part of a broader trend of charismatic female politicians: one-third of India’s people are now ruled by chief ministers who are women.

The northern state of Bihar used to be even more of an embarrassment. For many years, gangsters played a major role in government there, and nothing worked. I once visited a health clinic in Bihar where employees dumped medicines in a pit in the ground, so they wouldn’t have to dispense them. I visited a school in Bihar where teachers never bothered to show up. I visited villages where gangsters raped, robbed and ruled at their pleasure. Businesses fled, kidnapping became rampant, and Bihar seemed hopeless.

Yet Bihar has, wondrously, turned around since 2005, when a reformer named Nitish Kumar took over as chief minister. There are still enormous inefficiencies, but crime has been suppressed, corruption has diminished, and the local economy is booming at double-digit rates. And if Bihar can turn around, any Indian region can.

Look, India still lags far behind China, it faces risks of Pakistani extremism, it needs further economic reforms, and it too readily accepts inefficiency as the natural order of the universe. India’s education and health system is a disgrace, especially in rural areas; Bangladesh does a much better job, despite being poorer. But change is in the air in India. Infant mortality is dropping, voters are pushing for better governance, and I think India has three advantages over China in their economic rivalry in the coming decades.

First, India’s independent news media and grass-roots civic organizations — sectors that barely exist in China — are becoming watchdogs against corruption and inefficiency. My hunch is that kleptocracy reached its apogee and is now waning in India, while in China it continues to get worse. I’ve written scathingly about India’s human trafficking and oppression of women, but it’s also true that civil society is addressing these issues.

Second, China’s economy may be slowed by the aging of its population, while India’s younger population will lead to a “demographic dividend” in coming decades. (Indian overpopulation is still a problem, but the average woman now has 2.6 children, and the figure is dropping.) Likewise, China already reaped the economic advantages of empowering its women, while India is just beginning to usher the female half of its population into the formal labor force.

Third, India has managed religious and ethnic tensions pretty well, aside from the disgraceful anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat in 2002. The Sikh challenge in the Punjab has dissipated. Muslims have been president of India three times, and are prominent in business and the movie industry; perhaps as a result, India has the world’s third-largest Muslim population (after Indonesia and Pakistan) but few jihadis. And while India has sometimes behaved brutally in Kashmir, civil society watchdogs are pressing for better behavior there. In China, by contrast, tensions with ethnic Tibetans and Uighurs are worsening.

China’s autocrats are extraordinarily competent, in a way that India’s democrats are not. But traveling in India these days is a heartening experience: my hunch is that the world’s largest democracy increasingly will be a source not of embarrassment but of pride.

 

Collins, Blow and Nocera

Ms.  Collins is still reading, the poor soul.  In “The Coyote Candidate” she says in this week’s session of the presidential primary book club, we’re discussing Gov. Rick Perry of Texas. Gov. Goodhair has been being very coy, but maybe he’ll get into the race and discuss why he doesn’t want you to be able to vote for your Senators.  Mr. Blow, in “Endangered Ryan-os,” says Democrats aim at a Republican weak spot.   Mr. Nocera, on the other hand, says “Don’t Scorn Paul Ryan.”  He actually says that however wrongheaded his Medicare plan, at least he’s facing the problem.  Again a column full of pants-pissing and hand wringing about how we need to cut entitlement programs without ONE EFFING WORD about revenue enhancement (maybe that’s a less scary phrase than “raising taxes”) or land wars in Asia.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

Today, we are going to discuss Gov. Rick Perry of Texas.

Get back here and sit down.

Perry is the latest Republican Party crush. Rush Limbaugh delivered a 20-minute paean on the radio, begging him to run for president. He’s from the South, and he has great hair! What more could you want?

The G.O.P. is desperately seeking someone who can save the party from the fate of nominating Mitt Romney. But every time a non-Mitt throws his hat in the ring, the hat explodes. Newt Gingrich has been a candidate only about two weeks, and already he has announced that anyone who quotes his comments about Medicare on “Meet the Press” would be lying. And he responded to the question “did you owe a half-million dollars to a jewelry company at one point?” with a series of nonanswers, one of which was “we are very frugal.”

Meanwhile, about-to-announce Rick Santorum told an interviewer that John McCain doesn’t understand about interrogating people under torture.

Perry! Perry! Perry!

O.K., there are a few problems. One is that a Texas Tribune poll this week showed that Perry was only the choice of 4 percent of Texas Republicans for the presidential nomination. (Sarah Palin came in first and Gingrich second, which suggests the Republicans in Texas may not be totally focused.)

On Friday, Perry seemed a little more interested in the whole idea than he had in the past. “I’m going to think about it,” he told reporters after he ceremonially signed a bill making it more difficult for poor Texans who do not have drivers’ licenses to vote.

Anyway, we will refrain from any snide comments about how, in Perry’s case, thinking is a very intense commitment. Really, the guy might be president. Show some respect.

So who is this man called Rick? He is, in his own words, “the kind of guy who goes jogging in the morning packing a Ruger .380 with laser sights and loaded with hollow point bullets, and shoots a coyote that is threatening his daughter’s dog.” That really happened. In fact, it was possibly the high point of Perry’s political career.

You can see the attraction. Try to imagine the Republican convention being asked to choose between Mitt Romney, who once drove to Canada with the family dog strapped to the roof of his car, and the guy who shot a puppy-eating coyote. With a Ruger .380 with laser sights!

Also, Perry wears boots named “Freedom” and “Liberty.”

Clearly, this is a force to be reckoned with. So, today, as a public service, I am going to continue my survey of books by potential Republican presidential nominees by examining the collected works of Rick Perry. Fortunately, there are only two. And, if it’s all right with you, I’m going to skip over “On My Honor: Why the American Values of the Boy Scouts Are Worth Fighting For.”

Let’s go straight to “Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America From Washington,” which does read a whole lot like an I’m-running-for-president tome. Somewhere between “No Apology: Believe in America” (Mitt) or “To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine” (Newt).

“Something is terribly wrong,” Perry starts off. And he doesn’t mean coyotes or scuff marks on “Freedom” and “Liberty.” American people are fed up with federal government: “We are tired of being told how much salt we can put on our food, what windows we can buy for our house, what kind of cars we can drive, what kind of guns we can own.”

I hate it when the salt police come into your house and interrogate your French fries. The federal government actually doesn’t tell us any of these things. Although it is true that federal regulations have driven the price of machine guns way up.

Perry is a true believer. He hates Social Security. (“A crumbling monument to the failure of the New Deal.”) He wants the Supreme Court to stop its activist ways — as soon as it declares the health care reform law unconstitutional.

He hates the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, which permitted Congress to pass an income tax. (“The great milestone on the road to serfdom.”) He also hates the 17th Amendment, which allows for the direct election of the U.S. Senate because it reduces the power of state legislatures.

This is where he lost me forever. People, have you ever seen a state legislature in action? Have you ever seen the Texas Legislature in action? I have, and my first thought was not: “Gee, let’s give these folks a whole lot more clout.”

If Perry were elected president, perhaps he would do for the entire United States what he’s done for Texas, which ranks first in the nation in the percentage of the population without health insurance, and 45th in high school completion. We could return to grass-roots, state-driven environmental regulations, the kind that have made Texas the nation’s leader in clean-water permit violations, hazardous waste spills and toxic emissions from manufacturing facilities.

But the coyotes would really have to watch out.

Now here’s Mr. Blow:

It’s hard to overstate just how profoundly Republicans underestimated the public’s distaste for their draconian Medicare proposal.

Aside from the rich, the electorate is hurting — a pulsing mass of tender nerves, hypersensitive to things that portend pain, reflexively reacting to the thump of even the softest mallet. Needless to say, this is not the time for sledgehammer solutions.

Yet that’s exactly what Paul Ryan offered.

Scared of being labeled R.I.N.O.’s (Republicans in name only), Republicans became Ryan-os, blind devotees to their young Achilles in electoral flip-flops. Former Vice President Dick Cheney went so far as to say, “I worship the ground that Paul Ryan walks on.” When the Sultan of Sadism gushes over someone, you know there’s a problem.

This was a big mistake. Now the Democrats have a quiver of arrows aimed squarely at this newly exposed Republican weak spot.

According to Representative Steve Israel, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, “There are 97 Congressional districts in the country right now that have a Republican member of Congress, but the districts are more moderate and have a higher Democratic performance than NY-26,” which is the Republican district that Democrats won on Tuesday.

Democrats understand that many older Americans are just treading water. The last thing that they’ll countenance right now is any suggestion that one of the last remaining federal life preservers is being withdrawn.

A poll of people ages 50 and over that was released this week by the AARP Public Policy Institute found nearly half had experienced extraordinary and unexpected expenses in the previous three years; half had delayed getting medical or dental care or delayed or ceased taking medication; a quarter said that they used up all their savings; and 12 percent said that they had dropped health insurance coverage altogether.

Only a quarter expected their financial situation to improve next year, and most said that they were not too confident or not at all confident that they would have enough money to live comfortably throughout their retirement years. Only 8 percent were very confident that they’d have enough money.

This is not to say that Medicare isn’t in crisis. It is. But, we don’t have to gut it to save it. This election season, Republicans are suffering from the same disconnect over the idea of change that caused problems for the Democrats in 2010: Voters say “rearrange the furniture”; politicians hear “remodel the house.”

Ryan is known as a numbers guy, but numbers can be cold comfort. People don’t quantify the quality of their lives by the money they save or the money the government saved on them, but by the moments they savor. When dread creeps into the spaces where those moments should be, politicians pay a price at the polls.

And now here’s Mr. Nocera concern trolling and telling us we should take Ryan’s proposal as a starting point for discussions…

I hadn’t realized until I met him on Tuesday that Paul Ryan had been a protégé of Jack Kemp. But the minute I heard him talking about his late mentor, everything suddenly made sense.

Kemp — the former pro football quarterback, longtime Republican congressman, secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and vice presidential candidate (on Bob Dole’s 1996 ticket) — was, above all else, a man of Big Ideas. Especially big economic ideas. An early advocate of supply-side economics and tax cuts for the rich, Kemp did as much as any single person to create the modern Republican gospel.

“Jack used to talk about the battle of ideas,” Ryan told me. In fact, he lived for those battles.

Ryan clearly views himself as Kemp’s natural successor. At 41, he’s been in Congress most of his adult life, where he has pushed the boundaries of Republican economic orthodoxy, just as Kemp did. He has the same kind of “happy warrior” mentality. (“I’m a walking piñata,” he said with a smile.) And he’s finally latched onto a Big Idea that could reshape the country even more than the Kemp-Roth tax cuts did in 1981 — namely, the Republican budget he masterminded, particularly its radical vision for turning Medicare into, essentially, a do-it-yourself voucher program.

It was pure coincidence that I met Ryan on the same day that the Democrats were winning a special Congressional election in upstate New York that had been fought almost exclusively over his Medicare plan. The interview itself was not terribly enlightening; I got his standard talking points about how “we can’t keep kicking the can down the road,” because “Medicare will be bankrupt in nine years and the status quo is unsustainable.” He was, not surprisingly, largely dismissive of the political importance of the Congressional race in New York. His most memorable line came as we were parting ways, when he shook my hand and said, “We’re heading toward a debt crisis. I don’t want to be on the wrong side of history.”

I was not won over, just as I had not often been won over by Jack Kemp’s various enthusiasms. Not that I expected to be. The Ryan plan, which would give seniors a fixed amount they can use to buy health insurance, would undoubtedly shift the cost burden over time from the government to seniors themselves, making health care far less affordable for millions of people. Ryan says that “empowering” health care consumers will help control costs, but that’s absurd: Medicare itself has far more pricing power than the people who actually need treatment.

“It is a rejection of the social insurance principles that are at the root of Medicare,” said Theodore Marmor, whose 1973 book, “The Politics of Medicare,” remains the classic work on the subject. “Its pro-market conception is standard Republican orthodoxy.”

Yet I found myself disheartened as I read about the Democrats’ gleeful reaction to the victory in New York. They had a strategy now: bash the Republicans into submission over the Ryan plan. In the Senate, the Democratic leadership forced a vote over Ryan’s budget purely to force Republicans to cast a vote “against” Medicare. Clearly, the Democrats are going to make hay over the very idea that Republicans were trying to mess with Medicare, the most sacrosanct federal program of them all.

Why is this discouraging? Because even if Ryan’s solution is wrongheaded, he’s right that Medicare is headed for trouble. It might not be in nine years, but as health care costs continue to rise uncontrollably, and as baby boomers continue to age, Medicare will gobble up an ever larger percentage of the federal budget. “The problems are real,” said Alice Rivlin, the Brookings Institution fellow and former Congressional budget director (and a Democrat).

To put it another way, while the Democratic Party might be well served in trying to use the Ryan plan to bury their political opponents, the country itself is not. The debate we need is not about whether Medicare should be reformed, but how.

Marmor, for instance, says that the root problem is not with Medicare itself but with the larger phenomenon of rising health care costs. And he finds himself in philosophical agreement with Ryan about, as he puts it, “the need to put Medicare on a budget,” though he would approach it differently. Rivlin, along with former Senator Pete Domenici, a Republican, has come forth with a less-mean-spirited variant of Ryan’s voucher plan. There are also parts of the Ryan plan that deserve serious consideration, like means-testing — that is, forcing the elderly wealthy to pay more for health care than everyone else.  At the very least, it shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.

It would be nice if we could treat the Ryan plan not as an object of derision but as a launching off point for a serious debate. That way, maybe for once we could avert a crisis instead of acting shocked when it finally arrives.

It figures that Ryan is a Kemp disciple…

Brooks and Krugman

Once again Bobo and Prof. Krugman are addressing the same topic.  Want to guess who comes out on top?  Bobo presents his “Medicare Survival Guide,”  and gurgles about a two-step process to reducing the federal debt without committing political suicide.  Oddly enough, not a word about land wars in Asia, oil subsidies or the bloated defense budget.  I wonder why?  Well, enough snark…  Prof. Krugman, in “Medicare and Mediscares,” says Paul Ryan had reason to be upset after a Democrat won Tuesday’s election in New York’s 26th Congressional District. He’s experienced quite a comedown.  Here’s Bobo:

Sometime this summer, the Democrats and the Republicans will go toe-to-toe over whether to raise the debt ceiling. At the height of the confrontation, President Obama may well address the country and say that even though he has offered the Republicans more than $1 trillion in spending cuts (unspecified), the Republicans have not been willing to compromise on a deal. He will then announce that, even without an agreement, the U.S. will still have enough money to continue payments to its creditors.

Unfortunately, he will go on, the government will not have enough money to continue with many other programs. Federal agencies will send out letters advising parents that because of the deadlock in Congress, student loans will be suspended. Other letters will advise seniors to make arrangements with banks for credit lines until their Social Security checks can resume. National panic will ensue.

A few weeks ago, the Republicans might have been able to withstand this. Then it was possible to argue that Americans are so fed up with runaway spending and unsustainable debt that they would support a party brave enough to put the country on a sound fiscal footing. After the Republican defeat in New York’s 26th Congressional District, it is harder to argue that. After these results, 2012 looks more like a regular election — whichever party can be accused of cutting entitlements will get pummeled.

Already many consultants are telling Republicans to drop austerity and go back on offense: Spend 2012 accusing the Democrats of sponsoring death panels. The Democrats will spend 2012 accusing Republicans of ending Medicare. Whichever party demagogues best wins.

But, over the past few days, I’ve spoken with a number of Republicans — in Congress and elsewhere — who don’t want to do that. They fervently believe the country is in peril. They want to find a way to reduce the debt without committing political suicide.

Doing that is a two-step process. First, Republicans have to make a grand offer on raising the debt ceiling. This offer should include a bipartisan commitment to reduce the growth of Medicare spending. Republicans need Democratic fingerprints on a plan to restrain entitlements. In exchange, Republicans should offer to raise tax revenues on the rich. They should get rid of the interest deductions on mortgages over $500,000 and on second homes. They should close corporate loopholes and cap the health insurance deduction. They should offer a plan that follows the outline of the Simpson-Bowles report and what the now “Gang of Five” in the Senate is working on. (Senator Mark Kirk has a proposal roughly on this latter point.)

Democrats may not agree to this offer. Since the election, Democrats have gone into the fiscal fetal position, hoping to offend no one while Republicans catch all the flak. This week, Senate Democrats voted on four separate budget proposals and not a single Democrat voted for a single one. Even President Obama’s budget received zero votes. The Democrats don’t want to be on record for any governing choice that might be painful.

Moreover, President Obama may use this occasion to pummel the Republicans mercilessly on Medicare, no matter what the consequences for the country.

But if the Republicans made an offer that included revenue increases, they would at least show they are willing to compromise to prevent a national catastrophe. And Democrats might take them up on it. Many Democrats understand the fiscal peril. Many Democrats don’t want to go down in history as the people who did nothing while bankruptcy loomed.

More broadly, Republicans need to reconnect with the working class, the sort of people who live in upstate New York Congressional districts. Republicans won in 2010 because the working class fled from the Democrats’ top-down big government liberalism. But these families have seen the pillars of their world dissolve — jobs, family structure, neighborhood cohesion. They understandably reject any new proposals that introduce even more risk and uncertainty into their lives. Republicans need to be the party of order, stability and steady growth.

They need to lay out the facts showing that Medicare is unstable and on a path to collapse, as Representative Paul Ryan is doing. But they also need to enmesh Medicare reform within an agenda to build solid communities: more money for community colleges and technical schools, an infrastructure bank, a values agenda to shore up marriage and family cohesion, tax holidays to help the unemployed start businesses, tax reform to limit special interest power.

The Boston Consulting Group foresees a manufacturing renaissance as Chinese wages rise and workers in low-cost states like Mississippi find they can compete once again. If Republicans can help foster that, and if they can cut a bipartisan deal that illustrates that we are all in this together, they can do good for the country while doing well politically. If not, it’s the same old story: whoever is bravest on entitlements will lose.

Here’s Prof. Krugman:

Yes, Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, is a sore loser. Why do you ask?

To be sure, Mr. Ryan had reason to be upset after Tuesday’s special election in New York’s 26th Congressional District. It’s a very conservative district, so much so that last year the Republican candidate took 76 percent of the vote. Yet on Tuesday, Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, took the seat, with a campaign focused squarely on Mr. Ryan’s plan to dismantle Medicare and replace it with a voucher system.

How did Ms. Hochul pull off this upset? The Wisconsin congressman blamed Democrats’ willingness to “shamelessly distort and demagogue the issue, trying to scare seniors to win an election,” and he predicted that by November of next year “the American people are going to know they’ve been lied to.”

You can understand Mr. Ryan’s bitterness. He has, after all, experienced quite a comedown over the course of the past seven weeks. Until his Medicare plan was rolled out in early April he had spent months bathing in warm approbation from many pundits, who had decided to anoint him as an icon of fiscal responsibility. And the plan itself received rapturous praise in the first couple of days after its release.

Then people who actually know how to read a budget proposal started looking at the plan. And that’s when everything started to fall apart.

Mr. Ryan may claim — and he may even believe — that he’s facing a backlash because his opponents are lying about his proposals. But the reality is that the Ryan plan is turning into a political disaster for Republicans, not because the plan’s critics are lying about it, but because they’re describing it accurately.

Take, for example, the statement that the Ryan plan would end Medicare as we know it. This may have Republicans screaming “Mediscare!” but it’s the absolute truth: The plan would replace our current system, in which the government pays major health costs, with a voucher system, in which seniors would, in effect, be handed a coupon and told to go find private coverage.

The new program might still be called Medicare — hey, we could replace government coverage of major expenses with an allowance of two free aspirins a day, and still call it “Medicare” — but it wouldn’t be the same program. And if the cost estimates of the Congressional Budget Office are at all right, the inadequate size of the vouchers — which by 2030 would cover only about a third of seniors’ health costs — would leave many if not most older Americans unable to afford essential care.

If anyone is lying here, it’s Mr. Ryan himself, who has claimed that his plan would give seniors the same kind of coverage that members of Congress receive — an assertion that is completely false.

And, by the way, the claim that the plan would keep Medicare as we know it intact for Americans currently 55 or older is highly dubious. True, that’s what the plan promises, but if you think about the political dynamics that would emerge once Americans born a year or two too late realize how much better a deal slightly older Americans are getting, you realize that this is a promise unlikely to be fulfilled.

Still, are Democrats doing a bad thing by telling the truth about the Ryan plan? “If you demagogue entitlement reform,” says Mr. Ryan, “you’re hastening a debt crisis; you’re bringing about Medicare’s collapse.” Maybe he should have a word with his colleagues who greeted the modest, realistic cost control efforts in the Affordable Care Act with cries of “death panels.”

Anyway, the underlying premise behind statements like that is the assumption that the Ryan plan represents a serious effort to come to grip with America’s long-run fiscal problems. But what became clear soon after that plan was unveiled was that it was no such thing. In fact, it wasn’t really a deficit-reduction plan. Once you remove the absurd assumptions — discretionary spending, including defense, falling to Calvin Coolidge levels, and huge tax cuts for corporations and the rich, with no loss in revenue? — it’s highly questionable whether it would reduce the deficit at all.

What the Ryan plan is, instead, is an attempt to snooker Americans into accepting a standard right-wing wish list under the guise of deficit reduction. And Americans, it seems, have seen through the deception.

So what happens now? The fight will shift from Medicare to Medicaid — a program that has become an essential lifeline for many Americans, especially children, but which in the Ryan plan is slated for a 44 percent cut in federal aid over the next decade. At this point, however, I’m optimistic that this initiative will also run aground on popular disapproval.

What of Mr. Ryan’s hope that voters will realize that they’ve been lied to? Well, as I see it, that’s already happening. And it’s bad news for the G.O.P.

Collins and Kristof

In “Democratic Happy Dance” Ms. Collins says in case you missed it, New York’s 26th Congressional District went blue this week.  Of course, that outcome had NOTHING, NOTHING AT ALL to do with Ryan’s plan to get rid of Medicare…  Mr. Kristof is in Kolkata, India.  In “Raiding a Brothel in India” he writes about witnessing a recent brothel raid in Kolkata and seeing five girls freed from forced prostitution.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

Hey, did anybody notice that the Democrat won a special Congressional race in a Republican district in upstate New York? Apparently, she campaigned a lot on protecting Medicare.

OMG! The Democrats are levitating with joy. Never have you seen so many smiling liberals.

“I’m feeling great. I’m ecstatic,” said Steve Israel, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Israel is also a member of Congress from New York — a state where, in case you hadn’t heard, a Democrat won a special Congressional race Tuesday night.

There is no escaping our fate. We are going to spend the next 17 months hearing about how the Republicans want to kill off Medicare. By 2012, the current video on the Web showing a guy who resembles Representative Paul Ryan pushing an old woman off a cliff will look like a Teletubbies skit. By the fall, there will be ads showing the Republicans hacking their way through rows of bedridden seniors with scimitars.

Anybody who is hoping the two sides can come together and work out a plan to control health care costs should plan a lengthy visit to some other country. I hear Finland is nice.

“Look, if they didn’t get the hint in the special election in New York last night, they never will,” said Israel.

Did I mention that there was a Congressional election? And the Democrat won?

So far, the Republicans are increasing their opponents’ Glad Bag of Happiness by sticking to their guns. Ryan, the House budget guru, was back on YouTube Wednesday with another defense of his Medicare plan and a cogent explanation of how the current health care system is all screwed up, rewarding doctors for the number of procedures they do rather than how well they treat their patients.

“Washington has not been honest with you,” Ryan told the camera. He is the powerful chairman of the House Budget Committee, and, therefore, you would think, Washington.

Meanwhile, in the Senate, Republicans were complaining about Democratic triumphalism. They had a point. How are we going to fix the hugely expensive, deeply flawed fee-for-service health care system with all this demagoguery?

“I don’t think it’s responsible to try to scare seniors for political points,” said Senator John Cornyn.

Cornyn, a Texas Republican, is the author of the Health Care Bureaucrats Elimination Act. That bill would kill off the part of the Obama health care law that is aimed at reforming the hugely expensive, deeply flawed fee-for-service health care system.

“They say the way to win the next election is to scare the daylights out of senior citizens. I think that’s irresponsible,” said Cornyn, who predicted, back in 2009, that the Democrats were going to turn Medicare into “a health care gulag.”

The Democrats are still bitter about the way the Republicans demonized them with those “death panel” diatribes. Sensible Republicans say that was very unfortunate, but you have to remember that when they tried to fix Social Security during the Bush presidency, the Democrats said they were trying to bankrupt retirees. We can keep going on like this until we get to the Battle of the Field of Blackbirds in 1371.

The Senate had plenty of time to discuss who said what about whom, since they were engaged in a debate over the House budget, which includes the famous Medicare plan. The one that was such a big topic of discussion in upstate New York, where there was a special election on Tuesday. Which the Democrat won.

The Republican House and Democratic Senate are pursuing a bipartisan agenda this year, the Let’s Only Vote on Things That Will Fail initiative. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid decided to call for a vote on the House budget to trap the Republican moderates into choosing between betraying their party and ticking off their constituents. This is such a tiny group that you’d think torturing them would be illegal under the Endangered Species Act. But no.

Meanwhile, over in the House, videos were surfacing of a town hall meeting in which Rob Woodall, a Georgia Republican, argued health care with a Democratic activist who wanted to know what she was supposed to do without Medicare when her employer didn’t provide coverage for retirees.

“Hear yourself, ma’am. Hear yourself,” Woodall responded, rather triumphantly. “You want the government to take care of you because your employer decided not to take care of you. My question is: When do I decide I’m going to take care of me?”

Asked why he allowed the Congressional health care program to take care of him, Woodall responded, “because it’s free.”

Really, it’s hard to think of anything more the Democrats need to achieve total political bliss. Except maybe G.O.P. Presidential Nominee Newt Gingrich.

Well, Michelle Bachmann would be sorta bliss-y too…  Heavenly bliss?  Bachmann/Palin Overdrive.  Here’s Mr. Kristof:

At the beginning, I knew only about a young teenage girl imprisoned on the third floor of a brothel in a red-light district here in Kolkata.

The pimps nicknamed her Chutki, or little girl. She had just been sold to the brothel-owner and seemed terrified.

Investigators with International Justice Mission, a Washington-based aid group that fights human trafficking, had spotted Chutki while prowling undercover looking for prostituted children. I.J.M. hoped to convince the Kolkata police to free the girl, but it would help to have more evidence that the girl was still imprisoned. So an I.J.M. official asked: Would I like to accompany him as he sneaked into the brothel to gather evidence?

India probably has more modern slaves than any country in the world. It has millions of women and girls in its brothels, often held captive for their first few years until they grow resigned to their fate. China surely has more prostitutes, but they are typically working voluntarily. India’s brothels are also unusually violent, with ferocious beatings common and pimps sometimes even killing girls who are uncooperative.

Unicef has estimated that worldwide 1.8 million children enter the sex trade each year. Too many are in the United States, which should prosecute pimps much more aggressively, but the worst abuses take place in countries like Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Cambodia.

So I set off with the I.J.M. investigator (who wants to remain anonymous for his own safety) into the alleys of the Sonagachi red-light district one evening, slipped into the brothel, and climbed to the third floor. And there were Chutki and three other girls in a room, a pimp hovering over them. Perceiving us as potential customers, he offered them to us.

We demurred but said we’d be back.

The Kolkata police agreed to raid the brothel to free the girl. I.J.M. told them the location of the brothel at the last minute to avoid a tip-off from police ranks. The police casually asked us to lead the way in the raid since we knew what Chutki looked like and where she was kept.

So along with a carload of police, we drove up to the brothel and rushed inside to avoid giving the pimps time to hide Chutki or to escape themselves. With the I.J.M. representative in the lead, we hurtled up the stairs, brushed past the pimp and found Chutki and the three other girls in the same room where we had seen them before.

Two female social workers from I.J.M. immediately began comforting Chutki, who police said was about 15 and looked terrified. They explained that this was a police operation to rescue her, and they helped her put on a robe for modesty’s sake.

Then another of the girls in the room asked if she could be rescued — but a few days later. She explained that if she left now, the brothel-owners would blame her for the raid and possibly harm her grandmother, whose address they knew.

We told the girl that this chance might not come again. She dissolved into tears, wavered and then decided to come out. Then a third said that she wanted to escape as well.

The girls tipped off the police that the brothel-owner was in another building, arranging to sell a new girl named Raya for the very first time, either that evening or the next night. The police hurried off and returned with Raya, a wide-eyed girl of about 10 years.

It seemed that the brothel had purchased Raya just a week earlier, after her own brother-in-law tricked her and trafficked her. If the raid had been delayed by a few hours, she might have faced the first of many rapes.

With Raya was a 5-year-old girl who seemed to have been abandoned. Perhaps the brothel-owners were grooming her for sale in a few more years. So we emerged from the brothel with five lives that had just been transformed.

Equally important, one pimp had been arrested and arrest warrants had been issued for two more. There are no quick fixes to human trafficking, but experience in several countries suggests that prosecuting pimps and brothel-owners makes a difference. A study in Cebu, Philippines, found that helping police and courts target child prostitution resulted in 87 arrests over four years — and a 79 percent reduction in the number of children in the sex trade.

We drove the five girls to a police station to fill out paperwork so that they could move into shelters and receive schooling or vocational training. Raya, the 10-year-old who otherwise at that moment might have been enduring her first rape, was giggly and carefree as she pretended to drive the car. She behaved like a silly little girl — which was thrilling.

Gov. Christie of NJ’s education budget cuts ruled unconstitutional

Oh, my…  On the education front it turns out that perhaps Gov. Chris Christie of NJ may not be the Great White Hope that the Republicans are praying for.  In an article in today’s NYT we learn that “Court Orders New Jersey to Increase Aid to Schools,” reported by Richard Perez-Pena and Winnie Hu.  Turns out that defying prior court orders is frowned upon.  Here’s the article:

The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that a major piece of Gov. Chris Christie’s cost-cutting was unconstitutional and ordered lawmakers to raise spending for poor, urban schools by $500 million next year, despite a state budget shortfall estimated at $10 billion.

The decision is a new milestone in the intertwined disputes over school financing, taxation and the role of the courts that have roiled the state’s politics since the 1970s. And those disputes remain; the ruling intensifies Mr. Christie’s running battles with the Supreme Court and the Legislature, and it will resonate in the coming negotiations to balance the budget, negotiate new contracts with state workers and rescue the government employee pension plans.

The majority in the 3-to-2 decision accused the state of willfully violating previous Supreme Court orders in the long-running school-aid case under review.

“Like anyone else, the state is not free to walk away from judicial orders enforcing constitutional obligations,” Justice Jaynee LaVecchia wrote in the ruling. She added that “the state made a conscious and calculated decision” to renege on the commitment it made two years ago, the last time the case, Abbott v. Burke, went before the court.

In response, Mr. Christie again cited school financing as the chief example of a liberal court run amok, which he vowed to remedy by choosing more conservative justices. Answering questions at a public forum in Cherry Hill, N.J., he said, “I’m going to appoint people who I believe understand their job, which is to interpret the law and not make law from the bench.”

Earlier, in a news conference at the State House, the governor said, “I believe that this decision represents everything that’s wrong with how Trenton has historically operated and everything that I’m here to fight to change.” He said the Supreme Court “should not be dictating how taxpayer dollars are spent and prioritizing certain programs over others.”

While the additional aid ordered by the court was far less than the $1.7 billion requested by some schools advocates, it was still a blow to a governor who has made a national name for himself by cutting spending and assailing perquisites and benefits for public employees, particularly teachers. He has accused the teachers’ union, the New Jersey Education Association, and the courts of promoting the view that more money equals better schools, a position he says has been discredited by decades of failure.

Jon S. Corzine, the Democrat who preceded Mr. Christie as governor, used a one-time infusion of federal stimulus money to increase school spending, even as the state budget shrank. But as that money ran out, Mr. Christie, a Republican who took office last year, cut more than $1 billion in aid to all 591 of the state’s school districts, out of an overall budget of more than $10 billion.

The decision on Tuesday will have no direct impact on most of those districts. Instead, the court order increased aid for only the 31 low-income, urban districts that have long been the subject of the Abbott case. The case, a lawsuit first filed in 1981, has resulted in a series of Supreme Court rulings that have forced the state to funnel billions of dollars into those districts, in cities like Camden, Elizabeth, Jersey City, Newark, Passaic, Paterson, Trenton and Union City.

Mr. Christie said he would comply with the latest ruling, though he had previously suggested that he might ignore such an order. He challenged the Democrats who control the Legislature to figure out where to get the money and ruled out a tax increase to pay for the spending.

Traditionally, the governor and the Legislature spend much of June hammering out a state budget, which is supposed to be adopted by the end of the month.

David Sciarra, executive director of the Education Law Center, the plaintiff in the Abbott case, said, “Neither the governor nor the Legislature should walk away from this at this critical point in time.” He said the need remained “to remedy the harmful impact” of aid cuts on children who were not in the so-called Abbott districts.

Stephen M. Sweeney, the State Senate president, said the governor “was well aware that his draconian cuts to education were illegal,” and noted that in his 2009 campaign, Mr. Christie vowed not to cut school financing.

Some lawmakers pointed out that state revenues were running above projections by an amount close to the $500 million mandated by the court, an amount roughly equal to the sum that would be raised by reinstating the so-called millionaire’s tax on the highest incomes, which expired at the end of 2009.

But last year, Mr. Christie vetoed an effort to revive that tax, and this year, as the state’s fiscal crisis eases and every legislative seat is up for election, there appears to be less appetite for raising the issue again.

In practice, most communities pay for their schools primarily with local taxes, not money from Trenton. But according to the State Constitution, the Legislature has the duty to “provide for the maintenance and support of a thorough and efficient system of free public schools.”

The Supreme Court found, in Robinson v. Cahill in 1973, that the state had violated that mandate. The state then adopted its first personal income tax in 1976, to increase school financing.

Abbott, a similar case, followed, producing a string of rulings that said the state still was not living up to its constitutional duty.

Later Abbott rulings required parity between financing for schools in poor, urban districts and those in affluent suburbs. Yet those low-income districts continued to lag far behind in achievement.

For years, Democrats and Republicans alike complained that Abbott concentrated too much aid on a few urban districts, when many suburban and rural districts had smaller but still significant numbers of needy children.

In 2008, Governor Corzine and the Legislature enacted a new school financing formula that steered increased aid to 205 of the state’s districts rather than the 31 urban districts only. The Supreme Court ruled that the new system was acceptable as long as the state adhered to specific financing commitments for the Abbott districts.

On Tuesday, the court found that the state’s budget-cutting “amounts to nothing less than a reneging on the representations it made.”

But the 3-to-2 decision, and the other opinions that were issued, reveal a deeply divided court. One justice, Barry T. Albin, joined in the majority ruling, but also wrote a separate opinion stating that he would have required the state to stick to the 2008 formula for the 205 districts, which would have roughly doubled the ruling’s cost to the state.

Chief Justice Stuart J. Rabner, a former aide to Governor Corzine, recused himself from the case, as did Justice Virginia Long.

The two dissenting justices, Helen E. Hoens and Roberto A. Rivera-Soto, challenged the legality of the ruling, saying significant decisions required the support of four justices no matter how many were present.

So, since raising taxes is OBVIOUSLY out of the question, I wonder what safety net they’ll decide to defund?

Dowd and Friedman

MoDo is in Dublin, still following the President around.  In “Don’t Be a Stranger” she says Barry O’Bama, the Emerald Isle’s long lost son, zips from a family reunion to pomp and circumstance.  In “Lessons From Tahrir Square” The Moustache of Wisdom has a question:  Do the Israelis or Palestinians have any surprise in them?  Here’s MoDo:

It’s the next morning.

Swaddled in the afterglow, the Irish are trying to figure out: Was it true love or merely a one-day stand?

Not even a whole night, after all, since Barry O’Bama ran off after the ecstatic lovefest, muttering some incredible excuse about a volcanic ash cloud from Iceland.

The tall, dark stranger who bewitched an island didn’t say when he’d be calling again to help out with Ireland’s $100 billion debt. The American president was back in the arms of the Special Relationship. He even proposed a deeper commitment with David Cameron, calling it the Essential Relationship. And on Thursday he’ll be whispering je t’aime to the French.

But the ordinarily laconic lad had looked really happy while he was here, hadn’t he?

As J.F.K. and Bill Clinton discovered before him, Irish love is all-encompassing, a mother’s milk for needy politicians.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny was so enamored of the president that he offered an odd homage, a near-carbon copy of the opening of Obama’s victory acceptance speech in Grant Park in Chicago in 2008, changing the word “America” to “Ireland” and “founders” to “ancestors”: “If there’s anyone out there who still doubts that Ireland is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our ancestors is alive . . . today is your answer.”

The Irish thought they had their dream man when Obama drained a pint of the black stuff in Moneygall. For Barry, who drinks little and watches his calories a lot, that was the equivalent of a keg stand.

(One survey estimated that his suds-mustache picture taken at Ollie Hayes’s pub in Money-all, as his cashing-in hometown is now known, is worth about $200 million to Guinness.)

The next night, lonely and back to passing time with cooking shows and reruns of “Friends,” the Irish watched jealously as Barack enjoyed a more upscale repast with the Queen, washing down sole and watercress with Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin, Vintage Rich 2002.

They couldn’t help but be secretly gleeful that their events went off without a hitch, whereas the band at the British state dinner missed its cue and ended up playing “God Save the Queen” while the confused president was still toasting and the queen was staring stonily ahead.

In Ireland, all had been ebullient. Barry O’ kissed and hugged with abandon, totally out of character for him. He waved a hurling stick and playfully threatened to bring it back to paddle Congressional foes. He cuddled babies, kissed grannies and chatted up a mom who was home making spaghetti when her daughter thrust a cellphone at the president.

He basked in the glow of adoring distant relatives in Moneygall, like “long-lost” eighth cousin Henry Healy whom the president dubbed Henry the Eighth, and a crowd of 25,000 Dubliners, many young and all thrilled, in College Green.

The Irish warmed to their new native son’s flattery — “this little country that inspires the biggest things” — even though some privately doubted his sweet nothing that “your best days are still ahead.” Funnily enough, Obama had to take a foreign trip to seem less foreign to Americans. Even though he did a best-selling memoir about his roots, he has had a persistent and puzzling problem coming across as rooted.

A surprising number of Americans still find the president exotic and existentially detached, falsely believing he’s either a Muslim or foreign born. Just before his trip, he gave in to the demands of Donald Trump and other birthers to release his long-form birth certificate.

But with American reporters swarming Moneygall to examine and show off the long-form birth records of Obama’s ancestor Fulmouth Kearney, a shoemaker who immigrated to Ohio in 1850, the president suddenly seems more rooted in an ethnic working-class persona that even his critics can recognize.

On the streets and at the pub in Moneygall (still smelling of fresh paint) and again at his big speech in Dublin when he offered the Gaelic version of “Yes We Can” — “Is Feidir Linn” — Obama was transformed. He dropped his diffident debutante act. He liberally offered all the Irish charm, wit and warmth that he had lacked in working-class bars and neighborhoods when he lost primaries to Hillary in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana in 2008.

In Buckingham Palace in London, Obama would get to see a copy of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” given to Queen Victoria in 1852. And in Dublin, the president talked about the challenges of being a brash young African-American politician trying to get ahead in a hidebound white Irish-controlled city.

He lobbied for a spot in the Chicago St. Patrick’s Day Parade but ended up at the tail end. “I’ll bet those parade organizers are watching TV today and feeling kind of bad,” he said in Dublin.

With Gael force gusts that gave new meaning to the Irish toast, “May the wind be always at your back,” the cherished Son of Eire looked beyond what the eye could see at the throng of adoring Irish, his new instant family, and he drank in that mother’s milk. President Obama, happy at last.

Now here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

Being back in Cairo reminds me that there are two parties in this region that have been untouched by the Arab Spring: the Israelis and the Palestinians. Too bad, because when it comes to ossified, unimaginative, oxygen-deprived governments, the Israelis and Palestinians are right up there with pre-revolutionary Egypt and Tunisia. I mean, is there anything less relevant than the prime minister of Israel going to the U.S. Congress for applause and the leader of the Palestinians going to the U.N. — instead of to each other?

Both could actually learn something from Tahrir Square. To the Palestinians I would say: You believe the Israelis are stiffing you because they think they have you in box. If you resort to violence, they will brand you terrorists. And if you don’t resort to violence, the Israelis will just pocket the peace and quiet and build more settlements. Your dilemma is how to move Israel in a way that won’t blow up in your face or require total surrender.

You have to start with the iron law of Israeli-Arab peace: whichever party has the Israeli silent majority on its side wins. Anwar Sadat brought the Israeli majority over to his side when he went to Israel, and he got everything he wanted. Yasir Arafat momentarily did the same with the Oslo peace accords. How could Palestinians do that again today? I can tell you how not to do it. Having the U.N. General Assembly pass a resolution recognizing an independent Palestinian state will only rally Israelis around Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, giving him another excuse not to talk.

May I suggest a Tahrir Square alternative? Announce that every Friday from today forward will be “Peace Day,” and have thousands of West Bank Palestinians march nonviolently to Jerusalem, carrying two things — an olive branch in one hand and a sign in Hebrew and Arabic in the other. The sign should say: “Two states for two peoples. We, the Palestinian people, offer the Jewish people a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders — with mutually agreed adjustments — including Jerusalem, where the Arabs will control their neighborhoods and the Jews theirs.”

If Palestinians peacefully march to Jerusalem by the thousands every Friday with a clear peace message, it would become a global news event. Every network in the world would be there. Trust me, it would stimulate a real peace debate within Israel — especially if Palestinians invited youth delegations from around the Arab world to join the marches, carrying the Saudi peace initiative in Hebrew and Arabic. Israeli Jews and Arabs should be invited to march as well. Together, the marchers could draw up their own peace maps and upload them onto YouTube as a way of telling their leaders what Egyptian youth said to President Hosni Mubarak: “We’re not going to let you waste another day of our lives with your tired mantras and maneuvering.”

Crazy, I know. Bibi is reading this and laughing: “The Palestinians will never do that. They could never get Hamas to adopt nonviolence. It’s not who the Palestinians are.”

That is exactly what Mubarak said about the Egyptian people: “They are not capable of being anything but what they are: docile and willing to eat whatever low expectations I feed them.” But then Egyptians surprised him. How about you, Palestinians, especially Hamas? Do you have any surprise in you? Is Bibi right about you, or not?

As for Bibi, his Tahrir lesson is obvious: Sir, you are well on your way to becoming the Hosni Mubarak of the peace process. The time to make big decisions in life is when you have all the leverage on your side. For 30 years, Mubarak had all the leverage on his side to gradually move Egypt toward democracy — and he never used it. Then, when Mubarak’s people rose up, he tried to do it all in six days. But it was too late. No one believed him. So his tenure ended in ruin.

Israel today still has enormous leverage. It is vastly superior militarily and economically to the Palestinians, and it has the U.S. on its side. If Netanyahu actually put a credible, specific two-state peace map on the table — not just the same old vague promises about “painful compromises” — he could get the Americans and Europeans to toss in anything Israel wanted, including the newest weapons, NATO membership, maybe even European Union membership. It could be a security windfall for Israel. Does Bibi have any surprise in him or do the Palestinians have him right: a big faker, hiding a nationalist-religious agenda under a cloak of security?

It may be that Israeli and Palestinian leaders are incapable of surprising anyone anymore, in which case the logic on the ground will prevail: Israel will gradually absorb the whole West Bank, so, together with Israel proper, a Jewish minority will be ruling over an Arab majority. Israel’s enemies will refer to it as “the Jewish apartheid state.” America, Israel’s only true friend, will find itself having to defend an Israel whose policies it does not believe in and whose leaders it does not respect — and the tensions between the U.S. and Israel displayed in Washington last week will seem quaint by comparison.

Branching out a bit here…

It’s getting harder and harder for young folks who aren’t wealthy to afford a college education, and they’re pretty much relegated to flipping burgers or something like that if they don’t have the education.  Catch-22 much?  Today David Leonhardt addresses that in his article “Top Colleges, Largely for the Elite.”  It’s worth your time to read it.  Here he is:

The last four presidents of the United States each attended a highly selective college. All nine Supreme Court justices did, too, as did the chief executives of General Electric (Dartmouth), Goldman Sachs (Harvard), Wal-Mart (Georgia Tech), Exxon Mobil (Texas) and Google (Michigan).

Like it or not, these colleges have outsize influence on American society. So their admissions policies don’t matter just to high school seniors; they’re a matter of national interest.

More than seven years ago, a 44-year-old political scientist named Anthony Marx became the president of Amherst College, in western Massachusetts, and set out to change its admissions policies. Mr. Marx argued that elite colleges were neither as good nor as meritocratic as they could be, because they mostly overlooked lower-income students.

For all of the other ways that top colleges had become diverse, their student bodies remained shockingly affluent. At the University of Michigan, more entering freshmen in 2003 came from families earning at least $200,000 a year than came from the entire bottom half of the income distribution. At some private colleges, the numbers were even more extreme.

In his 2003 inaugural address, Mr. Marx — quoting from a speech President John F. Kennedy had given at Amherst — asked, “What good is a private college unless it is serving a great national purpose?”

On Sunday, Mr. Marx presided over his final Amherst graduation. This summer, he will become head of the New York Public Library. And he can point to some impressive successes at Amherst.

More than 22 percent of students now receive federal Pell Grants (a rough approximation of how many are in the bottom half of the nation’s income distribution). In 2005, only 13 percent did. Over the same period, other elite colleges have also been doing more to recruit low- and middle-income students, and they have made some progress.

It is tempting, then, to point to all these changes and proclaim that elite higher education is at long last a meritocracy. But Mr. Marx doesn’t buy it. If anything, he worries, the progress has the potential to distract people from how troubling the situation remains.

When we spoke recently, he mentioned a Georgetown University study of the class of 2010 at the country’s 193 most selective colleges. As entering freshmen, only 15 percent of students came from the bottom half of the income distribution. Sixty-seven percent came from the highest-earning fourth of the distribution. These statistics mean that on many campuses affluent students outnumber middle-class students.

“We claim to be part of the American dream and of a system based on merit and opportunity and talent,” Mr. Marx says. “Yet if at the top places, two-thirds of the students come from the top quartile and only 5 percent come from the bottom quartile, then we are actually part of the problem of the growing economic divide rather than part of the solution.”

I think Amherst has created a model for attracting talented low- and middle-income students that other colleges can copy. It borrows, in part, from the University of California, which is by far the most economically diverse top university system in the country. But before we get to the details, I want to address a question that often comes up in this discussion:

Does more economic diversity necessarily mean lower admissions standards?

No, it does not.

The truth is that many of the most capable low- and middle-income students attend community colleges or less selective four-year colleges close to their home. Doing so makes them less likely to graduate from college at all, research has shown. Incredibly, only 44 percent of low-income high school seniors with high standardized test scores enroll in a four-year college, according to a Century Foundation report — compared with about 50 percent of high-income seniors who have average test scores.

“The extent of wasted human capital,” wrote the report’s authors, Anthony P. Carnevale and Jeff Strohl, “is phenomenal.”

This comparison understates the problem, too, because SAT scores are hardly a pure measure of merit. Well-off students often receive SAT coaching and take the test more than once, Mr. Marx notes, and top colleges reward them for doing both. Colleges also reward students for overseas travel and elaborate community service projects. “Colleges don’t recognize, in the same way, if you work at the neighborhood 7-Eleven to support your family,” he adds.

Several years ago, William Bowen, a former president of Princeton, and two other researchers found that top colleges gave no admissions advantage to low-income students, despite claims to the contrary. Children of alumni received an advantage. Minorities (except Asians) and athletes received an even bigger advantage. But all else equal, a low-income applicant was no more likely to get in than a high-income applicant with the same SAT score. It’s pretty hard to call that meritocracy.

•

Amherst has shown that building a better meritocracy is possible, by doing, as Mr. Marx says, “everything we can think of.”

The effort starts with financial aid. The college has devoted more of its resources to aid, even if the dining halls don’t end up being as fancy as those at rival colleges. Outright grants have replaced most loans, not just for poor students but for middle-class ones. The college has started a scholarship for low-income foreign students, who don’t qualify for Pell Grants. And Amherst officials visit high schools they had never visited before to spread the word.

The college has also started using its transfer program mostly to admit community college students. This step may be the single easiest way for a college to become more meritocratic. It’s one reason the University of California campuses in Berkeley, Los Angeles and San Diego are so much more diverse than other top colleges.

Many community colleges have horrifically high dropout rates, but the students who succeed there are often inspiring. They include war veterans, single parents and immigrants who have managed to overcome the odds. At Amherst this year, 62 percent of transfer students came from a community college.

Finally, Mr. Marx says Amherst does put a thumb on the scale to give poor students more credit for a given SAT score. Not everyone will love that policy. “Spots at these places are precious,” he notes. But I find it tough to argue that a 1,300 score for most graduates of Phillips Exeter Academy — or most children of Amherst alumni — is as impressive as a 1,250 for someone from McDowell County, W.Va., or the South Bronx.

The result of these changes is that Amherst has a much higher share of low-income students than almost any other elite college. By itself, of course, Amherst is not big enough to influence the American economy. But its policies could affect the economy if more colleges adopted them.

The United States no longer leads the world in educational attainment, partly because so few low-income students — and surprisingly few middle-income students — graduate from four-year colleges. Getting more of these students into the best colleges would make a difference. Many higher-income students would still graduate from college, even if they went to a less elite one. A more educated population, in turn, would probably lift economic growth.

The Amherst model does cost money. And it would be difficult to maintain if Congress cuts the Pell budget, as some members have proposed. But when you add everything up, I think the model isn’t only the fairest one and the right one for the economy. It’s also the best one for the colleges themselves. Attracting the best of the best — not just the best of the affluent — and letting them learn from one another is the whole point of a place like Amherst.

“We did this for educational reasons,” Mr. Marx says. “We aim to be the most diverse college in the country — and the most selective.”

Brooks and Nocera

Bobo’s still in London.  Bobo has a man crush on the British political system.  In “Britain is Working” he gurgles that his trip overseas offers a good impression of what a functioning democracy looks like.  Bobo, sweetie, your implication is that ours is NOT a functioning democracy.  Gotta say I agree with you, but you guys are the ones holding the country hostage and proposing cutting funding from programs that feed children and squealing like the pigs you are over rolling back Bush’s tax cuts and cutting oil subsidies.  Mr. Nocera, in “Russian Justice,” says what Putin & Friends want, Putin & Friends get. Just look at the case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev.  Here’s Bobo:

In 1920, Winston Churchill’s mother held a dinner for M. Paul Cambon to celebrate the end of his 20 years as the French ambassador to Britain. One of the guests asked Cambon what he had seen in his two decades in London.

“I have witnessed an English revolution more profound and searching than the French Revolution itself,” Cambon replied. “The governing class have been almost entirely deprived of political power and to a very large extent of their property and estates; and this has been accomplished almost imperceptibly and without the loss of a single life.”

Buried in that answer is a picture of how politics should work. Britain faced an enormous task: To move from an aristocratic political economy to a democratic, industrial one. This transition was made gradually, without convulsion, with both parties playing a role.

This wasn’t because the political leaders were so brilliant. They simply responded to a series of immediate problems. Nor was it because they were postpartisan angels. The parties fought vigorously.

It’s just that the system worked. Each party took different whacks at pieces of the great national problem, depending on its interests. Opposing parties, when it was their turn in power, quietly consolidated the best of what the other had achieved. Gradually, through constructive competition, the country quarreled its way forward.

The United Kingdom seems to be in the middle of that sort of constructive quarrel now. Usually when I travel from Washington to Britain I move from less gloom to more gloom. But this time the mood is reversed. The British political system is basically functional while the American system is not.

As the British politician Oliver Letwin has argued, a generation of misrule between 1945 and 1979 left the U.K. with three large problems: a stifled industrial economy; an overcentralized welfare state; and an enervated people, some of whom are locked in cycles of poverty.

By liberating the economy, Margaret Thatcher tackled the first of these problems, and subsequent Labour governments consolidated her gains. Meanwhile, a series of governments have been fitfully tackling problems two and three, reforming the welfare state and energizing the populace.

In conversation, the Conservative and Labour leaders are happy to rubbish each other, but what’s striking to an outsider is how much their concerns overlap. A series of governments, going all the way back to John Major’s administration in the ’90s, have tried to decentralize power, come up with new ways to measure government performance, reduce welfare dependency and improve early childhood programs.

Many of the programs have failed, but the general direction is clear: the move from a centralized, industrial-era state to a networked, postindustrial one.

The momentum is especially evident just now. Prime Minister David Cameron is a skilled politician who dominates the scene. His agenda doesn’t merely touch his party’s hot buttons, but moves in many directions at once.

His austerity program includes tax increases as well as spending cuts. He’s vigorously protecting the foreign aid budget as he cuts almost everywhere else. He has aggressively reformed welfare and education while retreating on health service reform.

By balancing his agenda, by conveying a sense of momentum, by insisting on fiscal responsibility, he’s remained popular. His party did well in the recent local elections, even amid the fiscal pain.

Britain is also blessed with a functioning political culture. It is dominated by people who live in London and who have often known each other since prep school. This makes it gossipy and often incestuous.

But the plusses outweigh the minuses. The big newspapers still set the agenda, not cable TV or talk radio. If the quintessential American pol is standing in his sandbox screaming affirmations to members of his own tribe, the quintessential British pol is standing across a table arguing face to face with his opponents.

British leaders and pundits know their counterparts better. They are less likely to get away with distortions and factual howlers. They are less likely to believe the other party is homogenously evil. They are more likely to learn from a wide range of people. When they do hate, their hatreds are more likely to be personal and less likely to take on the tenor of a holy war.

The British political system gives the majority party much greater power than any party could hope to have in the U.S., but cultural norms make the political debate less moralistic and less absolutist. The British press also do an amazing job of policing corruption. The media go into a frenzy at the merest whiff of malfeasance. Last week, for example, a minister was pummeled for saying clumsy things about rape.

Tuesday, as President Obama visits London, we will get a glimpse of the British political culture. We Americans have no right to feel smug or superior.

Gawd, he’s SUCH a tool…  Here’s Mr. Nocera:

By the time you read this column, you may already know the fate of Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky and Platon L. Lebedev. Moscow, after all, is eight hours ahead of New York, and let’s be honest here: It’s not going to take the Moscow City Court very long to conclude that the two men deserve another seven years in prison — on top of the eight they’ve already served — on laughably trumped-up charges. Chances are, the three-judge panel knew going in how it planned to rule. That’s the way it works in Russia when somebody crosses the country’s ruling plutocrats. They get sent to Siberia on phony charges.

In China, when the country’s rulers want to get rid of a troublesome dissident, they just lock him up. There is not a lot of pretense. But Russia wants the world to believe that it abides by the rule of law. “It has a Constitution, courts, judges and established procedures,” said Pavel Ivlev, one of Khodorkovsky’s lawyers.

But, Ivlev adds, “You also have the reality that everything is controlled by Putin and his friends.” So when someone starts making trouble for Russia’s premier, Vladimir Putin, and his corrupt cronies, things play out a little differently. An “investigation” is begun, which leads to a series of criminal charges, which, in turn, leads to a lengthy trial. The illusion of justice is created. But the ending never varies: The defendants wind up in prison for crimes they never committed.

No one illustrates this better than Khodorkovsky, who in less than a decade has gone from being Russia’s richest man — an oligarch among oligarchs — to being its most prominent political prisoner. The founder of Yukos, the country’s best-run oil producer, Khodorkovsky undoubtedly played fast and loose in building the company in the early 1990s.

The plutocrats had no problem with that. But then Khodorkovsky did two things that made him intolerable. He began transforming Yukos into a legitimate company that played by the rules of Western capitalism. Worse, he began to challenge Putin — and put up money to back opposition parties.

Yukos was taken from Khodorkovsky and the shareholders in a bogus transaction, and handed to Rosneft, a more pliable oil company run by executives aligned with Putin’s cronies. Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, his longtime business partner, were arrested, convicted of trumped-up tax fraud charges and sentenced to eight years in prison that began in 2003.

In prison, Khodorkovsky became, if anything, even more of a threat to Putin than he had been when he was running Yukos. His imprisonment came to symbolize the stench emanating from Russia’s corrupt ruling class, the impunity with which it lined its own pockets, and its utter disregard for the rule of law. The Russian public, which originally viewed Khodorkovsky as a rich crook who had gotten his due, began to see him as a martyr.

Not surprisingly, as their sentence neared its conclusion, Khodorkovsky and Lebedev became the targets of a new investigation. Which led to new charges and another trial. The crime they were accused of was absurd on its face: They were alleged to have stolen every drop of Yukos oil between 1998 and 2003. But never mind. During the trial, Putin declared that Khodorkovsky should be sent back to prison. Late last December, the two men were once again found guilty — though not before Khodorkovsky gave an eloquent speech that cemented his role as the modern heir to the great Russian dissidents of the past.

“It is hard to live in prison, and I do not want to die here,” he said. “But, if I have to, I will have no hesitation. What I believe in is worth dying for.” When he finished speaking, the crowd in the courtroom yelled “Freedom” while the judge declared the trial over.

The Moscow City Court, where Tuesday’s hearing is taking place, is Russia’s equivalent of the court of appeals. This hearing is no more real than anything else in this case. Not long after the original trial judge read his verdict, one of his aides said publicly that he had been under constant pressure from his superiors to find the two men guilty. And who were these superiors? The judges of the Moscow City Court — the very ones who are now sitting in judgment today.

And so it goes.

Soon, Khodorkovsky and Lebedev will be safely back in Siberia. Then the plutocrats can then turn their attention to a new nemesis, Alexei Navalny. An outspoken lawyer, Navalny has devoted the past few years to exposing corruption at Russian big state-owned companies, even posting fraudulent contracts on his blogs. In some cases, deals have been scotched as a result of his efforts.

Recently, prosecutors opened an investigation into Navalny, claiming that he may have tricked a state-run company into paying an inflated price while serving as a consultant to a regional governor. It’s preposterous, of course, not that that matters in modern Russia.

He’s up next.