The Weirdest Washington Game

After ten months in office, Barack Obama must feel he has been in a long surreal tennis match with nobody on the other side of the net.

In the stands is a chorus of Republicans yelling "Out!" at everything he serves, while jeering that he is moving too fast on the economy and too slowly on Afghanistan.

On the other side, Democrats are weakly cheering him on but spending much of their energy fighting one another to position themselves for their own contests next year.

What does the scoreboard show? Economists are giving the President some points, tentatively concluding that "with roughly a quarter of the stimulus money out the door after nine months, the accumulation of hard data and real-life experience has allowed more dispassionate analysts to reach a consensus that the stimulus package, messy as it is, is working."

On the Wall Street bailout, resident New York Times pundits score him both ways. Paul Krugman concludes "government officials made no serious attempt to extract concessions from bankers, even though these bankers received huge benefits from the rescue. And more than money was lost. By making what was in effect a multibillion-dollar gift to Wall Street, policy makers undermined their own credibility--and put the broader economy at risk."

The same day, David Brooks disagrees, saying "the evidence of the past eight months suggests that [Treasury Secretary Tim] Geithner was mostly right and his critics were mostly wrong. The financial sector is in much better shape than it was then. TARP money is being repaid, and the debate now is what to do with the billions that were never needed."

With all this confused cheering and jeering, it should be no surprise that the public is losing heart with the Gallup Poll showing the President's approval ratings slipping below 50 percent for the first time.

But there is some optimism in the air. Peggy Noonan observes that "the mood of this Thanksgiving looks to be different. An unofficial poll of a dozen friends yields two themes: 'We're still here,' and 'I am so grateful.'"

Meanwhile, the President is back from Asia and still swatting away at the nation's problems, hoping someone will join him for a better game.

Good News About Afghanistan Ambivalence

The War on Terror, confusing and anxious-making as it may be, has produced one encouraging side effect in American politics: The gung-ho is gone as all sides concede the military effort in Afghanistan is a dangerous enterprise with an unknowable outcome.

As President Obama goes face-to-face with General McChrystal today by tele-conference, the debate over what to do next has been a good deal less rancorous than any other in recent Washington history. "Dithering" has been the harshest accusation against the White House by Congressional Republicans, as the Administration leaks reports of success against Al Qaeda by covert operations.

On PBS, GOP Sen. Saxby Chambliss agrees with the Democrats' Carl Levin that "just putting troops out there is not going to guarantee success" and argues for more reliance on the military judgment than Levin is willing to accept, a far different tone than partisan disagreements over the Surge in Iraq.

As wrenching as what's at stake is, it's heartening to see some semblance of sanity in American politics, the disappearance of which Tom Friedman laments today: "Our leaders, even the president, can no longer utter the word 'we' with a straight face. There is no more 'we' in American politics at a time when 'we' have these huge problems."

On the fringes, the overheated rhetoric goes on, from Gore Vidal on the Left expressing disappointment in Obama and predicting "dictatorship soon" to a Republican Congressman calling the President "an enemy of humanity."

In a perverse way, Afghanistan with all of its corruption and complexity is bringing back serious thought to political debate at a time when the substance of issues has been degraded into a 24/7 circus of media slanders.

Granted that self-interest is, as always, involved in both Republican and Democratic reluctance to stake their political futures on either going all in or pulling out of another quagmire in the making, the resulting focus on what's at stake there and how to going about dealing with it is a partial answer to Friedman's worries about "a different kind of American political scene that makes me wonder whether we can seriously discuss political issues any longer and make decisions on the basis of the national interest."

Whatever the outcome of White House deliberations on Afghanistan, they offer the faint hope that maybe "we" can.

Obama's Blackboard Jungle

As summer vacation ends, the President is looking like the principal of a dysfunctional high school, trying to quell yelling in the corridors and fist fights in the auditorium and get the student body to pay attention to what's going on in class.

Shades of "The Blackboard Jungle," in which an idealistic teacher struggles to educate a rowdy mob that controls the school! In that classic 1955 movie, the hero has to take away switchblade knives before he can inspire rambunctious students to start paying attention.

In today's Washington, the learning curve is at a standstill, and it's unclear how much lecturing can get through the clamor of an undisciplined crowd. But the former law school professor will give it a try with an address to Congress next Wednesday to confront critics and stimulate supporters of health care reform.

Meanwhile, the parent body is losing confidence that anything constructive is going on in Obama High, and the President is already taking steps to connect with the next generation through a national address to students the day before he tackles the invincible ignorance of Washington lawmakers.

The Good Citizen's Reward

While the President serves beer to Henry Louis Gates and James Crowley in the White House today, Lucia Whalen will be at work in Cambridge, pondering the lessons of her phone call to the police last week.

In the aftermath of Barack Obama's gaffe in saying the police acted "stupidly," the White House is smoothing over the ensuing national rancor with a photo-op reconciliation for the principals in the confrontation without acknowledging the abuse that has been heaped on Ms. Whalen as a racist.

"If you're a concerned citizen," she told reporters yesterday, "you should do the right thing if you're seeing something that seems suspicious. I would do the same thing."

The tape of her call reveals she told the dispatcher she had “no idea” if two men were breaking into the house, repeatedly suggesting they might live there. She did not mention the men’s race until a dispatcher asked if they were black, white or Hispanic.

“There were two larger men,” she says in the tape. “One looked kind of Hispanic, but I’m not really sure,” adding that she did not see what the second man “looked like at all.”

Ms. Whalen also told the dispatcher she was calling 911 on her cell phone at the request of an elderly neighbor who saw the men trying to get into the house.

After becoming a "a target of scorn and of ridicule because of the things I never said, " Ms. Whalen has the satisfaction of having done the right thing while the three principals in Gatesgate now bond and congratulate themselves for overcoming their own questionable actions in the affair.

She probably is not much of a beer drinker anyway.

Damage Controller-in-Chief

Nobody ever accused the President of being a slow learner.

"President Obama tried Friday," says the New York Times, "to defuse a volatile national debate over the arrest of a black Harvard University professor as he acknowledged that his own comments had inflamed tensions and insisted he had not meant to malign the arresting officer.

"Mr. Obama placed calls to both the professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and the man who arrested him, Sgt. James Crowley, two days after saying the police had 'acted stupidly' last week in hauling Professor Gates from his home in handcuffs. Mr. Obama said he still considered the arrest 'an overreaction,' but added that 'Professor Gates probably overreacted as well.'

“'I obviously helped to contribute ratcheting it up,' the president said in an appearance in the White House briefing room. 'I want to make clear that in my choice of words, I think I unfortunately gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department or Sergeant Crowley specifically, and I could have calibrated those words differently.'"

Now can we get back to talking about health care reform?

Update: Now Professor Gates thanks the President for his support and ducks behind an elder statesman of the civil rights movement to suggest a larger meaning for his rowdy behavior:

"It was very kind of the President to phone me today. Vernon Jordan is absolutely correct: my unfortunate experience will only have a larger meaning if we can all use this to diminish racial profiling and to enhance fairness and equity in the criminal justice system for poor people and for people of color."

Kumbaya and to all, a good night.

The President as TV Pitchman

The White House and ABC are taking flak for their health care infomercial last night for the wrong reasons.

As usual, the objections are political, with Republicans complaining about the lack of a response with their side of the issue, but Americans would not have been well-served by giving GOP equal time for their usual carping about socialized medicine.

What's disturbing is seeing the White House as the locale for a special edition of "Primetime," heavily larded with commercials, in a format making a pitchman of the President with tendentious questioners being used as props.

Barack Obama has more verbal dexterity and charm than any late-night TV host, but it's demeaning and far from edifying to see him in that role, competing for ratings with "CSI:NY."

This leads to glib and unpersuasive answers about serious issues as the role of a public plan to compete with private insurers and the soaring costs of end-of-life care.

If the White House and the networks want to educate voters, let them put the President at a table with experts on medical economics and ethics for a discussion without news anchors controlling the clock and fishing for sound bites.

Such a show would not draw prime-time audience figures, but countless Americans who truly care about the country's future would be willing to stay up late or take time out from weekend leisure to listen and learn.

The White House should be aiming less for ratings than bringing those who are interested into the national debate.

Health Care Sellout

The table is set for the Senate to cut the heart out of health care reform, with an ailing Ted Kennedy pitted against Max Baucus, recipient of $3 million from the industry over five years with a platoon of former staff members working as lobbyists for them.

Unless the White House rallies constituents to rise up, the Senate sellout will come from lawmakers hiding behind surgical masks--so-called compromises that will effectively kill what the President has called a public plan "to keep the insurance companies honest."

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich lists some of them:

"One of their proposals is to break up the public option into small pieces under multiple regional third-party administrators that would have little or no bargaining leverage. A second is to give the public option to the states where Big Pharma and Big Insurance can easily buy off legislators and officials, as they've been doing for years. A third is bind the public plan to the same rules private insurers have already wangled, thereby making it impossible for the public plan to put competitive pressure on the insurers."

All these ploys, plus others to give lip service to a public option but keep it on ice indefinitely, are being lined up to placate voters but serve the interests of the health insurers' and medical providers' lobbies.

If the President is serious about Change, here is his chance to prove it by going head to head with the bought-and-paid-for Senators of both parties who are still playing their old games and counting on real health care reform as being too complicated for the American public to understand.

Nothing will shake up the power of Washington lobbyists more than an uprising on this issue, and the President will have to stand shoulder to shoulder with Ted Kennedy in what he told the Democratic Convention last summer is "the cause of my life."

Different Ways of Remembering D-Day

All the eloquence about World War II comes from Americans too young to have experienced it--Tom Brokaw's "Greatest Generation," Steven Spielberg'a "Saving Private Ryan"--and now Barack Obama is memorializing D-Day along with Nicolas Sarkozy, Gordon Brown et al.

The survivors are in their eighties now, but age alone does not explain how inarticulate we all are about the transformative experience of our lives. As usual, reporters are interviewing veterans, but the quotes are the same as they have been for more than half a century--less the vivid impressions of participants than the dazed wonder of witnesses, whose bodies were doing what they were told but whose minds and hearts were watching from afar.

President Obama, born decades later, sees it as "the story of America...that always gives us hope" and finds a lesson for today:

"For as we face down the hardships and struggles of our time, and arrive at that hour for which we were born, we cannot help but draw strength from those moments in history when the best among us were somehow able to swallow their fears and secure a beachhead on an unforgiving shore."

Tom Brokaw, of the generation between Obama and us, puts it even more strongly: "Their sacrifices at home and on the frontlines make our current difficulties look like a walk on the beach in comparison."

"Hardships," "struggles" and "sacrifices" put a rhetorical glaze over a nightmare of blood and body parts in which those who were there had little control over whether they lived or died.

Heroism was a matter of staying and doing what had to be done. That's a high enough bar to set for today's generations without glorifying their parents and grandparents who set that example in a time when doing anything else was unthinkable.

Obama Talkfest

If nothing else, this President is setting records for communication as he visits the Middle East to say a few words privately and publicly in the Muslim world.

Before leaving, he tells Thomas Friedman of the New York Times that "if we are engaged in speaking directly to the Arab street, and they are persuaded that we are operating in a straightforward manner, then, at the margins, both they and their leadership are more inclined and able to work with us.”

His 20 minutes on the phone with Friedman and an interview with French TV yesterday, coming after dozens of other one-on-one media exchanges, have far outdone all previous presidents combined in giving access to the occupant of the White House.

Shortly before he died, JFK told me he had broken his rule against exclusive interviews only twice, for Izvestia with Soviet leader Khrushchev's son-in-law and a group of women's magazine editors about nuclear weapons.

Then there is the fabled Calvin Coolidge, the 1920s president known as "Silent Cal." At a White House dinner, when Dorothy Parker told him she had made a bet she could get him to say more than two words, Coolidge replied, "You lose."

In contrast, as President Obama's word count mounts, admirers will stress his openness while critics denounce him as all talk.

Be that as it may, Friedman tells him an old Jewish joke to start today's interview, and another comes to mind--about a voice from the balcony, after a famous Yiddish actor has dropped dead on the stage, keeps yelling "Give him an enema!"

Asked in exasperation how that could help a corpse. the heckler responds, "It couldn't hurt!"

Dueling Speeches and Ragtag Terrorists

The 9/11 world is back with full force as Barack Obama makes the case for a judicious approach to terrorism, Dick Cheney argues that only bare knuckles can keep us safe and New York police stage a perp walk of petty criminals scammed into believing they could bomb synagogues and shoot down Air National Guard planes.

It's one of those wake-me-when-it's-over days as the overloaded mind wants only to watch an old movie on TV or hide under the covers, but the dueling speeches and the terrorist bust are part of the way we live now. There is no escape.

For someone of advanced age, there are powerful echoes of the 1950s in all this--another era of anxiety about threats to "our way of life" from evil forces and politicians eager to exploit them with an easy sell of fear.

Dick Cheney is no Joe McCarthy, but here he is attacking the Obama Administration for closing Guantanamo with a desire "to bring some of these hardened terrorists into the United States" and praising Congressional exploitation of fears that "the terrorists might soon be relocating into their states," as if they were going to be walking the streets rather than being held in maximum-security prisons.

But Cheney's retroactive paean to torture, which has raised his approval ratings a few points from abysmal to awful, is less relevant than the President's attempt today to reconcile national ideals with what has to be done "to keep the American people safe."

Obama reviewed what he called the Guantanamo "mess--a misguided experiment that has left in its wake a flood of legal challenges that my administration is forced to deal with on a constant, almost daily basis, and it consumes the time of government officials whose time should be spent on better protecting our country."

Along with a dissection of the legal and moral issues involved, the President, who prefers to focus on the future, nevertheless acknowledged the demagoguery of "fear-mongering" surrounding the issue.

"Listening to the recent debate," he said, "I've heard words that, frankly, are calculated to scare people rather than educate them; words that have more to do with politics than protecting our country."

As this rhetorical duel was going on, New York Police were illustrating the complexities of the post-9/11 world by arresting four would-be jihadists for an "aspirational" plot (translation: they had the desire to bomb and kill but apparently neither the brains nor means until authorities provided them with harmless "explosives" and fake surface-to-air missiles).

The sadness in all this what used to be "The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight" comedy is that it now has to be treated with dead seriousness since Osama bin Laden took away our innocence almost eight years ago.

Obama v. Roberts, Round One

As the President begins one-on-one interviews with replacements for David Souter, his eventual choice will be only the start of a four- or eight-year struggle for the soul of the Supreme Court in the 21st century.

The lines are clearly drawn. In voting against the confirmation of John Roberts, then-Sen. Barack Obama acknowledged the Chief Justice's intellect and scholarship but questioned "what is in the judge’s heart. It is my personal estimation that he has far more often used his formidable skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak.”

In his tenure, Roberts has justified Obama's doubts. As Jeffrey Toobin observes in the New Yorker, "In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff...Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party."

President Obama's choice now will not alter the philosophical makeup of the Court but may go some distance in shifting its tone. If the rumored list of finalists is right, the new Justice is likely to share Souter's opinions but express them with more passion.

Judging from the President's track record so far, his pick will be confirmable but not bland. Gender and ethnicity will be in play but not determinative.

The actuarial tables suggest that Obama eventually will have his chance to alter the balance of the Court away from the Bush mindset in his own direction. Next week's decision will be a preliminary skirmish with the main battles yet to come.

Obama and the Non-Fighting Irish

No one will bridge the passionate gap on abortion, but Barack Obama, as he has on other issues, spoke yesterday for those whose position can embrace doubts in their own beliefs and respect for those who disagree.

Amid boycotts and protests at Notre Dame, the President used differences on abortion, as he did about race during his campaign speech after the Jeremiah Wright uproar, to move the debate toward "common ground" and shared humanity.

"In this world of competing claims about what is right and what is true," he told graduates, "have confidence in the values with which you’ve been raised and educated. Be unafraid to speak your mind when those values are at stake. Hold firm to your faith...

"But remember too that the ultimate irony of faith is that it necessarily admits doubt. It is the belief in things not seen. It is beyond our capacity as human beings to know with certainty what God has planned for us or what He asks of us, and those of us who believe must trust that His wisdom is greater than our own.

"This doubt should not push us away from our faith. But it should humble us. It should temper our passions, and cause us to be wary of self-righteousness."

A striking impression of the protest was its relative civility, with many arguing against awarding the President an honorary degree but not against inviting him to speak at the graduation ceremony.

For those of passionate faith and those with none at all, that mood change in America may be the real meaning of what happened yesterday.

Supreme Demographics

As Barack Obama, who changed the face of America's executive branch, prepares to name his first Supreme Court justice, speculation focuses as much on demography as it did during his presidential campaign last year.

Does he "have to" name a woman? Will his choice be a Hispanic woman or perhaps a Lesbian? Is political correctness running amok?

Not if you look back at Supreme Court history which, before the nasty Bork confirmation fight in 1987, is widely believed to have been beyond politics in a bipartisan search for the best legal minds available.

When FDR railed at the "nine old men" who blocked New Deal initiatives and made his ill-fated attempt to expand the Court by as many as six members, the only demographic issue was the naming of Jews, to the consternation of Justice James Clark MacReynolds, a Woodrow Wilson appointee and avowed anti-Semite who refused to talk to them or acknowledge their presence.

In those halcyon days, not long after women got the right to vote, the "best legal minds" were to be found almost exclusively in a white Protestant male gene pool that reflected not the diversity that Obama stresses but a minority of Americans that constituted a ruling elite.

Now that those barriers are down, there are heated arguments about which former outsiders have the strongest claim to representation, but when voters put Obama in the White House, they were giving him the power to decide what the redefinition of "best legal minds" should be for the 21st century.

After all the sound and fury die down, he will do just that.

Obama Beyond the Sound Bites

His press conferences are dazzling performances, but to get a glimpse of Barack Obama in the round takes the oldest journalistic setting of all, an extended one-on-one interview by David Leonhardt for this Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

Under questioning to show his state of mind rather than elicit sound bites, we get a picture of how the President sees the economic crisis in the long run beyond the bailouts and fixes.

"The critics have said, you’re doing too much, you can’t do all this at once," he observes. "Congress can’t digest everything. I just reject that. There’s nothing inherent in our political process that should prevent us from making these difficult decisions now, as opposed to 10 years from now or 20 years from now...

"It is true that as tough an economic time as it is right now, we haven’t had 42 months of 20, 30 percent unemployment. And so the degree of desperation and the shock to the system may not be as great. And that means that there’s going to be more resistance to any of these steps: reforming the financial system or reforming our health care system or doing something about energy...

But part of my job I think is to bridge that gap between the status quo and what we know we have to do for our future."

One of his goals in "the post-bubble economy," Obama says, is "restoring a balance between making things and providing services, whether it’s marketing or catering to people or servicing folks in some way. Those are all good jobs, and we’re not going to return to an economy in which manufacturing is as large a percentage as it was back in the 1940s"

He cites a campaign visit to a Seattle plant where welders and tradesmen were retrofitting buildings: "They’re not performing the same kind of manufacturing that their fathers might have, but with similar skill sets they are now making hospitals and schools and office buildings much more energy efficient, and...providing enormous value to the economy as a whole."

For such a future, the President points to "the smart grid," a huge project to modernize energy use, which is being hampered because "we don’t have enough trained electricians to lay down those lines." Government, he says, can help with "matching up the training with the need out there."

In looking at today's work force, Obama questions the level of education today by citing his grandmother who never went to college but worked her way up to being a bank vice-president. She "could write a better letter" than some of his former students at the University of Chicago Law School, he says.

As he pursues what he calls his "ruthless pragmatism" on the economy, Obama is asked about public impatience about not seeing improvement fast enough.

"In some ways it’s liberating," he says, "in the sense that whether I’m a one-termer or a two-termer, the problems are big enough and fundamental enough that I can’t sort of game it out. It’s not one of these things where I can say, Oh, you know what, if I time it just right, then the market is going to be going up and unemployment will be going down right before re-election. These are much bigger, much more systemic problems. And so in some ways you just kind of set aside the politics."

Can Obama Be Accidental?

On the evidence of his press conference, our president of 100 days seems so right for this critical time that it tempts a secular humanist to suspect Barack Obama came to power, not just by the natural selection of a brutal political campaign, but some more mysterious process of intelligent design.

How else to explain the qualities of mind and heart, and the eloquence to express them, that arrived in the White House just in time to deal with what he rightly calls "the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression" and a world filled with natural and man-made dangers from pandemics to nuclear weapons in the hands of extremists?

He answered questions on all these and more last night with a command of the issues and his own brand of idealistic pragmatism, tempered with the kind of humility unseen in past presidents who had much more reason to be self-effacing.

In answer to a question on that subject, Obama said he was "humbled by the fact that the presidency is extraordinarily powerful but...just part of a much broader tapestry of American life...I can't just press a button and suddenly have the bankers do exactly what I want or, you know, turn on a switch and suddenly, you know, Congress falls in line...

"This metaphor has been used before, but the ship of state is an ocean liner. It's not a speedboat. And so the way we are constantly thinking about this issue, of how to bring about the changes that the American people need, is to say, if we can move this big battleship a few degrees in a different direction, you may not see all the consequences of that change a week from now or three months from now, but 10 years from now or 20 years from now, our kids will be able to look back and say, 'That was when we started getting serious about clean energy. That's when health care started to become more efficient and affordable. That's when we became serious about raising our standards in education.'"

Ten or twenty years from now, that generation of Americans may also look back and wonder if their parents and grandparents were smart or just lucky in picking a president to attempt all that.

Steaming Ahead in Slow-Mo

The news today will be about Barack Obama's whirlwind energy steering the Ship of State for the first 100 days, but below the water line, the crew is still seriously undermanned.

The Cabinet was finally filled yesterday as the President swore in Kathleen Sebelius amid a swine flu scare and an impending Congressional battle over health care reform but, in true Washington tradition, the New York Times reports, "no cabinet department right now has even a third of its top appointees in place."

Secretary Sebelius will start work with no confirmed helpers and, as Treasury struggles with its massive effort to save the financial system, only nine percent of top officials have been approved by the Senate.

This glacial pace matches that of previous administrations, indicating that, for all of Obama's sense of urgency, "politics as usual" goes on in the bowels of the Washington behemoth.

The Wall Street Journal, for one, won't be complaining. "It is once again the liberal hour in American politics," an editorial declares, "and the media and political classes now see energy in the executive as a national asset...

"Mr. Obama is more popular than his policies, and sooner or later the twain shall meet. For now, we are living in another era of unchecked liberal government. The reckoning will come when Americans discover how much it costs."

The rest of us may be worrying more about getting that "unchecked liberal government" up and running before any more free-enterprise icebergs show up on the horizon.

Obama, Drudge and Swine Flu

As the Drudge Report hyperventilates with 18 headline links about swine flu, President Obama tells Americans the outbreak is "not a cause for alarm" and cites the current scare as an example of why investing in research is vital.

“Science is more essential for our prosperity, our security, our health, our environment and our quality of life than it has ever been before,” the President said today in a speech at the National Academy of Sciences. “If there was ever a day that reminded us of our shared stake in science and research, it is today.”

The contrast is more than a textbook example of sensationalism vs. responsibility but a reflection of something more basic in the current American mindset.

Drudge, who is always excited about earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters, thrives on stirring up primal emotions without regard to consequences, chalking up millions of web hits daily with irresistible appeals to fear, anger and other primal emotions.

In a 24/7 world of information overload, that's a formula for grabbing eyeballs which used to be the province of tabloid newspapers, now dying off like dinosaurs who just couldn't move fast enough as their environment evolved.

But the swine flu scare is also as good a time as any to emphasize the difference between news and infotainment.

We can get a daily rush from Drudge, but it's important to have Obama in the White House reminding us that "our capacity to deal with a public health challenge of this sort rests heavily on the work of our scientific and medical community" and setting a goal to "exceed the level achieved at the height of the space race, through policies that invest in basic and applied research, create new incentives for private innovation, promote breakthroughs in energy and medicine, and improve education in math and science."

If Drudge links to that, it will probably be headed SWINE FLU SPACE RACE.

Stealing Republican Thunder

"Obama is positioning the Democrats as the party of order, responsibility and small-town values," David Brooks writes in the New York Times today. "If he pulls this mantle away from the Republicans, it would be the greatest train robbery in American politics."

Where the conservative Brooks sees theft, the less ideological may find an expectable reaction to eight years of Bush lawlessness and loony laissez-faire. There is an indication of this in new Gallup figures on the relative mistrust of business and government

Historically, Americans have always been more wary of those who want political power than money. In handing out control of the then-limited capacity of radio and later television, for example, they set severe limits on the sales of ideas but practically none on peddling everything else.

That traditional mistrust of government power, Gallup reports, "expanded greatly in the 1990s--reaching a high of 65% in 1999 and 2000."

But Bush changed that: "In 2002, after the wave of accounting scandals at companies like Enron and WorldCom, opinions shifted, and the percentage mentioning big business as the greatest threat peaked at 38%, while concern about big government dipped below the majority level for the first time since 1981," then returned to normal "until the recent financial crisis caused more to fear the power of big business."

Now Americans, to Brooks' consternation, are putting their faith in big government to clean up the mess.

"Obama understands," he writes, "that this is primarily an authority crisis. A system Americans have trusted--the market--has failed in important ways. He has found a theme and bids to reassert authority. But he will seem like an impostor and a manipulator if he imposes responsibility on everybody but himself."

His worry is understandable, but there is no alternative to taking that risk. Obama is now the only game in town, and all the chips are on the table.

As John Bogle, a champion of capitalism who founded the Vanguard Funds, puts it in the Wall Street Journal:

"(S)elf-interest got out of hand. It created a bottom-line society in which success is measured in monetary terms. Dollars became the coin of the new realm. Unchecked market forces overwhelmed traditional standards of professional conduct, developed over centuries."

It will take a lot of brains and guts to get through what Bogle describes as "a crisis of ethic proportions," and most Americans will not be fussy about whether they are Democratic or Republican.

Painful Debate About Torture

In releasing the Bush memos, Barack Obama reaffirms that responsibility starts at the top by stopping practices that "undermine our moral authority and do not make us safer," absolving the practitioners who believed what they were doing was legal and making public the twisted thinking that sanctioned them.

But critics like Professor David Cole of the Georgetown University Law Center want more: "We must formally acknowledge that what was done was wrong, indeed criminal. At the very least, a credible independent investigation must be undertaken."

There is a good case to be made that American morality on torture should not depend on who is in the White House, but the argument collides with the realities that a President faces, that "in a dangerous world, the United States must sometimes carry out intelligence operations and protect information that is classified for purposes of national security," as Obama put it in his statement.

His administration will not press criminal charges against CIA operatives who interrogated terrorism suspects during the Bush era. "It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department," Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. says.

That position won't satisfy those who find a parallel with Nazis who were "only following orders" during the Holocaust, but 9/11 put Americans in a position where moral purity, or even the appearance of it, may be an impossible dream.

Meanwhile, the President has taken a step in the right direction by letting us see in detail just what was being done in our name and saying clearly that, on his watch, nothing like it will be done again.

After eight years of secrecy and lies by leaders who showed no doubts about their rectitude while abusing human beings, that's no small accomplishment.

Reviewing Obama's Star Turn

The reviews will be mixed, but the President, to use his own phrase, "did OK"--and probably a little better than that--in his first star turn on the international stage.

In a heavy global melodrama not best-suited to his light touch, Barack Obama comes out of the G20 show with renewed respect for his leadership and about as much substantive accomplishment as possible from a large cast with conflicting motives.

“If there’s just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy, that’s an easier negotiation,” Obama said at his international news conference afterward. “But that’s not the world we live in, and it shouldn’t be the world that we live in.”

The President got only a fraction of what he wanted in stimulus--a pledge of $1.1 trillion to the International Monetary Fund and other institutions to help revive the global economy--but what he gave Europe in return was not at odds with his own goals.

"In the end," Steven Pearlstein notes in the Washington Post, "yesterday's communique, with its promise of a global regulatory crackdown, was an easy win for all concerned. Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel could declare victory over unfettered Anglo-American capitalism, while Obama now has added political ammunition for taking on the banks, hedge funds, rating agencies and private-equity firms that will try to water down his proposals."

Impressively, Obama spent an hour yesterday successfully brokering a deal between President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and President Hu Jintao of China on the language for cracking down on tax havens, which ended with the French president calling our own "very helpful."

Making friends and impressing world leaders won't do much to solve the economic crisis, but it's a start.