Dowd and Friedman

In “My Man Newt” MoDo has a question:  If former Speaker Newt Gingrich broke Washington, is he the perfect one to fix it?  The Moustache of Wisdom addresses “The Arab Awakening and Israel,” and says the greatest threat to Israel right now might be the temptation to do nothing at all.  Here’s MoDo:

In many ways, Newt is the perfect man.

He knows how to buy good jewelry. He puts his wife ahead of his campaign. He’s so in touch with his feelings that he would rather close the entire federal government than keep his emotions bottled up. He’s confident enough to include a steamy sex scene in a novel. He understands that Paul Revere was warning about the British.

Mitt Romney is a phony with gobs of hair gel. Newt Gingrich is a phony with gobs of historical grandiosity.

The 68-year-old has compared himself to Charles de Gaulle. He has noted nonchalantly: “People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz.” As speaker, he liked to tell reporters he was a World Historical Transformational Figure.

What does it say about the cuckoo G.O.P. primary that Gingrich is the hot new thing? Still, his moment is now. And therein lies the rub.

As one commentator astutely noted, Gingrich is a historian and a futurist who can’t seem to handle the present. He has more exploding cigars in his pocket than the president with whom he had the volatile bromance: Bill Clinton.

But next to Romney, Gingrich seems authentic. Next to Herman Cain, Gingrich seems faithful. Next to Jon Huntsman, Gingrich seems conservative. Next to Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, Gingrich actually does look like an intellectual. Unlike the governor of Texas, he surely knows the voting age. To paraphrase Raymond Chandler, if brains were elastic, Perry wouldn’t have enough to make suspenders for a parakeet.

In presidential campaigns, it’s all relative.

Franker than ever as he announced plans to retire from Congress, Barney Frank told Abby Goodnough in The Times that Gingrich was “the single biggest factor” in destroying a Washington culture where the two parties respected each other’s differing views yet still worked together.

Newt is the progenitor of the modern politics of personal destruction.

“He got to Congress in ’78 and said, ‘We the Republicans are not going to be able to take over unless we demonize the Democrats,’ ” Frank said.

In the fiction he writes with William R. Forstchen, Gingrich specializes in alternative histories. What if America hadn’t gone to war with Germany in World War II? What if Gen. Robert E. Lee had won Gettysburg?

The Republican also weaves an alternative history of his own life, where he is saving civilization rather than ripping up the fabric of Congress, where he improves the moral climate of America rather than pollutes it.

Romney is a mundane opportunist who reverses himself on core issues. Gingrich is a megalomaniacal opportunist who brazenly indulges in the same sins that he rails about to tear down political rivals.

Republicans have a far greater talent for hypocrisy than easily cowed Democrats do — and no doubt appreciate that in a leader.

Gingrich led the putsch against Democratic Speaker Jim Wright in 1988, bludgeoning him for an ethically sketchy book deal. The following year, as he moved into the House Republican leadership, he himself got in trouble for an ethically sketchy book deal.

Gingrich was part of the House Republican mob trying to impeach Bill Clinton for hiding his affair with a young government staffer, even as Newt himself was hiding his affair with a young government staffer.

Gingrich has excoriated Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae for dragging the country into a financial spiral and now demands that Freddie Mac be broken up. But it turns out that he was on contract with Freddie for six years and paid $1.6 million to $1.8 million (yacht trips and Tiffany’s bling for everyone!) to help the company strategize about how to soften up critical conservatives and stay alive.

At a Republican debate in New Hampshire last month before this lucrative deal became public, Gingrich suggested that Barney Frank and Chris Dodd should be put in jail. “All I’m saying is, everybody in the media who wants to go after the business community ought to start by going after the politicians who were at the heart of the sickness that is weakening this country,” he said.

Another transcendent moment in Gingrich hypocrisy. He risibly rationalized his deal, saying he was giving the mortgage company advice as a prestigious historian rather than a hired gun.

Gingrich boasts that he’s full of fresh ideas, but it always seems to essentially be the same old one: Let’s turn the clock back to the ’50s. Just as Newt, who dodged service in Vietnam, once cast the Clintons as hippie “McGovernicks,” now he limns the Occupy Wall Street protesters as hippies who need to take a bath and get a job.

Maybe the ideal man to fix Washington’s dysfunction is the one who made it dysfunctional. He broke it so he should own it. And Newt has the best reason to long for the presidency: He’d never be banished to the back of Air Force One again.

[gag]  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

Israel is facing the biggest erosion of its strategic environment since its founding. It is alienated from its longtime ally Turkey. Its archenemy Iran is suspected of developing a nuclear bomb. The two strongest states on its border — Syria and Egypt — are being convulsed by revolutions. The two weakest states on its border — Gaza and Lebanon — are controlled by Hamas and Hezbollah.

It was in this context that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went before the Knesset last Wednesday and argued that the Arab awakening was moving the Arab world “backward” and turning into an “Islamic, anti-Western, anti-liberal, anti-Israeli, undemocratic wave.” Ceding territory to the Palestinians was unwise at such a time, he said: “We can’t know who will end up with any piece of territory we give up.”

Netanyahu added: “In February, when millions of Egyptians thronged to the streets in Cairo, commentators and quite a few Israeli members of the opposition said that we’re facing a new era of liberalism and progress. They said I was trying to scare the public and was on the wrong side of history and don’t see where things are heading.” But, he told the Knesset, events had proved him correct. Netanyahu reportedly said that when he cautioned President Obama and other Western leaders against backing the uprising against Egypt’s then-president, Hosni Mubarak, he was told that he didn’t understand reality: “I ask today, who here didn’t understand reality?”

Netanyahu’s analysis of the dangers facing Israel is valid, and things could still get worse. What is wrong is Netanyahu’s diagnosis of how it happened and his prescription of what to do about it — and those blind spots could also be very dangerous for Israel.

Diagnosis: From the very start, Israeli officials have insisted that Obama helped to push Mubarak out rather than saving him. Nonsense. The Arab dictators were pushed out by their people; there was no saving them. In fact, Mubarak had three decades to gradually open up Egyptian politics and save himself. And what did he do? Last year, he held the most-rigged election in Egyptian history. His party won 209 out of 211 seats. It is amazing that the uprising didn’t happen sooner.

 Israel’s fear of Islamists taking power all around it cannot be dismissed. But it is such a live possibility precisely because of the last 50 years of Arab dictatorship, in which only Islamists were allowed to organize in mosques while no independent, secular, democratic parties were allowed to develop in the political arena. This has given Muslim parties an early leg up. Arab dictators were convenient for Israel and the Islamists — but deadly for Arab development and education. Now that the lid has come off, the transition will be rocky. But, it was inevitable, and the new politics is just beginning: Islamists will now have to compete with legitimate secular parties.

 Netanyahu’s prescription is to do nothing. I understand Israel not ceding territory in this uncertain period to a divided Palestinian movement. What I can’t understand is doing nothing. Israel has an Arab awakening in its own backyard in the person of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad of the Palestinian Authority. He’s been the most radical Arab leader of all. He is the first Palestinian leader to say: judge me on my performance in improving my peoples’ lives, not on my rhetoric. His focus has been on building institutions — including what Israelis admit is a security force that has helped to keep Israel peaceful — so Palestinians will be ready for a two-state solution. Instead of rewarding him, Israel has been withholding $100 million in Palestinian tax revenues that Fayyad needs — in punishment for the Palestinians pressing for a state at the U.N. — to pay the security forces that help to protect Israel. That is crazy.

Israel’s best defense is to strengthen Fayyadism — including giving Palestinian security services more areas of responsibility to increase their legitimacy and make clear that they are not the permanent custodians of Israel’s occupation. This would not only help stabilize Israel’s own backyard — and prevent another uprising that would spread like wildfire to the Arab world without the old dictators to hold it back — but would lay the foundation for a two-state solution and for better relations with the Arab peoples. Remember, those Arab peoples are going to have a lot more say in how they are ruled and with whom they have peace. In that context, Israel will be so much better off if it is seen as strengthening responsible and democratic Palestinian leaders.

This is such a delicate moment. It requires wise, farsighted Israeli leadership. The Arab awakening is coinciding with the last hopes for a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians. Israeli rightists will be tempted to do nothing, to insist the time is not right for risk-taking — and never will be — so Israel needs to occupy the West Bank and its Palestinians forever. That could be the greatest danger of all for Israel: to wake up one day and discover that, in response to the messy and turbulent Arab democratic awakening, the Jewish state sacrificed its own democratic character.

 

Brooks, Cohen, Nocera and Bruni

Bobo’s got other people’s work for us today.  In “Life Reports II” he squeals that positive lessons from the senior set continue to pour in. Here are a few takeaways.  Bobo, sweetie, I don’t do takeaway food, and I’d just as soon not do takeaway crap from you either.  Mr. Cohen addresses the “Doctrine of Silence” and says on U.S. strategic policy, Obama has gone covert — and made the right call. So why am I uneasy?  Mr. Nocera says “Germany Cuts Off Its Nose,” and that self-righteousness is blinding Germans, and Americans, from making sensible policy decisions.  Mr. Bruni, in “Silvio’s Deluded Postscript,” says Italy must move far beyond the farce of the Berlusconi era.  Here’s Bobo:

A few weeks ago, I asked people over 70 to send me “Life Reports” — essays about their own lives and what they’d done poorly and well. They make for fascinating and addictive reading, and I’ve tried to extract a few general life lessons:

Divide your life into chapters. The unhappiest of my correspondents saw time as an unbroken flow, with themselves as corks bobbing on top of it. A man named Neil lamented that he had been “an Eeyore not a Tigger; a pessimist, not an optimist; an aimless grasshopper, not a purposeful ant; a dreamer, not a doer; a nomad, not a settler; a voyager, not an adventurer; a spectator, not an actor, player or participant.” He concluded: “Neil never amounted to anything.”

The happier ones divided time into (somewhat artificial) phases. They wrote things like: There were six crucial decisions in my life. Then they organized their lives around those pivot points. By seeing time as something divisible into chunks, they could more easily stop and self-appraise. They had more control over their fate.

Beware rumination. There were many long, detailed essays by people who are experts at self-examination. They could finely calibrate each passing emotion. But these people often did not lead the happiest or most fulfilling lives. It’s not only that they were driven to introspection by bad events. Through self-obsession, they seemed to reinforce the very emotions, thoughts and habits they were trying to escape.

Many of the most impressive people, on the other hand, were strategic self-deceivers. When something bad was done to them, they forgot it, forgave it or were grateful for it. When it comes to self-narratives, honesty may not be the best policy.

You can’t control other people. David Leshan made an observation that was echoed by many: “It took me twenty years of my fifty-year marriage to discover how unwise it was to attempt to remake my wife. … I learned also that neither could I remake my friends or students.”

On the other hand, some of the most inspiring stories were about stepparents who came into families and wisely bided their time, accepting slights and insults until they were gradually accepted by their new children.

Lean toward risk. It’s trite, but apparently true. Many more seniors regret the risks they didn’t take than regret the ones they did.

Measure people by their growth rate, not by their talents. The best essays were by people who made steady progress each decade. Regina Titus grew up shy and sheltered on Long Island. She took demeaning clerical jobs, working with people who treated her poorly. Her first husband died after six months of marriage and her second committed suicide.

But she just kept growing. At 56, studying nights and weekends, she obtained a college degree, cum laude, from Marymount Manhattan College. She moved to Wilmington, Del., works as a docent, studies opera, hikes, volunteers and does a thousand other things. She acknowledges, “I did not have the joy of holding my baby in my arms. I did not have a long and happy marriage.” But hers is a story of relentless self-expansion. I wonder how we can measure that capacity.

Be aware of the generational bias. Many of the essayists have ambivalent attitudes toward their parents. Almost all have worshipful attitudes toward their children. I’m not sure how to explain this pattern, but I don’t think it’s pure egotism. Many writers mentioned that given their own flaws, they are astounded that their kids turned out so well.

Work within institutions or crafts, not outside them. For a time, our culture celebrated the rebel and the outsider. The most miserable of my correspondents fit this mold. They were forever in revolt against the world and ended up sourly achieving little.

There are other patterns running through the essays. I was struck by the fact that almost nobody mentioned whether or not they were good-looking, though this must have been an important factor, especially when they were young. Many people lament the fact that they had to make the most important decisions in their 20s, at the age when they were least qualified to make them.

People get better at the art of living. By their 60s many contributors found their zone. Metaphysics is dead; very few of the writers hewed to a specific theology or had any definite conception of a divine order, though vague but uplifting spiritual experiences pepper their reflections.

Finally, the essays present disturbing quandaries. For example, we are told to live for others. But one savvy retiree writes, “Don’t stay with people who, over time, grow apart from you. Move on. This means do what you think will make you feel okay — even if that makes others feel temporarily not okay.”

Is that selfishness or hard-earned realism? That one you’ll have to answer for yourself. 

Bobo, that’s selfishness.  That you even asked the question is more telling than you realize.  Here’s Mr. Cohen, writing from London:

The Obama administration has a doctrine. It’s called the doctrine of silence. A radical shift from President Bush’s war on terror, it has never been set out to the American people. There has seldom been so big a change in approach to U.S. strategic policy with so little explanation.

I approve of the shift even as it makes me uneasy. One day, I suspect, there may be payback for this policy and this silence. President Obama has gone undercover.

You have to figure that one day somebody sitting in Tehran or Islamabad or Sana is going to wake up and say: “Hey, this guy Obama, he went to war in our country but just forgot to mention the fact. Should we perhaps go to war in his?”

In Iran, a big explosion at a military base near Tehran recently killed Gen. Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, a central figure in the country’s long-range missile program. Nuclear scientists have perished in the streets of Tehran. The Stuxnet computer worm has wreaked havoc with the Iranian nuclear facilities.

It would take tremendous naïveté to believe these events are not the result of a covert American-Israeli drive to sabotage Iran’s efforts to develop a military nuclear capacity. An intense, well-funded cyberwar against Tehran is ongoing.

Simmering Pakistani anger over a wave of drone attacks authorized by Obama has erupted into outright rage with the death of at least 25 Pakistani soldiers in a NATO attack on two military outposts near the Afghan border.

The Pakistani government has ordered the Central Intelligence Agency to end drone operations it runs from a base in western Pakistan within 15 days. Drone attacks have become the coin of Obama’s realm. They have killed twice as many suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda members as were ever imprisoned in Guantánamo.

One such drone attack, of course, killed an American citizen, the Al Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki, in Yemen a few weeks ago.

The U.S. government says precious little about these new ways of fighting enemies. But the strategic volte-face is clear: America has decided that conventional wars of uncertain outcome in Iraq and Afghanistan that may, according to a Brown University study, end up costing at least $3.7 trillion are a bad way to fight terrorists and that far cheaper, more precise tools for eliminating enemies are preferable — even if the legality of those killings is debatable.

The American case for legality rests on the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force act, which allows the president to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against persons, organization or nations linked to the 9/11 attack, and on various interpretations of the right to self-defense under international law.

But killing an American citizen raises particular constitutional concerns; just how legal the drone attacks are remains a vexed question. And Iran had no part in 9/11.

In general, it’s hard to resist the impression of a tilt toward the extrajudicial in U.S. foreign policy — a kind of “Likudization” of the approach to dealing with enemies. Israel has never hesitated to kill foes with blood on their hands wherever they are.

This is a development about which no American can feel entirely comfortable.

So why do I approve of all this? Because the alternative — the immense cost in blood and treasure and reputation of the Bush administration’s war on terror — was so appalling. In just the same way, the results of a conventional bombing war against Iran would be appalling, whether undertaken by Israel, the United States or a combination of the two.

Political choices often have to be made between two unappealing options. Obama has done just that. He has gone covert — and made the right call.

So why am I uneasy? Because these legally borderline, undercover options — cyberwar, drone killings, executions and strange explosions at military bases — invite repayment in kind, undermine the American commitment to the rule of law, and make allies uneasy.

Obama could have done more in the realm of explanation. Of course he does not want to say much about secret operations. Still, as the U.S. military prepares to depart from Iraq (leaving a handful of embassy guards), and the war in Afghanistan enters its last act, he owes the American people, U.S. allies and the world a speech that sets out why America will not again embark on this kind of inconclusive war and has instead adopted a new doctrine that has replaced fighting terror with killing terrorists. (He might also explain why Guantánamo is still open.)

Just because it’s impossible to talk about some operations undertaken within this doctrine does not mean the entire doctrine can remain cloaked in silence.

Foreign policy has been Obama’s strongest suit. He deserves great credit for killing Osama bin Laden, acting for the liberation of Libya, getting behind the Arab quest for freedom, winding down the war in Iraq, dealing repeated blows to Al Qaeda and restoring America’s battered image.

But the doctrine of silence is a failing with links to his overarching failure on the economy: it betrays a presidential reticence, coolness and aloofness that leave Americans uncomfortable.

Now here’s Mr. Nocera:

“Lords of Finance,” Liaquat Ahamed’s magisterial 2009 history of the events that led first to the Great Depression and then to the Second World War, is, necessarily, a book about policy mistakes. Central bankers and Treasury secretaries, presidents and prime ministers: all of them are locked into their own economic and political orthodoxies. Each is certain that his is the only sensible course of action. Crippled by their blinders, they consistently make economic choices that appear to us, nearly a century later, to be insane but to them seemed completely sensible.

Perhaps the worst of the policy errors during the post-World War I period was the insistence of the Allies that Germany pay war reparations — reparations that went far beyond anything that the defeated Germans could afford. As the victors, the Allies felt that it was only fair for Germany to pay for the terrible war it had waged, and they didn’t much care about whether such payments would cripple the German economy.

Which, of course, they did; by the early 1930s, the country was effectively bankrupt. And the Allies’ unrelenting demand for reparations bred immense resentment among the German people. There is not much doubt that this combination of public anger and economic distress helped facilitate the rise of Adolf Hitler.

Today, it is Germany that is making policy moves that seem insane. Locked into their modern-day orthodoxies, German politicians look at Greece with something akin to contempt. Aid to Greece — aid that is given grudgingly, when it is given at all — must be accompanied by severe austerity measures, the Germans believe, because the Greeks need to learn how to live within their means, the way Germans do.

For months, Germany has strongly supported the European Central Bank’s unwillingness to do the one thing that might have stemmed the euro crisis: buy and guarantee large amounts of distressed sovereign debt. When I asked Martin Wolf, The Financial Times columnist whose crisis coverage has been indispensible, why the E.C.B. was reluctant to act, he theorized that it “accepts the German view that monetizing government debt is inherently immoral.” As a result, though, what should have been a small crisis centering on Greek debt has turned into a full-fledged European contagion.

Can’t the Germans see, one wonders from afar, that their economy was the great beneficiary of the bubble economy that caused Greece — and the other peripheral euro-zone countries — to get in over their heads, because they were buying German exports? Don’t they understand that their banks should share the blame for lending to countries that couldn’t repay the debts? Don’t they realize that the collapse of the euro zone — unthinkable a year ago; perhaps inevitable now — will hurt Germany much more than Greece? Other currencies will be devalued against Germany’s, making German exports more expensive. And German banks — woefully undercapitalized and stuffed with sovereign debt — will face a major solvency crisis when other sovereigns devalue or default.

You would think that all of this would be obvious to the Germans. But it is not. Germany can’t get past the fact that it is being asked to bail out “club med” countries where no one pays taxes and everyone retires at the age of 50. From the German perspective, it doesn’t seem fair. And that overwhelms even the most powerful economic arguments that bailing out Greece and the other distressed countries also helps Germany.

The Germans, of course, are hardly alone in allowing their sense of righteousness to get in the way of sensible policy. Earlier this month, I wrote a column advocating principal reduction as a way of stemming foreclosures. My view is that housing, historically, has led most recoveries and that the foreclosure crisis is one of the things preventing the economy from truly reviving. Never-ending foreclosures cause housing prices to continue swooning and risk a deflationary spiral that could be devastating. They cause more homeowners to suddenly find themselves “underwater.” They hurt not just those losing their homes, but everybody. My argument is rooted not in morality, but in economics.

Yet the response I got from that column was, for the most part, fiercely negative. Why should people who took out loans they couldn’t afford get bailed out — while those who lived within their means get nothing? What about moral hazard? One reader wrote: “We should reward people who took large loans or refinanced their homes to go on vacations? Sorry, but correct ethical choices are more important.” In other words, it didn’t seem fair.

Such a view is understandable — in America and in Germany. But if we — and they — can’t stop obsessing about what is fair, we’re never going to get out of our current messes. The only thing that should matter is what works. Even if it means bailing out club med nations or underwater homeowners.

And lastly here’s Mr. Bruni, writing from Rome:

The direness of Italy’s financial situation forced him from office, and his country has been teetering on the precipice of default, with the euro on the line and the whole world holding its breath.

But Silvio Berlusconi still doesn’t get it. On Sunday, the deposed prime minister re-emerged in public and reopened that font of self-aggrandizing fantasy otherwise known as his mouth, and what do you suppose came out of it?

Not regret, not remorse and certainly not anything constructive.

Instead, Berlusconi ranted about the Communist menace and how he had long stood — and would forever stand — as a bulwark against it.

The Communist menace! That’s the bogeyman he has used his entire political career, with shockingly dependable success, and though it has nothing to do with Italy’s current predicament, he won’t let go of it.

In Berlusconi’s version, the story of Italy over the 17 years that he toggled in and out of power isn’t one of a country frittering away its lavish blessings under the ostensible leadership of a solipsistic oligarch. It’s of a country spared the red menace thanks to a knight in tangerine armor, that hue being the odd color he achieves through some amalgam of sun and makeup.

Among the many European leaders felled by the Continent’s debt crisis, Berlusconi will perhaps have the most sustained claim on the spotlight, because of his wealth, extensive media holdings, continuing criminal trials and sheer flamboyant Berlusconi-ness.

But for such a larger-than-life figure, he’s an awfully small man, and I don’t mean physically, though if he were to read this sentence, that’s the interpretation he’d worry about.

Back in 2003, when I interviewed him over a long dinner, he complained that he had been disparaged on Italian television as a dwarf.

“I’m as tall as Aznar,” he volunteered, referring to the Spanish prime minister at the time, José María Aznar.

“I’m the average Italian, right?” he added, seeking reassurance from an aide seated near him. It came right away.

“Certainly,” the aide said.

Just over two weeks ago Berlusconi finally surrendered the reins of the Italian government, and he pretty much stayed mum until Sunday, when he spoke to political allies at a gathering in Verona.

His tone was defiant, and he predicted that after the conclusion of the technocratic government expected to guide Italy until early 2013, the center-right political party that he started, the People of Liberty, would rise anew. (He himself has already pledged not to seek re-election.)

He vowed to continue the fight against a center-left coalition that didn’t really want people to be free. He mentioned a police state. He mentioned his trusty Communists.

He did not mention the country’s sovereign debt, which is now about 120 percent of its gross domestic product; its growing inability to secure loans at endurable interest rates; or all the young Italians who can’t find meaningful work.

These problems, to be fair, aren’t principally of his making. But he did too little to forestall them or to modernize Italy’s economy, even as he did plenty to serve his business, legal and libidinal needs.

And he cheapened Italian discourse, along with the country’s image, contributing to a sort of silliness and civic amorality that hold Italy back. An operator as crass and shady as Berlusconi was never, for example, going to be the leader to get all Italians to pay their full share of taxes.

He could now make amends for at least some of that if he lost his tired script, stopped fanning the flames of partisanship and exhorted Italians to shared purpose and sacrifice. Such a high-minded message from him of all people would underscore the seriousness of Italy’s situation, and might have real impact. It’s probably ludicrous to wish for that.

But it’s not unreasonable to hope that Italians take advantage of his ouster and start to prepare — really prepare — for the future.

Over the Berlusconi era they seemed to grow strangely resigned and even accustomed to him; he was reliable kindling for anger and an easy target for ridicule. And they adopted the refrain that there was no release from his chokehold on Italian life because no one had a comparable megaphone and there was no plausible alternative to him.

It’s incumbent on them now to create one. They no longer have any excuse not to. And they should treat those instances when he pops up in public — and pops off about this, that or whatever — as useful reminders of the kind of farce they can no longer afford and must leave far behind.

He popped up again on Monday, in a Milan courtroom, where he was facing bribery charges that, because of trial delays, may expire before any verdict is reached.

“It was very hard to stay awake,” he told reporters. He really needn’t try.

 

Keller and Krugman

Bill Keller has decided to discuss “The Politics of Economics in the Age of Shouting.”  He says it comes down to just say what they want to hear, and loudly.  At least he’s honest enough to admit that he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about, and manages to take a swipe at Paul Krugman in the first graf.  Bear in mind — he used to be the Managing Editor…  Prof. Krugman, who actually does know what he’s talking about, addresses “Things to Tax.”  He asks how about making increased revenue part of the remedy? And not just a return to Clinton-era tax rates.  Here’s Keller:

I share a virtual neighborhood with a legion of Times reporters, editors and columnists who know more than I will ever know about business and economics. (Look! Right over there: a Nobel-prize-winning economist!) In this humbling company, on this intimidating matter, who am I to tell anyone what to think? And so my plan was, frankly, to avoid the subject.

But while there are things a columnist can ignore (if Kim Kardashian ever features in this column, just shoot me), our failing economic ecosystem is not one of them. So for the past several weeks my airplane and bedside reading has consisted of sexy documents like “A Roadmap for America’s Future” and “The Way Forward” and “The Moment of Truth” and “Restoring America’s Future” and “Living Within Our Means and Investing in the Future.” I’ve also reached out to a few economists respected for the integrity of their science and their patience with economic illiterates.

The first thing I gleaned from this little tutorial will probably not surprise you: There really is a textbook way to fix our current mess. Short-term stimulus works to help an economy recover from a recession. Some kinds of stimulus pay off more quickly than others. Once the economic heart is pumping again, we need to get our deficits under control. The way to do that is a balance of spending cuts, increased tax revenues and entitlement reforms. There is room to argue about the proportions and the timing, and small differences can produce large consequences, but the basic formula is not only common sense, it is mainstream economic science, tested many times in the real world.

So what’s the problem? Why is our system so fundamentally stuck? Partly it’s a colossal, bipartisan lack of the political courage required to tell people what they sort of know but don’t want to hear. Partly it’s a Republican Party that, for its own cynical reasons, wants no deal with this president. Partly it’s moneyed, focused lobbies that swarm in defense of specific advantages written into the law; there is no comparable lobby for compromise, let alone sacrifice.

But also, I’ve come to think something is rotten in the state of economics. The dismal science, as Thomas Carlyle called it, has been ravaged by the same virus that has corrupted the rest of our national discourse.

Back in the very pre-digital days, the writer A. J. Liebling famously remarked that freedom of the press was guaranteed only to the man who owned one. Nowadays, of course, freedom of the press belongs to anyone with Internet access, from the information guerrillas of WikiLeaks to the blogger next door. The democratization of media has diminished the authority once held — and sometimes abused — by a few big newspapers and broadcasters. In many ways this has enriched society, creating a great global buffet of information and opinion, pooling the knowledge of the masses and providing an almost instantaneous reality check on the conventional wisdom.

The consequences have not all been happy, though. The easiest way to stand out in such a vast crowd of microbroadcasters is to be the loudest, the angriest, the most outrageous. If you want that precious traffic, you stake out a position somewhere in oh-my-God territory and proclaim it with a vengeance. Global warming is a hoax! Vaccines make you sick! Obama is a Muslim! In vanquishing the conventional wisdom, sometimes it seems we have vanquished wisdom itself.

Economists don’t live in caves, so there is no reason they should be immune to the centrifugal politics of this noisy world. Thus serious scholars are tempted to sign onto ideas that stretch their own credulity, and lesser economists are thrust forward for their moment of fame as witnesses on behalf of dubious claims. Economists cluster in ideological think tanks that promote political conformity rather than intellectual rigor. Politicians, with no generally accepted consensus to challenge them, can get away with plucking data out of context to bolster assertions that are based more on faith than on reality. Tax cuts pay for themselves! Protectionism saves jobs! It’s all the Fed’s fault! Deficits don’t matter! Obama is a socialist! Say it often enough and before long it’s a serious discussion on cable TV, in which the proven and the preposterous get the same respectful chin-wagging.

“Nobody who is taken seriously as an economist is going to say ‘cancel the Fed,’ ” said Glenn Hubbard, the dean of Columbia Business School, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under George W. Bush, and now Mitt Romney’s chief economic adviser. “I find it very disturbing that the media is giving equal time to some ideas that are just crazy.”

The Web site PolitiFact, the Pulitzer-winning fact-checking service, recently did a thorough debunking of Republican claims that Obama’s 2009 stimulus program created, quote, “zero jobs.” In fact, the checkers established, using still-trustworthy sources like the Congressional Budget Office, that the stimulus created or saved a couple of million jobs. Case closed? No, the Republicans just went on repeating the claim.

“The talking points drive the discourse,” said Bill Adair, the editor of PolitiFact. “They repeat the talking points so often I think they start actually believing them.”

In the Internet age, anyone can be an expert, and anyone who says otherwise is an elitist.

The other day House Speaker John Boehner put out a list of 132 economists who signed a statement endorsing a Republican menu of spending cuts, tax cuts and deregulation. All of these are legitimate things to propose, but the statement claimed the Republican list “will do more to boost private-sector job growth in America in both the near-term and long-term than the ‘stimulus’ spending approach favored by President Obama.” Reputable number-crunchers like Moody’s Analytics and some top-tier economists of both parties said Boehner’s statement would have little or no impact on the short-term employment problem. So who were these 132 economists? With a few exceptions they were academics from off-the-beaten-path colleges (no offense to Dakota State University), bloggers (the Calafia Beach Pundit?) and economists from devoutly libertarian think tanks. But the news had the right-wing tom-toms beating with excitement.

“I’ve never in my professional life seen the disjunction between the political debate about economics and the consensus of economists be as large as it is today,” said Justin Wolfers, a Wharton School economist who favors Democrats, and who tweeted withering commentary on the list of 132.

Surely this dilution of authority contributes to our national paralysis. At the very least it befogs the discussion and fosters a pervasive cynicism.

Columbia’s Hubbard says the way to weed out the quackery is for serious economists to speak up when silly ideas get a political foothold. He’s right, but once a mainstream economist has settled comfortably into a party-line think tank or joined a candidate’s brain trust, or even enjoyed the adulation at partisan cocktail parties, a degree of self-censorship takes hold.

Of course, there have always been economists who leaned right or left — and some outright snake-oil salesmen — but until recently the public debate about economics pretty much stayed within the boundaries of accepted science. Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman have become conservative icons, John Maynard Keynes and Paul Samuelson are stalwarts of the liberals, but in their lifetimes they all had a reverence for evidence (even if their acolytes did not).

Rereading some of the alternating, left-right weekly columns Samuelson and Friedman wrote for Newsweek in the 70s, I’ve been struck by their shared assumptions, and by the fact that the tone was so civil. It’s not hard to imagine both men signing on to the kind of grand bargain that keeps eluding Congress now. But if they were getting started in today’s media market, they would probably be obliged to amp up the vitriol, to sound like the old “Saturday Night Live” “Point-Counterpoint” parody:

“Paul, you pompous ass!”

“Milt, you ignorant slut!”

Here’s hoping that one of the Kardashians does something so extreme, so outré, that he’s forced to feature it in his column, and then someone can fulfill his wish…  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

The supercommittee was a superdud — and we should be glad. Nonetheless, at some point we’ll have to rein in budget deficits. And when we do, here’s a thought: How about making increased revenue an important part of the deal?

And I don’t just mean a return to Clinton-era tax rates. Why should 1990s taxes be considered the outer limit of revenue collection? Think about it: The long-run budget outlook has darkened, which means that some hard choices must be made. Why should those choices only involve spending cuts? Why not also push some taxes above their levels in the 1990s?

Let me suggest two areas in which it would make a lot of sense to raise taxes in earnest, not just return them to pre-Bush levels: taxes on very high incomes and taxes on financial transactions.

About those high incomes: In my last column I suggested that the very rich, who have had huge income gains over the last 30 years, should pay more in taxes. I got many responses from readers, with a common theme being that this was silly, that even confiscatory taxes on the wealthy couldn’t possibly raise enough money to matter.

Folks, you’re living in the past. Once upon a time America was a middle-class nation, in which the super-elite’s income was no big deal. But that was another country.

The I.R.S. reports that in 2007, that is, before the economic crisis, the top 0.1 percent of taxpayers — roughly speaking, people with annual incomes over $2 million — had a combined income of more than a trillion dollars. That’s a lot of money, and it wouldn’t be hard to devise taxes that would raise a significant amount of revenue from those super-high-income individuals.

For example, a recent report by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center points out that before 1980 very-high-income individuals fell into tax brackets well above the 35 percent top rate that applies today. According to the center’s analysis, restoring those high-income brackets would have raised $78 billion in 2007, or more than half a percent of G.D.P. I’ve extrapolated that number using Congressional Budget Office projections, and what I get for the next decade is that high-income taxation could shave more than $1 trillion off the deficit.

It’s instructive to compare that estimate with the savings from the kinds of proposals that are actually circulating in Washington these days. Consider, for example, proposals to raise the age of Medicare eligibility to 67, dealing a major blow to millions of Americans. How much money would that save?

Well, none from the point of view of the nation as a whole, since we would be pushing seniors out of Medicare and into private insurance, which has substantially higher costs. True, it would reduce federal spending — but not by much. The budget office estimates that outlays would fall by only $125 billion over the next decade, as the age increase phased in. And even when fully phased in, this partial dismantling of Medicare would reduce the deficit only about a third as much as could be achieved with higher taxes on the very rich.

So raising taxes on the very rich could make a serious contribution to deficit reduction. Don’t believe anyone who claims otherwise.

And then there’s the idea of taxing financial transactions, which have exploded in recent decades. The economic value of all this trading is dubious at best. In fact, there’s considerable evidence suggesting that too much trading is going on. Still, nobody is proposing a punitive tax. On the table, instead, are proposals like the one recently made by Senator Tom Harkin and Representative Peter DeFazio for a tiny fee on financial transactions.

And here’s the thing: Because there are so many transactions, such a fee could yield several hundred billion dollars in revenue over the next decade. Again, this compares favorably with the savings from many of the harsh spending cuts being proposed in the name of fiscal responsibility.

But wouldn’t such a tax hurt economic growth? As I said, the evidence suggests not — if anything, it suggests that to the extent that taxing financial transactions reduces the volume of wheeling and dealing, that would be a good thing.

And it’s instructive, too, to note that some countries already have financial transactions taxes — and that among those who do are Hong Kong and Singapore. If some conservative starts claiming that such taxes are an unwarranted government intrusion, you might want to ask him why such taxes are imposed by the two countries that score highest on the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom.

Now, the tax ideas I’ve just mentioned wouldn’t be enough, by themselves, to fix our deficit. But the same is true of proposals for spending cuts. The point I’m making here isn’t that taxes are all we need; it is that they could and should be a significant part of the solution.

 

The Pasty Little Putz, Friedman, Bruni and Kristof

Well, better VERY late than never, I guess.  My intertubez were out this morning.  Here we go:

MoDo is off today.  The Pasty Little Putz thinks he has something worth saying about “The Enduring Cult of Kennedy.”  He gurgles that the myths of the Kennedy presidency are resurrected again with Stephen King’s new novel.  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “In the Arab World, It’s the Past vs. the Future.”  He says as the fighting continues in Egypt and Syria, crucial questions are raised.  Mr. Bruni, in “Craven Political Crudités,” says this presidential race is shaping up to be an especially mendacious ride, and not just because the two Republicans currently in the lead have demonstrated a formidable talent for improvisation.  Mr. Kristof, in “President as Piñata,” says President Obama came into office with expectations that Superman couldn’t have met. Let’s remember his accomplishments and keep some perspective at election time.  Here, heaven help us, is the Putz:

The cult of John F. Kennedy has the resilience of a horror-movie villain. No matter how many times the myths of Camelot are seemingly interred by history, they always come shambling back to life — in another television special, another Vanity Fair cover story, another hardcover hagiography.

It’s fitting, then, that the latest exhumation comes courtesy of Stephen King himself. King serves a dual role in our popular culture: He’s at once the master of horror and the bard of the baby boom, writing his way through the twilit borderlands where the experiences of the post-World War II generation are stalked by nightmares and shadowed by metaphysical dread.

In this landscape, the death of J.F.K. looms up like the Overlook Hotel. The gauzy fantasy of the Kennedy White House endures precisely because the reality of the assassination still feels like a primal catastrophe — an irruption of inexplicable evil as horrifying as any supernatural bogeyman.

At its best, King’s new Kennedy assassination novel, “11/22/63” — which sends its protagonist back in time to change that November day’s events — offers an implicit critique of this generational obsession. (I am not giving much away when I reveal that the time-traveling hero does not succeed in freeing ’60s America from the cruel snares of history.) But its narrative power still depends on accepting the false premises of the Kennedy cult — premises that will no doubt endure so long as the 1960s generation does, but still deserve to be challenged at every opportunity.

The first premise is that Kennedy was a very good president, and might have been a great one if he’d lived. Few serious historians take this view: It belongs to Camelot’s surviving court stenographers, and to popularizers like Chris Matthews, whose new best seller “Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero” works hard to gloss over the thinness of the 35th president’s actual accomplishments. Yet there is no escaping the myth’s hold on the popular imagination. In Gallup’s “greatest president” polling, J.F.K. still regularly jostles with Lincoln and Reagan for the top spot.

In reality, the kindest interpretation of Kennedy’s presidency is that he was a mediocrity whose death left his final grade as “incomplete.” The harsher view would deem him a near disaster — ineffective in domestic policy, evasive on civil rights and a serial blunderer in foreign policy, who barely avoided a nuclear war that his own brinksmanship had pushed us toward. (And the latter judgment doesn’t even take account of the medical problems that arguably made him unfit for the presidency, or the adulteries that eclipsed Bill Clinton’s for sheer recklessness.)

The second false premise is that Kennedy would have kept us out of Vietnam. Or as a character puts it in “11/22/63,” making the case for killing Lee Harvey Oswald: “Get rid of one wretched waif, buddy, and you could save millions of lives.”

Actually, it would be more accurate to describe the Vietnam War as Kennedy’s darkest legacy. His Churchillian rhetoric (“pay any price, bear any burden …”) provided the war’s rhetorical frame as surely as George W. Bush’s post-9/11 speeches did for our intervention in Iraq. His slow-motion military escalation established the strategic template that Lyndon Johnson followed so disastrously. And the war’s architects were all Kennedy people: It was the Whiz Kids’ mix of messianism and technocratic confidence, not Oswald’s fatal bullet, that sent so many Americans to die in Indochina.

The third myth is that Kennedy was a martyr to right-wing unreason. Writing on J.F.K. in the latest issue of New York magazine, Frank Rich half-acknowledges the mediocrity of Kennedy’s presidency. But he cannot resist joining a generation of liberals in drawing a connection between the right-wing “atmosphere of hate” in early-1960s Dallas and the assassination itself — and then linking both to today’s anti-Obama zeal. Neither can King, whose “11/22/63” explicitly compares right-wing Dallas to his own fictional territory of Derry, Me. — home of the murderous Pennywise the Clown from “It,” among other demons.

This connection is the purest fantasy, made particularly ridiculous by the fact that both Rich and King acknowledge that Oswald was a leftist — a pro-Castro agitator whose other assassination target was the far-right segregationist Edwin Walker. The idea that an atmosphere of right-wing hate somehow inspired a Marxist radical to murder a famously hawkish cold war president is even more implausible than the widespread suggestion that the schizophrenic Jared Lee Loughner shot his congresswoman because Sarah Palin put some targets on an online political map.

This last example suggests why the J.F.K. cult matters — because its myths still shape how we interpret politics today. We confuse charisma with competence, rhetoric with results, celebrity with genuine achievement. We find convenient scapegoats for national tragedies, and let our personal icons escape the blame. And we imagine that the worst evils can be blamed exclusively on subterranean demons, rather than on the follies that often flow from fine words and high ideals.

What a poisonous little shit he is.  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

In 2001, a book came out about George Mitchell’s diplomatic work in Northern Ireland that was entitled “To Hell With the Future, Let’s Get On With the Past.” One hopes that such a book will never be written about today’s Arab awakenings. But watching events unfold out there makes it impossible not to ask: Will the past bury the future in the Arab world or will the future bury the past?

I am awed by the bravery of the Syrian and Egyptian youths trying to throw off the tyranny of the Assad family and the Egyptian military. The fact that they go into the streets — knowing they face security forces who will not hesitate to gun them down — speaks of the deep longing of young Arabs to be free of the regimes that have so long choked their voices and prevented them from realizing their full potential.

But I am deeply worried that the longer the fighting continues in Syria and Egypt, the less chance that any stable, democratizing order will emerge anytime soon and the more likely that Syria could disintegrate into civil war. You can’t exaggerate how dangerous that would be. When Tunisia was convulsed by revolution, it imploded. When Egypt was convulsed by revolution, it imploded. When Libya was convulsed by revolution, it imploded. If Syria is convulsed by revolution, it will not implode. Most Arab states implode. Syria explodes.

Why? Because Syria is the keystone of the Levant. It borders and balances a variety of states, sects and ethnic groups. If civil war erupts there, every one of Syria’s neighbors will cultivate, and be cultivated by, different Syrian factions — Sunnis, Alawites, Kurds, Druse, Christians, pro-Iranians, pro-Hezbollahites, pro-Palestinians, pro-Saudis — in order to try to tilt Syria in their direction. Turkey, Lebanon, Hezbollah, Iraq, Iran, Hamas, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Israel all have vital interests in who rules in Damascus, and they will all find ways to partner with proxies inside Syria to shape events there. It will become a big Lebanon-like brawl.

Syria needs a peaceful democratic transition set in motion now. Ditto Egypt. But that is easier said than done. Events in both countries are a reminder of the multidimensional struggle for power across the Middle East — what I once described as the struggle between “The Lexus and the Olive Tree.”

On one level, you have the very modern, deeply felt and truly authentic longing by Syrians and Egyptians for freedom, for the skills to thrive in modernity and for the rights of real citizens.

Outsiders often underestimate just how much these Arab youths are determined to limit the powers of their militaries as a necessary step for achieving true democracy. What you see in Egypt today are young people from across the political spectrum and classes who are willing to join forces, break ranks with their own parties and return to Tahrir Square to press for real freedom. This is a generational rupture. It is the old versus the young. It is the insiders (the adults) versus the outsiders (the youth). It is the privileged old guard versus the disadvantaged young guard. These young Egyptians, and Syrians, who have stopped fearing their military masters, are determined to unleash a true transformation in their world. We should be on their side.

 But the weight of their history is so heavy. The new Lexus-like values of “democracy,” “free elections,” “citizen rights” and “modernity” will have to compete with some very old Olive Tree ideas and passions. These include the age-old civil wars within Islam between Sunnis and Shiites, over who should dominate the faith, the heated struggle between Salafists and modernists over whether the 21st century should be embraced or rejected, as well as the ancient tribal and regional struggles playing out within each of these societies. Last, but not least, you have the struggle between the entrenched military/crony elites and the masses. These struggles from the “past” always threaten to rise up, consume any new movement for change and bury “the future.”

This is the grand drama now being played out in the Arab world — the deeply sincere youth-led quest for liberty and the deeply rooted quests for sectarian, factional, class and tribal advantage. One day it looks as though the revolutions in Egypt, Syria and Tunisia are going to be hijacked by forces and passions from the past while the next day that longing of young people to be free and modern pushes them back.

The same drama played out in Iraq, but there the process was managed, at a huge cost, by an American midwife — managed enough so that the communities were able to write a new, rudimentary social contract on how to live together and, thereby, give the future a chance to bury the past. But we still do not know how it will end in Iraq.

We know, though, that there will be no impartial outside midwife to guide the transitions in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen. Can they each make it without one? Only if they develop their own Nelson Mandelas — unique civic leaders or coalitions who can honor the past, and contain its volcanic urges, but not let it bury the future.

Now here’s Mr. Bruni:

Barack Obama hates Thanksgiving and all that it represents.

Don’t believe me? Then consider his own words. On Wednesday, previewing our annual overconsumption of fowl, the president said, “Tomorrow is one of the worst days of the year to be American.”

O.K., fine, he didn’t say it exactly like that. I attached the bulk of a sentence near the start of his remarks to the last word of a later sentence, and if you want to be a stickler, his “worst” sentiment in its original form referred to the predicament of oven-bound turkeys, not the experience of people gorging on them.

Even so. He did utter each of those syllables, in that precise order. I smell a Mitt Romney ad in the making.

A day earlier, the doomsayer in chief was in even finer fettle. Speaking in New Hampshire, he callously told Americans who are hurting financially and hungry for a turnaround that they shouldn’t hold their breath.

True, that wasn’t the language he actually used. “It’s going to take time,” Obama said, to rebuild an ailing economy, eliminate tax loopholes and invest appropriately in education.

But the gist of that message? The government is like the airport on Thanksgiving weekend — expect significant delays! — and citizens must adopt the long view, even if their houses are in foreclosure and their cars are being repossessed. I can certainly hear Rick Perry characterizing it that way, although with several verbal bobbles and a few seconds of staring blankly into space.

There are still more than 11 fractious, exceedingly long months before the 2012 election, but already the main players’ approach to the truth is rather like a Veg-o-Matic’s to carrots and celery. They slice and dice it to a fare-thee-well, and serve craven political crudités.

The week before last, Perry released a commercial that lambasted Obama for calling Americans lazy, though Obama had said nothing so unfeeling. His comment was that the country’s government and corporate community had been somewhat lazy over recent decades about attracting foreign investment.

And last week, Romney released a commercial with footage in which Obama stated, “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” As it happens, Obama was describing how the McCain campaign assessed McCain’s situation during the 2008 general election, and the clip was from back then. The Romney TV spot dispensed with all that pesky context.

When this flagrant misdirection was pointed out, the Romney campaign’s reaction was unapologetic pride.

“We’re not going to take our foot off the gas pedal,” crowed a senior aide, Eric Fehrnstrom. So long as everyone’s playing fast and loose with quotations, Team Obama should hold on to that one and perhaps cast it as evidence of Romney’s inability to relate to the average American, whose reaction to brutal fuel prices traditionally has been to go easy, not hard, on the accelerator.

Buckle up, folks. This presidential race is shaping up to be an especially mean and mendacious ride, and not just because the two Republicans currently in the lead, Romney and Newt Gingrich, have demonstrated a formidable talent for improvisation, starting with thorough revisions of their own positions on health care, climate change and such. They’re a limber duo, primed to teach classes on political yoga. Gingrich’s wife probably gave him a Tiffany-bejeweled mat.

But their specific contortions and distortions are no more worrisome than the backdrop against which this campaign unfolds, one of toxic partisanship and breathless hyperbole.

Romney has been on the receiving as well as the giving end of this: last month, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, warned that he wanted to “privatize Social Security and allow Wall Street brokers to gamble” with retirees’ pensions. What he has said is that the 2008 market collapse convinced him that privatization was a dangerous idea.

But facts count for little when there’s fear mongering to be done. Just ask Michele Bachmann, the source of the ludicrous assertion, ginned up to smear Perry, that a vaccine for the human papillomavirus causes mental retardation.

Is all of this hot air part of a broader climate of unprincipled hucksterism? As a country we’ve shifted emphasis from goods to services, manufacturing to marketing, and everyone natters on about the importance of brand rather than the quality of product — about the sell rather than the substance.

I think politics has followed suit, and politicians, stuck in a sclerotic system that renders real accomplishment difficult, lavish more energy on words than on elusive deeds. What matters is what they can convince voters of and how voters are left feeling about them — and their foes — as a result.

Look at the deficit-reduction supercommittee. As it sputtered to the finish line, how did its members spend the final days? Not with a last-ditch stab at compromise, according to many news reports, but with separate discussions among Republicans and Democrats about how to emerge from the debacle looking better than the other side. The endgame wasn’t about outcomes. It was about positioning.

The raw state of the electorate and the prospect of an extremely close race between Obama and his opponent also suggest that the 2012 presidential campaign could take on a desperate, profoundly dishonest edge. Obama isn’t there yet, but he also won’t be in the thick of things until he knows who his Republican adversary is.

When that happens, how low will his own road go? It’s worth noting that in 2008, when he ridiculed McCain for supposedly not wanting to talk about the economy, he used the words of an unnamed McCain adviser, who had spoken anonymously to a reporter. So last week’s misleading Romney ad corrupted material that was corrupt to begin with.

Many Democrats say privately that the Republican nominee will need to be savaged for the president to prevail. And the Web site Politico asserted in an article last summer that Obama’s allies were prepared, should Romney be the nominee, to stress his weirdness, which sounds an awful lot like a proxy putdown for his being Mormon. The White House denied any such strategy.

Whatever the case, candidates clearly don’t envision much of a penalty on Election Day for having slung mud and tortured the truth in attacking opponents. I bet Romney’s aides expected — and saw an upside to — the charges of foul play prompted by their ad. The coverage of it reached many more voters than the ad itself did, and that attention ultimately underscored Romney’s overarching assertion that Obama should be ashamed of his economic performance. If Romney came across as shifty in the process, well, that was apparently a small price to pay.

But there’s a larger cost, borne not just by the candidates but, sadly, by the rest of us, too. Campaigns waged with lies presage governments racked by distrust. The sclerosis starts there. And I don’t think this country can endure much more of it without profound, lasting damage.

Now here’s Mr. Kristof:

A year before President Obama faces re-election, take a look at what has happened to other Western leaders confronting voters in this economic vortex.

Spain’s Socialist government was defeated in a crushing landslide vote a week ago, leaving the party with its fewest members of Parliament since democratic elections were introduced in 1977. That’s the pattern for incumbents from Ireland to Finland, Portugal to Denmark: Spain’s was the eighth government to topple in Europe in two years.

In this economic crisis, Obama will face the same headwinds. That should provide a bracing warning to grumbling Democrats: If you don’t like the way things are going right now, just wait.

President Obama came into office with expectations that Superman couldn’t have met. Many on the left believed what the right feared: that Obama was an old-fashioned liberal. But the president’s cautious centrism soured the left without reassuring the right.

Like many, I have disappointments with Obama. He badly underestimated the length of this economic crisis, and for a man with a spectacular gift at public speaking, he has been surprisingly inept at communicating.

But as we approach an election year, it is important to acknowledge the larger context: Obama has done better than many critics on the left or the right give him credit for.

He took office in the worst recession in more than half a century, amid fears of a complete economic implosion. As The Onion, the satirical news organization, described his election at the time: “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job.”

The administration helped tug us back from the brink of economic ruin. Obama oversaw an economic stimulus that, while too small, was far larger than the one House Democrats had proposed. He rescued the auto industry and achieved health care reform that presidents have been seeking since the time of Theodore Roosevelt.

Despite virulent opposition that has paralyzed the government, Obama bolstered regulation of the tobacco industry, signed a fair pay act and tightened control of the credit card industry. He has been superb on education, weaning the Democratic Party from blind support for teachers’ unions while still trying to strengthen public schools.

In foreign policy, Obama has taken a couple of huge risks. He approved the assault on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, and despite much criticism he led the international effort to overthrow Muammar el-Qaddafi. So far, both bets are paying off.

Granted, the economic downturn overshadows all else, as happens in every presidency. Ronald Reagan, the Teflon president, saw his job approval rating sink to 35 percent in January 1983 because of economic troubles. A faltering economy sent the popularity of the first president Bush into a tailspin, tumbling to 29 percent in 1992.

By comparison, President Obama has about a 43 percent approval rating, according to Gallup.

Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois tells me he thinks that liberals will eventually unite behind the president. “It’s never going to be the first date we had four years ago,” he said. “But I don’t question the fact that he’ll have the support of the left.”

Still, it’s hard to see how Obama will replicate the turnout that swept him into office, or repeat victories in crucial states like Florida and Ohio.

Then again, Republicans face a similar enthusiasm gap with their likely nominee, Mitt Romney. (Republicans keep searching for any other candidate who they think would be electable, when they already have one: Jon Huntsman. They just don’t like him.)

Earlier this month, I asked Bill Clinton — who has a better intuitive feel for politics than anyone I know — about Obama’s chances for re-election. “I’ll be surprised if he’s not re-elected,” Clinton said, adding that Obama would do better when matched against a specific opponent like Romney.

Clinton said that Romney did “a very good job” as governor of Massachusetts and would be a credible general election candidate. But Clinton added that Romney or any Republican nominee would be hampered by “a political environment in the Republican primary that basically means you can’t be authentic unless you’ve got a single-digit I.Q.”

I’m hoping the European elections will help shock Democrats out of their orneriness so that they accept the reality that we’ll be facing not a referendum, but a choice. For a couple of years, the left has joined the right in making Obama a piñata. That’s fair: it lets off steam, and it’s how we keep politicians in line.

But think back to 2000. Many Democrats and journalists alike, feeling grouchy, were dismissive of Al Gore and magnified his shortcomings. We forgot the context, prided ourselves on our disdainful superiority — and won eight years of George W. Bush.

This time, let’s do a better job of retaining perspective. If we turn Obama out of office a year from now, let’s make sure it is because the Republican nominee is preferable, not just out of grumpiness toward the incumbent during a difficult time.

 

Nocera and Collins

Mr. Blow is off today.  Mr. Nocera, in “The Ballad of John and Jessica,” says the slow and steady careers of two great musicians provide some meaningful life lessons for the rest of us.  Poor Ms. Collins.  She’s finally arrived at “O.K., Now Ron Paul.”  It’s time for another meeting of the Republican Presidential Book Club. And lucky for you readers, Ron Paul has written a ton of stuff!  Here’s Mr. Nocera:

For the last five years, the Cafe Carlyle, perhaps the premier cabaret venue in New York City, has devoted the month of November to an act featuring John Pizzarelli, a jazz guitarist and vocalist, and his wife, Jessica Molaskey, a Broadway actress and singer.

My year wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t go. Their exacting musicianship; their ability to weave the Beatles and Sondheim, Jobim and Cole Porter into a seamless set; and their hilarious banter (John is a born ham, Jessica a born foil) invariably make it a memorable evening. I admire the way they make it look easy.

I also admire something else about them: the way they have built their careers. In their late 40s when the Carlyle first booked them, they are the opposite of “overnight sensations.” They have been working at their professions since they were teenagers.

They have had their setbacks. The one time Jessica thought she had landed a breakout role in a musical, the show failed to make it to Broadway. The one time John got a big push from a major record label, the record flopped. But they persevered, never mailed it in and, eventually, were rewarded. From where I’m sitting, their careers can serve as a model for a lot more people than just musicians and actors.

Jessica was 19 when she moved to New York from the small town of Wolcott, Conn., determined to be an actress. Her first audition landed her a role in the ensemble of “Oklahoma!,” which was being revived. “I thought it was going to be like that forever,” she recalls.

But, of course, it wasn’t. Although she had roles in many of the big-budget musicals that rolled through New York — “Cats,” “Les Miz” and the like — the parts were small, and the work ultimately stultifying.

So, in her late 20s, she stopped auditioning for can’t-miss musicals and gravitated instead to the riskier work of younger composers who were building their own careers. She remembers doing shows for $200 a week — and loving it. “I was a lot more broke, and a lot happier. I was learning things.”

John, meanwhile, had grown up around jazz. His father is Bucky Pizzarelli, the great guitarist. Bucky “didn’t teach me how to play the guitar, but he taught me how to love the guitar,” John says. As he got good, his father would take him on the occasional gig, but John was also playing in rock bands and writing songs.

“I thought I was going to be the next Billy Joel,” he says.

The light bulb went on when he started listening to Nat King Cole recordings. “I sorta said, ‘I’m gonna play this music,’ ” says John. That’s what he did in his 20s and early 30s — playing in bars in New Jersey, where he grew up, and in New York City for $40 a night, “barely paying the bills.”

His father would still sometimes employ him — and that would earn him a real paycheck. When I asked John what he learned from playing with his father, his answer was immediate: “Every gig counts.”

John and Jessica met in 1997, when they were both cast in a short-lived musical called “Dream.” They married, had a daughter, and built a life together.

For the most part, they continued their separate careers: John toured constantly with a quartet that included his brother Martin on bass, and Jessica began cutting records in addition to taking the occasional part in a musical. There was never a moment when their careers took off, but slowly, steadily, they each built a substantial, praise-worthy life in music and acting.

John knows that he is never going to be as rich or as famous as Billy Joel. He says he is O.K. with that. Jessica still yearns for that breakout Broadway role. But if it doesn’t happen, she says she’ll be fine.

When she first came to New York, Jessica recalled the other day, her brother dropped her off and then drove back home to Connecticut.

“He told me recently that he felt so guilty leaving me there,” she said. “He wasn’t sure I was going to survive. And there were days when I wondered that myself. I remember going to an audition and thinking, ‘If I don’t get this job I’m going to die, because I only have a dollar to my name.’ But guess what? I didn’t get the job, and I didn’t die. Kids get bailed out now,” she added. “There is something to be said for the resolve it takes to make it on your own.”

She thought about that for a minute. John, who was sitting next to her, looked over at her with a smile.

“There is something really lovely about putting one foot in front of the other,” she said, finally. “You wake up one day and you have a nice career, and a 13-year-old daughter and a house in the country. There is something about the way you earned it that is gratifying.”

I’m happy for Mr. Nocera that he can afford the tariff at the Cafe Carlyle…  Now here’s Ms. Collins:

Ron Paul, the libertarian congressman from Texas, now seems to have an outside chance of winning the Iowa caucus vote. Not the presidential nomination. It seems highly unlikely that the Republicans are going to give the nod to a guy who disapproves of the Patriot Act and marriage licenses.

But, still, he’s definitely having a moment.

And, therefore, I feel obliged to add him to our survey of presidential candidate book reports.

Just say a prayer Rick Santorum doesn’t take off next.

Paul has written a ton of stuff, most of it on his economic theories. His big best seller is “End the Fed,” and, if you are interested in abolishing the Federal Reserve, I would really suggest reading it. However, the Fed is not going to be ended. People are not going to be given the power to mint their own money, as Paul also suggests. But, really, if this is what floats your boat, read away.

“Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom” has more variety. It’s full of essays, mostly about things Paul disapproves of, from abortion to Zionism.

It’s quite a list. Paul says he believes that the federal government (“the wealth-extracting leviathan state”) shouldn’t be doing anything that’s not specifically enumerated in the Constitution, which once caused him to vote against giving a Congressional medal to Mother Teresa.

He doesn’t really believe in global warming, but, even if he did, he doesn’t think government is smart enough to be able to do anything about it.

He also doesn’t believe in, well, let’s see: gun control, the death penalty, the C.I.A., the Civil Rights Act, prosecuting flag-burners, hate crime legislation, foreign aid, the military draft under any circumstances, campaign finance reform, the war on drugs, the war on terror and the war on porn. Also the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan. Taxes are theft. While his fellow Republican candidates fume about gay marriage, Paul thinks the government should get out of the business of issuing marriage licenses entirely. (“In a free society, something that we do not truly enjoy, all voluntary and consensual agreements would be recognized.”)

Paul is the only person running for president in either party who seems determined to be consistent, come hell or high water. The only time I ever saw him dodge a question was when somebody asked him if he preferred letting people die in a ditch to government-financed health care. But, even then, you could tell that he really did prefer the ditch.

Paul can get kind of swoony when he’s talking about the rock stars of the Austrian school of economics, but he’s not much for personal autobiography. He has a few stories about his childhood in “End the Fed,” but they mainly involve the way his stamp and coin collections helped him to understand the concept of currency inflation.

When six of the Republican presidential candidates got together recently for a Family Forum in Iowa in order to woo the social right, they were invited to tell personal stories of their own moments of despair and doubt.

Herman Cain broke down while discussing a bout with cancer. Rick Perry said that Jesus had filled a hole in his soul. Santorum told a moving story about his seriously ill baby daughter, which he then somehow connected to the evils of Obamacare. Paul seemed at a loss, but then he finally offered that when he was in high school he really wanted to be a track star but it didn’t work out.

Basically, Paul seems to want to revert to the 18th century, when every bank could set its own monetary policy and every community ran its own schools — presuming, of course, the community wanted to pay for them.

“The founders of this country were well educated, mostly by being home-schooled or taught in schools associated with a church,” he reasons. Those of us who were not born in the gentry could presumably go back to sewing and reaping hay.

Naturally, a man with such a wide range of pet peeves is going to make waves in his own party.

“Chicken-hawks are individuals who dodged the draft when their numbers came up but who later became champions of senseless and undeclared wars when they were influencing foreign policy,” Paul writes in his chapter on conscription. “Former Vice President Cheney is the best example of this disgraceful behavior.”

Really, you can’t totally dislike the guy.

 

Brooks and Krugman

Bobo gives us “The Life Reports.”  After a few thousand readers over 70 wrote in with personal histories, here are some of the lessons they shared.  Prof. Krugman says “We Are the 99.9%,” and that the 99 percent slogan is great, but it actually aims too low. A big chunk of the top 1 percent’s gains have gone to an even smaller group, the top 0.1 percent.  Here’s Bobo:

A few weeks ago I asked people over 70 to send me “Life Reports” — little essays in which they evaluate their own lives. A few thousand people have written in, and I’ve been posting an essay a day on my blog.

Born in the 1920s and 1930s, most of them learned work habits in an age of scarcity and then got to explore opportunities in an age of growth. Unlike later generations, many of the men went through a phase in which they did physical labor in a factory, even if later they went on to become professionals.

Many of the women were born with limited aspirations and only saw their horizons expanded with feminism. By middle age, people of both sexes were moving freely, assuming there would be a decent job wherever they settled.

Some of my correspondents were influenced by the social revolution of the ’60s.

Hugh Nazor writes, “My wife, who had quit college when we married, was bored with life and the roles of suburban housewife and mother. Her affair with my best friend was easy for me to understand. Having grown up in the repressive, conformist ’50s, those of us who had recently lost the trust of the younger generation by being ‘over 30’ felt cheated. We were of another era, and wanted more. After some time acting out and playing ‘Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,’ my divorce was a foregone conclusion.”

Resilience is a central theme in these essays. I don’t think we remind young people enough that life is hard. Bad things happen.

Gilda Zelin lost her husband. “The loneliness will never disappear. The intensity ebbs as the years go by. To take care of the cold, empty nights, I have substituted an electric mattress warmer and large pillow to hug and push into, to take the place of my beloved.”

Robert Roy writes, “I often revisit the birth of my firstborn, Greg, and thoughts of who he would become. I fast-forward to when he was 35 and the image of placing a mahogany box filled with his ashes in a grave along side my mother and father.”

“My faith survived a trial by fire,” Marguerite E. Moore writes. “My seven-year-old son was hit by a car. Will he live? (Please God!) Will he regain consciousness? (Please God!) … I know how it feels to be totally vulnerable and to know God is the only being that can save my son. (He had five doctors, none of whom would look me in the eye.) I stormed heaven, begged, pleaded, swore and promised. He survived, and so did I. My faith is like a steel rod that goes through my core and the glue that holds me together.”

Most people give themselves higher grades for their professional lives than for their private lives. Almost everybody is satisfied with the contributions they made at work. The people who started family businesses seem especially happy.

At home, many give themselves mediocre grades. One workaholic describes the time his 6-year-old son brought a family portrait home from school. He wasn’t in it, but the dog and cat were.

“During my drinking years, I was unfaithful to my wife,” writes a doctor from Pennsylvania. “This is my greatest regret and shame and will remain so until I die.”

The essays give a big warning about the perils of marrying young. Some people found their beloved at 19 and have spent a blissful half-century with them. But many people married before they knew themselves and endured a lonely decade before divorcing. A vast majority of those people made a wiser choice the second time around.

When the writer has a happy marriage, the essay glows with contentment. Others somehow made it work. “It wasn’t a love match for me, or for him for that matter,” a woman from New Jersey writes, “but we made a good family and did very well for the first decade or so and stayed together until he died at 81.”

I’ve probably overemphasized the pitfalls of their lives in this column — I’ll write more about the positive lessons in the next one. But many of the writers have integrated the ups and downs into an enveloping sense of gratitude.

Judy Eddy from Nevada writes, “My symptoms of Parkinson’s disease have now become a major part of my life. But, oh wow! I think that I am handling Parkinson’s well — no despondency at what I can no longer do, but I get encouragement from everyone to do what I can. My life is full: love shared with family, love shared with friends, love shared with another dog, various projects and even another career, that keep my time occupied. How fortunate I am that I can count both my ex-husbands as friends, as we share a different kind of love from and for me.”

Here’s Prof. Krugman:

“We are the 99 percent” is a great slogan. It correctly defines the issue as being the middle class versus the elite (as opposed to the middle class versus the poor). And it also gets past the common but wrong establishment notion that rising inequality is mainly about the well educated doing better than the less educated; the big winners in this new Gilded Age have been a handful of very wealthy people, not college graduates in general.

If anything, however, the 99 percent slogan aims too low. A large fraction of the top 1 percent’s gains have actually gone to an even smaller group, the top 0.1 percent — the richest one-thousandth of the population.

And while Democrats, by and large, want that super-elite to make at least some contribution to long-term deficit reduction, Republicans want to cut the super-elite’s taxes even as they slash Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in the name of fiscal discipline.

Before I get to those policy disputes, here are a few numbers.

The recent Congressional Budget Office report on inequality didn’t look inside the top 1 percent, but an earlier report, which only went up to 2005, did. According to that report, between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted, after-tax income of Americans in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. The equivalent number for the richest 0.1 percent rose 400 percent.

For the most part, these huge gains reflected a dramatic rise in the super-elite’s share of pretax income. But there were also large tax cuts favoring the wealthy. In particular, taxes on capital gains are much lower than they were in 1979 — and the richest one-thousandth of Americans account for half of all income from capital gains.

Given this history, why do Republicans advocate further tax cuts for the very rich even as they warn about deficits and demand drastic cuts in social insurance programs?

Well, aside from shouts of “class warfare!” whenever such questions are raised, the usual answer is that the super-elite are “job creators” — that is, that they make a special contribution to the economy. So what you need to know is that this is bad economics. In fact, it would be bad economics even if America had the idealized, perfect market economy of conservative fantasies.

After all, in an idealized market economy each worker would be paid exactly what he or she contributes to the economy by choosing to work, no more and no less. And this would be equally true for workers making $30,000 a year and executives making $30 million a year. There would be no reason to consider the contributions of the $30 million folks as deserving of special treatment.

But, you say, the rich pay taxes! Indeed, they do. And they could — and should, from the point of view of the 99.9 percent — be paying substantially more in taxes, not offered even more tax breaks, despite the alleged budget crisis, because of the wonderful things they supposedly do.

Still, don’t some of the very rich get that way by producing innovations that are worth far more to the world than the income they receive? Sure, but if you look at who really makes up the 0.1 percent, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, by and large, the members of the super-elite are overpaid, not underpaid, for what they do.

For who are the 0.1 percent? Very few of them are Steve Jobs-type innovators; most of them are corporate bigwigs and financial wheeler-dealers. One recent analysis found that 43 percent of the super-elite are executives at nonfinancial companies, 18 percent are in finance and another 12 percent are lawyers or in real estate. And these are not, to put it mildly, professions in which there is a clear relationship between someone’s income and his economic contribution.

Executive pay, which has skyrocketed over the past generation, is famously set by boards of directors appointed by the very people whose pay they determine; poorly performing C.E.O.’s still get lavish paychecks, and even failed and fired executives often receive millions as they go out the door.

Meanwhile, the economic crisis showed that much of the apparent value created by modern finance was a mirage. As the Bank of England’s director for financial stability recently put it, seemingly high returns before the crisis simply reflected increased risk-taking — risk that was mostly borne not by the wheeler-dealers themselves but either by naïve investors or by taxpayers, who ended up holding the bag when it all went wrong. And as he waspishly noted, “If risk-making were a value-adding activity, Russian roulette players would contribute disproportionately to global welfare.”

So should the 99.9 percent hate the 0.1 percent? No, not at all. But they should ignore all the propaganda about “job creators” and demand that the super-elite pay substantially more in taxes.

 

Kristof and Collins

Mr. Kristof has a question:  “Are We Getting Nicer?”  He says behind the headlines, war is declining and humanity is becoming less violent, less racist and less sexist.  Ms. Collins is “Counting Really Small Blessings,” and says this year, don’t forget to give thanks for the Republican presidential debates. Seriously, they have given us so many truly interesting TV moments.  Here’s Mr. Kristof:

It’s pretty easy to conclude that the world is spinning down the toilet.

So let me be contrary and offer a reason to be grateful this Thanksgiving. Despite the gloomy mood, the historical backdrop is stunning progress in human decency over recent centuries.

War is declining, and humanity is becoming less violent, less racist and less sexist — and this moral progress has accelerated in recent decades. To put it bluntly, we humans seem to be getting nicer.

That’s the central theme of an astonishingly good book just published by Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard. It’s called “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” and it’s my bet to win the next Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

“Today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence,” Pinker writes, and he describes this decline in violence as possibly “the most important thing that has ever happened in human history.”

He acknowledges: “In a century that began with 9/11, Iraq, and Darfur, the claim that we are living in an unusually peaceful time may strike you as somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene.”

Still, even in a 20th century notorious for world war and genocide, only around 3 percent of humans died from such man-made catastrophes. In contrast, a study of Native-American skeletons from hunter-gather societies found that some 13 percent had died of trauma. And in the 17th century, the Thirty Years’ War reduced Germany’s population by as much as one-third.

Wars make headlines, but there are fewer conflicts today, and they typically don’t kill as many people. Many scholars have made that point, most notably Joshua S. Goldstein in his recent book “Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide.” Goldstein also argues that it’s a myth that civilians are more likely to die in modern wars.

Look also at homicide rates, which are now far lower than in previous centuries. The murder rate in Britain seems to have fallen by more than 90 percent since the 14th century.

Then there are the myriad forms of violence that were once the banal backdrop of daily life. One game in feudal Europe involved men competing to head-butt to death a cat that had been nailed alive to a post. One reason this was considered so entertaining: the possibility that it would claw out a competitor’s eye.

Think of fairy tales and nursery rhymes. One academic study found that modern children’s television programs have 4.8 violent scenes per hour, compared with nursery rhymes with 52.2.

The decline in brutality is true of other cultures as well. When I learned Chinese, I was startled to encounter ideographs like the one of a knife next to a nose: pronounced “yi,” it means “cutting off a nose as punishment.” That’s one Chinese character that students no longer study.

Pinker’s book rang true to me partly because I often report on genocide and human rights abuses. I was aghast that Darfur didn’t prompt more of an international response from Western governments, but I was awed by the way American university students protested on behalf of a people who lived half a world away.

That reflects a larger truth: There is global consensus today that slaughtering civilians is an outrage. Governments may still engage in mass atrocities, but now they hire lobbyists and public relations firms to sanitize the mess.

In contrast, until modern times, genocide was simply a way of waging war. The Bible repeatedly describes God as masterminding genocide (“thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth” — Deuteronomy 20:16), and European-Americans saw nothing offensive about exterminating Native Americans. One of my heroes, Theodore Roosevelt, later a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, was unapologetic: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely in the case of the tenth.”

The pace of moral progress has accelerated in the last few decades. Pinker notes that on issues such as civil rights, the role of women, equality for gays, beating of children and treatment of animals, “the attitudes of conservatives have followed the trajectory of liberals, with the result that today’s conservatives are more liberal than yesterday’s liberals.”

The reasons for these advances are complex but may have to do with the rise of education, the decline of chauvinism and a growing willingness to put ourselves in the shoes (increasingly, even hooves) of others.

Granted, the world still faces brutality and cruelty. That’s what I write about the rest of the year! But let’s pause for a moment to acknowledge remarkable progress and give thanks for the human capacity for compassion and moral growth.

Now here’s Ms. Collins:

This year I am giving thanks for the Republican presidential debates.

Didn’t see that one coming, did you?

I have a real tolerance for boring television, having watched at least two series now on the air about people who bid on abandoned storage lockers, as well as several segments of the show about extreme coupon-collecting. So the debates are right up my alley. After the 10th or 11th episode, you get a feeling of up-close interaction previously reserved for people who live in Iowa and New Hampshire, where voters are so entitled that they find it hard to support anybody who hasn’t been to the house for dinner, or possibly a sleepover.

You come to know everybody’s special gimmicks. Newt Gingrich will say something snotty to the moderators to show he hates the news media. Whenever Rick Perry gets lost in the verbal weeds, he has taken to demanding that Congress be made part time. Michele Bachmann points out that she’s had 23 foster children. Mitt Romney’s special thing is to swear that, unlike President Obama, he will not apologize for the United States. Which Obama never did.

Meanwhile, Romney’s campaign was running an ad in New Hampshire that purported to show Obama in 2008, saying: “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” Which was actually Obama quoting John McCain’s campaign. Romney has a long and well-documented history of changing his positions. This time around, he is apparently also planning to just make things up.

But about the debates. My favorite this week was the Thanksgiving Family Forum, in which everybody in the race who isn’t a Mormon went to Iowa to compete for the love of the Christian right. This was the one in which Rick Perry assured the audience that because of his strong anti-abortion stance he would immediately end the policy of sending China “billions of dollars” in American foreign aid.

Who knew? Truly, it was the most interesting TV moment since I watched somebody bid way too much money for an abandoned storage locker containing fake leather furniture and a portrait of cats with big eyes.

The CNN national security debate had fewer cheap thrills, although it was fun hearing Herman Cain call Wolf Blitzer “Blitz.” Also there was Michele Bachmann’s description of her role in the debt-ceiling crisis. (“And my voice said this: I said it’s time for us to draw a line in the sand.”) It seemed to suggest she had come to see herself in the third person. Or maybe as an oracle. Or a ventriloquist.

These are the moments that get you through the long, hard periods where everybody but Ron Paul is competing to see who can promise to do the toughest things to Iran. (Let Israel bomb them! Bomb them ourselves! Let’s assassinate some nuclear scientists!)

This week’s biggest drama was the Newt Has a Heart Moment, when Gingrich said he believed an undocumented immigrant who had “been here 25 years and you got three kids and two grandkids, you’ve been paying taxes and obeying the law, you belong to a local church” should be given some avenue to legal status. Bachmann instantly and repeatedly claimed Newt was talking about “11 million people,” which sounds like one heck of a lot of 25-year-resident grandparents.

“Amnesty is a magnet,” said Romney, who has spent two presidential campaigns branding his opponents as amnesty-givers.

You could see Perry’s face light up. This was so clearly his moment to point out that Mitt Romney used to have illegal immigrants mowing his lawn.

“Here we go again, Mitt. You and I, standing by each other again, and you used the words about the magnets,” Perry started. But you could almost hear the alarms going off. The candidates have been urged/bullied/blackmailed into avoiding personal attacks on one another.

“And that’s one of the things that we obviously have to do, is to stop those magnets of — for individuals to come in here,” Perry concluded, retreating fast. Nobody even noticed, since he talks like that even when he is saying what he intended to say.

This is totally unfair to the loyal debate watchers. I guess now there’s no chance anybody will ask Romney about the day he drove to Canada with the family dog strapped to the roof of the car.

On the plus side, there was the moment at the Family Forum when Rick Santorum explained how God had arranged his come-from-behind win of a U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania. “And I really felt blessed that I knew at that moment, when I won, I had a constituency of One,” he burbled.

Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster who served as moderator, asked Santorum what message God was sending when he then lost the seat — by what I believe was 17 percentage points.

Santorum was momentarily silenced. Really thankful for that.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Friedman, solo

MoDo is off today, so The Moustache of Wisdom has the place to himself.  In “Go Big, Mr. Obama” he says the president’s re-election hopes may boil down to him offering a bold plan for economic recovery.  Here he is:

President Obama has a clear choice on how to approach the 2012 election: He can spend all his energy defining Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich or whoever ends up as the Republican nominee in as ugly a way as possible, or he can spend all his energy defining the future in as credible a way as possible. If he spends his energy defining his Republican opponent, there is a chance the president will win with 50.00001 percent of the vote and no mandate to do what needs doing. If he spends his time defining the future in a credible way and offering a hard, tough, realistic pathway to get there, he will not only win, but he will have a mandate to take the country where we need to go.

I voted for Barack Obama, and I don’t want my money back. He’s never gotten the credit he deserves for bringing the economy he inherited back from the brink of a depression. He’s fought the war on terrorism in a smart and effective way. He’s making health care possible for millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions, and he saved the auto industry. This is big stuff. But, as important as all of these achievements are, they pale in comparison to the defining challenge of Obama’s presidency: Can he put the country on a sustainable economic recovery path at a time when, if we fail, it could be the end of the American dream?

I believe the best way for Obama to do that is by declaring today that he made a mistake in spurning his own deficit reduction commission, chaired by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, and is now adopting Simpson-Bowles — which already has Republican and Democratic support — as his long-term fiscal plan to be phased in after a near-term stimulus. If he did that, he would win politically and create a national consensus that would trump his opponents, right and left.

“I think what happened with Simpson-Bowles was an absolute tragedy,” Warren Buffett said on CNBC last week. “They work like a devil for 10 months. … They compromise. They bring in people as far apart as [Democratic Senator Dick] Durbin and [Republican Senator Tom] Coburn to get them to sign on and then they’re totally ignored. I think that’s a travesty.”

The president will never get the near-term stimulus through that he wants and that the economy needs without combining it with a credible bipartisan, multiyear deficit-reduction plan like Simpson-Bowles. Moreover, “a free-standing stimulus that is not combined with a credible multiyear plan that truly stabilizes our fiscal imbalances would not solve our problems,” argues Maya MacGuineas, the president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, “because if nobody knows what is waiting around the corner, after the stimulus runs out,” many people will just take that money and stuff it in a mattress “rather than in investments or spending.”

Obama aides argue that so many G.O.P. lawmakers are committed to making his presidency fail, or have signed pledges to an antitax cult, that they would never buy into any grand bargain. I think that is true for a lot of Republicans in Congress. But I have some questions: Why are the Republicans getting away with this? Why are so many independents and even Democrats who voted for Obama sitting on their hands? Obama owns the bully pulpit of the presidency and he’s losing to Grover Norquist? Also, assuming it is all true about the G.O.P., how can Obama trump them? I think he can, if he leads in a new way.

I think America’s broad center understands very clearly that the country is in trouble and that the Republican Party has gone nuts. But when they look at Obama on the deficit, they feel something is missing. People know leadership when they see it — when they see someone taking a political risk, not just talking about doing so, not just saying, “I’ll jump if the other guy jumps.” In times of crisis, leaders jump first, lay out what truly needs to be done to fix the problem, not just to win re-election, and by doing so earn the right to demand that others do the same.

What would it look like if the president was offering such leadership? First, he’d be proposing a deficit-cutting plan that matches the scale of our problem — one with substantial tax reform and revenue increases, a gasoline tax, deep defense cuts and cutbacks to both Social Security and Medicare. That is the Simpson-Bowles plan, and it should be Obama’s new starting point for negotiations. The deficit plan Obama put out last September is nowhere near as serious. “It is watered-down Simpson-Bowles,” said MacGuineas. “Most people don’t even know it exists.”

Second, he’d offer a plan in which the wealthy have to pay their fair share and more, because they’ve had a great two decades. But everyone, including the middle class, has to contribute something. This has to be a national effort. Third, he would offer a plan that is aspirational. It would not just be a roadmap to balancing the budget but to making America great again through reignited economic growth.

My gut says that if the president lays out such a plan — one that begins with him taking all the political risks on himself and then demanding the G.O.P. and his own party follow — he will be both defining himself and the future in a way that would earn him so much centrist support and respect that it would leave every possible Republican opponent in the dust, no matter how obstructionist they are or want to be.

Go big, Mr. President. You will win, and so will America.

 

Brooks, Cohen and Nocera

Mr. Bruni is off today.  In “The Two Moons” Bobo gurgles that we have entered an era of being governed by minority parties, with minority mentalities and defense mechanisms.  Mr. Cohen, in “Decline and Fall,” says gloom has settled on the world. Even the French are no longer sure their culture is superior.  Mr. Nocera has a question:  “Why Doesn’t No Mean No?”  He says the F.D.A. says Avastin doesn’t work for breast cancer patients.  So why is Medicare still paying for it?  Here’s Bobo:

In 1951, Samuel Lubell invented the concept of the political solar system. At any moment, he wrote, there is a Sun Party (the majority party, which drives the agenda) and a Moon Party (the minority party, which shines by reflecting the solar rays).

During Franklin Roosevelt’s era, Democrats were the Sun Party. During Ronald Reagan’s, Republicans were. Then, between 1996 and 2004, the two parties were tied. We lived in a 50-50 nation in which the overall party vote totals barely budged five elections in a row. It seemed then that we were in a moment of transition, waiting for the next Sun Party to emerge.

But something strange happened. No party took the lead. According to data today, both parties have become minority parties simultaneously. We are living in the era of two moons and no sun.

It used to be that the parties were on a seesaw: If the ratings of one dropped, then the ratings of the other rose. But now the two parties have record-low approval ratings together. Neither party has been able to rally the country behind its vision of government.

Ronald Brownstein summarized the underlying typography recently in The National Journal: “In Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor polls over the past two years, up to 40 percent of Americans have consistently expressed support for the conservative view that government is more the problem than the solution for the nation’s challenges; about another 30 percent have backed the Democratic view that government must take an active role in the economy; and the remaining 30 percent are agnostic. They are open to government activism in theory but skeptical it will help them in practice.”

In these circumstances, both parties have developed minority mentalities. The Republicans feel oppressed by the cultural establishment, and Democrats feel oppressed by the corporate establishment. They embrace the mental habits that have always been adopted by those who feel themselves resisting the onslaught of a dominant culture.

Their main fear is that they will lose their identity and cohesion if their members compromise with the larger world. They erect clear and rigid boundaries separating themselves from their enemies. In a hostile world, they erect rules and pledges and become hypervigilant about deviationism. They are more interested in protecting their special interests than converting outsiders. They slowly encase themselves in an epistemic cocoon.

The Democrat and Republican parties used to contain serious internal debates — between moderate and conservative Republicans, between New Democrats and liberals. Neither party does now.

The Democratic and Republican parties used to promote skilled coalition builders. Now the American parties have come to resemble the ideologically coherent European ones.

The Democrats talk and look like a conventional liberal party (some liberals, who represent, at most, 30 percent of the country, are disappointed because President Obama hasn’t ushered in a Huffington Post paradise). Meanwhile, many Republicans flock to Herman Cain or Newt Gingrich because they are more interested in having a leader who can take on the mainstream news media than in having one who can plausibly govern. Grover Norquist’s tax pledge isn’t really about public policy; it’s a chastity belt Republican politicians wear to show that they haven’t been defiled by the Washington culture.

The era of the two moons is a volatile era. Independent voters are trapped in a cycle of sour rejectionism — voting against whichever of the two options they dislike most at the moment. The shift between the 2008 election, when voters rejected Republicans, and the 2010 election, when voters rejected Democrats, was as big as any shift in recent history.

Sometimes voters even reject both parties on the same day. In Ohio last month, for example, voters rejected the main fiscal policy of the Republican governor. On the same ballot, by 31 points, they rejected health care reform, the main initiative of their Democratic president.

In policy terms, the era of the two moons is an era of stagnation. Each party is too weak to push its own agenda and too encased by its own cocoon to agree to a hybrid. The supercommittee failed for this reason. Members of the supercommittee actually took some brave steps outside party orthodoxy (Republicans embraced progressive tax increases, Democrats flirted with spending cuts), but these were baby steps, insufficient to change the alignment.

In normal circumstances, minority parties suffer a series of electoral defeats and then they modernize. But in the era of the two moons, the parties enjoy periodic election victories they don’t deserve, which only re-enforce their worst habits.

So it’s hard to see how we get out of this, unless some third force emerges, which wedges itself into one of the two parties, or unless we have a devastating fiscal crisis — a brutal cleansing flood, after which the sun will shine again.

Sweet FSM, but he’s such a pain in the arse.  Here’s Mr. Cohen:

Everyone’s so glum and gloomy. I suppose this is what decline looks like: the faces in the laundromat. It puts me in mind of Rome circa 475 A.D., Visigoths on the prowl.

Not so long ago Google chefs were making millions. Now everyone sits around with badges saying “99 percent.” That would be the 99 percent not getting the stock options Google chefs once got and banking executives still do.

Envy was never the American way. It is Thanksgiving week. Be thankful. You, too, can be a Google chef, or maybe a Groupon chef! You just have to get lucky.

Speaking of chefs, Mario Batali, the celebrity chef who caters to the 1 percent and is involved in a lawsuit over alleged underpayment of staff, has compared bankers to “Stalin or Hitler.” I guess he’s too busy uncorking super-Tuscans to fine-tune his similes. Even the rich are angry about something.

As is the Occupy movement, with reason. I just wish we could get a fix on what proposals lie beyond protest.

Over in Europe, dreams are also unraveling. In France, according to a Pew Research Center survey, only 27 percent of the population now believes that “our people are not perfect, but our culture is superior.”

I haven’t read such depressing news in a long time. When humility overtakes French culture, it’s over, folks.

French culture is superior. Just consider the cut of a Chanel suit, the sweep of the Champs Elysées or the line of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s brow. It’s obvious — to everyone except the doom-struck French, apparently.

Here in the United States, according to the same survey, 60 percent of Americans over 50 believe “our culture is superior.”

I’m not sure what’s more terrifying: the new French modesty or an old U.S. delusion. These are not happy times in the Atlantic community. Germans are particularly angry. They don’t think they’re being thanked enough for not quite saving the euro.

Sure as there are acorns beneath the oak tree, the West is shot. As Jim Morrison put it, “Your ballroom days are over, baby.” The U.S.A. is negative-equity central. Some 100 million Americans live below or close to the poverty line.

Greece wallows in the words it gave us: crisis, chaos and catastrophe.

Elsewhere it’s the Renaissance. Palaces rise. A bottle of Château Lafite-Rothschild goes for $4,000 in Hong Kong. Chinese and Brazilian bankers ponder whether Europe is creditworthy. It is payback time for the majority of humankind. They’re feeling pretty good about their former overlords feeling pretty bad. To be honest, I don’t blame them.

But never fear, resurgence is around the corner, the world will not be upside-down for long. The American century will in fact be two centuries!

I’ve heard that message from every Republican candidate, including one who can’t recall where Libya is, another who can’t think his way to the three government agencies he wants to disband, and a third who can’t remember why his dog got tied to the roof of his car en route to a family break in Canada.

They’re actually making me nostalgic for Sarah Palin. She forgot things with panache. She knew roughly where Russia was. She made no bones about killing animals — and did so with dispatch.

Still, folks, there’s hope out there. Japan, whose economy went dead for a decade, is enjoying a spurt. All it took was a tsunami to notch up a quarter of growth. Perhaps what Europe and the United States need is a major natural disaster — it would make a change from the man-made ones — or a good little war.

On reflection, wars are a bad idea, although Republicans seem to have plenty of ideas for new ones. President Obama is replacing conventional war with undercover operations — drone attacks, explosions in Iran, cyber-invasions. The president is effective, ice-cool and solemn as covert commanders-in-chief should be.

He just hasn’t made Americans or others in the languishing West feel good. That’s a serious omission.

Obama’s communication with the American people on the economy reminds me of one those off-key e-mail exchanges where each party gets more irritable, misunderstandings multiply, and you end up longing for someone to pick up the phone and clear things up with a declaratory sentence of the unambiguous “It’s morning again in America” variety.

I don’t see any such new dawn before November 2012, which makes what’s going to happen to the incumbent then uncertain. Glum people tend to go for change even if it may be bad for them.

But the election is a year away. Let’s shake off some of the gloom. America’s powers of reinvention are not exhausted. A friend of mine’s teenage son is a passionate pianist. He recently broke his right arm. So what did he do? Looked up Ravel’s concerto for the left hand and went to work on it. That’s the spirit needed.

I have an idea for Mario Batali’s penance. Cook free turkeys for some of the 100 million. Deeds matter. Americans know it — and let’s give thanks for that good sense at least.

Now here’s Mr. Nocera:

In 1998, The New York Times published a front-page article suggesting that two new drugs, angiostatin and endostatin, might finally win the war on cancer.

Though not yet tested in humans, the drugs had “eradicated” cancer in mice, the article said; and while some researchers were cautious, others could barely contain themselves. Dr. Richard Klausner, then the director of the National Cancer Institute called the drugs “the single most exciting thing on the horizon.”

In the subsequent 13 years, oncologists have come to the sobering realization these new drugs are not the holy grail after all. Usually used in conjunction with chemotherapy, they extend life and suppress tumor growth — but only by months, not years. Sometimes they do less than that — with serious side effects. As a breast cancer therapy, alas, the angiostatin Avastin falls in the latter category.

This is not to say that Avastin doesn’t help cancer patients. For lung cancer patients, Avastin plus chemotherapy extends life by an average of two months longer than chemotherapy alone. For renal cancer patients, Avastin gives the average patient an additional 4.8 months of what’s called “progression-free survival” — meaning that the tumors don’t grow and the cancer doesn’t spread for that amount of time.

But for breast cancer patients, Avastin neither suppresses tumor growth to any significant degree nor extends life. Although a 2007 study showed Avastin adding 5.5 months to progression-free survival, subsequent studies have failed to replicate that result.

As a result of that first, optimistic study, the Food and Drug Administration gave the drug “accelerated approval,” meaning it could be marketed as a breast cancer therapy while further studies were conducted. Those follow-up studies are what caused a panel of F.D.A. experts to then withdraw that approval. That decision, you may recall, was made this summer, after a heated two-day meeting that included pleas from breast cancer victims and enormous pushback from Genentech, which markets the drug and reaps around $7 billion in annual Avastin sales. After weighing the evidence, the F.D.A. panel voted 6 to 0 against Avastin.

After Genentech appealed, Dr. Margaret Hamburg, the F.D.A. commissioner, affirmed the decision on Friday in a ruling that would seem, on its face, unassailable. She essentially said that F.D.A. decisions had to be driven by science, and the science wasn’t there to support Genentech’s desire to market Avastin as a breast cancer drug.

Yet there was an immediate outcry. Some breast cancer patients, convinced that the drug was helping them stay alive, condemned the ruling. That’s certainly understandable. Less understandable was the reaction from conservatives, who cast the F.D.A. decision as an example of the nanny state making decisions that more properly belonged to doctors and their patients. The Wall Street Journal editorial page called Dr. Hamburg’s decision a “blunt assertion of regulatory power” and described Avastin as “potentially life-saving,” which it most certainly is not.

The strangest reaction, though, has come from the nation’s health insurers and the administrators of Medicare. Despite the clear evidence of Avastin’s lack of efficacy in treating breast cancer, they have mostly agreed to continue paying whenever doctors prescribe it “off label” for breast cancer patients. Avastin, by the way, costs nearly $90,000 a year.

The reason they are doing so is obvious: the science notwithstanding, no company wants to be cast as so heartless that it would deprive a seriously ill cancer patient of a drug that might offer hope, however slim. In October, when The Times reported that California Blue Shield would no longer pay for Avastin as a breast cancer therapy, the company was immediately inundated with calls from elected officials, reporters and patient advocates. Although the furor appeared to be orchestrated by Genentech’s lobbyists, the insurance company quickly put out a statement making it clear that it would, in certain cases, continue to pay for Avastin.

As for Medicare, it is, by statute, guided in such decisions not by the F.D.A. but by various compendia of drug use put together by such groups as the National Comprehensive Cancer Network. The network’s 32-member breast cancer panel is made up almost entirely of breast cancer specialists, nine of whom have financial ties to Genentech. The last time the panel voted on Avastin, it voted unanimously in favor of continuing to recommend it as a breast cancer therapy.

We talk, as a society, of our need to get health care costs under control. Conservatives, in particular, insist that Medicare must be reformed. Here is an enormously expensive drug that largely doesn’t work, has serious side effects and can no longer be marketed as a breast cancer therapy. Yet insurers, including Medicare, will continue to cover it.

If we’re not willing to say no to a drug like Avastin, then what drug will we say no to?

Good question…

Krugman solo

Prof. Krugman is flying solo today.  In “Boring Cruel Romantics” he helps us understand the architects of the European disaster.  Here he is:

There’s a word I keep hearing lately: “technocrat.” Sometimes it’s used as a term of scorn — the creators of the euro, we’re told, were technocrats who failed to take human and cultural factors into account. Sometimes it’s a term of praise: the newly installed prime ministers of Greece and Italy are described as technocrats who will rise above politics and do what needs to be done.

I call foul. I know from technocrats; sometimes I even play one myself. And these people — the people who bullied Europe into adopting a common currency, the people who are bullying both Europe and the United States into austerity — aren’t technocrats. They are, instead, deeply impractical romantics.

They are, to be sure, a peculiarly boring breed of romantic, speaking in turgid prose rather than poetry. And the things they demand on behalf of their romantic visions are often cruel, involving huge sacrifices from ordinary workers and families. But the fact remains that those visions are driven by dreams about the way things should be rather than by a cool assessment of the way things really are.

And to save the world economy we must topple these dangerous romantics from their pedestals.

Let’s start with the creation of the euro. If you think that this was a project driven by careful calculation of costs and benefits, you have been misinformed.

The truth is that Europe’s march toward a common currency was, from the beginning, a dubious project on any objective economic analysis. The continent’s economies were too disparate to function smoothly with one-size-fits-all monetary policy, too likely to experience “asymmetric shocks” in which some countries slumped while others boomed. And unlike U.S. states, European countries weren’t part of a single nation with a unified budget and a labor market tied together by a common language.

So why did those “technocrats” push so hard for the euro, disregarding many warnings from economists? Partly it was the dream of European unification, which the Continent’s elite found so alluring that its members waved away practical objections. And partly it was a leap of economic faith, the hope — driven by the will to believe, despite vast evidence to the contrary — that everything would work out as long as nations practiced the Victorian virtues of price stability and fiscal prudence.

Sad to say, things did not work out as promised. But rather than adjusting to reality, those supposed technocrats just doubled down — insisting, for example, that Greece could avoid default through savage austerity, when anyone who actually did the math knew better.

Let me single out in particular the European Central Bank (E.C.B.), which is supposed to be the ultimate technocratic institution, and which has been especially notable for taking refuge in fantasy as things go wrong. Last year, for example, the bank affirmed its belief in the confidence fairy — that is, the claim that budget cuts in a depressed economy will actually promote expansion, by raising business and consumer confidence. Strange to say, that hasn’t happened anywhere.

And now, with Europe in crisis — a crisis that can’t be contained unless the E.C.B. steps in to stop the vicious circle of financial collapse — its leaders still cling to the notion that price stability cures all ills. Last week Mario Draghi, the E.C.B.’s new president, declared that “anchoring inflation expectations” is “the major contribution we can make in support of sustainable growth, employment creation and financial stability.”

This is an utterly fantastic claim to make at a time when expected European inflation is, if anything, too low, and what’s roiling the markets is fear of more or less immediate financial collapse. And it’s more like a religious proclamation than a technocratic assessment.

Just to be clear, this is not an anti-European rant, since we have our own pseudo-technocrats warping the policy debate. In particular, allegedly nonpartisan groups of “experts” — the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the Concord Coalition, and so on — have been all too successful at hijacking the economic policy debate, shifting its focus from jobs to deficits.

Real technocrats would have asked why this makes sense at a time when the unemployment rate is 9 percent and the interest rate on U.S. debt is only 2 percent. But like the E.C.B., our fiscal scolds have their story about what’s important, and they’re sticking to it no matter what the data say.

So am I against technocrats? Not at all. I like technocrats — technocrats are friends of mine. And we need technical expertise to deal with our economic woes.

But our discourse is being badly distorted by ideologues and wishful thinkers — boring, cruel romantics — pretending to be technocrats. And it’s time to puncture their pretensions.