Dowd, Friedman, Kristof and Rich

For reasons best known to herself MoDo has decided to play film buff/historian today.  In “Ballet’s Mean Streets” she fizzes that “The Red Shoes,” a classic 1948 film directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, is a gorgeously haunting work of art.  One wonders if they dragged out one of her “anytime” columns they have in the can while they’re adjusting her medications…  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “Call White House, Ask for Barack,” says until the Palestinians and Israelis are serious about the peace process, the United States should get out of the picture.  Mr. Kristof addresses food safety in “Something Scary in the Pantry.”  He says bisphenol A, or BPA, is linked to things like cancer, obesity, attention deficit disorder and genital abnormalities, and it’s been found in our food.  Mr. Rich, in “The Night They Drove the Tea Partiers Down,” says Democrats need to realize they appear overly sympathetic to fat-cat bankers, particularly because Republicans may not self-destruct.  Here’s MoDo:

Some movies you have to watch whenever they’re on.

One of those, for me, is “The Red Shoes.” Like its doomed heroine, I’m pulled inexorably along by the bewitched crimson ballet slippers into a lush, swirling landscape that turns into an inescapable, bloody hell.

There are many great works of art about obsession, from Heathcliff’s wailing to Ahab’s whaling, but this is surely the most gorgeously haunting. The destructive obsession portrayed here is not with a lover or outside object of desire. It’s about the tyranny of creativity.

As the white-skinned, blue-blooded ballerina Vicky Page, Moira Shearer dons the red slippers and is forced to choose between love and art.

There was never a screen pairing more magical than Moira and Technicolor. The flame-haired Scottish dancer is so radiant in the Criterion DVD of the 1948 classic directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger that it’s impossible to believe she could glow more brightly. But in the lovingly polished version of the British movie that debuted at Cannes and is now showing at Film Forum in New York, Moira is even more incandescent.

The original backers of the movie had so little confidence that a stylized tragic ballet film could do well that they didn’t even give it an official London premiere.

Now Martin Scorsese calls “The Red Shoes” “one of the true miracles of film history.” He long ago began an obsessive campaign to restore Powell’s reputation. His Film Foundation and the UCLA Film and Television Archive have taken the lead in digitally alchemizing the movie from cracked, shrunk, moldy negatives.

Scorsese fell in love with the movies of Powell and Pressburger when he was an asthmatic kid living in a four-room tenement apartment in New York, watching “Million Dollar Movie” on TV and going to theaters with his dad.

“They have a flair and flamboyance you don’t usually find in films being made at that time,” he told me. “And a fearlessness about emotion. They create worlds that take no prisoners.”

In “Black Narcissus,” their 1947 movie about a lustful nun in the Himalayas, played by Deborah Kerr — they seemed drawn to redheads for Technicolor — the sister faints from sexual desire and the screen goes orange. “That’s such a wonderful way to express desire,” Scorsese marveled.

In a letter to Kerr in the early ’40s, Pressburger laid out their manifesto, including: “No artist believes in escapism. And we secretly believe that no audience does. We have proved, at any rate, that they will pay to see the truth, for no other reason than her nakedness.”

In the early ’70s, Scorsese tracked down the broke and discredited Powell in London and took him to a pub.

“Michael was very surprised to hear that his films had thrilled a younger audience and given fuel to the imagination of myself and Brian De Palma and Francis Coppola,” Scorsese once recalled. “He went home that night and recorded in his diary that he felt his blood course through his veins again after meeting us in the bar.”

In 1980, Coppola invited Powell to become a consultant at Zoetrope Studios. He moved to America and married Scorsese’s film editor, Thelma Schoonmaker.

It is interesting that Powell twice counseled Scorsese against the color red. He didn’t like the red boxing gloves in the early rushes of “Raging Bull” and urged Scorsese to switch to a black-and-white film. (He did.) Powell told him “Mean Streets” had too much red lighting and he should take some out. (He didn’t.)

“The Red Shoes” is based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of the same name about a little girl who becomes vain about her red shoes and gets confused about her priorities. As in the movie, the shoes force the girl to dance day and night, and then she dies. But the fable has an even grimmer coda: The girl asks an executioner to cut off her feet.

The shimmering Moira Shearer could never take off the red shoes, either.

“To be constantly associated with that one film is really quite dismaying,” she once said. “It’s as though I’d done nothing else in my life. I mean, it’s odd, when you’re 61, to be haunted by something you’ve done when you were 21!”

She resisted doing the movie, finding the script “silly and banal”; she feared it would deflect her from a classical ballet career. And when she died at 80 in 2006, her husband dismissively called her film work “a bit of a distraction.”

Shearer said she faced hostility when she returned to the ballet world from some who considered her overnight movie fame frivolous. She always worried that she was succeeding more for her looks than her dancing.

She was eclipsed by Margot Fonteyn, married, had four children and receded. She wrote a book about her experiences with George Balanchine. As Clive Barnes wrote in Dance Magazine, “She had a disappointing and disappointed dance career.”

In later years, Shearer was asked to give her occupation in “Who’s Who.”

“Writer,” she replied.

This belonged in the entertainment section, not the op-ed page.  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

The Israeli-Palestinian peace process has become a bad play. It is obvious that all the parties are just acting out the same old scenes, with the same old tired clichés — and that no one believes any of it anymore. There is no romance, no sex, no excitement, no urgency — not even a sense of importance anymore. The only thing driving the peace process today is inertia and diplomatic habit. Yes, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has left the realm of diplomacy. It is now more of a calisthenic, like weight-lifting or sit-ups, something diplomats do to stay in shape, but not because they believe anything is going to happen. And yet, as much as we, the audience, know this to be true, we can never quite abandon hope for peace in the Holy Land. It is our habit. Indeed, as I ranted about this to a Jordanian friend the other day, he said it all reminded him of an old story.

“These two guys are watching a cowboy and Indian movie. And in the opening scene, an Indian is hiding behind a rock about to ambush the handsome cowboy,” he explained. “ ‘I bet that Indian is going to kill that cowboy,’ one guy says to the other. ‘Never happen,’ his friend answers. ‘The cowboy is not going to be killed in the opening scene.’ ‘I’ll bet you $10 he gets killed,’ the guy says. ‘I’ll take that bet,’ says his friend.

“Sure enough, a few minutes later, the cowboy is killed and the friend pays the $10. After the movie is over the guy says to his friend, ‘Look, I have to give you back your $10. I’d actually seen this movie before. I knew what was going to happen.’ His friend answers: ‘No, you can keep the $10. I’d seen the movie, too. I just thought it would end differently this time.’ ”

This peace process movie is not going to end differently just because we keep playing the same reel. It is time for a radically new approach. And I mean radical. I mean something no U.S. administration has ever dared to do: Take down our “Peace-Processing-Is-Us” sign and just go home.

Right now we want it more than the parties. They all have other priorities today. And by constantly injecting ourselves we’ve become their Novocain. We relieve all the political pain from the Arab and Israeli decision-makers by creating the impression in the minds of their publics that something serious is happening. “Look, the U.S. secretary of state is here. Look, she’s standing by my side. Look, I’m doing something important! Take our picture. Put it on the news. We’re on the verge of something really big and I am indispensable to it.” This enables the respective leaders to continue with their real priorities — which are all about holding power or pursuing ideological obsessions — while pretending to advance peace, without paying any political price.

Let’s just get out of the picture. Let all these leaders stand in front of their own people and tell them the truth: “My fellow citizens: Nothing is happening; nothing is going to happen. It’s just you and me and the problem we own.”

Indeed, it’s time for us to dust off James Baker’s line: “When you’re serious, give us a call: 202-456-1414. Ask for Barack. Otherwise, stay out of our lives. We have our own country to fix.”

The fact is, the only time America has been able to advance peace — post-Yom Kippur War, Camp David, post-Lebanon war, Madrid and Oslo — has been when the parties felt enough pain for different reasons that they invited our diplomacy, and we had statesmen — Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, George Shultz, James Baker and Bill Clinton — savvy enough to seize those moments.

Today, the Arabs, Israel and the Palestinians are clearly not feeling enough pain to do anything hard for peace with each other — a mood best summed up by a phrase making the rounds at the State Department: The Palestinian leadership “wants a deal with Israel without any negotiations” and Israel’s leadership “wants negotiations with the Palestinians without any deal.”

It is obvious that this Israeli government believes it can have peace with the Palestinians and keep the West Bank, this Palestinian Authority still can’t decide whether to reconcile with the Jewish state or criminalize it and this Hamas leadership would rather let Palestinians live forever in the hellish squalor that is Gaza than give up its crazy fantasy of an Islamic Republic in Palestine.

If we are still begging Israel to stop building settlements, which is so manifestly idiotic, and the Palestinians to come to negotiations, which is so manifestly in their interest, and the Saudis to just give Israel a wink, which is so manifestly pathetic, we are in the wrong place. It’s time to call a halt to this dysfunctional “peace process,” which is only damaging the Obama team’s credibility.

If the status quo is this tolerable for the parties, then I say, let them enjoy it. I just don’t want to subsidize it or anesthetize it anymore. We need to fix America. If and when they get serious, they’ll find us. And when they do, we should put a detailed U.S. plan for a two-state solution, with borders, on the table. Let’s fight about something big.

Here’s Mr. Kristof, who made my hair stand up on end:

Your body is probably home to a chemical called bisphenol A, or BPA. It’s a synthetic estrogen that United States factories now use in everything from plastics to epoxies — to the tune of six pounds per American per year. That’s a lot of estrogen.

More than 92 percent of Americans have BPA in their urine, and scientists have linked it — though not conclusively — to everything from breast cancer to obesity, from attention deficit disorder to genital abnormalities in boys and girls alike.

Now it turns out it’s in our food.

Consumer Reports magazine tested an array of brand-name canned foods for a report in its December issue and found BPA in almost all of them. The magazine says that relatively high levels turned up, for example, in Progresso vegetable soup, Campbell’s condensed chicken noodle soup, and Del Monte Blue Lake cut green beans.

The magazine also says it found BPA in the canned liquid version of Similac Advance infant formula (but not in the powdered version) and in canned Nestlé Juicy Juice (but not in the juice boxes). The BPA in the food probably came from an interior coating used in many cans.

Should we be alarmed?

The chemical industry doesn’t think so. Steven Hentges of the American Chemistry Council dismissed the testing, noting that Americans absorb quantities of BPA at levels that government regulators have found to be safe. Mr. Hentges also pointed to a new study indicating that BPA exposure did not cause abnormalities in the reproductive health of rats.

But more than 200 other studies have shown links between low doses of BPA and adverse health effects, according to the Breast Cancer Fund, which is trying to ban the chemical from food and beverage containers.

“The vast majority of independent scientists — those not working for industry — are concerned about early-life low-dose exposures to BPA,” said Janet Gray, a Vassar College professor who is science adviser to the Breast Cancer Fund.

Published journal articles have found that BPA given to pregnant rats or mice can cause malformed genitals in their offspring, as well as reduced sperm count among males. For example, a European journal found that male mice exposed to BPA were less likely to make females pregnant, and the Journal of Occupational Health found that male rats administered BPA had less sperm production and lower testicular weight.

This year, the journal Environmental Health Perspectives found that pregnant mice exposed to BPA had babies with abnormalities in the cervix, uterus and vagina. Reproductive Toxicology found that even low-level exposure to BPA led to the mouse equivalent of early puberty for females. And an array of animal studies link prenatal BPA exposure to breast cancer and prostate cancer.

While most of the studies are on animals, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported last year that humans with higher levels of BPA in their blood have “an increased prevalence of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and liver-enzyme abnormalities.” Another published study found that women with higher levels of BPA in their blood had more miscarriages.

Scholars have noted some increasing reports of boys born with malformed genitals, girls who begin puberty at age 6 or 8 or even earlier, breast cancer in women and men alike, and declining sperm counts among men. The Endocrine Society, an association of endocrinologists, warned this year that these kinds of abnormalities may be a consequence of the rise of endocrine-disrupting chemicals, and it specifically called on regulators to re-evaluate BPA.

Last year, Canada became the first country to conclude that BPA can be hazardous to humans, and Massachusetts issued a public health advisory in August warning against any exposure to BPA by pregnant or breast-feeding women or by children under the age of 2.

The Food and Drug Administration, which in the past has relied largely on industry studies — and has generally been asleep at the wheel — is studying the issue again. Bills are also pending in Congress to ban BPA from food and beverage containers.

“When you have 92 percent of the American population exposed to a chemical, this is not one where you want to be wrong,” said Dr. Ted Schettler of the Science and Environmental Health Network. “Are we going to quibble over individual rodent studies, or are we going to act?”

While the evidence isn’t conclusive, it justifies precautions. In my family, we’re cutting down on the use of those plastic containers that contain BPA to store or microwave food, and I’m drinking water out of a metal bottle now. In my reporting around the world, I’ve come to terms with the threats from warlords, bandits and tarantulas. But endocrine disrupting chemicals — they give me the willies.

And last but not least here’s Mr. Rich:

For all cable news’s efforts to inflate Election 2009 into a cliffhanger as riveting as Balloon Boy, ratings at MSNBC and CNN were flat Tuesday night. But not at Fox News, where the audience nearly doubled its usual prime-time average. That’s what happens when you have a thrilling story to tell, and what could be more thrilling than a revolution playing out in real time?

As Fox kept insisting, all eyes were glued on Doug Hoffman, the insurgent tea party candidate in New York’s 23rd Congressional District. A “tidal wave” was on its way, said Sean Hannity, and the right would soon “take back the Republican Party.” The race was not “even close,” Bill O’Reilly suggested to the pollster Scott Rasmussen, who didn’t disagree. When returns showed Hoffman trailing, the network’s resident genius, Karl Rove, knowingly reassured viewers that victory was in the bag, even if we’d have to stay up all night waiting for some slacker towns to tally their votes.

Alas, the Dewey-beats-Truman reveries died shortly after midnight, when even Fox had to concede that the Democrat, Bill Owens, had triumphed in what had been Republican country since before Edison introduced the light bulb. For the far right, the thriller in Watertown was over except for the ludicrous morning-after spin that Hoffman’s loss was really a victory. For the Democrats, the excitement was just beginning. New York’s 23rd could be celebrated as a rare bright spot on a night when the party’s gubernatorial candidates lost in Virginia and New Jersey.

The Democrats’ celebration was also premature: Hoffman’s defeat is potentially more harmful to them than to the Republicans. Tuesday’s results may be useless as a predictor of 2010, but they are not without value as cautionary tales. And the most worrisome for Democrats were not in Virginia and New Jersey, but, paradoxically, in the New York contests where they performed relatively well. That includes the idiosyncratic New York City mayor’s race that few viewed as a bellwether of anything. It should be the most troubling of them all for President Obama’s cohort — even though neither Obama nor the national political parties were significant players in it.

But first let’s make a farewell accounting of the farce upstate. The reason why the Democratic victory in New York’s 23rd is a mixed blessing is simple: it increases the odds that the Republicans will not do Democrats the great favor of committing suicide between now and the next Election Day.

This race was a damaging setback for the hard right. Hoffman had the energetic support of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Fox as well as big bucks from their political auxiliaries. Furthermore, Hoffman was running not only in a district that Rove himself described as “very Republican” but one that fits the demographics of the incredibly shrinking G.O.P. The 23rd is far whiter than America as a whole — 93 percent versus 74 — with tiny sprinklings of blacks, Hispanics and Asians. It has few immigrants. It’s rural. Its income and education levels are below the norm. Only if the district were situated in Dixie — or Utah — could it be a more perfect fit for the narrow American demographic where the McCain-Palin ticket had its sole romps last year.

If the tea party right can’t win there, imagine how it might fare in the nation where most Americans live. Some G.O.P. leaders have started to notice. Mitt Romney didn’t endorse Hoffman despite right-wing badgering to do so. On Wednesday, Michael Steele dismissed the right’s mantra that somehow Hoffman’s loss could be called a victory and instead talked up the newly elected Republican governors who won by appealing to independents and moderates. Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell are plenty conservative, but both had rejected Palin’s offers to campaign for them. They also avoided the tea party zanies, the fear-mongering National Organization for Marriage and the anti-abortion-rights zealots Hoffman embraced. They positioned themselves as respectful Obama critics, not haters likening him to Hitler.

In the aftermath of this clear-cut demonstration of how Republicans can win, the revolutionaries are still pledging to purge the party’s moderates by rallying behind more Hoffmans in G.O.P. primaries from Florida to California. And they may get some scalps. But Tuesday’s loss revealed that they’re better at luring freak-show gawkers into Fox’s tent than voters into the G.O.P.’s. As if to prove the point, protesters hoisted a sign likening health care reform to Dachau at the raucous tea party rally convened by Michele Bachmann on Capitol Hill on Thursday.

Should the G.O.P. avoid self-destruction by containing this fringe, then the president and his party will have to confront their real problem: their identification with the titans who greased the skids for the economic meltdown from which Wall Street has recovered and the country has not. If there’s one general lesson to be gleaned from Christie’s victory over Jon Corzine in New Jersey, it’s surely that in today’s zeitgeist it’s less of a stigma to be fat than a former Goldman Sachs fat cat, even in a blue state.

Michael Bloomberg’s shocking underperformance in New York was an even more dramatic illustration of this animus. Tuesday’s exit polls found that he had a whopping 70 percent approval rating, as befits a mayor who, whatever his quirks and missteps, is widely regarded as a highly competent, nonideological executive who has run the city well. Yet only 72 percent of those who gave him a thumb’s up voted for him. Though the mayor wildly outspent and out-campaigned his bland opponent, Bill Thompson, he received only 50.6 percent of the vote.

This shortfall has been correctly attributed to Bloomberg’s self-serving, highhanded undoing of the term limits law he had once endorsed. The ferocity of the public reaction to this power grab surprised him, pollsters and the press alike. That it became a bigger deal than anyone anticipated — arguably bigger than it merited — is an indicator of how much antipathy there is toward the masters of the universe in the financial capital. Americans don’t hate rich people, but they do despise those who behave as if the rules don’t apply to them. “Michael Bloomberg is About to Buy Himself a Third Term” was the cover line on New York magazine in October. However unfairly, some voters conflated his air of entitlement with the swaggering Wall Street C.E.O.’s who cashed out before the crash and stuck the rest of us with the bill.

The Obama administration does not seem to understand that this rage, left unaddressed, could consume it. It has pushed aside the entreaties of many — including Paul Volcker, the chairman of the White House’s own Economic Recovery Advisory Board — to break up too-big-to-fail banks. Those behemoths, cushioned by the government’s bailouts, low-interest loans and guarantees, are back making bets that put the entire system at risk. Yet last Sunday, we once again heard the Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, on “Meet the Press” dodging questions about the banks in general and Goldman in particular with unpersuasive bromides. “We’re not going to let the system go back to the way it was,” he said.

Surely he jests. On Monday morning, a business-savvy Democratic senator, Maria Cantwell of Washington, publicly questioned Geithner’s fitness for his job, given his support of loopholes in proposed regulations of the derivatives that enabled last year’s collapse. On Tuesday, Congressional Democrats, with the White House’s consent, voted to gut the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the post Enron-WorldCom law passed in 2002 to prevent corporate accounting tricks and fraud. Arthur Levitt, the former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, told me on Friday it was “surreal” that Democrats were now achieving the long-held Republican goal of smashing “the golden chalice” of reform. If investors cannot have transparency, Levitt said, “the whole system is worthless.”

The system is going back to the way it was with a vengeance, against a backdrop of despair. As the unemployment rate crossed the 10 percent threshold at week’s end, we learned that bankers were helping themselves not just to bonuses as large as those at the bubble’s peak but to early allotments of H1N1 vaccine. No wonder 62 percent of those polled by Hart Associates in late September felt that “large banks” had been helped “a lot” or “a fair amount” by “government economic policies,” but only 13 percent felt the “average working person” had been. Unemployment ranked ahead of the deficit and health care as the No. 1 pocketbook issue in the survey, with 81 percent saying the Obama administration must take more action.

The tea party Republicans vanquished on Tuesday have no jobs plan. They just want to eliminate all Washington spending — a prescription that didn’t go down too well in New York’s 23rd, where the federal government has the largest payroll. The G.O.P. establishment’s one-size-fits-all panacea is tax cuts — thin gruel for those with little or no taxable income. The administration’s answer is the stimulus, whose iffy results so far, it argues, can’t be judged this early on.

Fair enough. But a year from now the public will register its verdict in any event. Meanwhile, both parties have their own delusions, not the least of which is the Republicans’ conviction that Tuesday was a referendum on what Obama has done so far. If anything, it was a judgment on just how much he has not.

 

Kristof, solo

Gail Collins is off today.  Mr. Kristof, in “More Schools, Not Troops,” says a compelling argument against more troops in Afghanistan rests on this trade-off: For the cost of an additional soldier stationed in Afghanistan for a year, nearly 20 schools could be built.  Here he is:

Dispatching more troops to Afghanistan would be a monumental bet and probably a bad one, most likely a waste of lives and resources that might simply empower the Taliban. In particular, one of the most compelling arguments against more troops rests on this stunning trade-off: For the cost of a single additional soldier stationed in Afghanistan for one year, we could build roughly 20 schools there.

It’s hard to do the calculation precisely, but for the cost of 40,000 troops over a few years — well, we could just about turn every Afghan into a Ph.D.

The hawks respond: It’s naïve to think that you can sprinkle a bit of education on a war-torn society. It’s impossible to build schools now because the Taliban will blow them up.

In fact, it’s still quite possible to operate schools in Afghanistan — particularly when there’s a strong “buy-in” from the local community.

Greg Mortenson, author of “Three Cups of Tea,” has now built 39 schools in Afghanistan and 92 in Pakistan — and not one has been burned down or closed. The aid organization CARE has 295 schools educating 50,000 girls in Afghanistan, and not a single one has been closed or burned by the Taliban. The Afghan Institute of Learning, another aid group, has 32 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with none closed by the Taliban (although local communities have temporarily suspended three for security reasons).

In short, there is still vast scope for greater investment in education, health and agriculture in Afghanistan. These are extraordinarily cheap and have a better record at stabilizing societies than military solutions, which, in fact, have a pretty dismal record.

In Afghanistan, for example, we have already increased our troop presence by 40,000 troops since the beginning of last year, yet the result has not been the promised stability but only more casualties and a strengthened insurgency. If the last surge of 40,000 troops didn’t help, why will the next one be so different?

Matthew P. Hoh, an American military veteran who was the top civilian officer in Zabul Province, resigned over Afghan policy, as The Washington Post reported this week. Mr. Hoh argues that our military presence is feeding the insurgency, not quelling it.

Already our troops have created a backlash with Kabul University students this week burning President Obama in effigy until police dispersed them with gunshots. The heavier our military footprint, the more resentment — and perhaps the more legitimacy for the Taliban.

Schools are not a quick fix or silver bullet any more than troops are. But we have abundant evidence that they can, over time, transform countries, and in the area near Afghanistan there’s a nice natural experiment in the comparative power of educational versus military tools.

Since 9/11, the United States has spent $15 billion in Pakistan, mostly on military support, and today Pakistan is more unstable than ever. In contrast, Bangladesh, which until 1971 was a part of Pakistan, has focused on education in a way that Pakistan never did. Bangladesh now has more girls in high school than boys. (In contrast, only 3 percent of Pakistani women in the tribal areas are literate.)

Those educated Bangladeshi women joined the labor force, laying the foundation for a garment industry and working in civil society groups like BRAC and Grameen Bank. That led to a virtuous spiral of development, jobs, lower birth rates, education and stability. That’s one reason Al Qaeda is holed up in Pakistan, not in Bangladesh, and it’s a reminder that education can transform societies.

When I travel in Pakistan, I see evidence that one group — Islamic extremists — believes in the transformative power of education. They pay for madrassas that provide free schooling and often free meals for students. They then offer scholarships for the best pupils to study abroad in Wahhabi madrassas before returning to become leaders of their communities. What I don’t see on my trips is similar numbers of American-backed schools. It breaks my heart that we don’t invest in schools as much as medieval, misogynist extremists.

For roughly the same cost as stationing 40,000 troops in Afghanistan for one year, we could educate the great majority of the 75 million children worldwide who, according to Unicef, are not getting even a primary education. We won’t turn them into graduate students, but we can help them achieve literacy. Such a vast global education campaign would reduce poverty, cut birth rates, improve America’s image in the world, promote stability and chip away at extremism.

Education isn’t a panacea, and no policy in Afghanistan is a sure bet. But all in all, the evidence suggests that education can help foster a virtuous cycle that promotes stability and moderation. So instead of sending 40,000 troops more to Afghanistan, how about opening 40,000 schools?

If you haven’t read it yet, I’d strongly urge you to read Three Cups of Tea.  It’s a wonderful book.

Blow and Herbert

Gail Collins is off today.  Mr. Blow, in “The Magic of Michelle,” says this is America. We respect fearlessness, regardless of what we feel about the person who embodies it. With Michelle Obama, we have it both ways.  Mr. Herbert, in “We Know What He Means,” asks why has Mayor Michael Bloomberg allowed Rudy Giuliani to fan the flames of racial tension while campaigning on his behalf?  Here’s Mr. Blow:

Forgive me in advance for fawning, but Michelle Obama is the coolest first lady ever. She clinched it for me this week by jumping double Dutch on the South Lawn as part of a “healthy kids fair.”

The scene underscored my impression of the first lady as utterly unencumbered by convention. She seems to feel free — free enough to loosen up and laugh a little, free enough to let her inner child peek through the veil of parenthood, free enough to be herself.

I couldn’t imagine recent first ladies jumping a puddle on the sidewalk, let alone two ropes swinging at the same time in opposite directions. So, on behalf of New York City, the so-called double Dutch capital of the world (so much so that this year it became a varsity sport in the city’s schools), allow me to say: Well played.

I could pile on platitudes here about her professional accomplishments, or explore to what degree she is redefining the role of women, or predict how she will be viewed by historians in the pantheon of her predecessors. I could, but I won’t. That’s not my bailiwick.

But I will say that she seems particularly suited to these times. She provides a certain authenticity and clarity of self in a time of uncertainty, projecting a casual grace onto a world of amplified anxiety. She has become a powerful symbol of fearlessness, refinement, frugality and frivolity, managing to be both fun and serious simultaneously. She’s genuinely human.

Mrs. Obama is redefining my concept of a first lady, and I like it. Apparently, I’m not alone.

In April, at the peak of her popularity, a New York Times/CBS News poll measured her favorability at 67 percent. The same poll found that a stratospheric 84 percent approved of how she was handling her role as first lady. That means that even half of those who didn’t hold a favorable view of her as a person still liked what she was doing as first lady.

(It should be noted that polls by USA Today/Gallup and CNN/Opinion Research Corporation, both released this week, put the first lady’s favorability ratings in the 60s and above those of her husband.)

It’s hard to believe that this is the same woman who during the presidential campaign was repeatedly portrayed as the neo-radical albatross to a postracial candidate.

This is America. We respect fearlessness, regardless of what we feel about the person who embodies it. With Mrs. Obama, we have it both ways.

If George W. Bush was the president that Americans most wanted to have a beer with, then Michelle Obama is becoming the first lady we most want to have a laugh with. And that’s cool.

Here’s Mr. Herbert:

I wasn’t at all surprised at Rudy Giuliani. He couldn’t find his way off the low road with a handful of maps and a GPS device. But I was very surprised at Mayor Bloomberg.

One of the signal successes of Mike Bloomberg’s tenure is that during his two terms as mayor of a rough, tough, extremely contentious city, he has helped lower the racial temperature. You can say whatever you want about his policies, you can like him personally or not, but he has not played that cheap and tired game of ethnic politics. He has not tried to divide people along racial, ethnic or religious lines, exploiting fears and pitting groups against one another. And he has stood up against those who would do so.

The city has benefited from this. So it was truly disheartening, dismaying, to have the mayor turn his back on all that last Sunday during an appearance with Mr. Giuliani before an Orthodox Jewish group in Borough Park, Brooklyn.

Mr. Giuliani, campaigning on Mr. Bloomberg’s behalf, warned that if the mayor is not elected to a third term on Nov. 3, the city could become unsafe — a place of escalating crime and heightened tensions and fear.

Homing in with the instincts of a born divider, Mr. Giuliani suggested that an environment filled with danger might be right there on the next horizon if the voters were to elect “the wrong political leadership.” The “wrong” leadership in this case would be Mr. Bloomberg’s opponent, the City Comptroller William Thompson, who is black.

Giuliani said he worries daily that the city might revert “to the way it was before 1993,” the year he was elected mayor. He then pointedly added, so that no one within earshot could mistake his not-so-coded meaning: “And you know exactly what I’m talking about.”

It was vintage Giuliani, as subtle as a heart attack, deliberately fanning the fears of a community that has long been the locus of tensions between blacks and Jews. And Mayor Bloomberg sat there, allowing that lousy message to be delivered on his behalf.

Mr. Bloomberg has had many opportunities to disavow Mr. Giuliani’s remarks, to say that as a city we’re better than that, to repudiate (as he has before) the very idea that exploiting fear and division for political gain is acceptable in this great city. But he has chosen not to. He chose instead, later that same day, to raise the specter of one of the worst big-city tragedies in American history: Detroit, which was laid low by every ill you can imagine, including a catastrophic race riot in 1967.

Detroit, said Mr. Bloomberg, “went from a great city with lots of good-paying jobs to a city that’s basically holding on for dear life.”

Well, that’s true. But what’s that got to do with New York City, or this year’s mayoral election? New York is not an incipient Detroit. New York will not become Detroit if Mike Bloomberg is not re-elected.

The mayor disingenuously said that Detroit’s decline was more about economics than “some other things.” But anyone who knows the sad history of Detroit knows about those “other things.”

This had all the appearance of Mayor Bloomberg piggybacking on Giuliani’s fear-mongering. He picked the worst-case urban scenario available, a crime-ridden, destitute city from which most whites have long since fled, and offered it as a suggestion of what might be in store for New York, a thriving metropolis filled with people from virtually every ethnic group on the planet.

Open a window, please. Some fresh air is in order.

The Mike Bloomberg that New Yorkers came to know during his first two terms as mayor was not the same man who remained shamefully silent last Sunday, willing to benefit politically from Mr. Giuliani’s toxic remarks.

Many of us have seen New York convulsed over the decades by one racially charged controversy after another, sometimes violently convulsed. They come easily to mind: The Central Park jogger case, the police killings of Eleanor Bumpurs, Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond, the vicious racial attacks in Howard Beach and Bensonhurst, the Tawana Brawley affair, the Crown Heights riot and on and on and on.

The Bloomberg administration has helped shield the city from similar convulsions. That the mayor is now willing to lock his principles in a safe deposit box and start riding the broomstick of ethnic politics suggests that he’s worried about the outcome of his race against Mr. Thompson (even though public opinion polls and most of the people I talk to expect Bloomberg to win).

One of the ironies at work here is that it is during the toughest economic times that a city, more than ever, needs a mayor who is committed to bringing people together, not playing them off against one another for short-term political gain. This is absolutely the worst time for that point to have slipped Michael Bloomberg’s mind.

Collins, Blow and Herbert

In “The Eye of the Beholder” Ms. Collins says in New Jersey’s gubernatorial race, a candidate’s weight is now an issue. As Americans get fatter, who will be qualified to run for office?  That won’t be a problem here in Savannah — our former mayor was separated at birth from Jabba the Hut.  Mr. Blow, in “No More Suffering in Silence,” says we must do a better job of helping children who are sexually assaulted realize they are not alone, not at fault and not powerless.  In “Igniting the Growth of Jobs” Mr. Herbert says the government must develop creative approaches and make the investments necessary to start putting people back to work.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

Our question for today is whether it’s fair for a politician to point out that his opponent is fat.

This involves the New Jersey gubernatorial race, where Gov. Jon Corzine has been running ads showing extremely unflattering shots of the Republican contender, Chris Christie, and claiming that Christie “threw his weight around” when he was stopped for traffic infractions.

While Christie is certainly a large guy, the more interesting factoids in the ad would seem to be that he is a large guy who is a bad driver. A bad driver who was given to loudly pointing out that he was the U.S. attorney when he was stopped for things like speeding, driving without a car registration, or — whoops! — running into a motorcyclist while going the wrong way on a one-way street.

However, the weight issue is the one that has caught all the attention. Patrick Murray, the poll director at Monmouth University, told David Halbfinger of The Times that he thought Corzine was trying to send a “subliminal message” that Christie was reckless about his health and, therefore, might be reckless about, say, the state budget.

During a debate among candidates for N.J. lieutenant governor, the Democrat, State Senator Loretta Weinberg, was asked whether she felt Christie is overweight. “I don’t think that there are too many of us in this race who could make it into ‘The Bachelor’ or ‘The Bachelorette,’ ” she responded.

This was an extremely discreet answer, although now that we have seen how much attention Tom DeLay got for “Dancing With the Stars,” I suspect that the networks would have no hesitation whatsoever in tossing a couple of lieutenant governors into a serial dating show.

It is definitely true that you do not see many overweight people in Washington these days. The Obama administration is so pathologically fit that I have developed a truly unexpected affection for Larry Summers.

But I would really hate to see national anti-fat standards move into state government. For one thing, it would totally ruin my hopes of becoming the next person to be appointed lieutenant governor of New York when something untoward happens yet again in Albany.

Also, one of the best things about state capitols is that they are places where people who have most of their teeth and some of their hair can count on feeling pretty darned attractive.

Some commentators have come down hard on Corzine for the “weight” ad. However, it’s hard to blame his campaign for focusing on matters of girth. The state is a mess, his party members keep getting indicted and his personality is what we always like to politely term “abrasive.” All he’s really got is his ability to run a 10K. Corzine can’t even dwell on Christie’s terrible driving record given the fact that he spent the first part of his administration incapacitated because of an unfortunate decision to mix speeding with failure to buckle one’s seat belt.

Other people have argued that the ad will backfire and elicit sympathy for Christie among the multitudes of overweight voters even in the relatively fit state of New Jersey. (And God help the candidate who tries to pull this kind of thing in Mississippi.)

That’s happened in the past. Like the time Mitt Romney ran against Ted Kennedy for the Senate during one of Kennedy’s particularly unslender periods. The Romney camp ran film of Kennedy struggling to squeeze behind a table. (Subliminal message: Too much fat in the budget.) Kennedy responded with workers who had been laid off after a factory takeover engineered by Romney’s firm. (Subliminal message: How do you like downsizing?)

Of course, Kennedy cleaned his clock. This is my second-favorite Mitt Romney story. I couldn’t figure out any way to bring up the one about him driving to Canada with the family dog strapped to the car roof.

I think we can all agree that William Howard Taft would not have made it into the White House if there had been YouTube in 1908. But George W. Bush gave fitness such a bad name I really expected the next president to be someone like Hillary Clinton, who does not seem to regard her treadmill as an integral part of the family circle. Instead, we elected a guy who’s so attractive that the Nobel committee couldn’t resist giving him a Peace Prize before he ever did anything. It was sort of like one of those greeting cards that say: “Thank you for being you.”

If the anti-fat bias among voters gets too intense, we are going to get in trouble eventually. The number of overweight Americans keeps going up, and pretty soon there are only going to be about six people in each state who are qualified to run for the U.S. Senate. The presidency may have to become a monarchy.

Here’s Mr. Blow:

Last Saturday, actor, playwright and impresario Tyler Perry posted a heart-rending message on his Web site recounting the abuses of his childhood. It was hard to read it without welling up.

His father had constantly belittled and savagely beaten him. Perry wrote that one beating was so merciless that “the skin was coming off my back.” When he was about 10 years old, while trying to leave a friend’s house, Perry wrote that the friend’s mother made lewd and disgusting suggestions and pulled him on top of her.

At another point, Perry wrote about a man from church who had molested him.

Coming on the heels of the arrest of Roman Polanski for his 1977 crime of plying a 13-year-old girl with Champagne and Quaaludes before raping and sodomizing her, and the revelation from Mackenzie Phillips that she had had a 10-year “consensual incestuous” relationship with her own father that she believes began when she was a teenager, it raises the question: How pervasive is child sexual abuse and how often do these crimes go unreported?

The statistics are sobering.

According to a 2000 report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, nearly 70 percent of all sexual assaults are committed against children. While the age with the greatest proportion of assaults reported was 14, more than half of all child victims were under 12. And of those under 12, 4-year-olds were at the greatest risk.

According to a Unicef report released this week, “5 to 10 percent of girls and up to 5 percent of boys suffer penetrative sexual abuse.” Up to three times of those numbers experience some type of sexual abuse.

The good news: Reports of sexual abuse in the United States seem to be sliding. The not-so-good news: Reports and prevalence are not the same, and it’s not conclusive that they move in concert. The bad news: If up to 3 in 10 girls and 3 in 20 boys are still being assaulted, these are epidemic proportions. And, if most cases are never reported, it’s a silent epidemic.

Like Perry, most child victims — scared, confused and ashamed — tell no one. Instead, they shunt the unsavory secret into a dark corner of the mind, where they try, alone, for years to make sense of it.

We must do a better job of helping these children realize that they are not alone, not at fault and not powerless, that there is hope and help and healing.

We need a public education campaign that speaks directly to children — on Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, at the beginning of G-rated movies, on classroom bulletin boards, everywhere. Nothing graphic, just something simple: “If it feels wrong, it’s wrong. Say something. It’s your body.”

And now here’s Mr. Herbert:

Think of this recession as a monstrous hurricane that swept through the job market and is still wreaking havoc. The latest unemployment rate for California is a knee-buckling 12.2 percent, the highest since World War II.

The job market nationwide is the worst it has been in 70 years, noted Robert Reich, the former labor secretary, during one of several conversations that I had with him over the past week. He dismissed the upbeat talk of “green shoots” sprouting in the devastated economic landscape and the dreamy notion that recovery is no longer just around the corner, it’s here.

The economy may have recovered technically, he said, “but this is not a real recovery.”

The Obama administration’s stimulus package has mitigated the damage, but it was not big enough or targeted enough toward job creation to halt the continued hemorrhaging in employment. (Incredibly, some 40,000 teachers have lost their jobs over the past year, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research.)

Without jobs, you don’t have a genuine recovery. And with consumers tapped out and business investment hamstrung, it’s up to the government to develop creative approaches and make the investments necessary to start putting people back to work in large numbers.

There are plenty of serious proposals available that are both doable and affordable.

Mr. Reich, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, is among those who favor a tax credit for small businesses that create jobs. This is tricky. Policy makers have to make sure that the credit is given only for net new hires, as companies will attempt to get a tax break for hires they would have made anyway.

“Under normal circumstances,” said Mr. Reich, “I would never recommend this. It’s a very blunt instrument. But these are not normal circumstances.”

A virtue of the tax credit, which reportedly is being considered by the administration, is that it could get significant Republican support.

Another promising approach is substantially increased federal aid to state and local governments, above and beyond what is already occurring. Local governments from one coast to the other are facing budget meltdowns and are slashing services and personnel.

“When states cut programs or raise taxes, that slows the economy down,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “You can prevent that if you give them aid, and that means state employees, and employees of local governments that depend on state assistance, don’t get laid off.”

That’s the beginning of an important ripple effect that spreads to the private sector jobs in firms that do business with state and local governments. The federal aid can help keep these folks on the job and contributing to the economy until a real turnaround occurs.

“We estimate that half the jobs that are created by fiscal relief to the states are private-sector jobs,” said Mr. Mishel. “No one thinks about that.”

More controversial but increasingly important is the idea of direct government job creation. The recession has absolutely crushed employment opportunities for unskilled, undereducated young people — not just in big cities and rural areas, but in suburban communities as well. Without direct government intervention, the recession is never going to end for them.

During the first half of this year in Illinois, to take one wretched example, just one in four black men in the age group of 20 through 24 had a job.

Nationally during that period, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston, “the employment rate of males 16-19, 20-24, and 25-29 were at their lowest values over the past 61 years for which national employment data are available.” That’s for men of all ethnic groups.

“The past,” as William Faulkner told us, “is not dead. It’s not even past.” The lessons of the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s are right in front of us, ready to be studied, analyzed, updated and applied to the present-day needs of the country.

If we’re serious about getting the U.S. back on track economically, we will have to take our heads out of the sand at some point with regard to the nation’s infrastructure. America has to be rebuilt, modernized and re-energized — from its water and sewer systems to its schools to the smart grid and the alternative energy sources that so many are talking about and beyond. That’s where the jobs are for the long term, and that’s the only route to a truly flourishing future.

These investments would be costly and require vision. Seeing them through would take an enormous collective effort by politicians and the public alike. But some variation on these themes is absolutely essential if the U.S. is to pull itself out of the economic quicksand and its long-term, potentially very tragic consequences.

Collins and Cohen

Mr. Kristof is off.  Ms. Collins, in “So Much for Civility,” says most of the Republicans listening to Barack Obama’s health care address sat in stony silence, but there were a few exceptions, and honestly, guys, she thinks you can do better.  Mr. Cohen, in “New Tweets, Old Needs,” says Twitter is a formidable new tool for communication, but it is not journalism. In fact, journalism in many ways is the antithesis of the deluge of raw material that new social media deliver.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

Let me go out on a limb and say that it is not a good plan to heckle the president of the United States when he’s making a speech about replacing acrimony with civility.

Most of the Republicans listening to Barack Obama’s health care address Wednesday night followed the normal rule about sitting in stony silence while the president’s party leaps up and down in rapturous applause. But there were a few exceptions, notably Joe Wilson, a member of Congress from South Carolina who loudly called the president a liar.

This was when Obama said illegal immigrants would not be covered by health care reform. It seemed like a pretty tame remark for so much disrespect, given all the recent uproar over the president’s alleged ability to brainwash elementary school students.

You might have expected Wilson to hold his tongue and wait to see if Obama would yell “Marxism is a good thing!” and send the commerce committee racing off to give workers control over the means of production.

I always wonder what the members of Congress are actually thinking while they listen to a presidential address. Maybe Senator Max Baucus, the chairman of the Finance Committee, was thinking about the health care reform bill he has yet to pass, although it is equally possible that he was just daydreaming about his recipe for huckleberry pie or that time he walked all the way across Montana, just because it was there and he was running for re-election.

Baucus has become central to health care reform, through the classic dithering technique. Finance has been so slow off the dime that in his speech, Obama gave it kudos for having announced “it will move forward next week.” The problem, according to Baucus, is that he wants a bipartisan bill that meets the cost-control demands of his favorite Republican colleagues.

Sure, Obama talked the fiscally responsible talk last night. But he cannot hold a candle to Baucus and Chuck Grassley, the committee’s lead Republican. These guys are really, really, really concerned about balancing the budget. And that seems only fair since they were basically the ones who unbalanced it in the first place when they worked in splendid bipartisan concert in 2001 to pass George W. Bush’s first $1.6 trillion in tax cuts.

We do not know exactly what Grassley was thinking while the president was talking. Perhaps he was mentally composing a twitter about the speech. The senator has been tweetless since last weekend, when he recorded the memorable: “Saw Ia U beat my school 17/16. UNI played best I proud of my team Pres Mason came up 22pts short of her prediction 4 victory. She good Prez.”

All summer we have heard reports that a special bipartisan group of six senators, including Baucus and Grassley, were working on a health care reform deal. Having a conversation. Talking on the phone. Posting on each other’s Facebook wall. Still, no bill and the definition of “bipartisan” shrank from 70 votes in the Senate to “Olympia Snowe seems to like it.”

We do not know exactly what Senator Snowe of Maine was thinking during the president’s speech. Probably about the president’s speech. She is really, really diligent.

It’s always possible that the Republicans will realize that their virulent opposition is not doing the country any good, and at least be obstructionist in a more cheerful way. Although Wednesday night, when the TV cameras caught the House minority leader, John Boehner, he looked as though he had just swallowed a cough drop.

Boehner got the day off to a fine start by telling reporters he expected the president would “try to put lipstick on this pig and call it something else.” It was a stunning development, suggesting that a new page in American politics was turning, one in which members of both parties could once again come together and toss around that lipstick-pig metaphor without being accused of a sexist attack on Sarah Palin.

The speech sounded fine to me, although I have to admit I’m still disappointed that Obama’s people have not done enough to start interesting rumors on their side of the debate. “Security and stability” is not quite as exciting as stories about old people being executed or registered Republicans being stripped of their Medicare.

So, I was hoping that the reform side would do some groundwork before the big address and start floating stories about how universal health care would save the car industry or combat hair loss.

I envisioned Robert Gibbs getting up at the next press conference and saying: “Look, I know it’s all over the Web that under health care reform every family will get a new wide-screen plasma TV. It’s just not so. That provision was merely proposed by the House Commerce Committee.

“However, I can confirm that the public option has been renamed the Captain Sully Sullenberger Julia Child Oprah option.”

Here’s Mr. Cohen:

Two mullahs gaze out on a crowd of protesters in Tehran. The one says, “Arrest the correspondents.” To which the despondent reply is: “But they’re all correspondents!”

This story, recounted by Mahasti Afshar, an Iranian-American scholar, during a debate at the University of Southern California, captures the post-election coming-of-age of new social media like Twitter that have provided critical information and images on the post-electoral upheaval even as the authorities have driven out mainstream networks and newspapers.

Iranian citizen-journalists have tweet-transformed the American image of their country (online youth have supplanted mad mullahs); globalized the protest movement by drawing a vast and previously apathetic Iranian diaspora into the struggle (albeit with still debilitating divisions); and provided an effective organizing tool in the absence of strong leadership (Mir Hussein Moussavi, thy name is meekness). These are not small achievements.

Still, the mainstream media — expelled, imprisoned, vilified — is missed. Iran has gone opaque. Its crisis is seen through a glass darkly. Its cries are muffled, its anguish subdued. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad rides roughshod. Nuclear calculus silences Western capitals.

After I left Iran, in early July, I wrote that Iranians “have borne witness — with cellphone video images, with photographs, through Twitter and other forms of social networking — and have thereby amassed an ineffaceable global indictment of the usurpers of June 12.

“Never again will Ahmadinejad speak of justice without being undone by the Neda Effect — the image of eyes blanking, life abating and blood blotching across the face of Neda Agha-Soltan.”

We now know that the 26-year-old student was among more than 70 people killed in the post-election violence. But who is there to investigate these deaths — or allegations of wholesale rape of hundreds of arrested men and women — and so shed light?

In the same column, I wrote that “To be a journalist is to bear witness. The rest is no more than ornamentation. To bear witness means being there — and that’s not free. No search engine gives you the smell of a crime, the tremor in the air, the eyes that smolder, or the cadence of a scream.”

This was too much for Arianna Huffington of the eponymous Post who fumed that I had chosen “to attack the tools of new-media-fueled reporting by citing the very event that highlights the power of those tools” and opined: “The truth is, you don’t have to ‘be there’ to bear witness. And you can be there and fail to bear witness.”

Huh? You can’t bear witness from afar any more than you make an omelet without cracking eggs. Seeing is different and has a price, sometimes even the ultimate price. As for being there and failing to bear witness, well, yes, you might be in a Hafez-induced trance or off climbing the Alborz mountains, if so inclined, but that’s hardly material.

Twitter’s pitch is “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.” That’s what it does — up to a point. It’s many things, including a formidable alerting system for a breaking story; a means of organization; a monitor of global interest levels (Iran trended highest for weeks until Michael Jackson’s death) and of media performance; a bank of essential links; a rich archive; and a community (“Twitter is my best friend.”)

But is it journalism? No. In fact journalism in many ways is the antithesis of the “Here Comes Everybody” — Clay Shirky’s good phrase — deluge of raw material that new social media deliver. For journalism is distillation. It is a choice of material, whether in words or image, made in pursuit of presenting the truest and fairest, most vivid and complete representation of a situation.

It comes into being only through an organizing intelligence, an organizing sensibility. It depends on form, an unfashionable little word, without which significance is lost to chaos. As Aristotle suggested more than two millennia ago, form requires a beginning and middle and end. It demands unity of theme. Journalism cuts through the atwitter state to thematic coherence.

In the making of the choices I have described, presence is required. Because part of the choice lies in something ineffable — the air you breathe, the sounds you hear, the shadow light as a bird’s wing that falls across fearful eyes — something that cannot be seized or rendered at a distance.

Technology has enriched journalism by expanding the means to deliver it and the raw material on which it is based. But technology has also diminished the incentive — and the revenue — to get out of the office. Understanding without the trained “view from the ground” (Martha Gellhorn) remains impossible. Nature abhors a vacuum, journalism even more so, and so it fills absence with windiness.

Iran expelled or imprisoned the mainstream media for a reason: to blind the world, to bewilder it, to make it forgetful.

But do not forget. Newsweek’s Maziar Bahari still languishes incommunicado in prison more than two months after his arrest. The dead are still dead. The seething still seethe. Ahmadinejad will address the United Nations in New York on Sept. 23. He must be reminded that the world demands the truth as seen and distilled from the ground.

Friedman and Kristof

MoDo and Frank Rich are off today.  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “From Baby-Sitting to Adoption,” says after eight years of work in Afghanistan, we still do not have a reliable Afghan partner to hand off to. It’s time to discuss if nation building is still worth doing and at what cost.  Mr. Kristof, in “The Afghanistan Abyss,” says sending more American troops into ethnic Pashtun areas in the Afghan south may only galvanize local people to back the Taliban.  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

On Aug. 29, this newspaper carried a front-page headline that should make your blood boil: “Karzai Using Rift With U.S. to Gain Favor.” The article said that Obama officials were growing disenchanted with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, whose supporters allegedly stuffed ballot boxes in the recent elections, while Mr. Karzai struck deals with accused drug dealers and warlords, one of whom is his brother, for political gain. The article added, though, that in a feat of political shrewdness, Mr. Karzai “has surprised some in the Obama administration” by turning their anger with him “to an advantage, portraying himself at home as the only political candidate willing to stand up to the dictates of the United States.”

If this is how our “allies” are treating us in Afghanistan, after eight years, then one really has to ask not whether we can afford to lose there but whether we can afford to win there.

It would be one thing if the people we were fighting with and for represented everything the Taliban did not: decency, respect for women’s rights and education, respect for the rule of law and democratic values and rejection of drug-dealing. But they do not. Too many in this Kabul government are just a different kind of bad. This has become a war between light black — Karzai & Co. — and dark black — Taliban Inc. And light black is simply not good enough to ask Americans to pay for with blood or treasure.

This is the most important and troubling fact about Afghanistan today: After eight years of work there, we still do not have a reliable Afghan partner to hand off to. And it is not all our fault. Lord knows, Iraq still has problems. The outcome there remains uncertain. But the reason Iraq still has a chance for a decent future is because a critical mass of Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites were ready to take on their own extremists and hold reasonably fair elections. The surge in Iraq started with key Iraqi communities wanting to liberate themselves from their own radicals. Our troops helped them do that.

The strategy that our new — and impressive — commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, is pursuing calls for additional troops to create something that does not now exist there — a reasonably noncorrupt Afghan state that will serve its people and partner with America in keeping Afghanistan free of drug lords, warlords, the Taliban and Al Qaeda. His plan calls for clearing areas of Taliban control, holding those areas and then building effective local, district and provincial governments — along with a bigger army, real courts, police and public services. Because only with all that can we hold the support of the Afghan people and avoid a Taliban victory and a return of Al Qaeda that could threaten us. That is the theory.

And it may, indeed, be the only way to go, but we should have no illusions: We’re talking State Building 101 in the most inhospitable terrain and in one of the poorest, most tribalized, countries in the world.

As the military expert Anthony Cordesman, who has advised the U.S. Army in Afghanistan, explained in The Washington Post recently, it requires “a significant number” of U.S. reinforcements and time to do what the Kabul government has failed to do, because it remains “a grossly overcentralized government that is corrupt, is often a tool of power brokers and narco-traffickers, and lacks basic capacity in virtually every ministry.”

To put it another way, we are not just adding more troops in Afghanistan. We are transforming our mission — from baby-sitting to adoption. We are going from a limited mission focused on baby-sitting Afghanistan — no matter how awful its government — in order to prevent an Al Qaeda return to adopting Afghanistan as our state-building project.

I recently looked back at Stephanie Sinclair’s stunning 2006 photograph in The Times of Ghulam Haider, an 11-year-old Afghan girl seated next to the bearded 40-year-old man she was about to be married off to. The article said Haider had hoped to be a teacher but was forced to quit her classes when she became engaged. The furtive sideways glance of her eyes at her future husband said she was terrified. The article said: “On the day she witnessed the engagement party. … Sinclair discreetly took the girl aside. ‘What are you feeling today?’ the photographer asked. ‘Nothing,’ the bewildered girl answered. ‘I do not know this man. What am I supposed to feel?’ ”

That is the raw clay for our state-building. It may still be worth doing, but one thing I know for sure, it must be debated anew. This is a much bigger undertaking than we originally signed up for. Before we adopt a new baby — Afghanistan — we need to have a new national discussion about this project: what it will cost, how much time it could take, what U.S. interests make it compelling, and, most of all, who is going to oversee this policy?

I feel a vast and rising ambivalence about this in the American public today, and adopting a baby you are ambivalent about is a prescription for disaster.

And here’s Mr. Kristof:

President Obama has already dispatched an additional 21,000 American troops to Afghanistan and soon will decide whether to send thousands more. That would be a fateful decision for his presidency, and a group of former intelligence officials and other experts is now reluctantly going public to warn that more troops would be a historic mistake.

The group’s concern — dead right, in my view — is that sending more American troops into ethnic Pashtun areas in the Afghan south may only galvanize local people to back the Taliban in repelling the infidels.

“Our policy makers do not understand that the very presence of our forces in the Pashtun areas is the problem,” the group said in a statement to me. “The more troops we put in, the greater the opposition. We do not mitigate the opposition by increasing troop levels, but rather we increase the opposition and prove to the Pashtuns that the Taliban are correct.

“The basic ignorance by our leadership is going to cause the deaths of many fine American troops with no positive outcome,” the statement said.

The group includes Howard Hart, a former Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Pakistan; David Miller, a former ambassador and National Security Council official; William J. Olson, a counterinsurgency scholar at the National Defense University; and another C.I.A. veteran who does not want his name published but who spent 12 years in the region, was station chief in Kabul at the time the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and later headed the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center.

“We share a concern that the country is driving over a cliff,” Mr. Miller said.

Mr. Hart, who helped organize the anti-Soviet insurgency in the 1980s, cautions that Americans just don’t understand the toughness, determination and fighting skills of the Pashtun tribes. He adds that if the U.S. escalates the war, the result will be radicalization of Pashtuns in Pakistan and further instability there — possibly even the collapse of Pakistan.

These experts are not people who crave publicity; I had to persuade them to go public with their concerns. And their views are widely shared among others who also know Afghanistan well.

“We’ve bitten off more than we can chew; we’re setting ourselves up for failure,” said Rory Stewart, a former British diplomat who teaches at Harvard when he is not running a large aid program in Afghanistan. Mr. Stewart describes the American military strategy in Afghanistan as “nonsense.”

I’m writing about these concerns because I share them. I’m also troubled because officials in Washington seem to make decisions based on a simplistic caricature of the Taliban that doesn’t match what I’ve found in my reporting trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Among the Pashtuns, the population is not neatly divisible into “Taliban” or “non-Taliban.” Rather, the Pashtuns are torn by complex aspirations and fears.

Many Pashtuns I’ve interviewed are appalled by the Taliban’s periodic brutality and think they are too extreme; they think they’re a little nuts. But these Pashtuns also admire the Taliban’s personal honesty and religious piety, a contrast to the corruption of so many officials around President Hamid Karzai.

Some Taliban are hard-core ideologues, but many join the fight because friends or elders suggest it, because they are avenging the deaths of relatives in previous fighting, because it’s a way to earn money, or because they want to expel the infidels from their land — particularly because the foreigners haven’t brought the roads, bridges and irrigation projects that had been anticipated.

Frankly, if a bunch of foreign Muslim troops in turbans showed up in my hometown in rural Oregon, searching our homes without bringing any obvious benefit, then we might all take to the hills with our deer rifles as well.

In fairness, the American military has hugely improved its sensitivity, and some commanders in the field have been superb in building trust with Afghans. That works. But all commanders can’t be superb, and over all, our increased presence makes Pashtuns more likely to see us as alien occupiers.

That may be why the troop increase this year hasn’t calmed things. Instead, 2009 is already the bloodiest year for American troops in Afghanistan — with four months left to go.

The solution is neither to pull out of Afghanistan nor to double down. Rather, we need to continue our presence with a lighter military footprint, limited to training the Afghan forces and helping them hold major cities, and ensuring that Al Qaeda does not regroup. We must also invest more in education and agriculture development, for that is a way over time to peel Pashtuns away from the Taliban.

This would be a muddled, imperfect strategy with frustratingly modest goals, but it would be sustainable politically and militarily. And it does not require heavy investments of American and Afghan blood.

Everyone in the current administration should be forced to read “Kim” and “Three Cups of Tea.”

A lonely Sunday for Kristof

Dowd, Friedman and Rich are all off today.  Mr. Kristof, in “Until Medical Bills Do Us Part,” has a question:  How do those who fear death panels feel about a health care system that breaks apart families?  Here he is:

Critics fret that health care reform would undermine American family values, not least by convening somber death panels to wheel away Grandma as if she were Old Yeller.

But peel away the emotions and fearmongering, and in fact it is the existing system that unnecessarily takes lives and breaks apart families.

My friend M. — you’ll understand in a moment why she’s terrified of my using her name — had to make a searing decision a year ago. She was married to a sweet, gentle man whom she loved, but who had become increasingly absent-minded. Finally, he was diagnosed with early-onset dementia.

The disease is degenerative, and he will become steadily less able to care for himself. At some point, as his medical needs multiply, he will probably need to be institutionalized.

The hospital arranged a conference call with a social worker, who outlined how the dementia and its financial toll on the family would progress, and then added, out of the blue: “Maybe you should divorce.”

“I was blown away,” M. told me. But, she said, the hospital staff members explained that they had seen it all before, many times. If M.’s husband required long-term care, the costs would be catastrophic even for a middle-class family with savings.

Eventually, after the expenses whittled away their combined assets, her husband could go on Medicaid — but by then their children’s nest egg would be gone, along with her 401(k) plan. She would face a bleak retirement with neither her husband nor her savings.

A complicating factor was that this was a second marriage. M.’s first husband had died, leaving an inheritance that he had intended for their children. She and her second husband had a prenuptial agreement, but that would not protect her assets from his medical expenses.

The hospital told M. not to waste time in dissolving the marriage. For five years after any divorce, her assets could be seized — precisely because the government knows that people sometimes divorce husbands or wives to escape their medical bills.

“How could I divorce him? I loved him,” she told me.

“I explored a lot of options with an attorney here in town,” she added. “The attorney said, ‘I don’t see any other options for you.’ It took about a year for me to do the divorce, it was so hard.”

So M. divorced the man she loves. I asked him what he thought of this. He can still speak, albeit not always coherently, and he paused a long, long time. All he could manage was: “It’s hard to say.”

Long-term care constitutes a difficult and expensive challenge in any health system. But the American patchwork, full of cracks through which people fall, has a special problem with medical expenses of all kinds bankrupting couples.

A study reported in The American Journal of Medicine this month found that 62 percent of American bankruptcies are linked to medical bills. These medical bankruptcies had increased nearly 50 percent in just six years. Astonishingly, 78 percent of these people actually had health insurance, but the gaps and inadequacies left them unprotected when they were hit by devastating bills.

M. still helps her husband and, quietly, continues to live with him and care for him. But she worries that the authorities will come after her if they realize that they divorced not because of irreconcilable differences but because of irreconcilable medical bills. There were awkward questions from friends who saw the divorce announcement in the newspaper.

“It’s just crazy,” she said. “It twists people like pretzels.”

The existing system doesn’t just break up families, it also costs lives. A 2004 study by the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, found that lack of health insurance causes 18,000 unnecessary deaths a year. That’s one person slipping through the cracks and dying every half an hour.

In short, it’s a good bet that our existing dysfunctional health system knocks off far more people than an army of “death panels” could — even if they existed, worked 24/7 and got around in a fleet of black helicopters.

So, for those of you inclined to believe the worst about President Obama, think it through. Suppose he is indeed a secret, foreign-born Muslim agent who is scheming to undermine American family values while killing off as many grandmothers as possible.

If all that were true, why on earth would he be trying so hard to reform our health care system? We already know how to prod families into divorce and take a life unnecessarily every 30 minutes — all we need to do is reject reform and stick with exactly what we have.

Solo MoDo

The Moustache of Wisdom is off today.  MoDo has her panties in a bunch about the interwebs toobz.  In “Stung by the Perfect Sting” she says the Internet was supposed to be the prolix paradise where everyone was free to have their say. Yet in this infinite realm of truth-telling, many want to hide.  Here she is:

If I read all the vile stuff about me on the Internet, I’d never come to work. I’d scamper off and live my dream of being a cocktail waitress in a militia bar in Wyoming.

If you’re written about in a nasty way, it looms much larger for you than for anyone else. Gossip goes in one ear and out the other unless you’re the subject. Then, nobody’s skin is thick enough.

“The velocity and volume on the Web are so great that nothing is forgotten and nothing is remembered,” says Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic. “The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone’s drunk and ugly and they’re going to pass out in a few minutes.”

Those are my people, I protested, but I knew what he meant. That’s why I was interested in the Case of the Blond Model and the Malicious Blogger.

Sooner or later, this sort of suit will end up before the Supreme Court.

It began eight months ago when Liskula Cohen, a 37-year-old model and Australian Vogue cover girl, was surprised to find herself winning a “Skankiest in NYC” award from an anonymous blogger. The online tormentor put up noxious commentary on Google’s blogger.com, calling Cohen a “skank,” a “ho” and an “old hag” who “may have been hot 10 years ago.”

Cohen says she’s “a lover, not a fighter.” But the model had stood up for herself before. In 2007, at a New York club, she tried to stop a man named Samir Dervisevic who wanted to drink from the vodka bottle on her table. He hit her in the face with the bottle and gouged a hole “the size of a quarter,” as she put it, requiring plastic surgery.

This time, she punched the virtual bully in the face, filing a defamation suit to force Google to give up the blogger’s e-mail. And she won.

“The words ‘skank,’ ‘skanky’ and ‘ho’ carry a negative implication of sexual promiscuity,” wrote Justice Joan Madden of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, rejecting the Anonymous Blogger’s assertion that blogs are a modern soapbox designed for opinions, rants and invective.

The judge cited a Virginia court decision that the Internet’s “virtually unlimited, inexpensive and almost immediate means of communication” with the masses means “the dangers of its misuse cannot be ignored. The protection of the right to communicate anonymously must be balanced against the need to assure that those persons who choose to abuse the opportunities presented by this medium can be made to answer for such transgressions.”

Cyberbullies, she wrote, cannot hide “behind an illusory shield of purported First Amendment rights.”

Once she had the e-mail address, Cohen discovered whence the smears: a cafe society acquaintance named Rosemary Port, a pretty 29-year-old Fashion Institute of Technology student.

Cohen called and forgave Port, but did not get an apology. She had her lawyer, Steve Wagner, drop her defamation suit. But now Port says she’ll file a $15 million suit against Google for giving her up.

Port contends that if Cohen hadn’t sued, hardly anyone would have seen the blog. (If a skank falls in the forest and no one hears it … ?)

But Cohen says the Internet is different than water-cooler gossip. “It’s there for the whole world to see,” she told me. “What happened to integrity? Why go out of your way solely to upset somebody else? Why can’t we all just be nice?”

She said she may become an activist, and has been e-mailing with Tina Meier, mother of Megan Meier, the 13-year-old who killed herself after getting cyberbullied by the mother of a classmate who pretended to be a teen suitor named “Josh.”

“If that woman had started a MySpace page as herself, that little girl would still be in her mother’s arms,” Cohen said.

The Internet was supposed to be the prolix paradise where there would be no more gatekeepers and everyone would finally have their say. We would express ourselves freely at any level, high or low, with no inhibitions.

Yet in this infinite realm of truth-telling, many want to hide. Who are these people prepared to tell you what they think, but not who they are? What is the mentality that lets them get in our face while wearing a mask? Shredding somebody’s character before the entire world and not being held accountable seems like the perfect sting.

Pseudonyms have a noble history. Revolutionaries in France, founding fathers and Soviet dissidents used them. The great poet Fernando Pessoa used heteronyms to write in different styles and even to review the work composed under his other names.

As Hugo Black wrote in 1960, “It is plain that anonymity has sometimes been assumed for the most constructive purposes.”

But on the Internet, it’s often less about being constructive and more about being cowardly.

Collins, Blow and Herbert

In “The Obamas Leave Town” Ms. Collins suggests that even on vacation with Michelle and the girls, President Obama is probably getting no end of helpful suggestions on what to do about health care.  Mr. Blow gives us “Masters and Slaves of Deception,” and says that President Obama should have treated health care reform the same way he treated the stimulus package — by personally helping to shape it and push it through from the start.  Bob Herbert, in “Voices of Anxiety,” says President Obama may be sanguine, but the same cannot be said of the general public, including some of his most ardent supporters.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

The Obama family is off for a week of summer vacation. This is something Barack owes Michelle and the girls, although I am sure he would personally have preferred to stay in Washington listening to people tell him what to do about health care.

The president is getting no end of helpful suggestions. Right now there is probably a caddy on Martha’s Vineyard wondering if he will be picked to carry Barack’s clubs, and if so, whether there will be time to put in a plug for the public option.

The Republicans say if Obama wants a bill that can pass, he should pay more attention to their ideas. Particularly the one about how he has to make the whole thing cheaper without getting the government in the business of reducing health care costs.

Democrats want him to stop betraying the party’s progressive base by being all kumbaya and bipartisan just because he won the election by being all kumbaya and bipartisan.

I am personally thinking that he should grab a copy of Tom Ridge’s memoir to read on vacation, come back and change the terror alert level to orange.

This summer we have found fissures in the social contract we never knew existed before. Until August, I had no idea that we were split over the question of whether it was a good plan to bring an assault rifle to a site where people had gathered to greet the president of the United States.

But the biggest stunner was the high regard in which the town meeting protesters seemed to hold members of Congress.

One thing I thought all Americans agreed about was that Congress is incapable of getting anything done. But the angry people at those meetings seemed to believe that their elected representatives are strong, sneaky, indifferent to public opinion, and intent on eviscerating popular and much-needed programs in order to create a national health care plan that will make everybody miserable.

This was a shocking new concept, a kind of Bizarro Congress that is exactly the opposite of the one we see stumbling through its paces on TV. That CSPAN Congress would quake in terror if asked to pass a bill against littering, fearing constituents might strain their backs by bending down to pick things up. It took the members 30 years to ax a fighter jet program even the Pentagon hates. Who knew they had the gumption to create death panels?

Charles Grassley, the Republican senator from Iowa, told one town hall meeting that people “have every right to fear” that health care reform could lead to a “government program that determines if you’re going to pull the plug on grandma.” Grassley has been in the Senate for 28 years, and chaired the Senate Special Committee on Aging. Yet he seems never to have noticed that if forced to choose between slaughtering a pen full of cute puppies and irritating the senior voters, every single elected official in Washington would grab a hatchet and dive for the dogs.

Grassley is a member of the six-person Senate negotiating panel that is making everybody wait around while it allegedly works on a bipartisan health care plan. On Friday, the group leader, Max Baucus of Montana, reported the good news that the senators had a “productive” phone conversation in which the members “discussed our progress.”

This is the sort of encouraging report that is going to have Obama hitting the lobsters over the head with his putter.

Grassley and Mike Enzi of Wyoming, another Republican negotiator, have been busy upping the ante on what counts as truly bipartisan. The magic number for Enzi and Grassley now seems to be 80 votes in the Senate. This would mean getting at least half the Senate Republicans on board.

Try to imagine what that would entail. The current Republican caucus contains exactly two members (Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine) who might be called moderate. After that you move into people like Grassley, who is part of the smallish Calm Conservative camp. Then you come to the larger Friendly Reactionaries contingent of which Enzi is a member and which has not indicated actual support for anything about health care reform except bipartisan negotiations. To get to 80 you would have to venture even further to the right, into the Clan of the Cave Bear.

It is not clear whether the 80-vote theory was part of the progress that the bipartisan negotiating panel discussed during that extremely productive call. Maybe they were trading stories about how they spent their summer vacations.

You may recall that the six states represented by the negotiators contain a whopping 2.77 percent of the American population. Perhaps they just wanted to stay on the phone because they’re lonely.

Here’s Mr. Blow:

President Obama made a huge mistake in pursuing health care reform. He tried to be hands-off when he needed to be knee-deep. The White House overcompensated for the Clinton-era defeat of health care reform by offering too little guidance and support to its own party’s lawmakers, who are now struggling to craft a coherent message out of a confusing bill. Adding to the challenge: this must be done in a bipartisan way.

But true bipartisanship, not withstanding candidate Obama’s grandiose visions of a post-partisan world, is becoming an increasingly quaint notion.

In this Washington, no outreached hand goes unmangled. Seeing an opening, conservatives have rushed in.

They have started Operation Master and Slaves of Deception — cooking up scary, outlandish claims about the plan and feeding them to a desperate base, eager to believe the worst about the man they loathe the most, President Obama.

Conservatives are now on fertile ground. Still enraged by the ignominy of having been trounced, they are most likely feeling marginalized, ignored and afraid. For them, it has been less about clarifying health care reform and more about a clarion call to resistance.

And the deceptions have worked. According to an NBC News poll released this week, 76 percent of Republicans believe that the health care plan will lead to a government takeover of the health care system; 70 percent believe it will allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care to the elderly; and 61 percent believe it will allow the use of taxpayer dollars for abortions.

Conservative lawmakers should be delirious. Not only is this stoking the passions of their dwindling base, it is opening the spigot of money from the health care industry and conservative groups.

According to a report on Wednesday by OpenSecrets.org’s Center for Responsive Politics, health services and H.M.O.’s increased their campaign donations by 37 percent from the first to the second quarter this year. Republican and conservative advocacy groups increased their contributions by a whopping 237 percent over the same time period. For comparison, donations by Democratic and liberal advocacy groups declined.

Realizing that the plan was running into trouble with a wrangling right, the president began kowtowing to the crazies himself. When the president of the United States has to reassure us that he is not going to kill our grandmothers, you know there’s a problem.

The president should have treated health care reform the same way he treated the stimulus package — by personally helping to shape it and push it through from the start.

On Feb. 11, a Gallup poll found that 59 percent of Americans over all supported the economic stimulus package, but only 28 percent of Republicans supported it. This is not so different from the way Americans feel about health care. According to a CNN/Opinion Research poll released this month, 50 percent of Americans said that they favored “Barack Obama’s plan to reform health care,” compared with just 19 percent of Republicans.

The Democrats forged ahead with the stimulus package. The House passed it without a single Republican vote, and the Senate passed it with the help of three moderate Republicans.

Six months later, what is the result? According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll released yesterday, half of Americans now expect the recession to be over within 12 months and “almost twice as many say the program has made things better as say it has made things worse (43 percent to 23 percent).”

Nothing succeeds like success. Now that the stimulus plan appears to be working, no one even remembers the acrimony about its passage.

Finally the Democrats are making rumblings that they may try to go it alone on health care reform as well. It’s about time.

The conservatives are not negotiating in good faith anyway. Chuck “snake in the” Grassley, ranking Republican member of the Senate Finance Committee and one of three Republicans supposedly working on the bipartisan health bill, is even propagating the nonsense, telling supporters that they have “every right to fear … a government program that determines if you’re going to pull the plug on grandma.”

There is nothing that the Democrats can do to placate this cabal. This is how the Republicans see it: for them to win, the plan must fail.

Concessions simply weaken the bill, with little reward. For instance, a Rasmussen Reports poll last week found that 78 percent of conservatives opposed the reform plan. This week, they were asked if they would support the plan if the controversial public option was removed, and 73 percent said that they would still oppose it. By contrast, liberal support for the plan sans public option dropped by a third.

The conservatives are never going to play ball. As the Senate Republican whip, Jon Kyl of Arizona, put it, “there is no way that Republicans are going to support a trillion-dollar-plus bill,” even if it doesn’t increase the deficit.

Most important, this two-year window may be the only time Democrats can push through reform without Republican support. As Nate Silver pointed out on his blog last week, “Without major intervening events like 9/11, the party that wins the White House almost always loses seats at the midterm elections — since World War II, an average of 17 seats in the House after the White House changes parties.” There is no reason to believe that this won’t be the case next year.

A poll released by Rasmussen Reports this week found that on a generic Congressional ballot, Republican candidates hold a 5 percent advantage over Democratic ones.

The time is now. Just do it.

Amen.  Here’s Mr. Herbert:

Barack Obama is a guy who is easy to underestimate. Six years ago hardly anyone outside of Illinois had ever heard of him. Now he’s America’s first Zen-master president.

On Thursday, he made a jocular reference to the tendency of pundits and others to declare periodically that he’s off his game and headed for disaster. He noted that in August 2008, with his poll numbers wavering and the Republicans energized by the addition of Sarah Palin to the national ticket, a lot of people were convinced that, as he put it, “Obama’s lost his mojo.”

“You remember all that?” he asked, smiling. “There is something about August going into September where everybody in Washington gets all wee-weed up.”

Wee-weed up? I don’t know what that means, but the president seemed pretty relaxed when he said it. This was the same day that he went on a radio program and did his Joe Namath routine, guaranteeing that health care reform would get done.

The president may be sanguine, but the same cannot be said of the general public, including some of Mr. Obama’s most ardent supporters. The American people are worried sick over the economy, which may be sprouting green shoots from Ben Bernanke’s lofty perspective but not from the humble standpoint of the many millions who are unemployed, or those who are still working but barely able to pay their bills and hold onto their homes.

This is the reality that underlies the anxiety over the president’s ragged effort to achieve health care reform. Forget the certifiables who are scrawling Hitler mustaches on pictures of the president. Many sane and intelligent people who voted for Mr. Obama and sincerely want him to succeed have legitimate concerns about the timing of this health reform initiative and the way it is unfolding.

The president has not made it clear to the general public why health care reform is his top domestic priority when the biggest issue on the minds of most Americans is the economy. Men and women who once felt themselves to be securely rooted in the middle or upper middle classes are now struggling with pay cuts, job losses and home foreclosures — and they don’t feel, despite the rhetoric about the recession winding down, that their prospects are good.

People worried about holding on to their standard of living need to be assured, unambiguously, that an expensive new government program is in their — and the country’s — best interest. They need to know exactly how the program will work, and they need to be confident that it’s affordable.

Mr. Obama, who has a command of the English language like few others, has been remarkably opaque about his intentions regarding health care. He left it up to Congress to draft a plan and he has not gotten behind any specific legislation. He has seemed to waffle on the public option and has not been at all clear about how the reform that is coming will rein in runaway costs. At times it has seemed as though any old “reform” would be all right with him.

It’s still early, but people are starting to lose faith in the president. I hear almost daily from men and women who voted enthusiastically for Mr. Obama but are feeling disappointed. They feel that the banks made out like bandits in the bailouts, and that the health care initiative could become a boondoggle. Their biggest worry is that Mr. Obama is soft, that he is unwilling or incapable of fighting hard enough to counter the forces responsible for the sorry state the country is in.

More and more the president is being seen by his own supporters as someone who would like to please everybody, who is naïve about the prospects for bipartisanship, who believes that his strongest supporters will stay with him because they have nowhere else to go, and who will retreat whenever the Republicans and the corporate crowd come after him.

People want more from Mr. Obama. They want him to be their champion. But they don’t feel that he is speaking to them in a language that they understand. He is seen as more comfortable speaking the Wall Street lingo. People don’t feel that the voices of anxiety are being heard.

Maybe they’re wrong. Maybe the economy really is turning around. Maybe Mr. Obama is working on a bipartisan deal that will take us a few small steps down the road to real health care reform.

It’s possible that we’ve been without mature leadership for so long that it’s difficult to recognize it when we see it. Mr. Obama has proved the naysayers wrong time and again. But if it turns out that this time he’s wrong, hold onto your hats. Because right now there is no Plan B.

Solo MoDo

The Moustache of Wisdom is off today, and MoDo has created another piece of tiresome fiction.  This one is called “Sarah’s Secret Diary,” and it’s about how the governor of Alaska has resigned, and how sad it is that the unpatriotic, godless media that is picking away at her will never understand it’s about country.  I’m just as willing to laugh at Sarah Palin as the next person, but this is tiresome, predictable, and profoundly unfunny.  Hey — I just described MoDo…  Here it is:

Dear Diary,

No one understands me. It’s like I’m speaking some Eskimo dialect or something. Andrea Mitchell follows me all the way to Kanakanak Beach and I get a French manicure and set up this huge photo op for her, even though she spooked the salmon.

Todd and me are in our cool fishing bibs. Piper’s helping out on the boat. It’s an amazing day that shows how our Creator favored my beloved Alaska, gatekeeper of the continent, and makes a great shot for all the network reporters up here to milk. This progresses me away from my image as some kind of flaky “rogue diva” and back to my image as a tough huntin’ and fishin’ gal.

But Andrea makes such a darn big deal about how I’m quitting in the middle of my term.

“You’re not listening to me!” I snap.

She says maybe I didn’t want to go back to the nitty-gritty of Alaska politics after the bright lights of the national campaign.

“The nitty-gritty, like, you mean, the fish slime and the dirt under the fingernails and stuff that’s me?” I said. Awesome response, huh?!!

It’s the same old double standard. I am not one of those who would whine and cuss. It’s just not how I’m wired!!! But the minute I start to whine and cuss, the mainstream media totally misunderstands my verbiage and the combination of things that brought me to this place of knowing. And I know that I know that I know those crappy bloggers will put out more confliction stories.

I keep explaining what impacted me, but everyone seems more confused and ironic than ever. What is it about average, hard-working Americans like me that Americans can’t understand?

I love Alaska too much to waste any more time on her Bridge to Nowhere. I need to be able to go forth out there and fight for what is right. And what is right is for me and my First Dude to take that big fish run to the White House.

So people should stop being so stinkin’ mean to me because this is a goal-setting thing, a full-court press, a sub-four marathon. Karl Rove thinks I’m not prepared for the national stage??? Pundits think I should read a book before I write one??? Man, I feel a grizzly rising up in me!!!

Every mom we know multitasks. And I am one to believe I can use an all-of-the-above approach, too. I can abandon Alaska and ambition myself for the presidency. I can get bored with my job and fight apathy. I can take the easy path out to work hard on a path for fruitfulness. I can move on selfishly and call it altruistically. I don’t need a title now when I can shake up the good ol’ boys and get a better title in the end.

You didn’t really think I was going anywhere, did you? I’m one of Google’s hot trends. We’re doing a fund-raising push this week on SarahPAC to destroy Obama’s attempt to destroy capitalism. And forget about Obama’s youth revolution. I posed for a cheesecake shot in Runner’s World with short-shorts and a crumpled American flag that’s destined to be on the bedroom wall of every conservative 12-year-old boy. It’s the metaphor, stupid! Heck yeah, I’m running! As I learned when I was a beauty contestant — flags and gams show you it’s about country.

And before you say anything though about the glam shots of me stretching and preening on the waterfront in my cute running outfits, don’t bother. That would be a sexist double standard.

Nobody said anything when Obama walked around in Hawaii without his shirt, showing off his washboard abs. Well, maybe they did, but I betcha they say more about me because, of course, we know by now, for some reason, a different standard applies to my decisions.

It’s just like when Obama, the One Who Must Be Obeyed, said his family was off-limits so everyone left them alone. But they never left mine alone. Thank goodness for that though because we hate being out of the limelight! It was a blast to see Bristol with my grandbaby Tripp on the cover of People as the ambassadress of abstinence!

It’s the same different standard with the dirt-digging behind these frivolous ethics complaints. As I told the reporters who chased me up here, if I were in the White House instead of Alaska, the Department of Law down there would look at some of the things that we’ve been charged with and automatically throw them out. Later, the media brats began making a big, fat ugly scene about there being no Department of Law in Washington.

I say, tell that to the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan who are risking their lives to protect our system of laws. How sad that the unpatriotic, godless media picking away at me will never understand it’s about country.

It’s about me running the country.

It’s about me running.

It’s about me.

The media doesn’t get Sarah Palin. I hear planes buzzing. Oh, no!! Have they all left?? Even that Time reporter who I showed how to smoke salmon???

Yawn…