Newt Gingrich is spaced-out. Literally.

Anyone who remembers him from his days as speaker of the House in the ’90s remembers how erratic, unpredictable and off-the-wall he could be, but, so far, this campaign season he has managed to conceal his many absurdities and eccentricities.

Furthermore, many Republican primary voters seem willing to forgive and forget his past. Others seem not even to remember it. He has been able to pass himself off as a wise elder statesman — a historian without a history — able to capture the anger and anxiety of the right and articulate it with force, lucidity and gravitas.

Oh, it is to laugh! That is if you’re on the left.

But for those on the right with firsthand knowledge of working with Gingrich when he was in Washington, this is a nightmare scenario. The outside possibility that Gingrich could win the nomination and wreck the party scares them to death. Their panic over this has reached a fever pitch.

And this is not without merit.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released this week found that Gingrich now enjoys a 9-point lead nationally among registered Republican likely primary voters. However, Gingrich fared worse than all other Republican candidates when tested against Obama. The poll suggested that Obama would trounce Gingrich by 18 points.

(Luckily for Mitt Romney, Gingrich’s surge in Florida may be fizzling. A Quinnipiac poll of likely Republican voters in that state found that Romney leads Gingrich by nine percentage points. If that holds, Romney and the establishment Republicans will have dodged a bullet like Neo in “The Matrix.” A Romney loss in Florida would call his candidacy into question and send the party scrambling for a more attractive replacement.)

One of the latest establishment Republicans to try to avert the Gingrich catastrophe is former Senator Bob Dole, who wrote a letter to the Romney campaign on Thursday saying: “I have not been critical of Newt Gingrich, but it is now time to take a stand before it is too late.” It only got better from there. Dole continued, “hardly anyone who served with Newt in Congress has endorsed him, and that fact speaks for itself. He was a one-man-band who rarely took advice.”

Dole’s concern in his statement, and the concern of countless others, is: “If Gingrich is the nominee it will have an adverse impact on Republican candidates running for county, state and federal offices.”

As Peter D. Hart, a Democratic pollster, told MSNBC, “Gingrich is Goldwater.” He continued, “In the general election, Gingrich not only takes down his ship, he takes down the whole flotilla.”

Part of the reason for this is Gingrich is thoroughly unlikable among the electorate at large and utterly nonsensical in his approach to real problem-solving. The fact that he has convinced some primary voters that he is an intellectual is one of the best electoral sleights of hand I can recall. As Dole said of Newt when he was in Washington: “Gingrich had a new idea every minute, and most of them were off the wall.”

To that point, Gingrich told a crowd on Florida’s so-called Space Coast on Wednesday that “by the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the Moon. And it will be American.” And he said that he would push for the introduction of a “Northwest Ordinance for Space” so that when the number of colonists reached 13,000, they could petition for statehood.

(By the way, I find it interesting that Gingrich didn’t insist on answering the question about Puerto Rican statehood at Thursday’s debate, yet he’s advocating for a state on the Moon. Earth to Newt: phone home.)

In the speech, Gingrich implied that he was “bold” and “romantic” and called himself “visionary” and “grandiose” in the vein of Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and the Wright brothers. Gingrich is a virtual supernova of megalomaniacal madness.

In a way, the space speech made sense. Gingrich was doing what he does: tossing out random ideas like darts at a board, hoping to score. He was repackaging the idea of Manifest Destiny for the Moon and appealing to an area of the country whose pride and purpose were wounded by the ending of the space shuttle program.

But, on the other hand, this is exactly the kind of election-year lunacy that establishment Republicans have been worrying about. Florida has one of the highest state unemployment rates in the country and has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country. The last thing that people who can’t hold on to their jobs and houses here on Earth want to hear about is a colony on the Moon. The whole thing bespeaks a man detached from the real world concerns of real people.

As Dole’s statement went on to say, “In my opinion, if we want to avoid an Obama landslide in November, Republicans should nominate Governor Romney as our standard-bearer.”

The truth is that the Republican Party has no good choice at this point. It only has bad choices and worse choices. And the American public is beginning to recognize that. As the Republican courtiers of incompetence beat up each other, knock down each other and reveal each other’s flaws, a number of recent surveys have found that President Obama’s poll numbers on a number of metrics have begun to trend upward.

That’s because an election is a choice, a zero-sum game — the worse the Republican field looks, particularly if Gingrich is at the front of it, the better President Obama looks by comparison, regardless of one’s misgivings about his first term.

Establishment Republicans understand this simple, painful truth: Romney is no guarantee of victory, but Gingrich is an absolute guarantee of defeat. At least here on Earth.

Now here’s Mr. Nocera:

If the worst thing that ever happens to Temi Fagbenle is that she gets to play college basketball for only three seasons instead of four, she’ll have lived a blessed life. No question, the wrong being perpetrated on this 6-foot-4 Harvard freshman pales compared with some of the injustices in college sports that I’ve been recounting lately.

Still, Fagbenle’s ordeal is worth telling for three reasons. It illustrates the sheer pettiness of the N.C.A.A. It shows that the N.C.A.A. won’t rectify even an obvious mistake to help an athlete. Saddest of all, it shows that even mighty Harvard won’t stand up to the N.C.A.A. Originally intended to help universities police their athletic teams, the N.C.A.A. has become higher education’s Frankenstein, terrifying its overseers.

Let me tell you a little bit about Temi. Yes, she’s 6-foot-4 and a terrific basketball player, but she’s a lot more than that. Born to Nigerian parents — her father is a prominent journalist — she moved with her large family to London as a girl. When she was 15, her parents enrolled her as a junior in Blair Academy, a New Jersey prep school, hoping the education she got there would lead her to the Ivy League. The Fagbenles had their hearts set on Harvard.

Temi struggled her first year, so much so that she and her parents decided that she should repeat her junior year to better her chances of getting into Harvard. By the time she graduated, she had won letters in track and tennis as well as basketball, had starred in the school play, had improved her grades enough to be accepted at Harvard, and had become one of the most popular students at Blair. Along the way, she turned down scholarship offers from big-time basketball schools like Duke.

If you are wondering how this outstanding high school career could have led to Temi’s being ruled ineligible to play as a freshman, you’re not alone. Her mistake, if you can call it that, was to take an exam, the General Certificate of Secondary Education, required of all British students when they are around 15. Inexplicably — and incorrectly — the N.C.A.A. says that the exam marks a British student’s graduation from high school. Under its rules, a British high school graduate must enroll in college within two years of taking the G.C.S.E. Because Temi repeated her junior year, it took her three years.

The sheer idiocy of this rule boggles the mind. As Harvard pointed out in a letter to the N.C.A.A., if she had stayed in London until she finished high school, she could have played. If she had started as a freshman in an American high school and repeated a grade, she could have played. But because she repeated a grade after coming to the United States, she is ineligible. It not only seems unfair, it seems discriminatory.

Behind the scenes, Harvard worked to get the N.C.A.A. to reverse its decision, making four separate appeals. All were denied. With Harvard’s help, Temi retained a lawyer, who gave serious thought to trying to get a restraining order against the N.C.A.A., on the grounds that the rule violates state antidiscrimination laws. But, in the end, Temi decided not to sue, to Harvard’s palpable relief. After all, if Temi began playing and then ultimately lost the case, the women’s basketball team would have to forfeit the games in which she had played. Sotto voce, officials also expressed fears that the N.C.A.A. might retaliate in other ways.

Despite its behind-the-scenes efforts, Harvard has never once said publicly that the rule is wrong and that Temi is being unfairly punished. On the contrary, in an e-mailed statement, Bob Scalise, the Harvard athletic director, said, “We at Harvard are fully committed to following all N.C.A.A. rules and guidelines.” Even, apparently, when those rules are wrong and unjust.

And, I might add, deeply hurtful. “When someone has a tremendous talent, you are taking away a fundamental part of their identity,” says Temi’s lawyer, Beth Reilly. “And there is a stigma in being declared ineligible, an implication that you have done something wrong. You have a label attached that the whole world sees.”

I understand why a school like the University of Connecticut won’t stand up to the N.C.A.A. There is nothing bigger in the state of Connecticut than UConn basketball. If it were to start playing Ryan Boatright, the suspended point guard whose mother is the subject of an N.C.A.A. witch hunt, it would risk not only forfeiting games, but missing the N.C.A.A. championship tournament. The price is too high.

But I would have thought that Harvard was made of sterner stuff. Harvard claims to have values that transcend wins and losses. Harvard has often been a leader in changing how universities act. So long as schools continue to cower in the face of N.C.A.A. abuses, those abuses will continue.

The Temi Fagbenle case was a perfect opportunity for Harvard to stand up for what’s right. Maybe next time.

And now here’s Ms. Collins:

Do you think that after all is said and done, Newt Gingrich will just go down in history as the politician who conclusively proved that voters don’t care about a candidate’s sexual misbehavior?

Imagine the history students of 2112, reading about the early 21st century on their vaporphones, or whatever they have by then. They would get to this presidential campaign and there would be a little footnote saying that despite a totally outrageous marital history, Newt Gingrich won the presidential primary in one of the most socially conservative states in the country. Maybe there would be a clip of him making the how-dare-you-sir speech to CNN’s John King.

Probably not exactly what Newt has in mind.

Perhaps things will go differently. Maybe, despite his blah debate performances in Florida, Newt will do well in this week’s primary, and go on to win the nomination, become president and build lots of moon colonies while saving America from Shariah law and the corrosive effects of the writing of Saul Alinsky.

But if not, he’ll still be the guy who managed to become a credible presidential candidate despite the three wives, the serial adultery, etc. etc. etc. He had a lot of help from the voters. In South Carolina, only 31 percent of the people interviewed by Public Policy Polling said they believed the second Mrs. Gingrich when she told ABC that her husband had asked her to share his sexual favors with his longtime mistress, who is now the third Mrs. G.

Presumably they believed Newt, who said that he had “witnesses” who were eager to go to ABC and denounce the story. Although the Gingrich campaign now says the proffered witnesses didn’t really exist. Except for his daughters by his first marriage. Who truly would not seem to be the best possible experts on whether Newt wanted to have whoopee rights to both their stepmothers.

If Gingrich loses the Florida primary, I hope it is for the crime of middle-aged-child abuse.

But about that open-marriage poll question: I believe that what the voters were actually saying was that they didn’t want to hear about it. The American public has a long history of ignoring the private lives of elected officials whenever possible. They gave up on politicians as role models somewhere around Richard Nixon.

Perhaps the critical moment came when voters decided to elect Bill Clinton president despite what were very clear storm warnings about his tendency to wander off, sexually speaking. Which was followed by the public’s very clear decision to keep Bill Clinton even after he was caught in behavior that, really, even the head of Hedonists Inc. could not possibly have thought was a good idea.

And it all worked out! Now Clinton is Beloved Ex-President Clinton, and everybody keeps sighing over how great things were when the prince of bad behavior was in charge.

That goes for the social right, too. They are going to go for the guy who they think will carry out their agenda. Even if he is, say, an anti-abortion crusader whose ex-wife swore that he took her to get an abortion. (See: former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr.)

The far right seems to be particularly indifferent to bad-behavior issues. Maybe this is because their supporters know that sinning social conservatives operate at a disadvantage. It is way easier to avoid the hypocrisy label if you’re a straying civil libertarian whose family values speeches mainly involve encouraging kids to donate money to feed impoverished people in Africa. You’re not going to be charged with speaking out of both sides of your mouth when the first side is talking about supporting Doctors Without Borders.

Conservative voters also like expressions of remorse and promises to reform. When all else fails, they have even been known to argue that everybody does it. “I’m just saying, they all have stinky feet,” former Congressman J. C. Watts, a Baptist preacher, said while he was campaigning for Newt in South Carolina.

Although actually, when you’re talking about 1) Committing adultery, 2) Divorcing your wife while she’s sick to marry your mistress, 3) Committing adultery, 4) Allegedly asking your wife to let you keep the mistress on the side and 5) Divorcing your wife while she’s sick to marry your mistress … it’s pretty clear everybody doesn’t do it.

But in a way, Watts is right. (And we do like that stinky feet line.) Everybody has something. Rick Santorum lusted in his heart for earmarks. Mitt Romney drove to Canada with the family Irish setter strapped on the car roof.

And Newt argues his checkered past is actually an advantage. He suggested to the Christian Broadcasting Network that “it may make me more normal than somebody who wanders around seeming perfect and maybe not understanding the human condition, and the challenges of life for normal people.”

Take that, Mitt.

I once wrote a book on how gossip about politicians’ private lives impacts their careers, and it was a very interesting experience, as a result of which I know way more about Grover Cleveland’s sex life than most people would find reasonable. Until the 1970s, voters found it very easy to ignore things they would rather not know about prominent politicians, since the mainstream media didn’t report it. That rule began to crack about the time one of the nation’s most powerful politicians, the House Ways and Means Committee chairman Wilbur Mills, was caught trying to drunkenly fish a striptease dancer out of the Washington Tidal Basin.

Ever since then, we have been writing about the ways politicians misbehave in private, usually after an ex-lover or angry wife blows the whistle. And the voters frequently yawn. However, the people a misbehaving politician really has to worry about are not his constituents, but his peers. These days, a congressman’s colleagues will throw him overboard in a second. We all remember that Anthony Weiner was driven out of Congress after he got caught tweeting pictures of his underwear. While he was inhabiting it. I am going to go out on a limb and say that his constituents in Brooklyn and Queens were not charmed by this behavior, but you did not see any widespread calls within his district for him to resign. No, the people who forced Weiner to go away were the Democratic leaders, particularly Nancy Pelosi, who thought he was hurting the party in general.

Over the last few days, there has been a big-name Republican uprising against Gingrich, featuring everybody from Bob Dole to Ann Coulter. They aren’t personally offended by Newt’s marital history — or if they are, they can certainly live with it. But they’re totally afraid that if he actually got the nomination and people had to take a long, serious look at the whole Newt picture, the Republicans would be destroyed in November.

We’ll see what happens. But here’s the good news: Newt has always dreamed of being a figure in American history books, and I think he’s got that nailed.

The Simpson-Bowles report wasn’t just a policy document. For a few months, it expanded the national debate. Everybody seemed to realize that the country was beset by large challenges that could no longer be neglected: soaring debt, lagging growth, wage stagnation, family breakdown, political dysfunction.

Suddenly, there was a sense of urgency. There were grand plans coming from all directions.

A bipartisan group of 65 senators gathered to think about government afresh. The Times had a fantastic online budget calculator to let readers reinvent government according to their own priorities.

The Peter G. Peterson Foundation asked six think tanks from across the political spectrum to offer fiscal solutions. The proposals teemed with big ideas: fundamental tax reform that would simplify the code and boost growth; fundamental entitlement reform to restrain cost; doubling spending on science, pre-K education and adult retraining; taxing fossil fuels to spur innovation; shifting from a consumption-led to an investment-led economy.

It’s sad to compare that era of bigness to the medium-sized policy morsels that President Obama put in his State of the Union address. He had some big themes in the speech, but the policies were mere appetizers. The Republicans absurdly call Obama a European socialist on the stump, but the Obama we saw Tuesday night was a liberal incrementalist.

There was nothing big, like tax reform or entitlement reform. There was no comprehensive effort to restore trust in government by sweeping away the tax credits and special-interest schemes that entangle Washington. Ninety percent of American workers work in the service economy, but Obama spoke mostly about manufacturing.

Instead, there were a series of modest proposals that poll well. In that sense, it was the Democratic version of Newt Gingrich’s original “Contract With America” — a series of medium-size ideas with 80 percent approval ratings.

Some of Obama’s ideas are outstanding. Presidential nominees should get an up-or-down vote within 90 days. We should connect community colleges more closely with labor markets. We should raise the income tax rates for millionaires back to Clinton-era levels. We should responsibly promote fracking to develop natural gas.

Some of the ideas were lamentable. Instead of simplifying the tax code, Obama would muddy it up with more tax loopholes for corporations as long as they conformed to this or that industrial policy.

Some of the ideas were just inexplicable. Is the government really going to defund Ivy League science labs if Ivy League colleges raise their tuitions?

But the core point is that these policies are incremental, not transformational. You could pass them all and the country might be slightly better off or slightly worse off, but it wouldn’t be on a different trajectory.

It’s odd that an administration that once wanted to do everything all at once now should be so gradualist. Maybe its members were scarred by the traumas of health care and the 2010 election. Maybe they just want to win the election, so every policy has to be politically easy instead of politically challenging.

Maybe the president’s aides believe that most of our problems are overhyped. I have heard them hint that in dozens of interviews. To balance the budget, we only need to bend revenues and taxes a bit. To compete with China, we only need to shift the playing field a bit.

Maybe the president’s cautious tendencies are just coming out.

In normal times, that sober, incremental approach would be admirable. In normal times, the best sort of change is gradual, flexible and constant. But these are not normal times. This is not Clinton’s second term, or Eisenhower’s. The fiscal train wreck is coming. The current U.S. growth model is insufficient. The American family and the American political system are cracking up.

Legislatively, the president has to build a center-left governing majority that can overwhelm those Republicans who will never support him. That can be done only with ground-shifting policies. Politically, the president has to resonate with voters who feel the country is on the wrong track. Prudentially, the president has to prepare for the likelihood that the economy is going to hit another rough patch this year — if Greece leaves the euro or if the French banks implode or if the Iranian crisis comes to a head. If any of that happens, the desire for profound change would be overwhelming and the candidate with a few carefully targeted tax credits would get blown away.

This election is about averting national decline. The president is making a mistake in ceding the size advantage to the Republicans. The Republicans at least speak with epic alarm about the nation’s problems. They are unified behind big tax and welfare state reforms that would purge Washington and shake things up.

The president is making a mistake in running a Sunset Boulevard campaign: I am big; it’s my presidency that got small.

Here’s Prof. Krugman:

Mitch Daniels, the former Bush budget director who is now Indiana’s governor, made the Republicans’ reply to President Obama’s State of the Union address. His performance was, well, boring. But he did say something thought-provoking — and I mean that in the worst way.

For Mr. Daniels tried to wrap his party in the mantle of the late Steve Jobs, whom he portrayed as a great job creator — which is one thing that Jobs definitely wasn’t. And if we ask why Apple has created so few American jobs, we get an insight into what is wrong with the ideology dominating much of our politics.

Mr. Daniels first berated the president for his “constant disparagement of people in business,” which happens to be a complete fabrication. Mr. Obama has never done anything of the sort. He went on: “The late Steve Jobs — what a fitting name he had — created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the president borrowed and blew.”

Clearly, Mr. Daniels doesn’t have much of a future in the humor business. But, more to the point, anyone who reads The New York Times knows that his assertion about job creation was completely false: Apple employs very few people in this country.

A big report in The Times last Sunday laid out the facts. Although Apple is now America’s biggest U.S. corporation as measured by market value, it employs only 43,000 people in the United States, a tenth as many as General Motors employed when it was the largest American firm.

Apple does, however, indirectly employ around 700,000 people in its various suppliers. Unfortunately, almost none of those people are in America.

Why does Apple manufacture abroad, and especially in China? As the article explained, it’s not just about low wages. China also derives big advantages from the fact that so much of the supply chain is already there. A former Apple executive explained: “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away.”

This is familiar territory to students of economic geography: the advantages of industrial clusters — in which producers, specialized suppliers, and workers huddle together to their mutual benefit — have been a running theme since the 19th century.

And Chinese manufacturing isn’t the only conspicuous example of these advantages in the modern world. Germany remains a highly successful exporter even with workers who cost, on average, $44 an hour — much more than the average cost of American workers. And this success has a lot to do with the support its small and medium-sized companies — the famed Mittelstand — provide to each other via shared suppliers and the maintenance of a skilled work force.

The point is that successful companies — or, at any rate, companies that make a large contribution to a nation’s economy — don’t exist in isolation. Prosperity depends on the synergy between companies, on the cluster, not the individual entrepreneur.

But the current Republican worldview has no room for such considerations. From the G.O.P.’s perspective, it’s all about the heroic entrepreneur, the John Galt, I mean Steve Jobs-type “job creator” who showers benefits on the rest of us and who must, of course, be rewarded with tax rates lower than those paid by many middle-class workers.

And this vision helps explain why Republicans were so furiously opposed to the single most successful policy initiative of recent years: the auto industry bailout.

The case for this bailout — which Mr. Daniels has denounced as “crony capitalism” — rested crucially on the notion that the survival of any one firm in the industry depended on the survival of the broader industry “ecology” created by the cluster of producers and suppliers in America’s industrial heartland. If G.M. and Chrysler had been allowed to go under, they would probably have taken much of the supply chain with them — and Ford would have gone the same way.

Fortunately, the Obama administration didn’t let that happen, and the unemployment rate in Michigan, which hit 14.1 percent as the bailout was going into effect, is now down to a still-terrible-but-much-better 9.3 percent. And the details aside, much of Mr. Obama’s State of the Union address can be read as an attempt to apply the lessons of that success more broadly.

So we should be grateful to Mr. Daniels for his remarks Tuesday. He got his facts wrong, but he did, unintentionally, manage to highlight an important philosophical difference between the parties. One side believes that economies succeed solely thanks to heroic entrepreneurs; the other has nothing against entrepreneurs, but believes that entrepreneurs need a supportive environment, and that sometimes government has to help create or sustain that supportive environment.

And the view that it takes more than business heroes is the one that fits the facts.

In November, a terrified 13-year-old girl pounded on an apartment door in Brooklyn. When a surprised woman answered, the girl pleaded for a phone. She called her mother, and then dialed 911.

The girl, whom I’ll call Baby Face because of her looks, frantically told police that a violent pimp was selling her for sex. He had taken her to the building and ordered her to go to an apartment where a customer was waiting, she said, and now he was waiting downstairs to make sure she did not escape. She had followed the pimp’s directions and gone upstairs, but then had pounded randomly on this door in hopes of getting help.

Baby Face said she hurt too much to endure yet another rape by a john. She told prosecutors later that she was bleeding vaginally and that her pimp had recently kicked her down a stairwell for trying to flee.

That 911 call set in motion the arrest of Kendale Judge, then 21. Judge has pleaded not guilty to charges of sex trafficking, kidnapping, rape and compelling prostitution. He is in jail, and we haven’t heard his side of the events yet.

The episode also shines a spotlight on how the girl was marketed — in ads on Backpage.com, a major national Web site where people place ads to sell all kinds of things, including sex. It is a godsend to pimps, allowing customers to order a girl online as if she were a pizza.

Lauren Hersh, the ace prosecutor in Brooklyn who leads the sex-trafficking unit there, says that of the 32 people she and her team have prosecuted in the last year and a half — typically involving victims aged 12 to 25 — a vast majority of the cases included girls marketed through Backpage ads.

“Pimps are turning to the Internet,” said Hersh. “They’re not putting the girls on the street so much. Backpage is a great vehicle for pimps trying to sell girls.”

Craigslist backed out of this sector after public protests. Pimps then moved to Backpage.com, which is owned by Village Voice Media, owners of The Village Voice weekly newspaper.

Attorneys general from 48 states wrote a joint letter to Backpage, warning that it had become “a hub” for sex trafficking and calling on it to stop running adult services ads. The attorneys general said that they had identified cases in 22 different states in which pimps peddled underage girls through Backpage.

The attorneys general cited a 15-year-old girl who was being forced to have sex with men last year in Dorchester, Mass. The pimp marketed the girl through Backpage.

But Backpage isn’t budging. Indeed, it has fought back with personal attacks on those, such as Ashton Kutcher, who have linked it to human trafficking.

Steve Suskin, legal counsel to Village Voice Media, gave me a lengthy statement in which he argued that the company is already cooperating closely with law-enforcement authorities. He cited a 16-year-old girl in Seattle who was rescued as a result of a tip the company had made.

“Censorship will not rid the world of exploitation,” Suskin asserted.

It’s true that there’s some risk that pimps will migrate to new Web sites, possibly based overseas, that are less cooperative. But, on balance, that’s a risk worth taking. The present system is failing. Pimps aren’t the shrewdest marketers, and eliminating a hub for trafficking should at least chip away at the problem.

Backpage suggests that it is battling censors and prudes. In fact, what drives it seems to be greed. In their letter, the attorneys general said that Backpage earns more than $22 million annually from prostitution advertising.

On Backpage, the pimps claim adult ages for the girls they market, but Hersh scoffs. “I see 19,” she said, “and I immediately think 13.”

“I’m not seeing a lot of cases where there’s not coercion,” she added. “The average age where a girl is forced into prostitution is 12 to 14. And most of these 16- or 17 year-olds are being run by pretty vicious pimps.”

While there are no reliable figures for human trafficking, the more we look, the more we find. The Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, says that in the year before he set up a sex-trafficking unit in June 2010, his office prosecuted no trafficking cases. Since then, the office has become a national model, indicting 32 people, with 10 convictions and no acquittals so far.

Among those rescued was Baby Face, who had run away from home in September. Judge allegedly found her on the street, bought food for her and told her that she was beautiful. Within a few days, he had posted her photo on Backpage and was selling her five to nine times a day, prosecutors say. When she didn’t earn enough money, he beat her with a belt, they add.

When Baby Face ran away from her pimp and desperately knocked on that apartment door in Brooklyn, she was also in effect pounding on the door of the executive suites of Backpage and Village Voice Media. Those executives should listen to her pleas.

Sure, Mittens can be annoying.

Paying an infuriatingly low tax rate and stashing millions in Swiss banks and the Cayman Islands, like a John Grisham villain. Letting son Tagg tweet a picture of him doing laundry on the road.

No matter what Romney is talking about in a debate, such as the inane suggestion that illegal aliens engage in “self-deportation,” he always looks like he’s really thinking: “Holy cow, it’s mine! GIVE IT TO ME!!”

But the most annoying thing about him may be that he’s a prankster. If wit is the most sophisticated form of humor, pranks are the most juvenile.

W. was a big prankster, and you see where that got us. As head of the D.K.E. fraternity in the ’60s — when many students were risking arrest for political protests — W. branded pledges with hot wire hangers and, after some holiday beers with pals, took a “decorating committee” on a mission to the New Haven shopping district.

After stealing a Christmas wreath from a hotel, the 20-year-old was arrested for disorderly conduct, a charge that was later dropped.

W. kept up his pranks when he was a managing partner of the Texas Rangers. He sat in the back of owners’ meetings, cowboy boots propped on the table, and threw spitballs. He convinced  fellow owners to punk George Steinbrenner by all showing up at a meeting dressed like the Boss.

But at least in college, W. had the excuse of being hammered. Mitt was a prankster in school and stone sober.

At the exclusive prep school Cranbrook in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., Mitt was “slapstick to a fault,” as one of his friends put it to Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, the authors of “The Real Romney.”

At Cranbrook, the authors report, “He staged an elaborate formal dinner in the median strip of a busy thoroughfare,” and another time “dressed up in a uniform similar to that worn by a police officer, put a flashing red ‘cherry top’ on his car, and raced after a vehicle carrying two of his male friends and their dates. By prearrangement, the friends had stashed beer bottles in the trunk and knew that Romney would pretend to be an officer chasing them. The dates had no idea of the plot.” The son of the Michigan governor “arrested” his friends, leaving the frightened girls behind for a spell.

Like W., another privileged political scion, Mitt supported the Vietnam War while avoiding it. At Stanford in ’65, freshman Mitt stayed in the bubble while others like David Harris, a resident adviser in Romney’s dorm, excoriated the escalation in Vietnam.

Mitt’s most serious commitment was to Ax-Com, or the Ax Committee. In the week before the football game between Stanford and University of California-Berkeley, Cal students would traditionally try to steal the ceremonial ax connected to the big bonfire.

Mitt spent four days and nights patrolling to protect the bonfire site and the ax. “When Mitt heard about a rally planned at Berkeley, he figured the ax heist might be discussed and decided to go undercover,” the authors write. “Ditching his coat and tie, he dressed up like an antiwar protester in the hope of going unnoticed in the Berkeley crowd. … One classmate recalled that Romney had borrowed David Harris’s clothing, although Harris has no recollection. … Harris was protesting a war and saw himself on a mission to prevent the United States from disaster, and Romney was protecting an ax in a campus tradition.”

The authors chronicled Romney’s “zany” side. “As a missionary, he had sometimes assumed the voices of cartoon characters in letters home,” they wrote. Later, as a Mormon bishop, he once jumped up during a meeting with a Mormon counselor and started singing “Billie Jean” and moonwalking. A former campaign adviser told me Mitt once flummoxed staffers, creating the illusion that he was on an endless bathroom stop by pouring water into the toilet.

J.F.K. was a wit and a practical joker, according to Chris Matthews, the author of “Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero.” He said Kennedy once “scared the heck” out of his former Harvard roommate and fellow Massachusetts Congressman Torby MacDonald by “having Ben Bradlee call him up and say he’s investigating a story about Torby and some questionable women.”

When he was president, J.F.K. once persuaded Greta Garbo to pretend that she had no memory of his friend Lem Billings, who had met her in Europe and was crushed.

Even worse than being a prankster, which is mildly sadistic, is being pranked, which is wildly humiliating.

In a 2003 interview with Ali G, Newt Gingrich looked on bemusedly as Sacha Baron Cohen, in hip-hop disguise, mused about how a female president would spend all her time getting facials, buying shoes and falling for dictators, given how women like bad boys.

“Ain’t you worried,” Ali G pressed, “that the whole cabinet would be like Brad Pitt on defense and George Clooney on health, you know, cause him from ‘E.R.’ ?”

Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

In an essay, entitled “Making It in America,” in the latest issue of The Atlantic, the author Adam Davidson relates a joke from cotton country about just how much a modern textile mill has been automated: The average mill has only two employees today, “a man and a dog. The man is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to keep the man away from the machines.”

Davidson’s article is one of a number of pieces that have recently appeared making the point that the reason we have such stubbornly high unemployment and sagging middle-class incomes today is largely because of the big drop in demand because of the Great Recession, but it is also because of the quantum advances in both globalization and the information technology revolution, which are more rapidly than ever replacing labor with machines or foreign workers.

In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra — their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment. Average is over.

Yes, new technology has been eating jobs forever, and always will. As they say, if horses could have voted, there never would have been cars. But there’s been an acceleration. As Davidson notes, “In the 10 years ending in 2009, [U.S.] factories shed workers so fast that they erased almost all the gains of the previous 70 years; roughly one out of every three manufacturing jobs — about 6 million in total — disappeared.”

And you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Last April, Annie Lowrey of Slate wrote about a start-up called “E la Carte” that is out to shrink the need for waiters and waitresses: The company “has produced a kind of souped-up iPad that lets you order and pay right at your table. The brainchild of a bunch of M.I.T. engineers, the nifty invention, known as the Presto, might be found at a restaurant near you soon. … You select what you want to eat and add items to a cart. Depending on the restaurant’s preferences, the console could show you nutritional information, ingredients lists and photographs. You can make special requests, like ‘dressing on the side’ or ‘quintuple bacon.’ When you’re done, the order zings over to the kitchen, and the Presto tells you how long it will take for your items to come out. … Bored with your companions? Play games on the machine. When you’re through with your meal, you pay on the console, splitting the bill item by item if you wish and paying however you want. And you can have your receipt e-mailed to you. … Each console goes for $100 per month. If a restaurant serves meals eight hours a day, seven days a week, it works out to 42 cents per hour per table — making the Presto cheaper than even the very cheapest waiter.”

What the iPad won’t do in an above average way a Chinese worker will. Consider this paragraph from Sunday’s terrific article in The Times by Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher about why Apple does so much of its manufacturing in China: “Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly-line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the [Chinese] plant near midnight. A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day. ‘The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,’ the executive said. ‘There’s no American plant that can match that.’ ”

And automation is not just coming to manufacturing, explains Curtis Carlson, the chief executive of SRI International, a Silicon Valley idea lab that invented the Apple iPhone program known as Siri, the digital personal assistant. “Siri is the beginning of a huge transformation in how we interact with banks, insurance companies, retail stores, health care providers, information retrieval services and product services.”

There will always be change — new jobs, new products, new services. But the one thing we know for sure is that with each advance in globalization and the I.T. revolution, the best jobs will require workers to have more and better education to make themselves above average. Here are the latest unemployment rates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for Americans over 25 years old: those with less than a high school degree, 13.8 percent; those with a high school degree and no college, 8.7 percent; those with some college or associate degree, 7.7 percent; and those with bachelor’s degree or higher, 4.1 percent.

In a world where average is officially over, there are many things we need to do to buttress employment, but nothing would be more important than passing some kind of G.I. Bill for the 21st century that ensures that every American has access to post-high school education.

FYWP.

I hope President Obama read about Maddie Parlier as he was working on his State of the Union address. Parlier is the subject of Adam Davidson’s illuminating article in the current issue of The Atlantic.

Parlier’s father abandoned her when she was young and crashed his car while driving drunk, killing himself and a family of four. Maddie is smart and hard-working. She did reasonably well in high school but got pregnant her senior year.

She and the father of her child split up, which put the kibosh on her college dreams because she couldn’t afford day care. She temped for a while. Her work ethic got her noticed, and she got a job as an unskilled laborer at Standard Motor Products, which makes fuel injectors.

Parlier earns about $13 an hour. She’d like to become one of the better-paid workers in the plant, but, in today’s factories, that requires an enormous leap in skills. It feels cruel, Davidson writes, to mention all the things Parlier would have to learn to move up. She doesn’t know the computer language that runs the machines. “She doesn’t know trigonometry or calculus, and she’s never studied the properties of cutting tools or metals. She doesn’t know how to maintain a tolerance of 0.25 microns, or what tolerance means in this context, or what a micron is.”

A good attitude and hustle have taken Parlier as far as they can. It’s hard, given her situation, to acquire the skills she needs to realize the American dream.

Davidson’s article is important because it shows the interplay between economic forces (globalization and technology) and social forces (single parenthood and the breakdown of community support). Globalization and technological change increase the demands on workers; social decay makes it harder for them to meet those demands.

Across America, millions of mothers can’t rise because they don’t have adequate support systems as they try to improve their skills. Tens of millions of children have poor life chances because they grow up in disorganized environments that make it hard to acquire the social, organizational and educational skills they will need to become productive workers.

Tens of millions of men have marred life chances because schools are bad at educating boys, because they are not enmeshed in the long-term relationships that instill good habits and because insecure men do stupid and self-destructive things.

Over the past 40 years, women’s wages have risen sharply but, as Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of the Hamilton Project point out, median incomes of men have dropped 28 percent and male labor force participation rates are down 16 percent. Next time somebody talks to you about wage stagnation, have them break it down by sex. It’s not only globalization and technological change causing this stagnation. It’s the deterioration of the moral and social landscape, especially for men.

The idiocy of our current political debate is that neither side seems capable of talking about the interplay of economic and social forces. Most of the Republican candidates talk as if all that is needed is more capitalism. But lighter regulation and lower taxes won’t, on their own, help the Maddie Parliers of the world get the skills they need to compete.

Democrats, meanwhile, have shifted their emphasis from lifting up the poor to pounding down the rich. Democratic candidates no longer emphasize early childhood education and community-building. Instead they embrace the pseudo-populist Occupy Wall Street hokum — the opiate of the educated classes.

This materialistic ethos emphasizes reducing inequality instead of expanding opportunity. Its policy prescriptions begin (and sometimes end) with raising taxes on the rich. This makes you feel better if you detest all the greed-heads who went into finance. It does nothing to address those social factors, like family breakdown, that help explain why American skills have not kept up with technological change.

If President Obama is really serious about restoring American economic dynamism, he needs an aggressive two-pronged approach: More economic freedom combined with more social structure; more competition combined with more support.

As a survey of nearly 10,000 Harvard Business School grads by Michael Porter and Jan Rivkin makes clear, to get companies to locate their plants in the U.S., Obama is going to have to simplify the tax code, cut corporate rates, streamline regulations, make immigration policy more flexible and balance the budget over the long term.

To ensure there’s skilled labor for those plants, Obama would have to champion different policies: successful training programs like Job Corps, better coordination between colleges and employers, better treatment for superstar teachers, more child care options and better early childhood education.

This agenda is libertarian in the capitalist sector and activist in the human capital sector. Don’t triangulate meekly toward the center; select bold policies from both ends. That’s what would help Maddie Parlier and millions like her.

Gee, Bobo…  Everything that would have really helped Maddie (family planning, day care, a decent public education, and on and on and on) is something that your party is rabidly against.  Schmuck.  Here’s Mr. Cohen:

In the other election of 2012, the one more imminent, there are only two words worth remembering. The first is leadership. The second is change. The rest, as the French say, is du blah-blah.

If the French decide leadership is more important in a time of crisis they will grit their teeth and re-elect Nicolas Sarkozy. If they want change from a president never close to their hearts, they will — as Samuel Johnson said of second marriages — embrace hope over experience and elect the Socialist candidate, François Hollande.

On the face of it, Hollande, slimmed-down and cultivated in a way the French like their presidents to be cultivated, should prevail. He has a clear if narrowing lead in opinion polls. The unemployment rate, at a 12-year high, is rising toward double figures. Pension reform has been unpopular. The national mood is sullen even by Gallic standards. The euro agonizes. The left has not held the presidency since, in another era, François Mitterrand stepped down 17 years ago.

In short, this is the French left’s election to lose. They may just do so.

I visited Paris a week ago, persuaded that Hollande would edge it. I came away thinking Sarkozy is the more likely winner. The president’s political courage is undeniable: A lot of people who can’t stand him now sense they may need him.

Hollande, the gentleman who went to the right elite schools, has charm and humor but has done nothing to dispel the notion he’s a waverer in the crunch. In a rambling appeal to voters this month, published in the daily Libération, he managed not to mention the rest of the world apart from a de rigueur condemnation of “unbridled globalization.” His vague exhortations reeked of navel-gazing sanctimony.

A telling moment came recently when Hollande, in talking about Sarkozy, used the phrase “un sale mec” — roughly a nasty piece of work. How he used the term has been disputed. It does not matter. The language provided an insight into his subconscious and that of a wide swathe of the French bourgeoisie. (Hollande is a bourgeois of the left).

To them Sarkozy, who went to the wrong schools, is forever the outsider, the upstart, the usurper — a “dirty” climber blinded by ambition and unworthy of incarnating the French state through the Fifth Republic’s highest office. Not for nothing is French rich in words — arriviste, parvenu — for characters, like Balzac’s Rastignac, who cut through social barriers to the summit.

So many in France want to see the back of Sarkozy. They dream of a comeuppance for this man of preternatural agitation, but then think: Oh no! Not the left with its indecision, its stale slogans, its colossal “immobilisme” that has somehow preserved class struggle as a tenet when most of the European left — like the German — moved on decades ago.

(The French left has a lot to answer for. It should not escape anyone’s attention that the current strength of the far right in the form of Marine Le Pen’s National Front owes much to the migration of all those ex-Communists whose adoration of Stalin never faded.)

I mentioned Sarkozy’s courage. I’d say it’s what makes him the most interesting politician in Europe. But before that my caveats: When he panders to Le Pen’s right — the appalling treatment of the Roma, the wrongheaded dismissal of Turkey’s E.U. candidacy, the ever more restrictive immigration policy — he’s at his worst. The Napoleonic ego can also get irksome, although his glittering wife Carla Bruni has reined in its sharper expressions.

In the end what’s unforgivable in a politician is ego and ambition that allow no greater cause than self. That’s not the case with Sarkozy. He’s a doer and taboo-breaker — bringing France back into the integrated command of NATO (and so enabling the successful Libyan mission); declaring that love of America is O.K.; reforming universities and the pension system against huge resistance; taking on the worthy Libyan cause where Jacques Chirac and Mitterrand would have waved it away (and where Germany shamefully did.)

But Sarkozy’s biggest achievement has been with respect to Germany in the euro crisis. The crisis came as Germany turned away from European idealism — exhausted by the financial effort of unification, angered by Mediterranean freeloaders, satisfied by its postwar redemption, bent more on material gain than great moral causes (bowing to Vladimir Putin, shunning Libyan freedom fighters). Faced by all this, and an Angela Merkel who had privately compared him to Mr. Bean, Sarkozy did not turn away in a huff. He persevered.

Merkel was reluctantly persuaded that the cause of Europe overrode her citizens’ Euro-bile. The effort has been faltering, countless mistakes made. But the quiet recent moves of the European Central Bank to flood the market with euros and in effect act as a lender of last resort — contrary to the treaty and despite protracted German resistance — reflect above all an enormous French effort to bring Germany around. Interest rates for Spanish and Italian bonds are falling, panic receding.

Score one — and a big one — for Sarkozy. Leadership matters.

Now here’s Mr. Nocera:

It was early in the evening of Jan. 13 when Ryan Boatright, the freshman basketball player at the University of Connecticut, learned that he was being suspended from the team for the second time this season. Earlier that day, he had flown into South Bend, Ind., with his teammates for a game against Notre Dame. The 19-year-old point guard was excited because some 400 people from his hometown, Aurora, Ill., were coming to see him play.

When his coach, Jim Calhoun, broke the news that the N.C.A.A. was still investigating him, Boatright collapsed in Calhoun’s arms. In tears, he called his mother, Tanesha, who began weeping uncontrollably. As I chronicled on Saturday, it was her acceptance of plane tickets a year or so ago that had caused his first suspension. The N.C.A.A. had ruled the tickets an “improper benefit,” and had ordered him to sit out six games and pay a $100-per-month fine to repay the tickets. What more, she wondered, could the N.C.A.A. want?

A lot, it turned out. Tanesha is a single mother raising four children on a small salary. The N.C.A.A. investigators viewed her circumstances as a cause for suspicion, not sympathy. For instance, she owns a car. Where did she get the money to pay for it, they asked? How did she pay for her home? And so on.

Concluding that she had no choice but to cooperate — otherwise, her son would surely pay a severe price — Tanesha turned over her bank statements, as the N.C.A.A. demanded. Four N.C.A.A. investigators pored through her financial records and conducted interrogations in Aurora, seeking “evidence” that she was getting money from “improper” sources. (Tanesha declined to comment.)

When the investigators saw a series of cash deposits in her bank account, they demanded to know the source of the money. She told them: Friends had given her money so that she and her children could have a joyful Christmas. The investigators said they didn’t believe her; they felt sure that she must have gotten the money from an unscrupulous sports agent or some other party outlawed by the N.C.A.A.

Meanwhile, her son remains in limbo, unable to play the game he loves, his reputation unfairly besmirched, while he awaits the N.C.A.A.’s latest ruling. I keep hearing it might happen soon, but, so far, nothing. People associated with Connecticut basketball, including Calhoun, are said to be furious at the N.C.A.A.’s treatment of Ryan Boatright. But the university is as fearful of the N.C.A.A. as Tanesha. It has yet to say a single word publicly on his behalf.

When I asked the N.C.A.A. about the Boatright case, the response I received was deeply disingenuous. Refusing to discuss the actions of its investigators, it essentially said that Connecticut, not the N.C.A.A., declared Boatright ineligible. That is technically true. Schools declare athletes ineligible because if they don’t, the N.C.A.A. will deprive them of scholarships, force them to forfeit games and prevent them from playing in postseason games. Most astonishing, an N.C.A.A. spokeswoman told me that the organization does not have the legal authority to compel cooperation from parents. Again, technically true: Its real weapon — the threat of destroying their sons’ careers — is far more potent than any mere subpoena.

Over the past three weeks, as I’ve written a series of columns about the abuses of the N.C.A.A., one question keeps reverberating in my head: How can this be happening in America?

How can children be punished for the deeds of their parents — deeds that aren’t even wrong in any basic legal sense? How can the N.C.A.A. blithely wreck careers without regard to due process or common fairness? How can it act so ruthlessly to enforce rules that are so petty? Why won’t anybody stand up to these outrageous violations of American values and American justice?

The columns have also prompted e-mails, mostly from parents of college athletes, with their own examples of N.C.A.A. injustices. The women’s basketball player at Harvard who came to the United States from Britain and isn’t allowed to play because she struggled when she first got to the U.S. and had to repeat a year of high school. The team manager — yes, team manager! — who was forced out of his role because he knew a high school player that his school was recruiting. The A students forced off the court because the N.C.A.A. does not include their high school A.P. courses among its “approved” coursework. The coach whose career was ended when the N.C.A.A. accused him of “unethical conduct” without giving him a chance to defend himself.

“The N.C.A.A. is like the Gestapo,” wrote one parent in an e-mail. “It’s out there, we all fear it, and it is all-powerful and follows its own rules and makes them up as they go along. Who are they protecting? The same thing the Gestapo protected: themselves.”

Now here’s Mr. Bruni:

Not long ago, a veteran Republican strategist told me that a politician could succeed with his zipper down, but not with his words unbridled.

He was talking about Newt Gingrich, and was saying that Gingrich’s philandering and three marriages weren’t going to be his real problem, given how many men in government had been forgiven for messy sexual pasts.

His greater liabilities were his wildly mixed messages, gross overstatements and insistence on inserting himself — like some mouthy Gump doppelgänger with a doctorate — into every key moment of the late 20th century. Gingrich was supposed to bloviate his way into oblivion.

Instead he bloviated his way to a 12-point victory in South Carolina and a credible shot at the Republican nomination. Grandiosity, it turns out, is good.

In fact he has doubled down on it. Quadrupled down, really. Although under fire since his previous surge two months ago for all his self-aggrandizing exaggerations, he hasn’t grown careful or bashful or anything of the sort. Neither has the team around him.

In late December, when it was announced that he had failed to qualify for the Virginia primary, a campaign official compared the blow to Pearl Harbor.

“Newt and I agreed that the analogy is December 1941,” wrote the official, Michael Krull, on the candidate’s Facebook page. I wonder which grim historical milestones they considered and rejected before finding consensus on that one.

In Monday night’s debate, Gingrich characterized the end of his Congressional career after the 1998 midterms as wholly volitional, making his exit sound like a self-sacrificing blaze of glory rather than the acrimonious firestorm it was.

With Gingrich, the distance between reality and rhetoric isn’t shrinking but growing, and the incongruities mount. He has lately fallen in love with his rants against “the elites,” and casts himself as their most determined foe, but I can’t for the life of me figure out a definition of elite that doesn’t include him.

Are the elites those hyper-educated intellectuals who use big words? Gingrich has a Ph.D. in history from a prestigious private university, Tulane, and when it suits him, he plays Cerebellum in Chief with nonpareil diction and derision.

Are the elites rich people with fancy ZIP codes? He and his third wife, Callista, made more than $3.1 million in 2010 and have an estimated net worth in excess of $6.5 million. Since 2000 they have lived in the posh enclave of McLean, Va., not Appalachia, and have personally stimulated the economy with expenditures at Tiffany, not Zales.

He lashes out against secularists and trumpets his and Callista’s Roman Catholicism, though the two of them lived for six years in explicit defiance of its tenets.

Mitt Romney’s reinventions pale beside Gingrich’s. At one moment, in one passage of oratory, Gingrich is the only stick-to-his-guns conservative running. At another moment, in another passage, he’s a seasoned practitioner of compromise, as proved by the Clinton years.

He’s also a longtime Washington insider who’s the only reform-minded outsider equipped to change the capital’s ways. How does that work?

In contesting his second wife’s claim on ABC’s “Nightline” that he had requested an open marriage, he accused the news media of a special anti-Republican zeal, conveniently forgetting how that same media — with his gleeful encouragement — pounced on the moral failings of President Clinton, a Democrat.

He rails that the media can’t be trusted, then readily cites any dispatch that cuts in his favor as unassailable truth. He did this on Monday on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” invoking a New York Times article from 2008 as part of his defense against Romney’s charge that he has lobbied lawmakers.

He had initially been slated to appear on ABC on Sunday, on “This Week,” but canceled after the network’s “Nightline” report. He did competing networks’ Sunday shows instead.

By Monday, though, he was ready to heed the siren call of George Stephanopoulos, his pique with ABC as transitory as his ire at CNN’s John King last week was inflated. It’s all one hyperbolic — and, in its way, brilliant — performance.

For a Republican electorate looking for heat, he delivers gust upon gust of hot air. Romney manages only a tepid breeze.

“I have emotion and passion,” Romney told the anchor Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday,” in a voice that communicated neither. Twice more he mentioned passion, as if willing it into his bones.

Wallace played a clip of Gingrich’s South Carolina victory speech, noting how fiercely angry at the state of the country Gingrich seemed.

Romney said that he himself was “very upset.”

Most Democrats are elated. Gingrich seems to them a weaker opponent for President Obama than Romney would be. They’re rooting for him.

But unbridled words have an unexpected currency right now. And one ill-timed, major economic relapse could give the general-election advantage to any Republican nominee, including Gingrich, whose bombast would then get the loudest microphone in the world.

O.K., Mr. President, here’s the plan. Sometime in the next few months you order the Department of Defense to destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity. Yes, I know it’s an election year, and some people will say this is a cynical rally-round-the-flag move on your part, but a nuclear Iran is a problem that just won’t wait.

Our pre-emptive strike, designated Operation Yes We Can, will entail bombing the yellowcake-conversion plant at Isfahan, the uranium enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordo, the heavy-water reactor at Arak, and various centrifuge-manufacturing sites near Natanz and Tehran. True, the Natanz facility is buried under 30 feet of reinforced concrete and surrounded by air defenses, but our new bunker-buster, the 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator, will turn the place into bouncing rubble. Fordo is more problematic, built into the side of a mountain, but with enough sorties we can rattle those centrifuges. Excuse me? Does that take care of everything? Um, that we know of.

Civilian casualties? Not a big deal, sir, given the uncanny accuracy of our precision-guided missiles. Iran will probably try to score sympathy points by trotting out dead bodies and wailing widows, but the majority of the victims will be the military personnel, engineers, scientists and technicians working at the facilities. Fair game, in other words.

Critics will say that these surgical strikes could easily spark a full-blown regional war. They will tell you that the Revolutionary Guard — not the most predictable bunch — will lash out against U.S. and allied targets, either directly or through terrorist proxies. And the regime might actually close off the vital oil route through the Strait of Hormuz. Not to worry, Mr. President. We can do much to mitigate these threats. For one thing, we can reassure the Iranian regime that we just want to eliminate their nukes, not overthrow the government — and of course they will take our word for it, if we can figure out how to convey the message to a country with which we have no formal contacts. Maybe post it on Facebook?

To be sure, we could just let the Israelis do the bombing. Their trigger fingers are getting itchier by the day. But they probably can’t do the job thoroughly without us, and we’d get sucked into the aftermath anyway. We might as well do it right and get the credit. Really, sir, what could possibly go wrong?

The scenario above is extracted from an article by Matthew Kroenig in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs. (The particulars are Kroenig’s; the mordant attitude is mine.) Kroenig, an academic who spent a year as a fellow at the Obama administration’s Defense Department, apparently aspires to the Strangelovian superhawk role occupied in previous decades by the likes of John Bolton and Richard Perle. His former colleagues at Defense were pretty appalled by his article, which combines the alarmist worst case of the Iranian nuclear threat with the rosiest best case of America’s ability to make things better. (Does this remind you of another pre-emptive war in a country beginning with I?)

This scenario represents one pole in a debate that is the most abused foreign policy issue in this presidential campaign year. The opposite pole, also awful to contemplate, is the prospect of living with a nuclear Iran. In that case, the fear of most American experts is not that Iran would decide to incinerate Israel. (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does a good impression of an evil madman, but Iran is not suicidal.) The more realistic dangers, plenty scary, are that a conventional conflict in that conflict-prone neighborhood would spiral into Armageddon, or that Iran would extend its protective nuclear umbrella over menacing proxies like Hezbollah, or that Arab neighbors would feel obliged to join the nuclear arms race.

For now, American policy lives between these poles of attack and acquiescence, in the realm of uncertain calculation and imperfect options. If you want to measure your next president against a hellish dilemma, here’s your chance.

In the Republican field we have one candidate (Rick Santorum) who is about as close as you can get to the bomb-sooner-rather-than-later extreme, another (Ron Paul) who is at the let-Iran-be-Iran extreme, and Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich are in between. Of particular interest is Romney, who has performed the same rhetorical trick with Iran that he did with health care. That is, he condemns Obama for doing pretty much what Romney would do.

Although much about Iran’s theocracy is murky, a few assumptions are widely accepted by specialists in and out of government.

First, for all its denials, the Iranian regime is determined to acquire nuclear weapons, or at least the capacity to make them quickly in the event of an outside threat. Having a nuclear option is seen as a matter of Persian pride and national survival in the face of enemies (namely us) who the Iranians believe are bent on toppling the Islamic state. The nuclear program is popular in Iran, even with many of the opposition figures admired in the West. The actual state of the program is not entirely clear, but the best open-source estimates are that if Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordered full-speed-ahead — which there is no sign he has done — they could have an actual weapon in a year or so.

American policy has been consistent through the Bush and Obama administrations: (1) a declaration that a nuclear Iran is “unacceptable”; (2) a combination of sticks (sanctions) and carrots (supplies of nuclear fuel suitable for domestic industrial needs in exchange for forgoing weapons); (3) unfettered international inspections; (4) a refusal to take military options off the table; (5) a concerted effort to restrain Israel from attacking Iran unilaterally — beyond the Israelis’ presumed campaign to slow Iran’s progress by sabotage and assassination; and (6) a wish that Iran’s hard-liners could be replaced by a more benign regime, tempered by a realization that there is very little we can do to make that happen. This is also the gist of Romney’s Iran playbook, for all his bluster about Obama the appeaser.

In practice, Obama’s policy promises to be tougher than Bush’s. Because Obama started out with an offer of direct talks — which the Iranians foolishly spurned — world opinion has shifted in our direction. We may now have sufficient global support to enact the one measure that would be genuinely crippling — a boycott of Iranian oil. The administration and the Europeans, with help from Saudi Arabia, are working hard to persuade such major Iranian oil customers as Japan and South Korea to switch suppliers. The Iranians take this threat to their economic livelihood seriously enough that people who follow the subject no longer minimize the chance of a naval confrontation in the Strait of Hormuz. It’s not impossible that we will get war with Iran even without bombing its nuclear facilities.

That’s not the only problem with the current — let’s call it the Obamney — approach to Iran.

The point of tough sanctions, of course, is to force Iranians to the bargaining table, where we can do a deal that removes the specter of a nuclear-armed Iran. (You can find some thoughts on what such a deal might entail on my blog.) But the mistrust is so deep, and the election-year pressure to act with manly resolve is so intense, that it’s hard to imagine the administration would feel free to accept an overture from Tehran. Anything short of a humiliating, unilateral Iranian climb-down would be portrayed by the armchair warriors as an Obama surrender. Likewise, if Israel does decide to strike out on its own, Bibi Netanyahu knows that candidate Obama will feel immense pressure to go along.

That short-term paradox comes wrapped up in a long-term paradox: an attack on Iran is almost certain to unify the Iranian people around the mullahs and provoke the supreme leader to redouble Iran’s nuclear pursuits, only deeper underground this time, and without international inspectors around. Over at the Pentagon, you sometimes hear it put this way: Bombing Iran is the best way to guarantee exactly what we are trying to prevent.

Here’s Prof. Krugman:

How goes the state of the union? Well, the state of the economy remains terrible. Three years after President Obama’s inauguration and two and a half years since the official end of the recession, unemployment remains painfully high.

But there are reasons to think that we’re finally on the (slow) road to better times. And we wouldn’t be on that road if Mr. Obama had given in to Republican demands that he slash spending, or the Federal Reserve had given in to Republican demands that it tighten money.

Why am I letting a bit of optimism break through the clouds? Recent economic data have been a bit better, but we’ve already had several false dawns on that front. More important, there’s evidence that the two great problems at the root of our slump — the housing bust and excessive private debt — are finally easing.

On housing: as everyone now knows (but oh, the abuse heaped on anyone pointing it out while it was happening!), we had a monstrous housing bubble between 2000 and 2006. Home prices soared, and there was clearly a lot of overbuilding. When the bubble burst, construction — which had been the economy’s main driver during the alleged “Bush boom” — plunged.

But the bubble began deflating almost six years ago; house prices are back to 2003 levels. And after a protracted slump in housing starts, America now looks seriously underprovided with houses, at least by historical standards.

So why aren’t people going out and buying? Because the depressed state of the economy leaves many people who would normally be buying homes either unable to afford them or too worried about job prospects to take the risk.

But the economy is depressed, in large part, because of the housing bust, which immediately suggests the possibility of a virtuous circle: an improving economy leads to a surge in home purchases, which leads to more construction, which strengthens the economy further, and so on. And if you squint hard at recent data, it looks as if something like that may be starting: home sales are up, unemployment claims are down, and builders’ confidence is rising.

Furthermore, the chances for a virtuous circle have been rising, because we’ve made significant progress on the debt front.

That’s not what you hear in public debate, of course, where all the focus is on rising government debt. But anyone who has looked seriously at how we got into this slump knows that private debt, especially household debt, was the real culprit: it was the explosion of household debt during the Bush years that set the stage for the crisis. And the good news is that this private debt has declined in dollar terms, and declined substantially as a percentage of G.D.P., since the end of 2008.

There are, of course, still big risks — above all, the risk that trouble in Europe could derail our own incipient recovery. And thereby hangs a tale — a tale told by a recent report from the McKinsey Global Institute.

The report tracks progress on “deleveraging,” the process of bringing down excessive debt levels. It documents substantial progress in the United States, which it contrasts with failure to make progress in Europe. And while the report doesn’t say this explicitly, it’s pretty clear why Europe is doing worse than we are: it’s because European policy makers have been afraid of the wrong things.

In particular, the European Central Bank has been worrying about inflation — even raising interest rates during 2011, only to reverse course later in the year — rather than worrying about how to sustain economic recovery. And fiscal austerity, which is supposed to limit the increase in government debt, has depressed the economy, making it impossible to achieve urgently needed reductions in private debt. The end result is that for all their moralizing about the evils of borrowing, the Europeans aren’t making any progress against excessive debt — whereas we are.

Back to the U.S. situation: my guarded optimism should not be taken as a statement that all is well. We have already suffered enormous, unnecessary damage because of an inadequate response to the slump. We have failed to provide significant mortgage relief, which could have moved us much more quickly to lower debt. And even if my hoped-for virtuous circle is getting under way, it will be years before we get to anything resembling full employment.

But things could have been worse; they would have been worse if we had followed the policies demanded by Mr. Obama’s opponents. For as I said at the beginning, Republicans have been demanding that the Fed stop trying to bring down interest rates and that federal spending be slashed immediately — which amounts to demanding that we emulate Europe’s failure.

And if this year’s election brings the wrong ideology to power, America’s nascent recovery might well be snuffed out.

There are 300 million people in the United States of America. There are millions of political activists, volunteers, organizers and would-be officeholders. There are hundreds of thousands of elected officials. Yet somehow, out of all this multitude, the Republican Party has been unable to find a candidate for the White House in 2012 who inspires anything but weary resignation from its voters.

What’s remarkable is how often this seems to happen. As weak as this year’s Republican field has proved, it’s not that much weaker than a number of recent presidential vintages, from the Democrats’ lineups in 1988 and 2004 to the Republican field in 1996. In presidential politics, the great talents (a Clinton, a Reagan) seem to be the exception; a march of Dole-Dukakis-Mondale mediocrity is closer to the rule.

The problem, perhaps, is that a successful presidential campaign calls on a trio of talents that only rarely overlap. Being a master politician in a mass democracy, in this sense, is a bit like being a brilliant filmmaker who’s somehow also a great economist, or a Nobel-winning scientist who writes best-selling novels on the side.

First, a great politician needs the gift of management. A would-be president has to be the C.E.O. of his or her campaign, with a flair for fund-raising, an eye for talent, and a keen sense of when to micromanage and when to delegate. This is the arm-twisting, organization-building, endorsement-corralling side of presidential politics, and not surprisingly it tends to favor insiders and deal-makers and old Washington hands.

But successful insiders and deal-makers are rarely comfortable with the more public, rhetorical, self-advertising side of politics. The great manager is unlikely to be a great persuader, capable of seducing undecided voters with his empathy, or inspiring them with what George H. W. Bush (who lacked it) called “the vision thing.” He’s also unlikely to be a great demagogue, capable of demonizing his enemies and convincing his supporters that they stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord. The manager can play these roles, but there will always be a hint of irony, a touch of phoniness, a sense that he’d much rather get back to the inside game.

Nor do the gifts of persuasion necessarily overlap with the gifts of demagoguery. Quite the reverse: The politician who’s good at reaching out to the unconverted is usually mistrusted by his own base, and the politician whose us-versus-them rhetoric inspires devotion among ideologues rarely finds it easy to pivot to a more transcendent, unifying style. If Jon Huntsman had a little more Sarah Palin in him, for instance, or Palin a bit more Huntsman, one of them might have been the 2012 Republican nominee. But their respective gifts are rarely shared in a single personality.

When a politician somehow hits the manager-persuader-demagogue trifecta, he can seem unstoppable. (See Roosevelt, Franklin, and his four terms in office.) But just going two for three is usually enough to create an immensely formidable candidate.

Both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, for instance, were great persuaders and great demagogues — they could woo with high-minded appeals one moment and twist the partisan knife the next — and that combination more than compensated for their weaknesses as managers. Dwight Eisenhower wasn’t much of a demagogue, but he excelled at playing the unifier in public and at organizational hardball behind closed doors. Richard Nixon’s appeal to voters’ better angels always felt forced, but he could out-organize and out-demonize just about anyone — at least until his paranoia infected his management style, and undid everything he’d built.

The losers of our presidential history, on the other hand, usually have only one gift out of three. They’re good managers, more often than not, whose organizations outlast demagogues and persuaders in the primaries but who can neither rally the base nor inspire the center in the general election. Thus Walter Mondale, victorious over Jesse Jackson and Gary Hart but crushed by Reagan; thus Bob Dole and Michael Dukakis; thus John Kerry in 2004.

This is the path that Mitt Romney, managerial to his core, seems to be treading in 2012. The question is what kind of opponent he’ll find waiting in November. In 2008, Barack Obama seemed to have almost F.D.R.-like gifts: He out-managed, out-inspired and out-demagogued both Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

But the presidency, unexpectedly, has exposed his limits as a communicator. Now when Obama demonizes, it seems clumsy; when he tries to persuade, it falls on deaf ears. Unlike Reagan and Clinton, the two masters, he seems unable to either bully or inspire.

What Obama has left, though, is the same capable, even ruthless organization that helped him over the top last time around. Maybe he’ll rediscover the old 2008 magic as well. But if not, the 2012 election is shaping up to be the most wearying sort of American presidential campaign: a clash of two managers, slogging their way toward a prize that a stronger candidate might have taken in a walk.

I love it when he whistles past the graveyard.  Here’s MoDo:

For eight seconds, we saw the president we had craved for three years: cool, joyous, funny, connected.

“I, I’m so in love with you,” Barack Obama crooned to a thrilled crowd at a fund-raiser at the Apollo in Harlem on Thursday night, doing a seductive imitation as Al Green himself looked on.

The song would make a good campaign anthem: “Let’s stay together, lovin’ you whether, whether times are good or bad, happy or sad.” Don’t break up, turn around and make up.

Times have been bad and sad, and The One did not turn out to be a messiah, just a mortal politician who ruefully jokes that his talent is hitting the “sweet spot” where he makes no one happy, neither allies nor opponents.

The man who became famous with a speech declaring that we were one America, not opposing teams of red and blue states, presides over an America more riven by blue and red than ever.

The man who came to Washington on a wave of euphoria has had a presidency with all the joy of a root canal, dragged down by W.’s recklessness and his own inability to read America’s panic and its thirst for a strong leader.

In an interview with Fareed Zakaria for this week’s Time cover story, the president is maddeningly naïve.

Asked about his cool, aloof style and his unproductive relationship with John Boehner, Obama replied: “You know, the truth is, actually, when it comes to Congress, the issue is not personal relationships. My suspicion is that this whole critique has to do with the fact that I don’t go to a lot of Washington parties. And as a consequence, the Washington press corps maybe just doesn’t feel like I’m in the mix enough with them, and they figure, well, if I’m not spending time with them, I must be cold and aloof. The fact is, I’ve got a 13-year-old and 10-year-old daughter.”

Reagan didn’t socialize with the press. He spent his evenings with Nancy, watching TV with dinner trays. But he knew that to transcend, you can’t condescend.

The portrait of the first couple in Jodi Kantor’s new book, “The Obamas,” bristles with aggrievement and the rational president’s disdain for the irrational nature of politics, the press and Republicans. Despite what his rivals say, the president and the first lady do believe in American exceptionalism — their own, and they feel overassaulted and underappreciated.

We disappointed them.

As Michelle said to Oprah in an interview she did with the president last May: “I always told the voters, the question isn’t whether Barack Obama is ready to be president. The question is whether we’re ready. And that continues to be the question we have to ask ourselves.”

They still believed, as their friend Valerie Jarrett once said, that Obama was “just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”

As Kantor reports, when the president met with Democratic members of Congress who had lost their seats in the midterms because of an incoherent White House economic and jobs strategy, he did not seem to comprehend the anxiety that had spawned the Tea Party, or feel any regret. Jim Oberstar, who lost his long-held Minnesota perch, recalled Obama’s saying, “In the end, this is for the greater good of the country.”

Who knew, in the exuberance of 2008, that America was electing an introvert? And that one who touched so many felt above the touchy-feely-gritty parts of politics?

Asked last week by Piers Morgan how he got on with Obama, Jimmy Carter — one of two living Democratic ex-presidents — replied, “We don’t really have any relationship.” The Clintons have not been courted with dinners in the private residence either.

Kantor writes that the Obamas, feeling misunderstood, burrowed into “self-imposed exile” — a “bubble within the bubble” — with their small circle of Chicago friends, who reinforced the idea that “the American public just did not appreciate their exceptional leader.”

She reports that Marty Nesbitt indignantly told his fellow Obama pal Eric Whitaker that the president “could get 70 or 80 percent of the vote anywhere but the U.S.”

The Obamas, especially Michelle, have radiated the sense that Americans do not appreciate what they sacrifice by living in a gilded cage. They’ve forgotten Rule No. 1 of politics: No one sheds tears for anyone lucky enough to live at the White House. And after four or eight years of public service, you are assured membership in the 1 percent club.

The Obamas truly feel like victims. But Newt Gingrich, who campaigns by attacking the culture of victimization, plays one on stage. He soared at the Charleston CNN debate by brazenly proclaiming himself the victim of “the elite media protecting Barack Obama” (the same Obama who told Time he was victimized by the press). Newt’s gambit was a calculated way of deflecting attention from a charge by his second wife, Marianne, that the family values he preaches are hypocritical platitudes, given his cheating ways with two wives he divorced when they were ill.

Could 2012, remarkably, be a race between two powerful victims yearning to be lonely at the top?

Now here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

A Washington Post-ABC News poll released on Friday found that two-thirds of Americans would consider voting for a third-party presidential candidate, while 48 percent definitely wanted a third party in the race. Now what does that tell you? It tells you that with the campaign about to go into full swing, as the president delivers his State of the Union address next week, voters are still casting about for a leader with a winning message. I can save both parties a lot of money. I am one of those voters, and I can tell you exactly for whom I want to vote — and I don’t think I’m alone.

I want to vote for a candidate who advocates an immediate investment in infrastructure that will create jobs and upgrade America for the 21st century — ultrafast bandwidth, highways, airports, public schools, mass transit — and combines that with a long-term plan to fix our fiscal imbalances at the real scale of the problem, a plan that could be phased in as the economy recovers.

On the latter point, I am talking about the Bowles-Simpson bipartisan deficit reduction plan — or something equally serious and with a chance of bipartisan support. President Obama has proposed smart infrastructure investments, but he has not paired them with a credible long-term deficit-reduction plan, and the only chance of passage in Congress is to have both. Mitt Romney is not even close.

Christina Romer, the former chairwoman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, put it best when she told this newspaper on Dec. 31 that the U.S. “faces two daunting economic problems: an unsustainable long-run budget deficit and persistent high unemployment. … Over the next 20 to 30 years, rising health care costs and the retirement of the baby boomers are projected to cause deficits that make the current one look puny. At the rate we’re going, the United States would almost surely default on its debt one day. … We already have a blueprint for a bipartisan solution. The Bowles-Simpson commission hashed out a sensible plan of spending cuts, entitlement program reforms and revenue increases that would shave $4 trillion off the deficit over the next decade. It shares the pain of needed deficit reduction, while protecting the most vulnerable and maintaining investments in our future productivity.  

“But we can’t focus on the deficit alone,” added Romer. “Persistent unemployment is destroying the lives and wasting the talents of more than 13 million Americans. Pairing additional strong stimulus with a plan to reduce the deficit would likely pack a particularly powerful punch for confidence and spending.”

Second, I want to vote for a candidate who is committed to reforming taxes, and cutting spending, in a fair way. The rich must pay more, but everyone has to pay something. We are all in this together.

Third, I want to vote for a candidate who has an inspirational vision, not just a plan to balance the budget. People will sacrifice to make this country great again if they think you have a real plan for American success in the 21st century. And that plan is obvious. We’re not going to be about launching one big moon shot anymore. We need to be building a country where everyone in the world wants to come to launch their own moon shot — their own company, their own start-up — because we have the best immigration policies, regulations, schools and incentives. We can’t tax or cut our way to prosperity and jobs. We have to invent our way there. We need both more “Made in America” and “Imagined in America.”

Finally, I want to vote for a candidate who supports a minimum floor of public financing of presidential, Senate and House campaigns. Money in politics is out of control today. Our Congress has become a forum for legalized bribery. Americans are losing faith in the instruments of government because they think the game is rigged by big money — and they’re right.

Any candidate with that four-part agenda would win — and so would the country, because he would win with a mandate to do what needs doing.

“The people are so far ahead of the politicians,” says the Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg. His polling, he adds, shows that many Americans today “think that China, Germany and Brazil have strategies for success, and that we don’t. But they are looking for that. They are looking for a leader who will be really bold.”

People have been misled by months of crazy G.O.P. debates that make the country look so much more divided, small-minded and unwilling to sacrifice to fix our problems than it actually is. That’s why I’d bet anything that the first candidate who steps out of the cartoonish politics of destruction — “Romney is just a capitalist vulture. Obama is a Kenyan socialist” — and shocks the public by going radically responsible, radically honest, radically demanding and radically aspirational, along the lines above, will be our next president.

I hope it is Obama, because I agree with him on so many other issues. But if it’s Romney, he’d deserve to win. And, if by some miracle, both run that campaign, and the 2012 contest is about two such competing visions, then put every dollar you own in the U.S. stock market. It will go up a gazillion points.

Me?  I want to vote for someone who will repeal the Bush tax cuts.  Of course, that would gore Tommy’s ox…  Here’s Mr. Kristof:

If you want to understand how great teachers transform lives, listen to the story of Olly Neal.

A recent study showed how a great elementary schoolteacher can raise the lifetime earnings of a single class by $700,000. After I wrote about the study, skeptics of school reform wrote me to say: sure, a great teacher can make a difference in the right setting, but not with troubled, surly kids in a high-poverty environment. If you think that, or if you scoff at the statistics, then listen to Neal.

In the late 1950s, Olly Neal was a poor black kid with an attitude. He was one of 13 brothers and sisters in a house with no electricity, and his father was a farmer with a second-grade education. Neal attended a small school for black children — this was in the segregated South — and was always mouthing off. He remembers reducing his English teacher, Mildred Grady, to tears.

“I was not a nice kid,” he recalls. “I had a reputation. I was the only one who made her cry.”

Neal adds: “She would have had good reason to say, ‘this boy is incorrigible.’ ”

A regular shoplifter back then, Neal was caught stealing from the store where he worked part time. He seemed headed for a life in trouble.

Carolyn F. Blakely, then a new teacher at the school (who retired last year as the dean of the Honors College that now bears her name at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff), remembers Neal as an at-risk kid prone to challenge authority. At the time, even teachers in the school called students “Mr.” or “Miss,” but Neal disrupted class by addressing her impertinently as “Carolyn.”

To deal with kids like him, Blakely told me, “I’d go home and stand in front of the mirror and practice being mean.”

One day in 1957, in the fall of his senior year, Neal cut Blakely’s class and wandered in the library, set up by Grady, the English teacher whom he had tormented. Neal wasn’t a reader, but he spotted a book with a risqué cover of a sexy woman.

Called “The Treasure of Pleasant Valley,” it was by Frank Yerby, a black author, and it looked appealing. Neal says he thought of checking it out, but he didn’t want word to get out to any of his classmates that he was reading a novel. That would have been humiliating.

“So I stole it.”

Neal tucked the book under his jacket and took it home — and loved it. After finishing the book, he sneaked it back into the library. And there, on the shelf, he noticed another novel by Yerby. He stole that one as well.

This book was also terrific. And, to Neal’s surprise, when he returned it to the shelf after finishing it, he found yet another by Yerby.

Four times this happened, and he caught the book bug. “Reading got to be a thing I liked,” he says. His trajectory changed, and he later graduated to harder novels, including those by Albert Camus, and he turned to newspapers and magazines as well. He went to college and later to law school.

In 1991, Neal was appointed the first black district prosecuting attorney in Arkansas. A few years later, he became a judge, and then an appellate court judge.

But there’s more.

At a high school reunion, Grady stunned Neal by confiding to him that she had spotted him stealing that first book. Her impulse was to confront him, but then, in a flash of understanding, she realized his embarrassment at being seen checking out a book.

So Grady kept quiet. The next Saturday, she told him, she drove 70 miles to Memphis to search the bookshops for another novel by Yerby. Finally, she found one, bought it and put it on the library bookshelf.

Twice more, Grady told Neal, she spent her Saturdays trekking to Memphis to buy books by Yerby — all in hopes of turning around a rude adolescent who had made her cry. She paid for the books out of her own pocket.

How can one measure Grady’s impact? Not only in Neal, but in the lives of those around him. His daughter, Karama, earned a doctorate in genetics, taught bioethics at Emory University, and now runs a community development program in Arkansas.

The big-hearted Grady, now dead, is a reminder that teachers may have the most important job in America. By all accounts, Grady transformed many other children as well, through more mundane methods.

To me, the lesson is that while there are no silver bullets to chip away at poverty or improve national competitiveness, improving the ranks of teachers is part of the answer. That’s especially true for needy kids, who often get the weakest teachers. That should be the civil rights scandal of our time.

The implication is that we need rigorous teacher evaluations, more pay for good teachers and more training and weeding-out of poor teachers. The need for more pay is simple. In the 1950s, outstanding women like Grady didn’t have many alternatives, and they became teachers. Grady was black, so she didn’t have many options other than teaching black children in a segregated school.

Today, women like Grady often become doctors, lawyers or bankers — professions with far higher salaries. If we want to recruit and retain the best teachers, we simply have to pay more — while also more aggressively thinning out those who don’t succeed. It’s worth it.

“There are some kids who can’t be reached,” Neal acknowledges. “But there are some that you can reach every now and then.” As his life attests.

And now here’s Mr. Bruni:

The people who invite us to wallow in food seldom remind us to beware.

In the pages of their gorgeously illustrated cookbooks or on their delectably edited TV shows, they assemble and plunge headlong into lavish feasts, oohing as they baste, cooing as they carve and swooning over the side dishes. We respond as intended. We hanker and yearn.

Here’s what we don’t see: the yogurt and berries they had for breakfast; the salads and grilled vegetables they eat on nights off; the portion of each lovingly shot dish that they don’t touch, having satisfied their curiosity or the cameras with a few bites. If they’re fit, they often neglect to mention the exercise involved. If they’re not, they infrequently cop to their health worries or woes.

Last week Paula Deen copped. The woman whose best-known burger recipe uses glazed doughnuts in place of a bun announced that she has diabetes. It would have been refreshing if the circumstances hadn’t been so self-serving: she was plugging her son Bobby’s new Cooking Channel show, “Not My Mama’s Meals,” which is devoted to lower-calorie recipes. And she had recently signed on as a paid pitchwoman for a diabetes drug.

What’s more, she had waited three long, greasy years since her diagnosis to come out. During that period, she promoted the deep-fried life without acknowledging her firsthand experience of how a person can be burned by it.

That’s a profound, unsettling act of withholding. But it’s mirrored by many smaller, less calculated, more innocent ones in the world of food celebrities and food celebrators, including those of us who have written orgiastic accounts of sumptuous dinners. Deen’s revelation jolted me in part because people in the business of peddling gastronomic bliss rarely draw such a bold connection between indulgence and its possible wages.

It’s not that the wages are unpredictable or hidden. Every day seems to bring the invention of a new diet, and in a country with tens of millions of obese people, it sometimes seems that half of them are on reality shows, sweating or crying their way up the steep, broccoli-paved road to redemption. We once again have “jiggle TV,” only now it refers to the swoop and sway of second chins on a StairMaster.

But those programs tend to exist in a penitent universe apart from those that traffic in Southern barbecue, ornately iced cakes and the handiwork of iron-willed chefs. An exception that proves the rule is “Fat Chef,” a Food Network show beginning on Thursday. Apart from it, there’s a chasm between revelry and responsibility that makes it all too easy to cast aside caution and dig in. That disconnect carries over to magazine publishing, where epicurean counsel and restrained eating are largely separate genres, and to the sectioning of newspapers, in which kitchen frolicking goes in the dining pages, low-calorie recipes in the health ones. Too much integration of the latter into the former spoils the fun.

But they’re integrated behind the scenes. You show me a truly skinny food editor or writer who frequents serious restaurants and — in two out of three cases — I’ll show you someone expert at a brand of knife work that yields infinitesimal bites and an illusion of gluttony where mere grazing occurred. They should be surgeons, these people. I know. Especially during my five years as a restaurant critic, I ate with many of them — and can assure you that people in the food industry are among the least likely to clean their plates.

MANY of the acclaimed chefs whose television appearances, cookbooks or venerated restaurants whet our appetites have only an occasional, formal relationship with the luxuries they hawk. For a forthcoming book, Allison Adato, an editor at People, debriefed some three dozen of them about how they themselves ate.

“When I asked them what kind of food they cooked at home, it was surprising to me how many said roast chicken and vegetables,” she told me. “You can’t imagine. And none of them are particularly known for roast chicken.” She heard a lot as well about high-fiber cereals, egg whites, yogurt smoothies, leafy greens.

The research that she recounted to me and the book itself, “Smart Chefs Stay Slim,” to be published by New American Library in April, describe a populous crowd of food professionals who work out diligently to keep the ravages of foie gras at bay.

They have private trainers. They play tennis or soccer. They climb rocks or box or do yoga or bicycle or run. Adato’s book spotlights four chefs and restaurateurs who have run marathons, including Art Smith, who cooked for Oprah Winfrey for 10 years and was once more than 100 pounds above his current weight. It could also have name-checked Bobby Flay, who has run three.

Gail Simmons, the host of “Top Chef: Just Desserts,” told me that she and her “Top Chef” colleagues are all committed exercisers. Padma Lakshmi, she said, will repeatedly scale hotel stairs for quick workouts when they’re taping out of town.

They’re careful with eating, too. Before each of three recent seasons, Simmons did a roughly 10-day program of mostly vegetarian meals with a three-day juice cleanse in the middle.

She’s not trying to hide that, and in fact mentions her mindful ways in a memoir, “Talking With My Mouth Full,” to be published by Hyperion next month. The chefs whom Adato profiled weren’t reticent about their efforts at fitness, either. Readers, though, may be surprised by the magnitude of discipline many of them muster. It just isn’t brought up as often as it could be.

And discipline is in order, because some of the upscale victuals they concoct and invariably test aren’t all that much safer than Deen’s grub, the doughnut burger excepted. While Deen has a preponderance of calorie bombs in her playbook and a heavy hand with salt, a given dish of hers can sometimes be lighter than its haute counterpart. An analysis of written recipes that I commissioned from a dietitian suggested that her oven-fried potato wedges, made with mayonnaise, are 328 calories per serving. The chef Thomas Keller’s “tasting of potatoes with black truffles,” made with cream and butter, is 494.

That’s the kind of thing that made me consider some past put-downs of Deen elitist. After all, she isn’t alone in exhorting people to pig out. She’s just unusually cornmeal-crusted, saucy and bewigged about it.

I hope she’ll have plenty of company now, too, as she tells some valuable truths about food and consequences, belated as they are.

Oh, and she’ll rake in a bunch of cash from endorsing her medication (and Smithfield hams…).  She’s a blight, and shameless into the bargain.

Up with Newt. Down with dignity. That’s the way it goes.

Newt Gingrich is surging in South Carolina and has a good chance to win that state’s primary on Saturday. But, as he rises, so grows the dark shadow that he casts over his party and the grievous damage he does to its chances of unseating President Obama.

For Gingrich’s part, he’s a shrewd politician executing a well-honed strategy to exploit an obvious opening.

Aside from Ron Paul’s Libertarian views, which some Republicans find extreme, there is little daylight between the views of the remaining Republican presidential candidates on the major issues. They all want lower taxes, less regulation, smaller government and no marriage among gay men and lesbians.

The debate now is about who best carries the mantra into the general election and has the best chance of defeating President Obama. The answer among the establishment remains Mitt Romney. But Romney goes down sour for many rank-and-file Republicans. Some don’t connect with him. Others don’t trust him. Others outright detest him. Poor Mitt.

Furthermore, his last two debate performances have vacillated between lackluster and disastrous — stammering and stuttering, hemming and hawing, looking out of wits.

In steps Gingrich, with more baggage than Prince Akeem in “Coming to America.” But many Republicans are willing to forgive his flaws and his past because he connects with a silent slice of their core convictions — their deep-seated, long-simmering issues with an “elite” media bias, minority “privilege” and Obama’s “otherness.”

Romney dares not go there. Not Newt. He’s the street fighter with a history of poisonous politics who not only goes there but dwells there. He makes his nest among the thorns of open animus and coded language.

Take the issue of media bias for instance: according to a September Pew Research Center poll, more than three-quarters of Republicans said that news organizations are politically biased. That was appreciably higher than both independents and Democrats. And that same month a Gallup poll found that three-quarters of Republicans believe that the news media are too liberal. This, too, was appreciably higher than independents and Democrats.

Gingrich is using this distrust as a weapon. At a campaign stop this week, a man in the audience asked, “What I’ve been looking for in my candidate is fire in the belly. We’ve got to bloody Obama’s nose. You mentioned challenging him to seven three-hour debates. He has this armor of media surrounding him. If he doesn’t agree to that, how do you plan to aggressively take the gloves off and go after him?”

Gingrich responded, “I don’t want to bloody his nose. I want to knock him out.”

At Thursday’s debate, Gingrich upped the ante by laying into CNN’s John King, the debate moderator, for opening the debate with a question about an interview his ex-wife had given to ABC News alleging that Gingrich had asked for an “open marriage.” He slammed the news media’s “destructive, vicious, negative nature,” said that he was “appalled” that King had asked the question and said that asking it was “as close to despicable as anything I can imagine.” (I can think of something closer.)

Gingrich went on to say, “I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans.” Points scored. The crowd ate it up.

In a previous debate on Monday, Gingrich rebuffed a suggestion by Fox News’s Juan Williams, a debate panelist, that blacks might be offended by his notion that they should demand jobs not food stamps, or that poor children lacked a strong work ethic, or that calling Obama the “food stamp president” might be “intended to belittle the poor and racial minorities.”

Gingrich scoffed: “I know among the politically correct, you’re not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable.” More points. That crowd went crazy.

On Friday, Gingrich doubled down and told a campaign crowd that “the idea of work” seemed to Williams “to be a strange, distant concept.”

This conjures the historical fiction that blacks are lazy and plays to the belief among many Republican voters that race is inconsequential to one’s ability to succeed in this country. According to a New York Times/CBS News poll released this week, Republican voters, particularly those in the South, were more likely than all voters to say that blacks and whites have an equal chance of getting ahead in today’s society.

As for the president, Gingrich this week at a campaign stop called the president’s decision to block the Keystone XL oil pipeline “stunningly stupid.” Even more points. The crowd jumped to its feet and pumped fists.

But that’s a mild statement for Gingrich. His hostility, distrust and disrespect of the president has deep roots.

In September 2010, he told the National Review Online that President Obama followed a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview. Gingrich continued, “I think he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating — none of which was true.”

Gingrich was commenting on a Forbes article by Dinesh D’Souza, the president of the King’s College in New York City. In the article, D’Souza said of President Obama:

“Our president is trapped in his father’s time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anti-colonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.”

Gingrich called the article the “most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama.” Bonus points. Ding, ding, ding, ding.

Gingrich is appealing to (and exposing) an ugly, gut-level anger and animosity among a sizable portion of the Republican electorate. This may work for him in the primaries, but it doesn’t bode well for his party in November.

The Republican party has turned into a gang of people who will boo the Golden Rule.  Stunning…  Here’s Mr. Nocera:

In America, a person is presumed innocent until proved guilty. Unless, that is, he plays college sports.

When the N.C.A.A. investigates an athlete for breaking its rules, not only is he presumed guilty but his punishment begins before he knows what he’s accused of. He is not told who his accuser is. The N.C.A.A. will delve into the personal relationships of his relatives and demand their bank statements and other private records. And it will hand down its verdict without so much as a hearing. Reputations have been ruined on accusations so flimsy that they would be laughed out of any court in the land. Then again, the N.C.A.A. isn’t a court of law. It’s more powerful.

Like most sports fans, I had always assumed that if an athlete was sanctioned by the N.C.A.A., he must have done something wrong. I don’t assume that anymore. Many N.C.A.A. infractions consist of actions that most people would consider perfectly appropriate — and entirely legal — but that the N.C.A.A. has chosen to criminalize. Today’s case in point: the ongoing N.C.A.A. harassment — there is no other word for it — of Ryan Boatright, a basketball player at the University of Connecticut.

Boatright is 19 years old, a freshman guard who was named Mr. Basketball in Illinois during his senior year of high school. He grew up in Aurora, outside of Chicago, one of four children raised by his mother, Tanesha. He clearly sees basketball as his means to a better life.

But to get to that better life, whether in the N.B.A. or a European league, he needs to be able to play in college, and, so far, the N.C.A.A. has done its best to prevent that from happening. Before the season began, it informed Connecticut that Boatright was under investigation for accepting “improper benefits” in high school. (That’s right: The N.C.A.A. regulates the behavior of athletes who have not yet joined the N.C.A.A.) Connecticut immediately suspended him from the team; otherwise it risked forfeiting games that Boatright played in. That’s how the system works — and it’s why I say that players are punished before they even know the charges against them.

Sure enough, the N.C.A.A. eventually informed Connecticut that Boatright would be suspended for six games — and that he would have to come up with $100 a month to repay the “impermissible benefit.” (I was unable to learn how long the payments will continue, but I hear that it is substantial.)

Surely, Boatright must have done something awful to merit that kind of punishment, right? In fact, he did nothing at all. It was his mother who had violated N.C.A.A. rules. Her crime was looking out for her son.

Like any parent would, she wanted to visit the schools her son was considering. But under N.C.A.A. rules, the universities recruiting Ryan are only allowed to pay his way, not hers. So she got the money from an old friend, Reggie Rose, an A.A.U. coach in Aurora and the older brother of Derrick Rose, the Chicago Bulls star. Boatright played for Rose during his last two years of high school, but his mother had known Rose well before then. That airfare is the “impermissible benefit.”

“Reggie Rose is not a UConn booster,” says Sonny Vaccaro, a former Nike marketer who is now a critic of the N.C.A.A. “He is not an agent. He has a pre-existing relationship with Ryan’s mother. He was doing what anyone would do: lending a hand. That should be applauded.”

Instead, the N.C.A.A. told Tanesha that she should “stay away” from Rose — thus claiming yet another absurd power: the power to dictate who an athlete’s parents can befriend. (Tanesha declined to comment.)

And how did the N.C.A.A. find out about Tanesha’s airfare? Get this: The N.C.A.A. heard about it from her ex-boyfriend, a convicted felon who, according to Ryan’s cousin, Jaeh Thomas, had once seen Ryan as “his big ticket.” When the relationship turned ugly, he vowed to exact revenge on Tanesha by calling in the N.C.A.A., according to Thomas and Mike McAllister, Ryan’s father. If this were a court proceeding, the ex-boyfriend’s credibility could be challenged and his motives questioned. Instead, in its crazed obsession with its extra-legal rules, the N.C.A.A. is willing to serve the interests of an angry ex-boyfriend who wants to ruin an athlete’s career to get back at his mother. It almost defies belief.

Ryan did finally get to play once his suspension ended. His case had been closed. Last Saturday, against Notre Dame, was supposed to be his fourth game back. South Bend is only two-and-a-half hours from Aurora, and more than 400 Aurora residents bought tickets to the game. Ryan was excited at the prospect of playing in front of friends and family. Finally, he thought, his troubles with the N.C.A.A. were over.

But he was wrong. What happened next will be the subject of Tuesday’s column.

Now here’s Ms. Collins:

Right now, you are probably asking yourself whether two divorces, a history of adultery and an ex-wife who says you asked for an open marriage would be enough to disqualify a person from becoming president of the United States.

O.K., pretend that was what you were asking yourself.

Sex was one of the topics very much on the minds of voters as South Carolina prepared to go to the polls on Saturday. Also, there was the big debate, in which Newt Gingrich said that asking about the open marriage thing was “despicable.” That was also when Mitt Romney slipped and referred to health reform in Massachusetts as “Romneycare,” which I enjoyed very much.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the campaign, Herman Cain announced that he was endorsing “the people” for president. On behalf of the people, I would like to say that, if elected, we promise to balance the budget, release Mitt Romney’s tax returns and pass a law against driving to Canada with an Irish setter tied to the roof of the car.

But about sex. Marianne Gingrich, Wife No. 2, told ABC News in an interview that Newt had called her up while she was visiting her mother, told her he was having an affair, and then proposed an open marriage. Newt denied the open marriage part and referred all questions to his two daughters by his other former marriage.

This seems like a lot to dump on the daughters. When we the people are president, we are definitely passing a law against requiring children to field media inquiries about their father’s other wives.

South Carolina is probably not the ideal state in which to be accused of breaking the matrimonial bonds, then smashing them and jumping up and down on them until they’re just a pile of marital powdery dust. But Newt has framed his sexual history — the parts he isn’t totally denying — in terms of a redemption story. (“I’ve had to go to God for forgiveness.”) Everybody likes a story of the fallen man who rejects his wicked ways and starts a new life. Remember how well George W. Bush did with the one about renouncing alcohol on his 40th birthday? There is, however, a lot of difference between giving up drinking on the eve of middle age and giving up adultery at about the time you’re qualifying for Social Security. Cynics might suggest that Newt didn’t so much reform as poop out.

Still, he has several things working in his favor, one of which has got to be the public’s lack of appetite for thinking about Newt Gingrich’s sex life at all.

Another is that his hound dog persona is old news. Marianne even told the break-up story to Esquire a while back. That version included the memorable description of how Newt had explained that she was a Jaguar, while he needed a Chevrolet, like his Washington squeeze, Callista.

This would appear to be a Newtian version of “it’s not you, it’s me.”

Conservative Gingrich fans lined up to argue that his bedroom behavior made no difference. Dr. Keith Ablow, a psychiatrist “and member of the Fox News Medical A-Team” opined on the Fox Web site that it actually made Newt a better candidate: “So, as far as I can tell, judging from the psychological data, we have only one real risk to America from his marital history if Newt Gingrich were to become president: We would need to worry that another nation, perhaps a little younger than ours, would be so taken by Mr. Gingrich that it would seduce him into marrying it and becoming its president.”

O.K.

Voters very seldom penalize politicians for sexual misbehavior — unless it’s of a type that suggests the pol in question is a little … off. (See: sexting pictures of your underwear, having tickling parties with your young male aides, telling your staff you’re going on a hike and then flying to see your girlfriend in Argentina. Really, when you look back, we have been through a lot.)

Beyond the hypocrisy of this sort of behavior from a guy who wants to protect the sanctity of holy matrimony from gay couples, there also seems to be a streak of almost crazed self-absorption that runs through the Newt saga. Who would ditch a spouse of 18 years in a phone call? Shortly after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis? And, of course, he broke up with his first wife while she was battling cancer. Do you see a theme developing here? This is the same guy who proudly announced “I think grandiose thoughts” during the last debate.

Campaigning after the ABC News interview broke, Gingrich said: “Callista and I have a wonderful relationship. We knew we’d get beaten up. We knew we’d get lied about. We knew we’d get smeared. We knew there would be nasty attack ads. And we decided the country was worth the pain.”

The country is so grateful for your sacrifice.

They’ve made amazing strides in animitronics.  Callista is a stunning example.

Mitt Romney is a rich man, but is Mitt Romney’s character formed by his wealth? Is Romney a spoiled, cosseted character? Has he been corrupted by ease and luxury?

The notion is preposterous. All his life, Romney has been a worker and a grinder. He earned two degrees at Harvard simultaneously (in law and business). He built a business. He’s persevered year after year, amid defeat after defeat, to build a political career.

Romney’s salient quality is not wealth. It is, for better and worse, his tenacious drive — the sort of relentlessness that we associate with striving immigrants, not rich scions.

Where did this persistence come from? It’s plausible to think that it came from his family history. The philosopher Michael Oakeshott once observed that it takes several generations to make a career. Interests, habits and lore accrue in families and shape those born into them.

The Romney family history, which is nicely described in “The Real Romney” by Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, is a story of tenacious work, setbacks and recovery. People who analyze how Mormonism may have shaped Romney generally look to theology. But the Mormon history, the exodus, matters most.

Mitt Romney’s great-great-grandfather Miles was a member of the church in Nauvoo, Ill., and spent years building a temple there. Even after Joseph Smith was killed by a mob and most of the Mormons fled, Miles stayed to finish his temple.

Then, in 1844, as the great work was being completed, mobs burned it to the ground and forced Miles and his family to head West. Most Mormons made the trek to Salt Lake City, but the Romneys could not afford an ox cart. They were part of a small, malnourished band that took four years of struggle to make it the 1,300 miles west.

Mitt’s great-grandfather, also Miles, made the trek starting at age 7. He was married in 1862, but a month after his marriage Brigham Young told him to leave his wife, Hannah, and become a missionary for three years in Britain. Hannah supported herself by taking in other people’s washing.

Miles returned in 1867 and bought a two-room house. Young commanded him to take another wife, and Hannah had to prepare the room for the woman who would be her rival. “I used to walk the floor and shed tears of sorrow,” she recounted in her own private memoir.

Then they were commanded to leave family and friends and build a new settlement in the desert 300 miles south of Salt Lake City. Living at first in primitive huts, they built a community, and Miles prospered. Then came a new command to move 400 miles across the wilderness to settle a desert patch in Arizona.

Again the Romneys were thrown back into primeval hardship. Miles, his three wives and their many children lived in a small wooden house and survived on bread, beans and gravy. There, as elsewhere, the locals detested the Mormons for their polygamy, for their religion and for the fact that the Mormons tended to outwork them. The local newspaper said Miles should be hung for polygamy, so two of his wives were sent to hide in cornfields and the mountains of New Mexico.

They were compelled to move again. Romney left his family to build a colony in Mexico. It was 1885, and he was living out of a wagon. Hannah led eight children through the Arizona mountains to join him. In Mexico, they lived in a house with a dirt roof, so mud dropped down when it rained. Eventually, all the wives and the 21 children were reunited. Miles and his son Gaskell, Mitt’s grandfather, built a successful community, with brick homes, churches and wealth.

George Romney, Mitt’s father, was born in Mexico. But when he was 5, in 1912, Mexican revolutionaries confiscated their property and threw them out. Most of the Romneys fled back to the U.S. Within days, they went from owning a large Mexican ranch to being penniless once again, drifting from California to Idaho to Utah, where again they built a fortune.

Mitt Romney can’t talk about his family history on the campaign trail. Mormonism is an uncomfortable subject. But he must have been affected by it.

It is a story of relentless effort, of recovery and of being despised (in their eyes) because of their own success. Romney himself experienced none of this hardship, of course, but Jews who didn’t live through the Exodus are still shaped by it.

Romney seems to share his family’s remorseless drive to rise — whether it’s trying to persuade the French to give up wine and join his church, or building a business, or being willing to withstand heaps of abuse in pursuit of the presidency. He may have character flaws, but he does not have the character flaws normally associated with great wealth. His signature is focus and persistence. The wealth issue is a sideshow.

If the wealth issue is a sideshow then Bobo’s the clown leading the parade.  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

Call me peculiar, but I’m actually enjoying the spectacle of Mitt Romney doing the Dance of the Seven Veils — partly out of voyeurism, of course, but also because it’s about time that we had this discussion.

The theme of his dance, for those who haven’t been paying attention, is taxes — his own taxes. Although disclosure of tax returns is standard practice for political candidates, Mr. Romney has never done so, and, at first, he tried to stonewall the issue even in a presidential race. Then he said that he probably pays only about 15 percent of his income in taxes, and he hinted that he might release his 2011 return.

Even then, however, he will face pressure to release previous returns, too — like his father, who released 12 years of returns back when he made his presidential run. (The elder Romney, by the way, paid 37 percent of his income in taxes).

And the public has a right to see the back years: By 2011, with the campaign looming, Mr. Romney may have rearranged his portfolio to minimize awkward issues like his accounts in the Cayman Islands or his use of the justly reviled “carried interest” tax break.

But the larger question isn’t what Mitt Romney’s tax returns have to say about Mitt Romney; it’s what they have to say about U.S. tax policy. Is there a good reason why the rich should bear a startlingly light tax burden?

For they do. If Mr. Romney is telling the truth about his taxes, he’s actually more or less typical of the very wealthy. Since 1992, the I.R.S. has been releasing income and tax data for the 400 highest-income filers. In 2008, the most recent year available, these filers paid only 18.1 percent of their income in federal income taxes; in 2007, they paid only 16.6 percent. When you bear in mind that the rich pay little either in payroll taxes or in state and local taxes — major burdens on middle-class families — this implies that the top 400 filers faced lower taxes than many ordinary workers.

The main reason the rich pay so little is that most of their income takes the form of capital gains, which are taxed at a maximum rate of 15 percent, far below the maximum on wages and salaries. So the question is whether capital gains — three-quarters of which go to the top 1 percent of the income distribution — warrant such special treatment.

Defenders of low taxes on the rich mainly make two arguments: that low taxes on capital gains are a time-honored principle, and that they are needed to promote economic growth and job creation. Both claims are false.

When you hear about the low, low taxes of people like Mr. Romney, what you need to know is that it wasn’t always thus — and the days when the superrich paid much higher taxes weren’t that long ago. Back in 1986, Ronald Reagan — yes, Ronald Reagan — signed a tax reform equalizing top rates on earned income and capital gains at 28 percent. The rate rose further, to more than 29 percent, during Bill Clinton’s first term.

Low capital gains taxes date only from 1997, when Mr. Clinton struck a deal with Republicans in Congress in which he cut taxes on the rich in return for creation of the Children’s Health Insurance Program. And today’s ultralow rates — the lowest since the days of Herbert Hoover — date only from 2003, when former President George W. Bush rammed both a tax cut on capital gains and a tax cut on dividends through Congress, something he achieved by exploiting the illusion of triumph in Iraq.

Correspondingly, the low-tax status of the very rich is also a recent development. During Mr. Clinton’s first term, the top 400 taxpayers paid close to 30 percent of their income in federal taxes, and even after his tax deal they paid substantially more than they have since the 2003 cut.

So is it essential that the rich receive such a big tax break? There is a theoretical case for according special treatment to capital gains, but there are also theoretical and practical arguments against such special treatment. In particular, the huge gap between taxes on earned income and taxes on unearned income creates a perverse incentive to arrange one’s affairs so as to make income appear in the “right” category.

And the economic record certainly doesn’t support the notion that superlow taxes on the superrich are the key to prosperity. During that first Clinton term, when the very rich paid much higher taxes than they do now, the economy added 11.5 million jobs, dwarfing anything achieved even during the good years of the Bush administration.

So Mr. Romney’s tax dance is doing us all a service by highlighting the unwise, unjust and expensive favors being showered on the upper-upper class. At a time when all the self-proclaimed serious people are telling us that the poor and the middle class must suffer in the name of fiscal probity, such low taxes on the very rich are indefensible.

I’m off to get the brain bleach — the image of Mittens doing the Dance of the Seven Veils is one that has just GOT to go…

When I spoke at Swarthmore College recently, I was startled by one question: Is it immoral for students to seek banking jobs?

The corollary question, with Mitt Romney’s business career under attack even by staunch Republicans, is this: Is it unethical to make millions in private equity?

My answer to both questions: no.

I’ve been sympathetic to the Occupy Wall Street movement, but, look, finance is not evil. Banking has contributed immensely to modern civilization. By allocating capital to more efficient uses, banking laid the groundwork for the industrial revolution and the information revolution.

Likewise, the attacks on private equity seem over the top. Private equity firms like Bain Capital, where Romney worked, aren’t about destroying companies and picking over the carcasses. Rather, the aim is to acquire poorly managed companies, make them more efficient (sometimes by firing people but often by rejiggering the business model) and then resell them at a profit. That’s the merciless, rugged nature of capitalism.

Liberals should also be wary of self-selecting out of certain occupations. After Vietnam and revelations of C.I.A. abuses in the 1970s, many university students avoided the military and the intelligence agencies. So slots were filled disproportionately by ideological conservatives in a way that undermined everyone’s interests. We would have been better off if more Swarthmore idealists had become generals and C.I.A. officers — and we may be better off if some idealists become bankers as well.

Now for my caveats.

When young people go into finance, I hope that they’ll show judgment, balance and principles instead of their elders’ penchant for greed and rigging the system. Just as Communists managed to destroy Communism, capitalists are discrediting capitalism.

A Pew Research Center poll in December found that only 50 percent of Americans reacted positively to the term “capitalism,” while 40 percent reacted negatively. Among Americans ages 18 to 29, more had a negative view of capitalism than a positive view, the survey found. Those young Americans actually viewed socialism more positively than capitalism. In other words, America’s grasping capitalists are turning young Americans into socialists.

The Financial Times recently published a series about “capitalism in crisis.” It noted that the Edelman Trust Barometer, a survey, found that only 46 percent of Americans had confidence in business to do the right thing (and only 25 percent trusted banks).

Public skepticism is warranted, in my view. Corporations have vastly overpaid C.E.O.’s, handsomely rewarding not only success but also failure. Banks that helped cause today’s financial mess lobbied successfully for bailouts for themselves; they privatized profits and socialized losses.

Meanwhile, more than four million families have lost their homes to foreclosure, according to Zillow.com, a real estate company. Bankers and shareholders found a safety net, but not working-class families. One reason is that the campaign finance system allows financiers to buy access and special favors. If you’re a tycoon, your best investment often is a lobbying firm in Washington to create a tax loophole for you. The last few years have been a showcase not of capitalism itself, but of crony capitalism.

Romney’s average tax rate, which he says is probably about 15 percent, exemplifies the problem. The Romneys benefit because capital gains tax rates have been slashed to just 15 percent, much lower than rates paid on labor income.

Then there’s the most egregious tax loophole of all, for “carried interest.” A triumph of lobbying, it allows private equity and hedge fund managers to pretend that their labor income is a capital gain. So they sometimes pay a tax rate of just 15 percent, compared with up to 35 percent for almost everyone else.

Granted, young people haven’t been pouring into finance in recent years out of eagerness to reform this rigged system but to milk it. In 2007, on the eve of the financial crisis, 47 percent of Harvard’s graduating class headed for consulting firms and the financial sector — a huge misallocation of human capital. However well-meaning these new graduates are initially, they often end up caught up in the scramble at the trough.

In the postwar years, labor unions became greedy and rewarded themselves with feather-bedding and rigid work rules — turning much of the public against them. Likewise, Wall Street feather-bedding is tarnishing the public image of banks and business and undermining confidence in capitalism itself.

When financiers rig the system, they should remember the warning of John Maynard Keynes: “The businessman is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society.”

So university students would be wrong to mock their classmates who choose Citigroup over CARE. Banking and private equity aren’t evil, and I would never urge college students to stay away. Maybe today’s young socialist sympathizers, along with healthy regulation and a loud public outcry, can help rescue capitalism from the crony capitalists.

From his lips to God’s ear…  Here’s Ms. Collins, who’s in Charleston, SC:

This week, Rick Santorum held a town hall meeting on a retired aircraft carrier. It was definitely a more dramatic venue than the last time I saw him, in a nursing home auditorium in New Hampshire.

As the candidate made small talk with supporters in the hangar bay of the U.S.S. Yorktown, his staff was frantically trying to fold away some of the empty chairs to make the audience look larger. They shooed the attendees — who appeared to be mainly a few families with home-schooled children and one woman with a very busy red-white-and-blue hat — into the middle “so we can have you guys in the camera shot.”

Although the meeting area was cold and smelled vaguely fishy, everyone in the little audience seemed upbeat, even the woman who expressed concern that the federal government was planning to round up local Tea Party members and put them in a FEMA concentration camp “that has a razor-wire fence around it.”

“I’m not familiar with that at all,” said Santorum, who was looking slightly less chipper than his fans. (The Federal Emergency Management Agency says there is no plan to round up the Tea Party. The agency doesn’t have any concentration camps. Just in case you were worried.)

But I digress. The point here is that while South Carolina is a very lively state, this primary has been lacking the kind of anything-can-happen excitement that made Iowa one long frostbitten romp. But things could change! Voting on Saturday! And here’s how everybody is doing:

MITT ROMNEY The South Carolina primary has been one long obsession with Mitt Romney’s extreme richness. This is partly because Newt Gingrich keeps carping on it. Which, to be honest, we have enjoyed very much. But, mainly, it’s because Mitt is so weird and off-putting on the subject. Like the time he told people he was unemployed. And, this week, when he dismissed the fees he earns as a public speaker, which ran to $374,327 in one recent year, as “not very much.”

People, what is it with this guy? Mitt was charging around $42,000 a speech. If you were planning to run for president and didn’t need money, would you deliberately pursue a sideline that would put you in the top 1 percent for about 12 hours’ worth of work? And, while we’re at it, if you were that rich and had a very large family to take to Canada, wouldn’t you hire a plane? What kind of obsession is it that makes a multi-multi-multimillionaire show up for the GoldenTree Asset Management convention for a $68,000 fee? Or drive for 12 hours with the Irish setter strapped to the car roof?

RON PAUL During the recent South Carolina debate, Paul called for a “golden rule in foreign policy,” in which we would refrain from doing things to other countries we would not like done to us. This triggered cries of outrage from the audience on behalf of the New Exceptionalism, which holds that the United States is the only country with “do-to” rights.

But Paul has pretty much written off South Carolina anyway. He’s hoping the race drags on to February and caucus states like Maine and Nevada, where a candidate with a small-but-dedicated following has an advantage. Even if that following appears to be composed largely of slightly abrasive young men with high IQs who smoke and wear hunter caps with ear flaps.

RICK PERRY You may have heard the rumor that Perry is doing better in his campaign performances lately. Frequently, the words “doing better” are spoken in the same tone used when describing, say, a 97-year-old heart attack victim on a ventilator. Lately, he has been expressing his patriotism by denouncing the Obama administration’s stern treatment of the Marines who urinated on dead Afghans. At a recent speech in South Carolina, he referred to Washington as a “suburb.” But, at this point, really, people have stopped keeping track.

NEWT GINGRICH Once again in South Carolina, Gingrich is proving that he is the top debater in the field. Truly, if the office of president of the United States involved nothing but debating in front of enthusiastic Republican audiences, he would be far and away the best possible choice. If nominated, Newt promises that he will follow Barack Obama around the country challenging him to a series of three-hour-long “Lincoln-Douglas” debates. He can already imagine it! I bet you can, too.

RICK SANTORUM Santorum enjoys spending time with his wife and seven kids, doing 50 push-ups every morning, and pressuring for a recount of the Iowa caucus vote. He also likes sweater vests, talking about his coal-miner grandfather and visiting aircraft carriers to drive home his campaign slogan. Which is “Courage to Fight for America” not “Already in Drydock.”

In case you were unaware, South Carolina is a really, really special place.  Too small to be a country and too big to be an insane asylum, it hovers in limbo between the two.