In “Personal and Political” The Pasty Little Putz whines that the attacks on Rick Santorum and his wife are weird but inevitable. The Moustache of Wisdom is in Cairo. In “Watching Elephants Fly” he says when something extraordinary happens, like the uprising and subsequent truly free elections in Egypt, you just shut up and take notes. MoDo is in Manchester, NH. In “The Grating Santorum” she says in New Hampshire, Rick Santorum’s hot politics of aggrievement are competing with Mitt Romney’s cold politics of convenience. Mr. Bruni addresses “A Campaign Pruned of Bushes,” and says to hear the Republican candidates speak, you’d think Ronald Reagan was the last Republican president — and that he upheld the party’s current values. Mr. Kristof, in “A Poverty Solution That Starts With a Hug,” says the American Academy of Pediatrics is warning that a harsh early environment can lay the groundwork for lifelong achievement gaps, health problems and poverty. Here’s The Putz:
In the five days since his almost-victory in the Iowa caucuses, Rick Santorum’s critics have tried out an unusual line of attack against the former Pennsylvania senator. Not content with the many targets that Santorum’s record presents, they’ve gone after the way he and his wife, Karen, handled the premature delivery and death of their fourth child, Gabriel, in 1996.
At 19 weeks of pregnancy, Gabriel was found to have a potentially fatal fetal abnormality. After a risky intrauterine surgery, Karen Santorum came down with an infection that ended up triggering labor. The baby lived for just two hours, and after his death the couple took his body home overnight — so that their children could “absorb and understand that they had a brother,” Santorum said later — before burying him the following day.
This tragedy was old news until Santorum’s Iowa surprise, at which point various commentators began to bring it up as evidence of his extremism and hypocrisy. Alan Colmes, Fox News’s token liberal, cited Santorum’s decision to take his son’s body home as one of the crazier of all the “crazy things he’s said and done,” and The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson presented it as evidence that Santorum isn’t just “a little weird, he’s really weird.” A number of left-wing Web sites, meanwhile, asserted that the antibiotics Santorum’s wife had taken induced delivery before the fetus could survive outside the womb, which they argued was tantamount to the kind of late-term abortion Santorum famously opposes.
Neither attack made much sense. Weirdness is in the eye of the beholder, but as Commentary’s Pete Wehner pointed out, at least one major pregnancy Web site advises parents of stillborn children to do roughly what the Santorums did. (“It is important for your family members to spend time with the baby. This will help them come to terms with their loss.”) Meanwhile, the antibiotics Karen Santorum took probably did not directly induce her labor. And even if they had, most pro-life worldviews — Santorum’s Catholic faith included — make a clear moral distinction between medical interventions that directly kill a fetus and efforts to save the mother’s life that indirectly lead to fetal death.
But if the attacks on the Santorums’ personal choices were incoherent (so incoherent, in fact, that both Colmes and Robinson soon backtracked), they were also entirely characteristic of our moment. This is the second consecutive election cycle in which a Republican politician has endured a bizarre obstetrics-related controversy; last time, we had the various conspiracy theories surrounding Sarah Palin’s pregnancy and her Down syndrome son.
In a sense, one could say that these kinds of invasive debates become inevitable once the traditional zone of privacy around public figures collapses. But it would be more accurate to say that the zone of privacy has collapsed precisely because of the deep moral divisions that these kinds of controversies reveal.
Privacy is a luxury of moral consensus. Nobody would have thought to politicize the premature birth and death of John F. Kennedy’s son Patrick, because abortion wasn’t a polarizing issue in the America of 1963. But if a white politician in the Jim Crow South had married a black woman, the relationship would inevitably have been seen as a political gesture as well a personal decision.
Today, we are less divided over race, but more divided over sex and reproduction. In a country that cannot agree whether fetuses are human beings, even questions like how to mourn and bury a miscarried child are inevitably freighted with ideological significance. Likewise, in a country where the majority of Down syndrome fetuses are aborted, the mere act of carrying a child with a genetic disorder to term — as both the Palins and the Santorums, whose daughter Bella has Trisomy 18, have done — feels like a political statement.
The same pattern holds with respect to politicians and their marriage vows. In an era that had a clear and stable understanding of marriage, it was easier to treat politicians’ adulteries as a private matter between a husband and a wife. But hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, and a society that can’t agree on the definition of sexual virtue inevitably takes a stronger interest in whether a politician actually lives up to the definition of marriage he defends.
When Palin wove special needs children into her 2008 speeches, or when Santorum featured his daughter Bella in a campaign video, they were implicitly acknowledging these personal-is-political realities. Likewise Mitt Romney, who ran an ad highlighting his 42-year marriage at the height of the twice-divorced Newt Gingrich’s surge in the polls.
But by turning their personal choices to political ends, politicians lose the right to complain when those same personal lives are subject to partisan critiques. They can and should contest these critiques, but they can’t complain about them. In a culture as divided about fundamental issues as our own, the kind of weird attacks that Rick Santorum is enduring come with the vocation he has chosen.
The Putz should be coated with honey and staked out over a fire ant mound. Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:
Someday I’d love to create a journalism course based on covering the uprising in Egypt, now approaching its first anniversary. Lesson No. 1 would be the following: Whenever you see elephants flying, shut up and take notes. The Egyptian uprising is the equivalent of elephants flying. No one predicted it, and no one had seen this before. If you didn’t see it coming, what makes you think you know where it’s going? That’s why the smartest thing now is to just shut up and take notes.
If you do, the first thing you’ll write is that the Islamist parties — the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafist Al Nour Party — just crushed the secular liberals, who actually sparked the rebellion here, in the free Egyptian parliamentary elections, winning some 65 percent of the seats. To not be worried about the theocratic, antipluralistic, anti-women’s-rights, xenophobic strands in these Islamist parties is to be recklessly naïve. But to assume that the Islamists will not be impacted, or moderated, by the responsibilities of power, by the contending new power centers here and by the priority of the public for jobs and clean government is to miss the dynamism of Egyptian politics today.
Come with me to Cairo’s dirt-poor Shubra el-Khema neighborhood and the dilapidated Omar Abdel Aziz School, where I watched the last round of voting on Wednesday at a women-only voting center. We were guided by Amr Hassan, a 22-year-old commerce student from the ’hood — a secular youth, who fought to topple the Hosni Mubarak regime in Tahrir Square last year.
Here is what was so striking: virtually all the women we interviewed after the voting — all of whom were veiled, some with only slits for their eyes — said that they had voted for either the Muslim Brotherhood or the Salafists. But almost none said they had voted that way for religious reasons.
Many said they voted for Islamists because they were neighbors, people they knew, while secular liberal candidates had never once visited. Some illiterate elderly women confided that they could not read the ballot and just voted where their kids told them to. But practically all of them said they had voted for the Muslim Brotherhood or Salafist candidates because they expected them to deliver better, more honest government — not more mosques or liquor bans.
Here are some quotes from Egyptian women on why they voted Islamist: “I love the Muslim Brotherhood; they are the only honest ones. … I want good education and clean air to breathe. … We need proper medical care. … I want my kids to be properly educated. They can’t find any jobs. … The Muslim Brotherhood is not just an Islamist party. It is going to help solve all the problems of the country. … We have to get the youth working and to raise salaries. Education here is only getting worse. … My biggest fear is lack of security. We sit in our homes — afraid. You are afraid your son won’t be able to go back and forth to school without being kidnapped.”
Meanwhile, when I asked our young guide Hassan, the revolutionary, whom he had voted for, he said that he wrote on his ballot “Down with the SCAF” — the acronym for the Egyptian military council now running the country. He spat out his disgust with the fact that while secular youth like him toppled Mubarak, the Islamist parties were winning the elections and the army generals — who abandoned Mubarak to save themselves — were still in power!
And there you have Egypt today — a four-way power struggle between the army, the rising Islamist parties, the smaller liberal parties and the secular youth of Tahrir Square. All of them will have a say in how this story plays out. “We want to see a new Egyptian government with new thoughts,” said Hassan. “I am ready to go back into Tahrir Square if I have to.”
Indeed, everyone feels more empowered now. The army has its guns and now runs the country; both the Islamists and the liberals have won electoral mandates; and the secular youth from Tahrir feel empowered by the street — by their now proven ability to mobilize and to fight whenever they see things going awry. Even the silent majority here, called “The Party of the Couch,” feels more empowered, having just voted in high numbers in an election where the votes actually got counted.
My favorite election story was told to me by an international observer, who asked not to be identified. His voting station had just closed and as the polling workers were loading up the box filled with votes onto a bus to be taken to a central counting station, an Egyptian woman, who had just voted, ran over to them and shouted: “Please, never leave that box alone. This is our future. Go and make sure they put it in the right place.”
That box and all the hopes stuffed into it by so many average Egyptians is surely necessary for a new beginning here. But it is not sufficient. The country needs a leader — there is still a huge vacuum at the top — who can take all those votes, all those hopes, and meld them into a strategy to create the jobs, schooling, justice and security that all Egyptians clearly crave. If that happens, those ballot boxes really will have delivered a different future for Egypt. Until then, I am just taking notes.
Now here’s MoDo:
Rick Santorum was locking down the youth vote.
The man who fondly recalls nuns rapping his knuckles with rulers did some verbal knuckle-rapping of his own on Thursday with students at a forum in Concord hosted by New England College.
Not satisfied with mentioning homosexuality in the same breath as bestiality and pedophilia, as he did in 2003, Santorum tried to win over the kids by equating homosexuality with polygamy.
Even for Santorum, it was a masterpiece of antediluvian abrasiveness — slapping gays and Mormons at the same time.
When 17-year-old Rhiannon Pyle, visiting with her civics class from Newburyport, Mass., pressed Santorum on how he could believe that all men are created equal and still object to two men in love marrying, he began nonsensically frothing.
“So if everybody has the right to be happy, so if you’re not happy unless you’re married to five other people, is that O.K.?” he said, adding, “Well, what about three men?”
The grating Santorum was their worst nightmare of a bad teacher. He merely got booed; he’s lucky the kids didn’t TP his car or soap the windows.
In a campaign where W. is an unmentionable, Santorum is an unexpected revival of Bushian uncompassionate conservatism.
He got more scattered boos on Friday at a library in Keene and a private high school in Dublin. In Keene, he was asked if he would protect gay rights, since gays are “children of God” too.
“Serving in the military is not an unalienable right, it’s a privilege, you’re selected,” replied the candidate, who wants to restore “don’t ask, don’t tell.” He also called marriage “a privilege, not a right,” for the purpose is procreation.
Rick Perry baits gays because it’s good politics; Santorum sincerely means it. His political philosophy is infused with his über-Catholicism but lacks humanity.
At the Dublin event, 16-year-old Jessica Scharf asked Santorum how her handicapped brother could be cared for without help from the federal government. He replied, as The Times’s Katharine Q. Seelye reported, that he and his wife “bear the cost” of a handicapped daughter; he said family, friends, neighbors and the church could help, and that caring for someone would knit them closer. Scharf told Seelye later that such a group was not equipped to handle her brother, who has multiple handicaps.
New Hampshire’s feisty voters don’t seem as enraptured with Santorum’s rigid conservatism and sweater vests as evangelical voters in Iowa were. Many are pushing back on the wacky worldview of Senator Slash, as Santorum was once known for his vicious attacks on Bill Clinton and other Democrats.
He bashes President Obama as a European-style socialist and preaches fiscal conservatism. Yet in the Senate, he made sure dollars from the socialistic Medicare program went to Puerto Rico on behalf of a hometown firm — United Health Services — that later gave him nearly $400,000 in director’s fees and stock options.
He was among the pay-for-play Republicans who tried to strong-arm lobbyists and say that if you wanted to have influence you had to cough up campaign money.
While Karen Santorum was home-schooling their seven children in Virginia, Santorum soaked the Pennsylvania taxpayers to the tune of $100,000 by enrolling the children in a Pennsylvania cyber charter school.
The preface to Mrs. Santorum’s 2003 book of moral parables teaching children good manners was written by Joe Paterno, who warns against “a decline of civility and a coarsening of society.” And he knows how that goes.
In his 2005 book, “It Takes a Family,” Santorum goes off on “radical feminists” poisoning society: “What happened in America so that mothers and fathers who leave their children in the care of someone else — or worse yet, home alone after school between three and six in the afternoon — find themselves more affirmed by society?”
In Iowa, he tossed out a line about food stamps that NPR reported this way: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” He later told CNN that he was “pretty confident” that he didn’t say “black.” The only alternative, watching the video clip, is that he said “blah.” He doesn’t want to make blah people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money?
Santorum’s hot politics of aggrievement have competed with Mitt Romney’s cold politics of convenience. But soon Santorum will be gone and Mittens will reign as the calculating consultant type, unpersuasive in premium denim mom jeans, his hair slicked and gray, a lead in a ’50s B movie.
Santorum thinks he’s a bold color and Romney’s a pastel. But the whole Republican field seems ensconced in a black-and-white ’50s diorama. It’s like they’re running for president of Leave It to Beaverland.
As Tony Soprano told Meadow, “Out there it’s the 1990s, but in this house, it’s 1954.”
Now here’s Mr. Bruni:
The sweater-vested theocrat Rick Santorum was in the midst of a customary jeremiad against the evils of “Obamacare” and the scourge of government regulations when I heard him utter something positively extraordinary:
The name of George W. Bush.
Remember him? Not long ago, he was president. For eight turbulent years. But you wouldn’t know it from listening to the Republican candidates who are vying to evict his Democratic successor and reclaim the White House for their party. On the subject of the way the country was governed — and how it fared — when they last ruled that particular roost, they’re almost consistently mum.
They seldom mention Bush positively. They seldom mention Bush negatively. They also never mention the Bush before Bush — the other slice of bread in the Clinton sandwich — and have thus turned the father and the son almost wholly into ghosts.
You’d think Ronald Reagan, who is invoked incessantly, was the last Republican president, and you’d think he was not only a flawless chief executive but a sinless adherent to current Republican dogma. We’ll come back to that.
But after Reagan there were of course two additional Republicans over an aggregate 12 years — more than half of the last 23. The candidates almost never hark back to that.
They travel across a curiously Bush-denuded oratorical landscape. And that says a lot about the party’s binds, fudges and fibs, along with the narrow ideological bandwidth it now occupies.
Santorum brought up the second Bush — the 43rd president, or “43,” as Republicans call him — during the final days of his Iowa campaign and only in passing, accusing Obama of excessive environmental protection by saying that 43 had a more reasonable approach.
Other Republican aspirants bring him up even less than that. Newt Gingrich glides past 43 but fusses over Bill Clinton as if he were a schoolboy crush. Knocking Obama for insufficient bipartisanship, Gingrich recently noted that Clinton was expert at “little courtesies” and “a thousand small things,” like a “phone call on a birthday.” No roses?
“He understood,” blushed Gingrich, who once shut down the government in a fit of pique with Clinton and pushed for his impeachment. For Gingrich, grudges are apparently like wives. He moves nimbly past them.
Gingrich can’t discuss 43 because his own call for an assertive foreign policy and tax cuts sounds a lot like 43’s presidency, which landed the country in a giant fiscal hole, proving that significantly diminished revenue without substantially trimmed entitlements don’t do a budget any favors, especially when there are wars in the equation as well.
That presidency is a cautionary tale for successors, who aren’t learning proper caution from it. They’re still adamant about low taxes despite being vague about entitlement reform, which carries the risk of alienating important constituencies. So they simply eliminate 43 from the narrative, a bit of creative editing that helps them pin the mind-boggling level of federal debt overwhelmingly on Obama.
That debt has indeed risen at a terrifying pace over the last three years, but for reasons that have a great deal to do with … George W. Bush. The perpetuation of his tax cuts, the continuation of his new prescription drug benefit, the management of his wars and the interest payments on debt that he accumulated account for a crucial share of the additional sum Obama has amassed. And while the details of Obama’s stimulus spending and bailouts can and should be seriously questioned, the need for action stemmed largely from a severe economic downturn that began under 43.
For real, brave fiscal responsibility, Republicans should refer to and lionize the 41st president, the other George Bush. Much of his record, including his decision to exit Iraq after removing Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, shimmers in retrospect.
At great political cost, he allowed a tax increase appropriate to the fiscal circumstances. More than a few economists believe that it set the stage for the boom of the Clinton years. But 41’s budgetary approach is less likely to draw attention from present-day Republicans than 43’s. It runs counter to the party’s anti-tax obsessions. It’s anathema.
Can you even imagine one of the candidates crowing about his likeness to 41? To any sane audience and at any healthy national moment, that would be a major point in the candidate’s favor. The Romney who governed Massachusetts really does resemble him. Like 41, he’s a moneyed moderate not intrinsically interested in messy social issues.
But last month, when 41 came close to endorsing Romney in remarks to a Texas reporter, neither Romney nor his aides made a particularly big deal of it. The party they inhabit has taken an emphatic rightward lurch since 41’s days.
Its candidates talk instead about Reagan, Reagan and Reagan, name-checked on Tuesday by three of the six candidates who gave speeches following the Iowa caucuses.
With striking frequency and trademark self-congratulation, Gingrich casts himself as a crucial ally of Reagan in the 1980s. Ron Paul goes back to the 1970s, trumpeting that he was a Reagan supporter long before it was fashionable.
But it’s only because Reagan governed nearly a quarter-century ago, is gone now and has become the stuff of myth as much as reality that these admirers can embrace him so unreservedly.
As one prominent party strategist laughingly reminded me this week, Reagan allowed a dozen tax increases by some counts and measures; put Sandra Day O’Connor, an eventual disappointment to conservatives, on the Supreme Court; and signed the Simpson-Mazzoli immigration reform act, which gave amnesty to three million illegal immigrants. The liberal in Obama must be green with envy.
Time warps memory. And politics is funny: not on center stage but most definitely in the wings, echoes of Bush are audible in this election. Romney’s chief strategist, Stuart Stevens, worked on George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign. So did Joe Allbaugh, who is managing Rick Perry’s presidential bid.
And in Florida, where the late January primary could be the very last gasp for the anyone-but-Mitt brigade if Romney performs as well in New Hampshire and South Carolina as polls last week augured, there’s a Bush whose blessing would actually be a political gift: Jeb.
He’s not expected to put his finger on the scale. In fact, he’s thought to be entertaining his own presidential run in 2016, if Obama wins a second term and there’s no Republican incumbent in the picture.
That could be fascinating. How do you downplay your connection to the last two Republicans in the White House when your surname and theirs are the same four-letter word?
And last but not least we get to Mr. Kristof:
Perhaps the most widespread peril children face isn’t guns, swimming pools or speeding cars. Rather, scientists are suggesting that it may be “toxic stress” early in life, or even before birth.
This month, the American Academy of Pediatrics is issuing a landmark warning that this toxic stress can harm children for life. I’m as skeptical as anyone of headlines from new medical studies (Coffee is good for you! Coffee is bad for you!), but that’s not what this is.
Rather, this is a “policy statement” from the premier association of pediatricians, based on two decades of scientific research. This has revolutionary implications for medicine and for how we can more effectively chip away at poverty and crime.
Toxic stress might arise from parental abuse of alcohol or drugs. It could occur in a home where children are threatened and beaten. It might derive from chronic neglect — a child cries without being cuddled. Affection seems to defuse toxic stress — keep those hugs and lullabies coming! — suggesting that the stress emerges when a child senses persistent threats but no protector.
Cues of a hostile or indifferent environment flood an infant, or even a fetus, with stress hormones like cortisol in ways that can disrupt the body’s metabolism or the architecture of the brain.
The upshot is that children are sometimes permanently undermined. Even many years later, as adults, they are more likely to suffer heart disease, obesity, diabetes and other physical ailments. They are also more likely to struggle in school, have short tempers and tangle with the law.
The crucial period seems to be from conception through early childhood. After that, the brain is less pliable and has trouble being remolded.
“You can modify behavior later, but you can’t rewire disrupted brain circuits,” notes Jack P. Shonkoff, a Harvard pediatrician who has been a leader in this field. “We’re beginning to get a pretty compelling biological model of why kids who have experienced adversity have trouble learning.”
This new research addresses an uncomfortable truth: Poverty is difficult to overcome partly because of self-destructive behaviors. Children from poor homes often shine, but others may skip school, abuse narcotics, break the law, and have trouble settling down in a marriage and a job. Then their children may replicate this pattern.
Liberals sometimes ignore these self-destructive pathologies. Conservatives sometimes rely on them to blame poverty on the poor.
The research suggests that the roots of impairment and underachievement are biologically embedded, but preventable. “This is the biology of social class disparities,” Dr. Shonkoff said. “Early experiences are literally built into our bodies.”
The implication is that the most cost-effective window to bring about change isn’t high school or even kindergarten — although much greater efforts are needed in schools as well — but in the early years of life, or even before birth.
“Protecting young children from adversity is a promising, science-based strategy to address many of the most persistent and costly problems facing contemporary society, including limited educational achievement, diminished economic productivity, criminality, and disparities in health,” the pediatrics academy said in its policy statement.
One successful example of early intervention is home visitation by childcare experts, like those from the Nurse-Family Partnership. This organization sends nurses to visit poor, vulnerable women who are pregnant for the first time. The nurse warns against smoking and alcohol and drug abuse, and later encourages breast-feeding and good nutrition, while coaxing mothers to cuddle their children and read to them. This program continues until the child is 2.
At age 6, studies have found, these children are only one-third as likely to have behavioral or intellectual problems as others who weren’t enrolled. At age 15, the children are less than half as likely to have been arrested.
Evidence of the importance of early experiences has been mounting like snowflakes in a blizzard. For example, several studies examined Dutch men and women who had been in utero during a brief famine at the end of World War II. Decades later, those “famine babies” had more trouble concentrating and more heart disease than those born before or after.
Other scholars examined children who had been badly neglected in Romanian orphanages. Those who spent more time in the orphanages had shorter telomeres, a change in chromosomes that’s a marker of accelerated aging. Their brain scans also looked different.
The science is still accumulating. But a compelling message from biology is that if we want to chip away at poverty and improve educational and health outcomes, we have to start earlier. For many children, damage has been suffered before the first day of school.
As Frederick Douglass noted, “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”
