In “Free-Market Socialism” Bobo gurgles that in his State of the Union address, he’s hoping President Obama promotes policies that will help more people realize the American dream. I guess Bobo, given the title of this thing, is a fan of The Doughy Pantload. Mr. Cohen addresses “The Sarkozy Effect” and says the French president’s political courage is undeniable: A lot of people who can’t stand him now sense they may need him. Mr. Nocera continues his crusade. In “Living in Fear of the N.C.A.A.” he says in the saga of Ryan Boatright, Part II, there is more evidence of how the N.C.A.A. wrecks careers, ignores due process and punishes the innocent. Mr. Bruni, in “The Gusts of Gingrich,” says the candidate hasn’t grown careful, and it doesn’t seem to be hurting him. Here’s Bobo:
I hope President Obama read about Maddie Parlier as he was working on his State of the Union address. Parlier is the subject of Adam Davidson’s illuminating article in the current issue of The Atlantic.
Parlier’s father abandoned her when she was young and crashed his car while driving drunk, killing himself and a family of four. Maddie is smart and hard-working. She did reasonably well in high school but got pregnant her senior year.
She and the father of her child split up, which put the kibosh on her college dreams because she couldn’t afford day care. She temped for a while. Her work ethic got her noticed, and she got a job as an unskilled laborer at Standard Motor Products, which makes fuel injectors.
Parlier earns about $13 an hour. She’d like to become one of the better-paid workers in the plant, but, in today’s factories, that requires an enormous leap in skills. It feels cruel, Davidson writes, to mention all the things Parlier would have to learn to move up. She doesn’t know the computer language that runs the machines. “She doesn’t know trigonometry or calculus, and she’s never studied the properties of cutting tools or metals. She doesn’t know how to maintain a tolerance of 0.25 microns, or what tolerance means in this context, or what a micron is.”
A good attitude and hustle have taken Parlier as far as they can. It’s hard, given her situation, to acquire the skills she needs to realize the American dream.
Davidson’s article is important because it shows the interplay between economic forces (globalization and technology) and social forces (single parenthood and the breakdown of community support). Globalization and technological change increase the demands on workers; social decay makes it harder for them to meet those demands.
Across America, millions of mothers can’t rise because they don’t have adequate support systems as they try to improve their skills. Tens of millions of children have poor life chances because they grow up in disorganized environments that make it hard to acquire the social, organizational and educational skills they will need to become productive workers.
Tens of millions of men have marred life chances because schools are bad at educating boys, because they are not enmeshed in the long-term relationships that instill good habits and because insecure men do stupid and self-destructive things.
Over the past 40 years, women’s wages have risen sharply but, as Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of the Hamilton Project point out, median incomes of men have dropped 28 percent and male labor force participation rates are down 16 percent. Next time somebody talks to you about wage stagnation, have them break it down by sex. It’s not only globalization and technological change causing this stagnation. It’s the deterioration of the moral and social landscape, especially for men.
The idiocy of our current political debate is that neither side seems capable of talking about the interplay of economic and social forces. Most of the Republican candidates talk as if all that is needed is more capitalism. But lighter regulation and lower taxes won’t, on their own, help the Maddie Parliers of the world get the skills they need to compete.
Democrats, meanwhile, have shifted their emphasis from lifting up the poor to pounding down the rich. Democratic candidates no longer emphasize early childhood education and community-building. Instead they embrace the pseudo-populist Occupy Wall Street hokum — the opiate of the educated classes.
This materialistic ethos emphasizes reducing inequality instead of expanding opportunity. Its policy prescriptions begin (and sometimes end) with raising taxes on the rich. This makes you feel better if you detest all the greed-heads who went into finance. It does nothing to address those social factors, like family breakdown, that help explain why American skills have not kept up with technological change.
If President Obama is really serious about restoring American economic dynamism, he needs an aggressive two-pronged approach: More economic freedom combined with more social structure; more competition combined with more support.
As a survey of nearly 10,000 Harvard Business School grads by Michael Porter and Jan Rivkin makes clear, to get companies to locate their plants in the U.S., Obama is going to have to simplify the tax code, cut corporate rates, streamline regulations, make immigration policy more flexible and balance the budget over the long term.
To ensure there’s skilled labor for those plants, Obama would have to champion different policies: successful training programs like Job Corps, better coordination between colleges and employers, better treatment for superstar teachers, more child care options and better early childhood education.
This agenda is libertarian in the capitalist sector and activist in the human capital sector. Don’t triangulate meekly toward the center; select bold policies from both ends. That’s what would help Maddie Parlier and millions like her.
Gee, Bobo… Everything that would have really helped Maddie (family planning, day care, a decent public education, and on and on and on) is something that your party is rabidly against. Schmuck. Here’s Mr. Cohen:
In the other election of 2012, the one more imminent, there are only two words worth remembering. The first is leadership. The second is change. The rest, as the French say, is du blah-blah.
If the French decide leadership is more important in a time of crisis they will grit their teeth and re-elect Nicolas Sarkozy. If they want change from a president never close to their hearts, they will — as Samuel Johnson said of second marriages — embrace hope over experience and elect the Socialist candidate, François Hollande.
On the face of it, Hollande, slimmed-down and cultivated in a way the French like their presidents to be cultivated, should prevail. He has a clear if narrowing lead in opinion polls. The unemployment rate, at a 12-year high, is rising toward double figures. Pension reform has been unpopular. The national mood is sullen even by Gallic standards. The euro agonizes. The left has not held the presidency since, in another era, François Mitterrand stepped down 17 years ago.
In short, this is the French left’s election to lose. They may just do so.
I visited Paris a week ago, persuaded that Hollande would edge it. I came away thinking Sarkozy is the more likely winner. The president’s political courage is undeniable: A lot of people who can’t stand him now sense they may need him.
Hollande, the gentleman who went to the right elite schools, has charm and humor but has done nothing to dispel the notion he’s a waverer in the crunch. In a rambling appeal to voters this month, published in the daily Libération, he managed not to mention the rest of the world apart from a de rigueur condemnation of “unbridled globalization.” His vague exhortations reeked of navel-gazing sanctimony.
A telling moment came recently when Hollande, in talking about Sarkozy, used the phrase “un sale mec” — roughly a nasty piece of work. How he used the term has been disputed. It does not matter. The language provided an insight into his subconscious and that of a wide swathe of the French bourgeoisie. (Hollande is a bourgeois of the left).
To them Sarkozy, who went to the wrong schools, is forever the outsider, the upstart, the usurper — a “dirty” climber blinded by ambition and unworthy of incarnating the French state through the Fifth Republic’s highest office. Not for nothing is French rich in words — arriviste, parvenu — for characters, like Balzac’s Rastignac, who cut through social barriers to the summit.
So many in France want to see the back of Sarkozy. They dream of a comeuppance for this man of preternatural agitation, but then think: Oh no! Not the left with its indecision, its stale slogans, its colossal “immobilisme” that has somehow preserved class struggle as a tenet when most of the European left — like the German — moved on decades ago.
(The French left has a lot to answer for. It should not escape anyone’s attention that the current strength of the far right in the form of Marine Le Pen’s National Front owes much to the migration of all those ex-Communists whose adoration of Stalin never faded.)
I mentioned Sarkozy’s courage. I’d say it’s what makes him the most interesting politician in Europe. But before that my caveats: When he panders to Le Pen’s right — the appalling treatment of the Roma, the wrongheaded dismissal of Turkey’s E.U. candidacy, the ever more restrictive immigration policy — he’s at his worst. The Napoleonic ego can also get irksome, although his glittering wife Carla Bruni has reined in its sharper expressions.
In the end what’s unforgivable in a politician is ego and ambition that allow no greater cause than self. That’s not the case with Sarkozy. He’s a doer and taboo-breaker — bringing France back into the integrated command of NATO (and so enabling the successful Libyan mission); declaring that love of America is O.K.; reforming universities and the pension system against huge resistance; taking on the worthy Libyan cause where Jacques Chirac and Mitterrand would have waved it away (and where Germany shamefully did.)
But Sarkozy’s biggest achievement has been with respect to Germany in the euro crisis. The crisis came as Germany turned away from European idealism — exhausted by the financial effort of unification, angered by Mediterranean freeloaders, satisfied by its postwar redemption, bent more on material gain than great moral causes (bowing to Vladimir Putin, shunning Libyan freedom fighters). Faced by all this, and an Angela Merkel who had privately compared him to Mr. Bean, Sarkozy did not turn away in a huff. He persevered.
Merkel was reluctantly persuaded that the cause of Europe overrode her citizens’ Euro-bile. The effort has been faltering, countless mistakes made. But the quiet recent moves of the European Central Bank to flood the market with euros and in effect act as a lender of last resort — contrary to the treaty and despite protracted German resistance — reflect above all an enormous French effort to bring Germany around. Interest rates for Spanish and Italian bonds are falling, panic receding.
Score one — and a big one — for Sarkozy. Leadership matters.
Now here’s Mr. Nocera:
It was early in the evening of Jan. 13 when Ryan Boatright, the freshman basketball player at the University of Connecticut, learned that he was being suspended from the team for the second time this season. Earlier that day, he had flown into South Bend, Ind., with his teammates for a game against Notre Dame. The 19-year-old point guard was excited because some 400 people from his hometown, Aurora, Ill., were coming to see him play.
When his coach, Jim Calhoun, broke the news that the N.C.A.A. was still investigating him, Boatright collapsed in Calhoun’s arms. In tears, he called his mother, Tanesha, who began weeping uncontrollably. As I chronicled on Saturday, it was her acceptance of plane tickets a year or so ago that had caused his first suspension. The N.C.A.A. had ruled the tickets an “improper benefit,” and had ordered him to sit out six games and pay a $100-per-month fine to repay the tickets. What more, she wondered, could the N.C.A.A. want?
A lot, it turned out. Tanesha is a single mother raising four children on a small salary. The N.C.A.A. investigators viewed her circumstances as a cause for suspicion, not sympathy. For instance, she owns a car. Where did she get the money to pay for it, they asked? How did she pay for her home? And so on.
Concluding that she had no choice but to cooperate — otherwise, her son would surely pay a severe price — Tanesha turned over her bank statements, as the N.C.A.A. demanded. Four N.C.A.A. investigators pored through her financial records and conducted interrogations in Aurora, seeking “evidence” that she was getting money from “improper” sources. (Tanesha declined to comment.)
When the investigators saw a series of cash deposits in her bank account, they demanded to know the source of the money. She told them: Friends had given her money so that she and her children could have a joyful Christmas. The investigators said they didn’t believe her; they felt sure that she must have gotten the money from an unscrupulous sports agent or some other party outlawed by the N.C.A.A.
Meanwhile, her son remains in limbo, unable to play the game he loves, his reputation unfairly besmirched, while he awaits the N.C.A.A.’s latest ruling. I keep hearing it might happen soon, but, so far, nothing. People associated with Connecticut basketball, including Calhoun, are said to be furious at the N.C.A.A.’s treatment of Ryan Boatright. But the university is as fearful of the N.C.A.A. as Tanesha. It has yet to say a single word publicly on his behalf.
When I asked the N.C.A.A. about the Boatright case, the response I received was deeply disingenuous. Refusing to discuss the actions of its investigators, it essentially said that Connecticut, not the N.C.A.A., declared Boatright ineligible. That is technically true. Schools declare athletes ineligible because if they don’t, the N.C.A.A. will deprive them of scholarships, force them to forfeit games and prevent them from playing in postseason games. Most astonishing, an N.C.A.A. spokeswoman told me that the organization does not have the legal authority to compel cooperation from parents. Again, technically true: Its real weapon — the threat of destroying their sons’ careers — is far more potent than any mere subpoena.
Over the past three weeks, as I’ve written a series of columns about the abuses of the N.C.A.A., one question keeps reverberating in my head: How can this be happening in America?
How can children be punished for the deeds of their parents — deeds that aren’t even wrong in any basic legal sense? How can the N.C.A.A. blithely wreck careers without regard to due process or common fairness? How can it act so ruthlessly to enforce rules that are so petty? Why won’t anybody stand up to these outrageous violations of American values and American justice?
The columns have also prompted e-mails, mostly from parents of college athletes, with their own examples of N.C.A.A. injustices. The women’s basketball player at Harvard who came to the United States from Britain and isn’t allowed to play because she struggled when she first got to the U.S. and had to repeat a year of high school. The team manager — yes, team manager! — who was forced out of his role because he knew a high school player that his school was recruiting. The A students forced off the court because the N.C.A.A. does not include their high school A.P. courses among its “approved” coursework. The coach whose career was ended when the N.C.A.A. accused him of “unethical conduct” without giving him a chance to defend himself.
“The N.C.A.A. is like the Gestapo,” wrote one parent in an e-mail. “It’s out there, we all fear it, and it is all-powerful and follows its own rules and makes them up as they go along. Who are they protecting? The same thing the Gestapo protected: themselves.”
Now here’s Mr. Bruni:
Not long ago, a veteran Republican strategist told me that a politician could succeed with his zipper down, but not with his words unbridled.
He was talking about Newt Gingrich, and was saying that Gingrich’s philandering and three marriages weren’t going to be his real problem, given how many men in government had been forgiven for messy sexual pasts.
His greater liabilities were his wildly mixed messages, gross overstatements and insistence on inserting himself — like some mouthy Gump doppelgänger with a doctorate — into every key moment of the late 20th century. Gingrich was supposed to bloviate his way into oblivion.
Instead he bloviated his way to a 12-point victory in South Carolina and a credible shot at the Republican nomination. Grandiosity, it turns out, is good.
In fact he has doubled down on it. Quadrupled down, really. Although under fire since his previous surge two months ago for all his self-aggrandizing exaggerations, he hasn’t grown careful or bashful or anything of the sort. Neither has the team around him.
In late December, when it was announced that he had failed to qualify for the Virginia primary, a campaign official compared the blow to Pearl Harbor.
“Newt and I agreed that the analogy is December 1941,” wrote the official, Michael Krull, on the candidate’s Facebook page. I wonder which grim historical milestones they considered and rejected before finding consensus on that one.
In Monday night’s debate, Gingrich characterized the end of his Congressional career after the 1998 midterms as wholly volitional, making his exit sound like a self-sacrificing blaze of glory rather than the acrimonious firestorm it was.
With Gingrich, the distance between reality and rhetoric isn’t shrinking but growing, and the incongruities mount. He has lately fallen in love with his rants against “the elites,” and casts himself as their most determined foe, but I can’t for the life of me figure out a definition of elite that doesn’t include him.
Are the elites those hyper-educated intellectuals who use big words? Gingrich has a Ph.D. in history from a prestigious private university, Tulane, and when it suits him, he plays Cerebellum in Chief with nonpareil diction and derision.
Are the elites rich people with fancy ZIP codes? He and his third wife, Callista, made more than $3.1 million in 2010 and have an estimated net worth in excess of $6.5 million. Since 2000 they have lived in the posh enclave of McLean, Va., not Appalachia, and have personally stimulated the economy with expenditures at Tiffany, not Zales.
He lashes out against secularists and trumpets his and Callista’s Roman Catholicism, though the two of them lived for six years in explicit defiance of its tenets.
Mitt Romney’s reinventions pale beside Gingrich’s. At one moment, in one passage of oratory, Gingrich is the only stick-to-his-guns conservative running. At another moment, in another passage, he’s a seasoned practitioner of compromise, as proved by the Clinton years.
He’s also a longtime Washington insider who’s the only reform-minded outsider equipped to change the capital’s ways. How does that work?
In contesting his second wife’s claim on ABC’s “Nightline” that he had requested an open marriage, he accused the news media of a special anti-Republican zeal, conveniently forgetting how that same media — with his gleeful encouragement — pounced on the moral failings of President Clinton, a Democrat.
He rails that the media can’t be trusted, then readily cites any dispatch that cuts in his favor as unassailable truth. He did this on Monday on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” invoking a New York Times article from 2008 as part of his defense against Romney’s charge that he has lobbied lawmakers.
He had initially been slated to appear on ABC on Sunday, on “This Week,” but canceled after the network’s “Nightline” report. He did competing networks’ Sunday shows instead.
By Monday, though, he was ready to heed the siren call of George Stephanopoulos, his pique with ABC as transitory as his ire at CNN’s John King last week was inflated. It’s all one hyperbolic — and, in its way, brilliant — performance.
For a Republican electorate looking for heat, he delivers gust upon gust of hot air. Romney manages only a tepid breeze.
“I have emotion and passion,” Romney told the anchor Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday,” in a voice that communicated neither. Twice more he mentioned passion, as if willing it into his bones.
Wallace played a clip of Gingrich’s South Carolina victory speech, noting how fiercely angry at the state of the country Gingrich seemed.
Romney said that he himself was “very upset.”
Most Democrats are elated. Gingrich seems to them a weaker opponent for President Obama than Romney would be. They’re rooting for him.
But unbridled words have an unexpected currency right now. And one ill-timed, major economic relapse could give the general-election advantage to any Republican nominee, including Gingrich, whose bombast would then get the loudest microphone in the world.
