Brooks, Cohen, Nocera and Bruni

Bobo is dreaming of “A Second G.O.P.”  He says it’s time for a second Republican stream, one that shows a deep interest in reforming our bloated institutions and repairing our human capital.  One could almost feel sorry for him.  Almost, but not quite.  Watching Bobo squirm schadens my freuds.  Mr. Cohen, in “Sitting Down With Amos Oz,” says the Israeli novelist’s message to the incoming government is clear: Nothing is impossible — even peace.  Mr. Nocera gives us “And in Last Week’s Gun News…”  He says a small sampling of news articles from around the country gives a sense of the Second Amendment’s toll.  Mr. Bruni is being fatalistic about relationships.  In “Manti and the Mating Game” he whines that dead or not, courtship was never all it’s cracked up to be, and there’s no one playbook for pairing off.  Here’s Bobo (who should have read Prof. Krugman on the subject of Bobby Jindal):

On the surface, Republicans are already doing a good job of beginning to change their party. Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana gave a speech to the Republican National Committee calling on Republicans to stop being the stupid party, to stop insulting the intelligence of the American people.

Representative Paul Ryan gave a fine speech to the National Review Institute calling for prudence instead of spasmodic protest. The new senator for Texas, Ted Cruz, gave a speech to the same gathering saying the Republicans should be focusing on the least fortunate 47 percent of Americans.

But, so far, there have been more calls for change than actual evidence of change. In his speech, for example, Jindal spanked his party for its stale clichés but then repeated the same Republican themes that have earned his party its 33 percent approval ratings: Government bad. Entrepreneurs good.

In this reinvention process, Republicans seem to have spent no time talking to people who didn’t already vote for them.

Change is hard because people don’t only think on the surface level. Deep down people have mental maps of reality — embedded sets of assumptions, narratives and terms that organize thinking. Since Barry Goldwater, the central Republican narrative has been what you might call the Encroachment Story: the core problem of American life is that voracious government has been steadily encroaching upon individuals and local communities. The core American conflict, in this view, is between Big Government and Personal Freedom.

While losing the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, the flaws of this mentality have become apparent. First, if opposing government is your primary objective, it’s hard to have a positive governing program.

As Bill Kristol pointed out at the National Review event, the G.O.P. fiercely opposed the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law but never offered an alternative. The party opposed Obamacare but never offered a replacement. John Podhoretz of Commentary added that as soon as Republicans start talking about what kind of regulations and programs government should promote, they get accused by colleagues of being Big Government conservatives.

The next problem with this mentality is that it makes it hard for Republicans to analyze social and economic problems that don’t flow directly from big government. For example, we are now at the end of the era in which a rising tide lifts all boats. Republicans like Mitt Romney can talk about improving the overall business climate with lower taxes and lighter regulation, but regular voters sense that that won’t necessarily help them because wages no longer keep pace with productivity gains.

Americans are still skeptical of Washington. If you shove a big government program down their throats they will recoil. But many of their immediate problems flow from globalization, the turmoil of technological change and social decay, and they’re looking for a bit of help. Moreover, given all the antigovernment rhetoric, they will never trust these Republicans to reform cherished programs like Social Security and Medicare. You can’t be for entitlement reform and today’s G.O.P., because politically the two will never go together.

Can current Republicans change their underlying mentality to adapt to these realities? Intellectual history says no. People almost never change their underlying narratives or unconscious frameworks. Moreover, in the South and rural West, where most Republicans are from, the Encroachment Story has deep historic and psychological roots. Anti-Washington, anti-urban sentiment has characterized those cultures for decades.

It’s probably futile to try to change current Republicans. It’s smarter to build a new wing of the Republican Party, one that can compete in the Northeast, the mid-Atlantic states, in the upper Midwest and along the West Coast. It’s smarter to build a new division that is different the way the Westin is different than the Sheraton.

The second G.O.P. wouldn’t be based on the Encroachment Story. It would be based on the idea that America is being hit simultaneously by two crises, which you might call the Mancur Olson crisis and the Charles Murray crisis.

Olson argued that nations decline because their aging institutions get bloated and sclerotic and retard national dynamism. Murray argues that America is coming apart, dividing into two nations — one with high education levels, stable families and good opportunities and the other with low education levels, unstable families and bad opportunities.

The second G.O.P. would tackle both problems at once. It would be filled with people who recoiled at President Obama’s second Inaugural Address because of its excessive faith in centralized power, but who don’t share the absolute antigovernment story of the current G.O.P.

Would a coastal and Midwestern G.O.P. sit easily with the Southern and Western one? No, but majority parties are usually coalitions of the incompatible. This is really the only chance Republicans have. The question is: Who’s going to build a second G.O.P.?

Well, Bobo, since the Teatards and folks like ZEGS have run off anyone who could possibly pull that off, it’s not going to happen.  Here’s Mr. Cohen, writing from Tel Aviv:

Amos Oz, the novelist whose stories and tales have probed the soul of Israel with an intimate insistence, greeted me to his book-lined apartment with a quick Hebrew lesson. I must understand that the key word, Yiddish really, is “fraiers” — or suckers.

“Most Israelis,” he suggested, “would wave goodbye to the West Bank but they don’t want to be suckers, they don’t want the Gaza scenario to repeat itself. First and foremost, these elections were about internal affairs, the middle class, state and synagogue, the draft, with a silent consensus that the occupied territories do not matter that much. Israelis are no longer interested. They vote with their feet. They don’t go there, except for the settlers and right-wing extremists. This means that if Israelis can be reassured that by renouncing the West Bank they are not going to get a lousy deal — not going to be ‘fraiers’ — they are quietly ready to do it.”

With religious-nationalist sentiment strong, even if the elections demonstrated an Israeli turn against extremism, I suggested Oz might be optimistic. But he insisted that at the end of the day some 70 percent on both sides — kicking and screaming and crying injustice — were ready for two states. “If I may use a metaphor,” Oz said, “I would say that the patient, Israeli and Palestinian, is unhappily ready for surgery, while the doctors are cowards.”

Among the cowards, would he include Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? “Yes I think Netanyahu is a coward,” he declared. But the victory of the center in the election could alter the equation. “It means,” Oz said, “that there will be more pressure on Netanyahu from the dovish side in Israel and from the outside world, so that his cowardice may work the other way.”

Israel — perched in a hostile neighborhood, its borders undefined, beset by internal rifts between the religious and secular, unsure what to make of the Arab upheaval around it — craves normality. Its citizens today are more concerned about violent crime than political violence. Not one Israeli was killed in 2012 in the West Bank. Its packed malls purr with affluence. Iran was a nonissue during the campaign. The Palestinian conflict, despite the odd spasm, has receded, enough anyway for people to vote en masse for a political novice, the telegenic Yair Lapid, a mystery wrapped in good looks at the head of a party with a reassuring-disquieting name: There Is a Future.

Oz, up in Tel Aviv for the weekend from his home in the desert town of Arad, has lived the entire past of the modern state of Israel. His credo as a novelist is that humankind is open-ended: People are capable of surprising not only others but themselves. He calls this “the single most promising phenomenon in history.” Lapid, in effect a political vessel awaiting content, is a character in search of meaning and, as such, of interest to Oz.

“He is a phenomenon, a manifestation of the desire of the middle class for normalization. Israelis want to be like Holland,” Oz told me. “It is a legitimate desire even if it tends to ignore fundamental issues, like the conflict with the Arabs. I don’t know if Lapid has ideas and I’m not sure he knows. What Lapid will do is a mystery not just to me — it is probably a mystery to him!”

At 73, Oz has been surprised often enough not to regard the worst as inevitable, even if war has been Israel’s leitmotif since 1948. He asks this question: “Who ever expected Churchill to dismantle the British Empire, or De Gaulle to take France out of Algeria, or Sadat to come to Jerusalem, or Begin to give back the whole of Sinai for peace, or Gorbachev to undo the whole Soviet bloc?”

His message to the incoming Israeli government is clear: Peace is impossible without boldness; nothing is beyond the capacity of an open-ended, surprise-prone humanity.

There is wistfulness in his gaze on the Israel he loves. He marvels at what he calls “a cultural golden age” of literary and scientific achievement. He deplores — and abhors — what he sees as a creeping questioning of Israel’s existence in Europe and elsewhere, one that “goes way beyond legitimate criticism of Israeli policy” and in part reflects anti-Americanism because “if the United States is the devil then Israel must be Rosemary’s Baby.”

At the same time he does not hide his own disappointments. “Building settlements in occupied territories was the single most grave error and sin in the history of modern Zionism, because it was based on a refusal to accept the simple fact that we are not alone in this country,” he told me. “The Palestinians for decades also refused the fact that they are not alone in this country. Now, with clenched teeth, both sides have recognized this reality and that is a good basis.”

He went on: “Loss of contact may be healthy for a while after 100 years of bloody conflict; loss of contact may be a blessing. But loss of contact can be based on a fence built between my garden and my neighbor’s garden. It cannot be based on a fence built right in the middle of the neighbor’s garden. So a fence may not be a bad idea except that this fence is located in the wrong place.” Israel’s separation barrier, closing off the West Bank, is, in other words, an unacceptable land grab.

Israel was a dream. The only way, Oz notes, to keep a dream rosy and intact and unsullied is never to live it out. This is true of everything — traveling, writing a novel, a sexual fantasy. Israel is now a fulfilled dream, one that exceeds the wildest dreams of his parents. So, Oz concludes, “The disappointment is not in the nature of Israel, it is in the nature of dreams.”

Here is his political credo. There cannot be one state because Israelis and Palestinians cannot become one happy family (“they are not one and they are not happy.”) So “the only solution is turning the house into two smaller apartments.” Two states, absolutely, are the only answer. Palestinians and other Arabs once treated Israel like a passing infection: If they scratched themselves hard enough it would go away. Israel treated Palestine as no more than “the vicious invention of a pan-Arabic propaganda machine.” These illusions have passed. Reality now compels a compromise — “and compromises are unhappy, there is no such thing as a happy compromise.”

And what of Hamas? “At least what we can do is solve the conflict with the Palestine Liberation Organization and reduce the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to an Israel-Gaza conflict. This will be a big step forward. Then we will see. Hamas may change as the P.L.O. did. The Palestinian Authority is ready for a state in the West Bank, unhappy about it, sure, but ready. They will go on dreaming of Haifa and Jaffa just as we will dream of Hebron and Nablus. There is no censorship on dreams.”

And the Palestinian right of return? “The right of return is a euphemism for the liquidation of Israel. Even for a dove like myself this is out of the question. Refugees must be resettled in the future state of Palestine, not Israel.”

Two final thoughts from Oz worth the consideration of Israeli politicians: On the nature of tragedy and the nature of time.

“The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a clash of right and right. Tragedies are resolved in one of two ways: The Shakespearian way or the Anton Chekhov way. In a tragedy by Shakespeare, the stage at the end is littered with dead bodies. In a tragedy by Chekhov everyone is unhappy, bitter, disillusioned and melancholy but they are alive. My colleagues in the peace movement and I are working for a Chekhovian not a Shakespearian conclusion.”

And this: “I live in the desert at Arad. Every morning at 5 a.m. I start my day by taking a walk before sunrise. I inhale the silence. I take in the breeze, the silhouettes of the hills. I walk for about 40 minutes. When I come back home I turn on the radio and sometimes I hear a politicians using words like ‘never’ or ‘forever’ or ‘for eternity’ — and I know that the stones out in the desert are laughing at him.”

Sit down with Oz. That is my advice to the next Israeli government — and to all the deluded absolutists, Arab and Jew, of this unnecessary conflict whose unhappy but peaceful ending is not beyond the scope of open-ended human imagination.

Next up is Mr. Nocera:

Monday, Jan. 21:

Eleaquin Temblador had plans. He was working to earn his high school diploma and wanted to join the U.S. Marine Corps and marry his girlfriend. … Instead, family members are planning Temblador’s funeral. For reasons no one can explain, gunmen in a light-colored, older-model vehicle gunned down the 18-year-old … as he rode his bicycle home from his girlfriend’s house.

— Dailybreeze.com, Los Angeles

Relatives of a teen who was shot while playing basketball at a local park said the 16-year-old is now paralyzed from the waist down. … Police said the shooter, a 17-year-old boy, had a gun stuck in his waistband. While he was playing basketball, someone bumped into him and the gun went off. …

— Click Orlando.com

Tuesday, Jan. 22:

A Baton Rouge man who authorities said was playing with a gun was booked … in the accidental shooting of his 2-year-old brother. … [The man’s uncle] said the teen had armed himself due to “environmental pressure” from neighborhood friends.

— The Advocate, Baton Rouge, La.

The New Mexico teenager who used an assault rifle to kill his mother, father and younger siblings told police he hoped to shoot up a Walmart after the family rampage and cause “mass destruction.” … Nehemiah Griego, the 15-year-old son of an Albuquerque pastor … “stated he wanted to shoot people at random and eventually be killed while exchanging gunfire with law enforcement,” the [police] report said.

— ABC News

Wednesday, Jan. 23:

Kansas City police arrested a 16-year-old Ruskin High School student accused of shooting at a school bus after the driver refused to allow him to board on Wednesday.

— The Kansas City Star

A 4-year-old boy has died after being shot in the head Wednesday. … The deputy [sheriff] located the child’s body inside of a Ford Taurus. There was a bullet hole in the roof of the car. … “Jamarcus loved Batman, Spider-Man and football and was looking forward to starting kindergarten,” [his mother] said.

— Newsnet5.com, Akron, Ohio

Thursday, Jan. 24:

The estranged husband of a woman found dead in her Madison apartment Thursday was found dead in his home … of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. … “We can’t really believe it; I mean, these things happen on TV, they don’t happen to us,” [her stepmother] said. “We’re middle class, normal Americans, and she was a nice girl.”

— WISC-TV, Madison, Wis.

Police said an 11-year-old girl is in critical condition after being shot in the face by her father in a New Jersey home on Thursday night. Investigators said 27-year-old Byaer Johnson apparently entered the home to visit his young daughter. … He was asked to leave, then picked up a handgun and shot his daughter.

— CBS News

Friday, Jan. 25:

An Oakland police officer was shot and wounded Friday evening, the second officer in the city to be injured by gunfire this week. … The shooting happened after a man in a car ran a stop sign, crashed into another car … and ran off. Shortly thereafter, an uncle and his nephew reported that they were shot a block away by a man who tried to steal the uncle’s bicycle.

— SFGate.com

A man has been charged with murder for fatally shooting his brother during a “domestic” dispute outside a South Side Englewood home Friday afternoon. …

— Chicago.CBSlocal.com

Saturday, Jan. 26:

A party in Salem that spilled outdoors ended in drive-by gunfire that hit at least two people and riddled a car and nearby homes. …

— KOINlocal6, Salem, Ore.

A 55-year-old man has been released from custody after allegedly shooting and killing his own dog. Police say Gordon Lagstrom was drunk Saturday night when he pulled a .38 caliber handgun and shot to death his 4-year-old Australian terrier, Lena.

— Boston.CBSlocal.com

The city broke a nine-day murder-free streak last night when a man was found dead in the basement of a Queens apartment complex, police said. The 20-year-old victim, whose name was not released, had been shot in the head.

— New York Post

Among those killed Saturday was a 34-year-old man whose mother had already lost her three other children to shootings. Police say Ronnie Chambers, who was his mother’s youngest child, was shot in the head while sitting in a car. Police say two separate double-homicide shootings also occurred Saturday about 12 hours apart. … Chicago’s homicide count eclipsed 500 last year for the first time since 2008.

— CBS News

But the NRA has so terrified our politicians and inflamed the low information knuckle-walkers that nothing will change.  Here’s poor, depressed Mr. Bruni:

As we wring our hands over the impulsive hookups and Internet hoaxes of modern romance, let us pause a moment and travel back to the days long before text messages, Photoshop and all other manner of digital bedlam. Let us return to a halcyon world of agrarian ways and contemplate the unflustered situation of a fertile lass on the cusp of womanhood centuries ago.

What options she had! They were culled from the burg she lived in and maybe from the next village over, so that her total population of potential suitors — men in an acceptable age range, with discernible pulses and a majority of their limbs — was five if she was lucky, three if the burg had just emerged from a period of savage smallpox. And while her eye might be drawn to the lad with the least rotted teeth, Ma and Pa knew better, not so much nudging as commanding her toward the one whose family had the most livestock. They understood that meat, not mirth, would sustain her and her brood over the harsh winters to come, and that love meant never having to say you’re hungry.

Are we really worse off now? In the annals of mating, are the straits we’re in so dire?

From the commentary about Manti Te’o and from the angst vented in news reports and on blogs, you certainly get that sense. “The End of Courtship?” lamented a recent headline in The Times; the story with it traced the waning of wining and dining, the triumph of Facebook updates over face-to-face heart-to-hearts. Apparently the avenues by which lusty millennials come to grope and perchance know one another are brusque, confused and rife with deception, and probably aren’t reliable precursors to unions of enduring bliss.

Which is to say: they’re as imperfect as they’ve always been. While we Homo sapiens have paired off in diverse methods across disparate epochs, we’ve seldom done it with ample information or any particular finesse. There was no saner, better yesteryear: just a different set of customs, a different brand of clumsiness.

And where there’s sex, there’s subterfuge, a truism that runs from “Cyrano de Bergerac” through “The Crying Game.” It’s what the makers of Spanx depend on and the peddlers of Botox profit from. All is fair in love and the eradication of unwanted bulges and creases.

True, cyberspace and smartphones have ushered in such present-day distinctions as the fully fictional avatar, the wholly disembodied relationship and the instantaneously arranged mashing of genitals. But illusion, assumption and haste have had starring roles in our amorous escapades before.

Think about war brides and wartime romances, about couples from the greatest generation who met just before D-Day or traded glances at the U.S.O. and then did their tortured wooing almost entirely by post. What they took wasn’t an accurate measure of each other but a leap of faith.

And as vessels of self-revelation, were letters much more trustworthy than tweets? Couldn’t their authors labor mightily over the flaunting of an invented wisdom, the flashing of a borrowed wit? Beth Bailey, a historian at Temple University, told me that during the 19th century, when such missives were considered “an essential way to get to know people,” there were how-to books that provided not only letter-writing templates but also “phrases for how to communicate your true self.”

Until the dawn of cars and greater mobility, there wasn’t dating as we came to understand it; there were visits on porches and in parlors, often under the intrusive gazes of nattering relatives. “It was very limiting,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University.

And there weren’t all that many visits, either. Cherlin said that a person back then might meet his or her spouse just 10 times before marrying, and that this minimal contact enabled you to “present yourself much differently than you will later on.”

In the 1950s, with its drive-in diners and back-seat fumbling, teenagers in lust finally had quality time away from meddlesome parents, going off to sock hops and going steady. But the choreographed roles they played and the chauvinistic rituals they obeyed didn’t necessarily tease out someone’s real personality and definitely didn’t give young women anything approaching full autonomy.

There’s no ideal stratagem for figuring out whom any one of us should be with and how to chart a course to that person, no fail-safe process for determining whether a twosome will endure. The act of getting together, whether brokered by yenta or Yahoo, is one of willed credulousness and wishful thinking as much as anything else, the triumph of optimism over morning breath.

And it’s a wager, because people have hidden layers, hidden intentions. Your beloved could switch political parties. Your hookup could insist on a soundtrack of Celine Dion. Not knowing what’s in store is the very soul of romance: what makes it so scary, and what makes it so thrilling.

Man…  It sounds to me like he had a dreadful time in high school and college…

The Pasty Little Putz, Dowd, Kristof and Bruni

The Pasty Little Putz has extruded a thing called “A Sneaky Peek at Obama’s Speech.”  he babbles that Obama has four more years and he’s feeling pretty good about it.  Not only is it not half as funny as he undoubtedly thought it was, it also reeks of flop sweat.  In “Sheriff Andy of Albany” MoDo says as usual, the question burns: What’s Andrew Cuomo up to?  In “Warnings From a Flabby Mouse” Mr. Kristof points out that studies suggest that endocrine disruptors, chemicals found everywhere from couches to shampoos, may contribute to obesity along with Twinkies and TV.  In “Love, Marriage and Voters” Mr. Bruni says storybook married lives and effective governance have nothing to do with each other, and that will become ever more accepted in presidential politics.  Here’s The Putz:

President Barack Obama’s Second Inaugural Address, revised for maximum honesty:

My fellow Americans, I am grateful for the honor of this hour, mindful of the consequential times in which we live, and determined to fulfill the oath that I have sworn and you have witnessed.

[long pause]

Hey, no, just kidding: That’s from George W. Bush’s second inaugural. I just wanted to see if you could tell the difference.

I’m going to keep this brief, because we’re all cold and there’s always a chance that the House Republicans might start imitating the Donner Party if we stay out here too long.

[broad wink at Eric Cantor]

You already know how the better angels of our nature are going to make hope and history rhyme, and all the usual fluff. So I’ll skip that part. But before my second term gets under way, I do have a few people from the last four years I want to acknowledge.

First, my dear friends in the press and on the professional left (but I repeat myself). It’s so nice to have you back on the bandwagon, guys! I’ve been surfing the Interwebs, reading the tweets, and it feels like old times. The Obama realignment is all the rage again. The thrill is back on MSNBC. Newsweek’s comparing me to Jesus. All I need is a will.i.am video to really take me back.

But don’t think I’ve forgotten that when the going got tough, you guys went weak at the knees. I always knew my fellow liberal elites were self-involved, self-dramatizing and out of touch: I was in academia, remember? But the kind of mood swings I’ve had to put up with have been absolutely ridiculous.

The fact is, I’ve been your dream president; you’ve just spent four years coming up with reasons not to notice. I spend a gazillion dollars on stimulus, and the next day I wake up and it’s all, “Why didn’t he spend two gazillion dollars?” I pass universal health care — your goal for what, a thousand years or so? — and it takes all of five seconds before you start whining about how I didn’t cure cancer too. I suffer a few setbacks — that midterm business, a bad debate — and you start panicking about how some stuffed-suit corporate raider who stepped out of an Eisenhower-era time capsule is going to beat cool, multiracial, 21st-century ME.

Please. Please.

Next, a big, big shout-out to my opponents on the right — I really couldn’t have done it without you. Sure, you won a few battles here and there: Scott Brown versus Martha Coakley, cap-and-trade, and yes, again, that midterm business. But in the larger war, has any president ever been so lucky in his enemies?

Every time I needed to paint the American right as paranoid and out-of-touch, misogynistic and mindless, you were there for me. Thanks for making Sandra Fluke a martyr, Rush. Thanks for Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, Mr. Ailes. Thanks for everything, Donald Trump. Todd Akin — I love you, man.

And that parade of lightweights you put up against Romney in the primaries? A godsend. Bless you, Herman Cain. Never change, Michele Bachmann. Oh — and hope you enjoy being president of Purdue, Mitch Daniels.

Of course, my friends in right-wing media have been lucky in me as well. I kept your ratings stellar, your book sales booming, your page views sky-high. You got the income stream, I kept the power. So here’s to another flush four years for you.

Finally, to all the centrist wise men and reasonable-sounding conservatives — how do you like me now? You said I couldn’t get re-elected unless I was more bipartisan, more moderate, more Clintonian. You blamed me for Washington’s gridlock and assumed the country would as well. You said I should campaign on Simpson-Bowles, of all things, instead of social issues.

Well, guess what? I did it my way, and it worked. I got tax increases without entitlement cuts, I flipped the script on the culture war, and now Marco Rubio is going to help me pass an immigration bill. I’m still up for a grand bargain, but I don’t need one: The economy’s limping back, the deficit should stabilize in the short run, and the long term — well, that’s my successor’s problem. I’d like to win on gun control and climate change, but I’ll settle for making the case and seeing whether a Biden administration (you only think I’m kidding) can finish the job.

Sure, second terms can be dicey propositions. But as long as I don’t get impeached or start a land war in Asia, I’m feeling pretty good about my legacy.

And oh, you centrist chin-strokers who kept saying I was no Clinton? You were absolutely right.

I’m the liberal Reagan. Deal with it.

Next up we have MoDo:

When he was a young henchman for his father in Albany, Andrew Cuomo gave intensity a bad name.

Now that he is New York’s governor himself, Cuomo gives intensity a good name.

In the old days, that dark zeal was scattered around, directed at anyone who insulted or crossed him. Now he channels it more narrowly on the handful of things he wants to get done that he thinks the public wants.

“I was 23 years old then; now I’m 55 years old,” he says with an air of the Stephen Sondheim classic “I’m Still Here.” “I was a linear, focused person. Then I got knocked on my rear end. I went through professional and personal hell. So now I keep it very simple. One day at a time. I’m killing myself to do the best job I can as governor. I do what I’m supposed to do and forget about the unhealthy things that used to distract me. I put one foot in front of the other. We take on big problems. And to say there’s no solution to the problems is not an option.”

Following the grotesque murders of children in Newtown, Conn., and firefighters in Webster, N.Y., the governor bellowed “Stop the madness” and shoved through tough gun-control legislation so blindingly fast that some state senators had scarcely read the bill, and the N.R.A. conceded that it had no time to thwart it.

Cuomo, who worked the phones every day for a month, straight through the holidays, to drum up support, dismisses criticism of rushing and secrecy: “Everyone said, ‘You did it so quickly.’ That perspective is skewed. We’re years and years late. The federal assault weapons ban had lapsed. The state assault weapons ban was on the books, but everybody knew it wasn’t working. Government just failed to perform, and people died. So it’s all bittersweet because I have to say to myself, maybe if we had done earlier what we were supposed to do, figured out how to overcome the politics of extremes, we could have saved all those lives.

“We should have done it as a prophylactic, but maybe it’s human nature to tend to respond to an emergency. You have to sniffle before you get a flu shot.”

You could say it’s not so hard to pass such a bill in a left-leaning state with a popular governor (he is floating at a 71 percent favorability rating), and that it’s a far easier achievement than the gay marriage bill.

But with the president privately signaling some pessimism on new gun laws, as his domestic policy aides take a slower, less stringent approach, it’s bracing to see somebody, anybody, actually make government hum.

Cuomo doesn’t spend much time on TV baring his soul or hustling to get name recognition. (He doesn’t need to.) He focuses-focuses-focuses on the matter at hand, and on proving that government can work — if you apply the proper intensity at times of intense awareness.

“You have to try to hit a home run,” he said. “Home run hitters also have notoriously high strikeout rates. But it’s like when we tried to pass marriage equality. You have to be willing to fail.”

On BuzzFeed, Blake Zeff said “the latest unachievable triumph” shows that Cuomo has “a seemingly superhuman mastery of legislative politics.” And The Daily News christened Cuomo “America’s Sheriff.”

“I’m psyched,” Sheriff Andy said in a call from Albany, not Mayberry, joking, “But I never really saw myself in a big cowboy hat.”

And there is always suspicion swirling: What is Andrew up to? He is always up to something, but is he really deserving of the ever-present assumption that self-advancement trumps his true beliefs? On gun control, was he driven to beat the White House to the punch — or perhaps to beat a fellow governor and 2016 prospect, Martin O’Malley of Maryland? Was he pandering to the left to make up for centrist moves?

“Even when we’re building a bridge,” the governor noted dryly, “opponents say, ‘You’re only building a bridge to run for president.’ People are cynical about politicians. I’m the son of a politician, and I grew up in the political world, so people think I must be that — on steroids.”

The N.R.A. and Greg Ball, a Republican state senator, denounced the New York law as a product of the governor’s 2016 ambition, although it could hurt Candidate Cuomo in places like Nevada, Colorado and Florida.

The governor doesn’t have the president’s public magnetism. But Cuomo, who devotes a lot of time to wining, dining and wheedling legislators, is far more deft at carrots, sticks and baby-talk than President Obama is. It’s a fascinating — and open — question about whether those skills could work the same way to jolt comatose Washington.

“It’s more nuanced than carrots and sticks,” the governor explained. “People are complex. It’s about the full panorama of relationships, the positive and negative. There’s love, fear, desire to please, fear of reprisal. It’s not a fist. I would much rather be home watching a ballgame. But it takes time. It takes effort. It’s the job.”

Of course MoDo came up with carrots and sticks and a slap against Obama, and had to be told about nuance…  MoDo don’t do no nuance.  Here’s Mr. Kristof:

[A photograph of 2 mice, the one on the top about twice the size of the one on the bottom, accompanies his column.]

One of the puzzles of the modern world is why we humans are growing so tubby. Maybe these two mice offer a clue.

They’re genetically the same, raised in the same lab and given the same food and chance to exercise. Yet the bottom one is svelte, while the other looks like, well, an American.

The only difference is that the top one was exposed at birth to just one part per billion of an endocrine-disrupting chemical. The brief exposure programmed the mouse to put on fat, and although there were no significant differences in caloric intake or expenditure, it continued to put on flab long after the chemical was gone.

That experiment is one of a growing number of peer-reviewed scientific studies suggesting that one factor in the industrialized world’s obesity epidemic (along with Twinkies, soda and television) may be endocrine-disrupting chemicals. These chemicals are largely unregulated — they are in food, couches, machine receipts and shampoos — and a raft of new studies suggest that they can lead to the formation of more and larger fat cells.

Before I describe some of this research, a more basic issue: Why should an op-ed columnist write about scholarship published in scientific journals? Don’t pundits have better things to fret about, like the feuding between Democrats and Republicans?

One answer is that obesity is an important national problem, partly responsible for soaring health care costs. Yet the chemical lobby, just like the tobacco industry before it, has impeded serious regulation and is even trying to block research.

A second is that journalists historically have done a poor job covering public health issues — we were slow on the dangers of tobacco and painfully delinquent in calling attention to the perils of lead — but these are central to our national well-being. Our lives are threatened less by the Taliban in Afghanistan than by unregulated contaminants at home.

Endocrine disruptors are a class of chemicals that mimic hormones and therefore confuse the body. Initially, they provoked concern because of their links to cancers and the malformation of sex organs. Those concerns continue, but the newest area of research is the impact that they have on fat storage.

Bruce Blumberg, a developmental biologist at the University of California, Irvine, coined the term “obesogen” in a 2006 journal article to refer to chemicals that cause animals to store fat. Initially, this concept was highly controversial among obesity experts, but a growing number of peer-reviewed studies have confirmed his finding and identified some 20 substances as obesogens.

The role of these chemicals has been acknowledged by the presidential task force on childhood obesity, and the National Institutes of Health has become a major funder of research on links between endocrine disruptors and both obesity and diabetes.

Among chemicals identified as obesogens are materials in plastics, canned food, agricultural chemicals, foam cushions and jet fuel. For example, a study in the fall found that triflumizole, a fungicide used on many food crops, like leafy vegetables, causes obesity in mice.

Just this month, a new study in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives found that endocrine disruptors that are sometimes added to PVC plastic cause mice to grow obese and suffer liver problems — and the effect continues with descendants of those mice, generation after generation.

Another study found that women with a pesticide residue in their blood bore babies who were more likely to be overweight at the age of 14 months.

That’s a common thread: The most important time for exposure appears to be in utero and in childhood. It’s not clear whether most obesogens will do much to make an ordinary adult, even a pregnant woman, fatter (although one has been shown to do so), and the greatest impact seems to be on fetuses and on children before puberty.

The magazine Scientific American recently asked whether doctors should do more to warn pregnant women about certain chemicals. It cited a survey indicating that only 19 percent of doctors cautioned pregnant women about pesticides, only 8 percent about BPA (an endocrine disruptor in some plastics and receipts), and only 5 percent about phthalates (endocrine disruptors found in cosmetics and shampoos). Dr. Blumberg, the pioneer of the field, says he strongly recommends that people — especially children and women who are pregnant or may become pregnant — try to eat organic foods to reduce exposure to endocrine disruptors, and try to avoid using plastics to store food or water. “My daughter uses a stainless steel water bottle, and so do I,” he said.

For all the uncertainty, these latest studies are one more reason to worry that endocrine disruptors may be the tobacco of our time. Science-based decisions to improve public health — like the removal of lead from gasoline — have been among our government’s most beneficial public policy moves. In this case, a starting point would be to boost research of endocrine disruptors and pass the Safe Chemicals Act. That measure, long stalled in Congress, would require more stringent safety testing of potentially toxic chemicals around us.

After all, which mouse would we rather look like?

Last but not least here’s Mr. Bruni:

Andrew Cuomo doesn’t dally. If he deems something important, he pounces on it. Last week he did that with gun control, signing sweeping new legislation.

He’s also ambitious. A 2016 presidential bid may be in the offing, especially if Hillary Clinton doesn’t jump in. And the national profile that he’s forging — trailblazer on gay marriage, guardian of public safety — almost surely reflects his sense of where the country is heading and what voters will and won’t reward.

How, then, are we supposed to read his romantic situation?

He’s unmarried, but has been living with the irrepressible food celebrity Sandra Lee for years now, most recently in her Westchester house. “Public concubinage” is what one Roman Catholic official once called their cohabitation, generating a flurry of articles that mentioned “living in sin.” The couple made no apologies. And they’ve never signaled any plans to wed.

That wasn’t a factor in Cuomo’s successful New York gubernatorial campaign, but whether it would be a liability in a national race is hard to say. Political strategists told me yes, no, maybe. I’m rooting for no, because that would be an affirmation that we, as a voting public, have wised up to the frequent lack of any correlation between a tableau of traditional family life and the values, character and skills it takes to govern effectively. And I’m intrigued by politicians who are writing fresh scripts and handling their personal situations in surprising ways.

Recently I visited Colorado, whose governor, John Hickenlooper, is another prominent Democrat sometimes mentioned in connection with 2016. I met up with him just a few hours after his State of the State address. Its distinctions included this: when he thanked his wife, Helen Thorpe, for coming to hear it, he was reminding Coloradans that the two had separated midway through 2012, less than two years into his first term.

“I greatly appreciate Helen being here today,” he told the gathered lawmakers. Then, mentioning their 10-year-old son, he added, “Even with the changes in our life, she remains a beacon of light to me and Teddy.”

Hickenlooper has handled the separation not with terse acknowledgments and speedy pivots to the next topic but with a transparent emotionalism. It’s arresting — and refreshing. The couple announced that he was moving out of their Denver house and into the governor’s mansion in a joint statement that the governor’s office e-mailed to their friends and to journalists last July. Half news release, half personal letter, it was unlike any political document I’d seen.

In it he and Thorpe wrote that they remained “close friends,” that they and Teddy would still take vacations and spend holidays together and that acquaintances should “feel free to include both of us in social gatherings, as we will not find it awkward.” They also said that neither of them had had an affair.

During my recent conversations with Hickenlooper, he brought up Thorpe readily and repeatedly. She’s a journalist, and he proudly described her progress on a new book. He expressed sorrow that the public eye and the whirl of his political life had never really suited her. When they married in 2002, his political career had really yet to begin.

He said that over the last few years, as he rose in political prominence, they were careful to carve out private time, thinking that that would do the trick. He was sure to be home with his wife by 7 p.m. at least four of every seven nights, he said.

But, he said: “There was just always somebody interrupting. She’s someone who just thinks so deeply and feels so deeply — it was just so distracting for her. I didn’t appreciate that properly.”

If he hadn’t run for governor, I asked, would the marriage have survived? “It’s conceivable,” he said. Then he volunteered that when they discussed separating, she had told him: “If you want to run for president, I’m in. We’ll stay married. I’ll figure it out and I’ll be fine.”

He shook his head. “It was amazingly generous,” he said.

He turned down that offer, he told me, because he didn’t want to prolong her unhappiness and had “pretty much made my mind up to focus on Colorado and not to spend time imagining any national campaigns.” There are few signs that he’s gearing up for one.

“I never considered how a voter might respond,” he said. “Marriage ‘status’ still matters to some people, but it seems like less and less.”

Is he right? Could he or Cuomo run for national office without a spouse at his side? Could Mayor Cory Booker of Newark, another rising Democratic star? He’s steadfastly single. What about Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles, whose marriage unraveled messily in 2007? Although Jerry Brown strode unmarried onto the national stage — and sought the Democratic presidential nomination sans bride — decades ago, that was a different thing. He was a decided iconoclast, and his stubborn bachelorhood was part and parcel of his outré political appeal.

There’s certainly no divorce taboo in contemporary presidential politics. Ronald Reagan demonstrated that, and then came Bob Dole and John McCain, with one divorce apiece, and Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich, with two each. Gingrich last year won two Republican primaries in socially conservative Southern states, including South Carolina, where another messily divorced Republican, Mark Sanford, the state’s former governor, announced a candidacy for Congress last week.

Lucky for him and Gingrich and others, there’s no infidelity taboo, either. Bill Clinton demolished that. Lewinsky or no Lewinsky, most Americans have come to see his presidency as a bright one and Hillary as an estimable public servant, yet none of those supporters mistake the Clintons’ marriage for the stuff of storybooks, unless maybe we’re talking about Rona Jaffe or David Baldacci novels.

We’ve seemingly moved away from conventional and naïve expectations, if we ever really had them, and in the years to come we’ll surely see, on the national stage, more proof of that: candidates without partners, candidates with partners they haven’t wed, candidates with partners of the same sex.

And my guess is that many of them will do just fine, as long as they aren’t defensive or opaque and they permit enough of a view into their lives and hearts for voters to see — and identify with — a bedrock of common longings, a braid of recognizable frailties and frustrations.

Hickenlooper is doing that, and if Cuomo does likewise, he could find that an outspoken, aggressive support of regulations on firearms is a bigger political problem in much of the United States than, er, concubinage is. Ours is a peculiar land, growing saner in some regards even as we remain absolutely bonkers in others.

The Pasty Little Putz, Dowd, Friedman, Kristof and Bruni

The Pasty Little Putz has decided to ‘splain to us “Why Obama is Winning.”  He gibbers that after coming through a crisis, stagnation doesn’t seem so bad.  Well, that and the fact that Money Boo Boo’s party has turned into a herd of howler monkeys hooting and throwing shit at the wall.  MoDo decided the leave the Beltway and politics behind and come down to my town.  In “It Goes With Everything, Even Blue Hair” she croons that from Coco to Gaga, the L.B.D. works that old black magic.  (Yeah, I know.  I had to read the thing before I knew WTF she was talking about too.  LBD is “little black dress,” so this is another quintessential MoDo cruise down memory lane.)  The Moustache of Wisdom has decided to tell us all about “The World We’re Actually Living In,” and he says in President Obama and Mitt Romney we have a choice between someone who understands the complex world we live in and someone who doesn’t.  Mr. Kristof, in “Women Hurting Women,” says female leaders can be just as horrible for women as men — just look at Bangladesh.  In “Three Muffled Syllables” Mr. Bruni says we need a blunter and more expansive discussion about sacrifice.  Here’s The Putz:

Last winter, I had lunch with a junior White House official who works on economic issues. The unemployment rate had just dipped to 8.3 percent, and I asked if he was encouraged by the figure, and hopeful that it might be down another point by Election Day.

He shook his head. The positive news notwithstanding, he said, there were good reasons to think that we would still be staring at 8 percent unemployment in the fall of 2012.

“Well,” I told him, with all the authority a professional pundit can muster, “then you should assume that you’re going to lose the election.”

Today, just as he predicted, the unemployment rate is 8.1 percent. The year’s second-quarter growth rate was just downgraded to an anemic 1.3 percent, real household income dipped in the month leading up to the two political conventions, and the American Enterprise Institute’s James Pethokoukis suggests that 2012 might turn out to be the worst not-technically-in-a-recession year in modern American history.

But Barack Obama would win if the election were held today, and probably by a relatively comfortable margin. My wintertime prediction, Mitt Romney’s campaign strategy, the assumptions of Republicans and Democrats alike — all have been confounded by voters’ refusal to lean the way the unemployment rate suggests they should.

Why is this? In part, it’s the hangover from the Bush years, and the fact that Americans don’t yet trust the Republican Party given how little the party seems to have learned and changed since 2008. In part, it’s Romney himself, a deeply flawed candidate whose “47 percent” remarks look like the rare disastrous sound-bite that actually turns the polls against the candidate who uttered it.

But something deeper is going on as well. Remember that the economy is growing, however slowly, and most working-age Americans do have jobs. (A Bureau of Labor Statistics reassessment just found that there are now — finally — more Americans employed than when Barack Obama took office.) It turns out that dreadfully slow growth isn’t nearly as politically damaging as decline, because voters can adapt to stagnation, and approach it as a kind of grim “new normal” rather than a disaster requiring an immediate response.

Over the last two years, then, what still felt like an economic crisis during the 2010 midterms has become a grim-but-bearable status quo. In this new normal, Ronald Brownstein reports in the National Journal, “a slim majority of Americans now say they define getting ahead as not falling behind — not losing ground or falling into debt — rather than the more traditional definition of enjoying steady increases in pay and income.”

It’s voters like these who are giving Obama his cushion. The president trails among people who report themselves worse off than four years ago. But he leads comfortably among Americans who are merely treading water.

These signs of resignation are good news for the White House, but they’re bad news for the country’s future. Even if a rich nation like ours can learn to live with 8 percent unemployment and slow growth for now, the costs of persistent joblessness and sustained stagnation could be devastating in the long run.

As Don Peck pointed out in his 2011 book “Pinched,” an analysis of the Great Recession’s likely consequences, the socioeconomic scars left by a period of mass unemployment get deeper the longer that period persists. Young people put off life decisions, delaying education, marriage, childbearing. Older people drop out of the work force permanently. Families are strained and split apart; people lose crucial years of saving and asset building; dependency on government assistance becomes a way of life. And a culture of fearfulness takes hold, discouraging risk-taking and entrepreneurship even when better times return.

Meanwhile, every year with subpar growth makes our government’s existing liabilities larger, and the fiscal adjustments the country is facing that much more difficult to make. All of these problems will gradually intertwine, as they already do in Western Europe. Today’s stagnation means that Americans a generation hence will face bigger-than-expected deficits, even as today’s recession-dampened birthrate means there will be fewer younger workers to help pay them down.

This grim prospect doesn’t necessarily make the case for electing Romney in Obama’s place. Indeed, Romney’s dismissal of the government-dependent 47 percent suggests a fatal misunderstanding of what should be his mission — namely, to persuade precisely those Americans clinging, understandably, to government programs in tough times to choose the risks of further change over the temporary security of stasis.

But the costs of stagnation definitely make the case against the kind of resignation we’re now seeing in the electorate. Whatever happens in November, American voters should be asking for more — both for themselves, and for future generations — than an economy in which stagnation is the best that we can hope for, and the American dream just means barely getting by.

Well, and maybe we could start to hope for a more responsible Republican party, instead of the pack of howling lunatics we have now.  Here’s MoDo, crooning about clothes:

Growing up, I did not think of black as an alluring color.

When you misbehaved, nuns in black habits, brandishing rulers, bore down on you. When a relative died, my mom wore rustling black rayon.

When my Irish great-aunts went to work for rich American families, they wore black maids’ uniforms. Our family dog, Scottie, bit anyone wearing black, even my brothers in their prom tuxedos.

Black was the color of despair, decadence, death, nightmares and vampire capes. It was the color, priests warned, that your soul would turn if you sinned.

But part of becoming a woman is realizing the mythic power of the little black dress. It makes you thinner and more chic, no matter how stunted your fashion sense, and gives you dash.

I first saw it in old movies: Rita Hayworth vamping in strapless black satin in “Gilda”; Marilyn Monroe sparkling in a barely-there Orry-Kelly beaded dress in “Some Like it Hot”; Natalie Wood winning Steve McQueen’s heart with a low-cut black dress in “Love With the Proper Stranger.”

And of course, the gorgeous black Givenchy cocktail dress Audrey Hepburn wore munching a pastry in front of Tiffany’s one morning — a look so embedded in the DNA of American culture that Tina Fey feyly evokes it on the cover of the new Entertainment Weekly, complete with upswept hair, long gloves, cigarette holder and Cat curled around her neck.

Others consider that image the shimmering height of the L.B.D., or little black dress. But not André Leon Talley, the imperious impresario of a new exhibition on the colorful subject at his eponymous gallery in the art museum of the Savannah College of Art and Design.

“It’s not the most iconic or important little black dress ever made,” dismissively notes the fashion czar, who himself favors comfortable yurt-like garments and size-15 Uggs. (He owns nine pairs of black and bark Uggs.) He points in the direction of an L.B.D. he finds far more compelling. I’m startled to see a male mannequin gussied up in a see-through black lace dress worn over spanking white boxers, black socks and shoes that would have dazzled Louis XIV, the Carrie Bradshaw of his day.

“This is what Marc Jacobs wore to the Met Costume Gala, a man-dress from Comme des Garçon,” Talley says. “It was a seminal moment in style for a man to go there, perfectly accessorized with diamanté buckled black matte leather court shoes that he designed himself.”

No doubt.

Talley, a contributing editor at Vogue and a correspondent at “Entertainment Tonight,” said he was inspired to mount the show after seeing Anna Wintour in a classic black Chanel dress, now framed in a shadow box on the cherry-red wall.

It was Coco Chanel and Vogue, after all, who popularized “the little nothings,” as they were known then, on Oct. 1, 1926, when the magazine published an illustration of a blouson black crepe de Chine sheath, predicting that every woman would aspire to have it in her closet, just as every man wanted a Model T in the garage.

“Chanel craved the power and independence of men,” says Gioia Diliberto, who has written a novel and a play about the couturière and who contributed an essay to the show’s catalog. “So in her designs, she borrowed the ease, comfort and muted palette of men’s clothes to create a style of pared-down elegance for women that liberated them from furbelows and froufrou confections.”

Talley says he collected a cavalcade of designer dresses from his friends in materials from “neoprene scuba diving fabric to latex to chicken feathers.” (Really ostrich feathers.)

In the rows of black glamour can be found Whoopi Goldberg’s Chado Ralph Rucci caftan — with a snake necklace strangling the mannequin’s neck; Sarah Jessica Parker’s buttery leather pleated Prabal Gurung; L’Wren Scott’s own design, a sexy wool and lace number that she wore to the Golden Globes with her boyfriend, Mick Jagger; a Tom Ford Chantilly lace and beaded concoction based on Goya’s portrait of the Duchess of Alba.

“Lady Gaga wore that with blue hair,” Talley confides.

Renée Zellweger contributed a navy ribbon-candy-style dress. “Sometimes you wear midnight blue as black,” Talley opined.

I start to feel paranoid when my friend André offers a disquisition on how to identify a “good black” hue versus a “bad black” one, and which blacks don’t match. I’d assumed black was black.

“You don’t want a harsh black or a dead black that looks like an old bunker that’s been oxidized through years of neglect in a barren warehouse,” he says. “A good black is an electrifying black. It should be about dreams of beauty.”

Gazing at my green T-shirt, Talley murmurs scornfully, “Sea foam, I suppose,” before turning back to the inanimate but far more enticing mannequins. “When in doubt, you go to your best little black dress, not to your wimpy, seaweedy, outre-mer sea foam or your wretched yellow lemon drop.”

He sums up the staying power of noir style with a line straight out of film noir: “It’s just something that you know is right, even if it’s wrong.”

Well, all things being equal, I’d rather have MoDo crooning about clothes than trying to cover politics.  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

For the first time in a long, long time, a Democrat is running for president and has the clear advantage on national security policy. That is not “how things are supposed to be,” and Republicans sound apoplectic about it. But there is a reason President Obama is leading on national security, and it was apparent in his U.N. speech last week, which showed a president who understands that we really do live in a more complex world today — and that saying so is not a cop-out. It’s a road map. Mitt Romney, given his international business background, should understand this, but he acts instead as if he learned his foreign policy at the International House of Pancakes, where the menu and architecture rarely changes.

Rather than really thinking afresh about the world, Romney has chosen instead to go with the same old G.O.P. bacon and eggs — that the Democrats are toothless wimps who won’t stand up to our foes or for our values, that the Republicans are tough and that it is 1989 all over again. That is, America stands astride the globe with unrivaled power to bend the world our way, and the only thing missing is a president with “will.” The only thing missing is a president who is ready to simultaneously confront Russia, bash China, tell Iraqis we’re not leaving their country, snub the Muslim world by outsourcing our Arab-Israel policy to the prime minister of Israel, green light Israel to bomb Iran — and raise the defense budget while cutting taxes and eliminating the deficit.

It’s all “attitude” — without a hint at how we could possibly do all these contradictory things at once, or the simplest acknowledgment that two wars and a giant tax cut under George W. Bush has limited our ability to do even half of them.

Let’s look at the world we’re actually living in. It is a world that has become much more interdependent so that our friends failing (like Greece) can now harm us as much as our enemies threatening, and our rivals (like China) collapsing can hurt us as much as their rising. It’s a world where a cheap YouTube video made by a superempowered individual can cause us more trouble than the million-dollar propaganda campaign of a superpower competitor. It is a globalized economy in which the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, America’s largest business lobby, has opposed Romney’s pledge to designate China as a currency manipulator and is pressing Congress to lift cold war trade restrictions on Russia, a country Romney has labeled America’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe.” It is a world where, at times, pulling back — and focusing on rebuilding our strength at home — is the most meaningful foreign policy initiative we can undertake because when America is at its best — its institutions, schools and values — it can inspire emulation, whereas Russia and China still have to rely on transactions or bullying to get others to follow. It is still a world where the use of force, or the threat of force, against implacable foes (Iran) is required, but a world where a nudge at the right time and place can also be effective.

Add it all up and it’s a world in which America will have greater responsibility (because our European and Japanese allies are now economically enfeebled) and fewer resources (because we have to cut the defense budget) to manage a more complex set of actors (because so many of the states we have to deal with now are new democracies with power emanating from their people not just one man — like Egypt — or failing states like Pakistan) where our leverage on other major powers is limited (because Russia’s massive oil and gas income gives it great independence and any war we’d want to fight in Asia we’d have to borrow the money from China).

This complexity doesn’t argue for isolationism. It argues for using our power judiciously and in a nuanced fashion. For instance, if you had listened to Romney criticizing Obama for weakness after the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, you’d have thought that, had Romney been president, he would have immediately ordered some counterstrike. But, had we done so, it would have aborted what was a much more meaningful response: Libyans themselves taking to the streets under the banner “Our Revolution Will Not Be Stolen” and storming the headquarters of the Islamist militias who killed the U.S. ambassador. It shows you how much this complexity can surprise you.

The one area where Romney could have really challenged Obama on foreign policy was on the president’s bad decision to double-down on Afghanistan. But Romney can’t, because the Republican Party wanted to triple down. So we’re having no debate about how to extricate ourselves from our biggest foreign policy mess and a cartoon debate — “I’m tough; he’s not” — about everything else. In that sense, foreign policy is a lot like domestic policy. The morning after the election, we will face a huge “cliff”: how to deal with Afghanistan, Iran and Syria, without guidance from the candidates or a mandate from voters. Voters will have to go with their gut about which guy has the best gut feel for navigating this world. Obama has demonstrated that he has something there. Romney has not.

Next up is Mr. Kristof:

Are female leaders better for the world’s women?

It would be nice to think that women who achieve power would want to help women at the bottom. But one continuing global drama underscores that women in power can be every bit as contemptible as men.

Sheikh Hasina, prime minister of Bangladesh, is mounting a scorched-earth offensive against Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank and champion of the economic empowerment of women around the world. Yunus, 72, won a Nobel Peace Prize for his pioneering work in microfinance, focused on helping women lift their families out of poverty.

Yet Sheikh Hasina’s government has already driven Yunus from his job as managing director of Grameen Bank. Worse, since last month, her government has tried to seize control of the bank from its 5.5 million small-time shareholders, almost all of them women, who collectively own more than 95 percent of the bank.

What a topsy-turvy picture: We see a woman who has benefited from evolving gender norms using her government powers to destroy the life’s work of a man who has done as much for the world’s most vulnerable women as anybody on earth.

The government has also started various investigations of Yunus and his finances and taxes, and his supporters fear that he might be arrested on some pretext or another.

“It’s an insane situation,” Yunus told me a few days ago at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, sounding subdued instead of his normally exuberant self. “I just don’t know how to deal with it.”

If the government succeeds in turning Grameen Bank into a government bank, Yunus said, “it is finished.”

Sheikh Hasina, in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, initially agreed to be interviewed by me in a suite at the Grand Hyatt. At the last minute she canceled and refused to reschedule.

Perhaps none of this should be surprising. Metrics like girls’ education and maternal mortality don’t improve more when a nation is led by a woman. There is evidence that women matter as local leaders and on corporate boards, but that doesn’t seem to have been true at the national level, at least not for the first cohort of female leaders around the world.

Bangladesh is actually a prime example of the returns from investing in women. When it separated from Pakistan in 1971, it was a wreck. But it invested in girls’ education, and today more than half of its high school students are female — an astonishing achievement for an impoverished Muslim country.

All those educated women formed the basis for Bangladesh’s garment industry. They also had fewer births: the average Bangladeshi woman now has 2.2 children, down from 6 in 1980. Bringing women into the mainstream also seems to have soothed extremism, which is much less of a concern than in Pakistan (where female literacy in the tribal areas is only 3 percent).

To her credit, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has spoken up for Yunus: “I highly respect Muhammad Yunus, and I highly respect the work that he has done, and I am hoping to see it continue without being in any way undermined or affected by any government action,” she said earlier this year. Two former secretaries of state, George Shultz and Madeleine Albright, have also called on Sheikh Hasina to back off.

She shows no sign of doing so. One theory is that she is paranoid and sees Yunus as a threat, especially since he made an abortive effort to enter politics in 2007. Another theory is that she is envious of his Nobel Peace Prize and resentful of his global renown.

Sheikh Hasina is disappointing in other ways. She has turned a blind eye to murders widely attributed to the security services. My Times colleague Jim Yardley wrote just this month about a labor leader, Aminul Islam, who had been threatened by security officers and whose tortured body was found in a pauper’s grave.

Yunus fans are signing a Change.org petition on his behalf, but I’d like to see more American officials and politicians speak up for him. President Obama, how about another photo op with Yunus?

I still strongly believe that we need more women in leadership posts at home and around the world, from presidential palaces to corporate boards. The evidence suggests that diverse leadership leads to better decision making, and I think future generations of female leaders may be more attentive to women’s issues than the first.

In any case, this painful episode in Bangladesh is a reminder that the struggle to achieve gender equality isn’t simply a battle between the sexes.

It is far more subtle. Misogyny and indifference remain obstacles for women globally, but those are values that can be absorbed and transmitted by women as well as by men.

Last but not least, here’s Mr. Bruni:

In a few days, as you may have heard, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney will go head-to-head in their first presidential debate. What I most want from it isn’t fireworks, though I’m as big a fan of political theater as the next hack. It’s a word, one that has gone sadly out of vogue over recent decades and been mostly absent from this campaign.

Sacrifice.

And I’m not holding my breath.

Romney, in his convention speech, never uttered it, and Obama, in his, said those three syllables just once, in a telling context. He thanked servicemen and -women who were fighting or had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan for what they’d risked and endured, a sacrifice limited to them and their families and not shared by the rest of us, who enjoyed tax cuts even as the wars’ costs drove the federal debt ever higher.

It’s odd. We revere the Americans who lived through World War II and call them the “greatest generation” precisely because of the sacrifices they made. But we seem more than content to let that brand of greatness pass us by.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, at the end of his presidency, warned Americans about “plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow.”

“We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow,” he said, as the writer Evan Thomas recalls in a new biography, “Ike’s Bluff.”

But the last president to make a truly robust call for sacrifice was ridiculed for it. That president, Jimmy Carter, suggested only that we turn down our thermostats a tad and guzzle a bit less gas, and in July 1979 observed, “Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.”

Then came Ronald Reagan, whose many great contributions to America were coupled with less great ones, including the idea, which has dominated our political discourse ever since, that we should speak only of morning in America and that optimism, like virtue, is its own reward.

It isn’t, not if it crowds out realism, which we need more of these days.

The size of the federal debt and the pace of its growth can’t be ignored. Economists disagree on how soon and aggressively to tackle them, but not about the eventual need to.

Yet we have tax rates that, by some measures, are near the lowest in the postwar era. We also have polls that show that a clear majority of Americans don’t think our country is positioned to afford its children as good a life as its adults have enjoyed.

Conditions, all in all, are ripe for a serious conversation about sacrifice. But this presidential campaign has been noteworthy for its nonsensical insinuations or assurances that although we’re in a jam, we can emerge from it with discrete, minimal inconvenience.

This claim is most laughably manifest in Romney’s ill-defined tax “policy,” which promises lower marginal rates without any reduction in the amount of revenue the United States Treasury collects.

Romney says that he intends to make this magic happen by closing tax loopholes, but he won’t identify which, because God forbid any voter be told that he or she might have to surrender something advantageous. We live in a sacrifice-free bubble of volitional delusion.

Obama has lately taken to speaking of “economic patriotism,” which is in some sense his euphemism for sacrifice. But the patriotic pinch he suggests is a tax increase only for households that make more than $250,000. They represent a small minority of American taxpayers, and a tax hike extending well beyond them would be necessary to raise enough revenue to solve our debt problems.

Campaign rhetoric, of course, is campaign rhetoric. Even so, the amount of it devoted to lessening our anxieties about any financial pain in the present is alarming.

Those of us with health insurance are encouraged not to fear any negative consequence from the attempt to universalize coverage, rather than being told that such a goal is worth some giveback — which it is.

All of us are assured that the cost of Medicare can be contained without the program’s beneficiaries’ feeling a significant impact. Really?

What once made Paul Ryan exciting even to some moderates was his readiness to sing a more somber song and say: folks, we can’t have it all. But if you track his own changes to his budget proposals — and then add the alterations that Romney layered on — you hear a muffling of the summons to any current or imminent sacrifice.

Besides which, Ryan’s notion of sacrifice is lopsided: diminished entitlements even for people who truly depend on them but not a cent more in taxes for affluent Americans like him. These days sacrifice is what you recommend for others, not what you volunteer for yourself.

How did that happen? One theory is the end of military conscription after Vietnam.

“As we baby boomers became adults, less than 1 percent of the population served in the military,” wrote Matthew Paull, a former chief financial officer for McDonald’s, and Steve Krause, the director of finance at the University of Chicago’s business school, in an article in The New Republic last year. It was titled, “Why Are the Children of the ‘Greatest Generation’ So Selfish?”

“In World War II, that figure was over 10 percent,” the authors continued, later adding: “With relatively few of us sharing the bonds, lessons and sacrifices of military service, perhaps there is little widespread experiential counterbalance to each of us pursuing only our self-interest.”

I think the rise of interest groups, identity politics and cause-specific lobbyists has diminished our attention to, and sense of, a communal good.

And cynicism about the intentions of politicians and the effectiveness of government has become an easy out: why sacrifice in ways that plump federal coffers or reduce federal obligations when Washington can’t be trusted to make anything better or get anything right?

I have my own trust issues. But they’d be lessened considerably if one of the candidates got up at the first debate and said that climate change can’t be mourned from the back seat of an Escalade; that the future benefits of expanded health care and more affordable college have a price tag in the here and now; that pain is a precursor to healing; and that it’s time to take our medicine.

Somehow I doubt that there will be much “sacrifice” made by the MOTU, but I’d probably better start developing a taste for Friskies.