Talk About Bad Taste

CNN interrupts graphic wall-to-wall coverage of the Casey Anthony child-murder trial to lecture Newsweek editor Tina Brown on a “revolting” computer-generated cover showing Kate Middleton side by side with her late mother-in-law to mark what would have been Princess Diana’s 50th birthday this week.

In the world of journalistic grave-robbing, this might seem a minor misstep at most, but it raises questions about taste in an era when we have all just had electronic and digital views of Anthony Weiner’s penis ad nauseum.

From a dead-tree editor of the past century who did his share of exploiting Prince William’s mum, this comes with no sanctimony about what anybody is doing now, but it’s hard to see what’s vulgar in Newsweek’s respectful what-if about how the Princess would look and what her life might be like if she had survived that 1997 car crash.

If anything, it makes fascinating reading and viewing, and brings back a memory of what an aide of Diana’s told me at the height of her fame in the 1980s. Driving through the countryside past a huge billboard with a magazine cover, the Princess buried her face in her hands, saying, “It’s gotten so that I don’t know where I end and she begins.”

Neither did we all but, in this era of 24/7 shamelessness, it’s good to be reminded there were real people who lived and suffered back then from our prurient interest.

In those days, some journalists still cared about taste, as Joseph Epstein, then editor of American Scholar, attempted to define vulgarity in an essay and came up with his best invented example—-Barbara Walters interviewing the Pope and asking, “Tell me, Holy Father, have you never regretted not having children of your own?”

That was smarmy before the word became popular, but Barbara is still with us and, compared to those who have followed, is now a doyenne of good taste.

Vulgarity Update : The legal case in Manhattan crumbles against France’s towel-wrapped statesman, creating moral confusion an ocean away.

As forensic tests find evidence of a sexual encounter between Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the woman in his hotel room, prosecutors “now do not believe much of what the accuser has told them about the circumstances or about herself.”

None of this has the glamor of Princess Diana redux, but it’s a fair sample of the state of bad taste now.

Grownup Time Again in Washington?

Barack Obama’s press conference ends up being an effort to put aside childish games and restore government to an adult level on national issues.

“Call me naïve,” he tells reporters. “But my expectation is that leaders are going to lead.”

At one point, he contrasts Congress’ dealing with the debt limit to the way his daughters do their homework a day early, not waiting until the last minute and “pulling all-nighters” to get it done on time.

Members of Congress “need to do their job. They need to go ahead and make the tough choices...

“This is not a situation where Congress is going to say we won’t buy this car or we won’t take the vacation. They took the vacation. They bought the car. And now they are saying maybe we don’t have to pay. If the United States government, for the first time, cannot pay its bills, if it defaults, then the consequences for the U.S. economy will be significant and unpredictable. And that is not a good thing.”

Meanwhile, with as much apparent patience and good humor as he can muster, the President chides the GOP’s line in the sand against raising taxes for the richest Americans:

“If you are a wealthy C.E.O. or hedge fund manager in America right now, your taxes are lower than they have ever been. They are lower than they have been since the 1950s. And they can afford it. You can still ride on your corporate jet. You’re just going to have to pay a little more.”

With his temperament, this is about far as Barack Obama will go with his impersonation of Harry Truman running for reelection against a “do-nothing, good-for-nothing” Congress in 1948 and, against all odds, winning reelection.

At least it’s a start.

Update: The President’s tone in yesterday’s news conference now becomes a political issue itself as pundits point out, “Showing a rarely seen passion, the president called out his rivals for their comments about him, saying they are ‘just not on the level’ and essentially accusing them of being crybabies who walk away from the discussions when the debate gets tough.”

There won’t be a total Obama abandonment of his congenital approach--reasonable, conciliatory, even professorial--but his inner Harry Truman is beginning to surface, just in time for not only this year’s battles with “a do-nothing, good-for-nothing Congress,” but next year’s political campaign.

Says the New York Times Caucus blog: “Mr. Obama’s more aggressive, confrontational tone will probably be welcomed by many in the president’s party who have been eager for him to fight for the causes they believe in.”

Amen to that.

Update Update: The President hangs tough with Senate Republicans and turns down their invitation to meet and hear them reiterate their tantrum position on the debt ceiling. The first step in dealing with schoolyard bullies is to turn your back on them.

Clown of the Month Club

A new month brings another GOP candidate as Rep. Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan arrives. He plays a star-spangled guitar, wants to repeal health care reform and is backing a $3500 annual tax deduction for pet owners.

The Republican race is looking like one of those old mail-order book clubs that thrive on negative option. Once you sign up and send a buck for the first three or four choices, they automatically start shipping you each month’s new selection, unless you tell them to stop.

Last month, ready or not, we got Michele Bachmann for a coffee table already piled high with Romney, Pawlenty, Cain et al, a summer reading list of anti-Obama screeds with little or no sexy conflict in their own stories.

The Gingriches at least provided a “Breakfast at Tiffany” subplot for a while, as Trump teased us with “DaVinci Code” revelations about Hawaiian archives that never materialized and Palin still keeps hinting at a “Going Rogue” sequel with a promotional tour but fails to deliver a product.

The old saying “You can’t beat somebody with nobody” recurs as Republicans keep “Searching for Mr. Goodbar” (or Ms.) to excite a fractured audience of Tea Party true believers, skeptical Independents and disaffected Democrats to take over the top spot on their best-seller list.

For beach reading, voters could do worse than pull Barack Obama’s old tomes from the shelves and try to remind themselves (and him) of what excited them so much back then.

Palin-Bachmann Iowa Pas de Deux

Ballet comes to mind for what GOP divas as doing in the Hawkeye State, a new variation on the graceful duet in which dancers make their moves in harmony but in this case as if the other were invisible.

La Palin comes into the state on tiptoe for the premiere of an adoring movie about her, cloaked in classic subtlety that sets off equal and opposite images in the eyes of two leading political blogs:

“Sarah Palin team reaching out to Iowa activists for meetings headlines Politico as Real Clear Politics reports, “Palin Not Reaching Out to Key Iowans Ahead of Visit.”

No such ambiguity is seen as the new ballerina bursts on the presidential stage, swathed in patriotic clichés and gaffes, sometimes in the same metaphor as she proclaims her love for “John Wayne’s America” in Waterloo, Iowa, hometown not of the cowboy hero but John Wayne Gacy, the celebrated serial killer. Oops!

For political dance critics, Bachmann’s exuberance may be both her strength and...er...Achilles heel. Her surprisingly positive performance in the South Carolina debate was surely at least in part due to the hiring of veteran Ed Rollins as an adviser.

But moving his new client centerward has a Tea Party price, as Rollins soon learned after being bashed for jibing at the iconic non-candidate.

Now an official entrant, Bachmann will have to go beyond patriotic postures and start tangling with Mitt Romney and even Tim Pawlenty, if he shows signs of life, in Iowa.

Palin may keep striking poses, but her doppelganger will have to accept the reality that running for president, unlike ballet, is a contact sport.

Update: On the fact-checking meter, Bachmann has climbed (or fallen, depending on your perspective) halfway to a rating of two Pinocchios: “Significant omissions and/or exaggerations. Some factual error may be involved but not necessarily.”

That sounds like progress.

Deficit Debate: Air-Cooling the Desert

As the President prepares to confront Mitch McConnell and John Boehner on the deficit, an irresistible image arrives for the absurdity of those deliberations.

Among the endless laundry list of government expenditures to be evaluated is $20.2 billion, an item larger than the entire N.A.S.A. budget, scheduled to go for air-conditioning in Afghanistan and Iraq next year.

What would be the tradeoffs between scrapping the space program or letting our troops fry in Middle East heat? Or could that much more just be sliced from the American old and poor by a new stroke of the Paul Ryan cleaver?

McConnell drops a Sunday talk show gauntlet: “Throwing more tax revenue into the mix is simply not going to produce a desirable result, and it won’t pass. I mean, putting aside the fact that Republicans don’t like to raise taxes, Democrats don’t like to either.” (He makes it sound like eating spinach or going to the dentist.)

So Republicans frame the struggle to avoid national bankruptcy as a we win-you lose effort for the White House: You can cut out apples, oranges, grapes or even figs but add nothing to the other side of the scale.

If that seems like a weird process, taxpayers can look forward to Tea Party help as the parsimonious patriots form a commission to find ingenious new ways to cut government expenses and reduce the deficit.

In the movie, “The American President,” a politician claims that, without leadership, a parched public would head for an imaginary oasis and try to drink the sand. But apparently not without air-cooling it first.

Take Two Aspirin and Call Me Next Month

As the GOP keeps trying to repeal health care reform, the White House is hiring comparison shoppers to call doctors’ offices and find out how hard it is to get appointments.

While they are snooping, some of the pseudo-patients will claim to have private insurance while others say they are covered by government programs to see if it makes a difference.

This newest wrinkle in the sacred doctor-patient relationship comes as a result of such evidence as that of a Massachusetts study finding that more than half of primary care physicians are not accepting new patients and, for those who do, the waiting time for an appointment averages 36 to 48 days.

Whatever happened to “Take two aspirin and call me in the morning”? Before long, it will be easier to get medical advice by phoning your Congressman’s office.

Is College for Everyone? A Very Old Story

From the current debate over whether a college education is worth the price in money and time for every American child, a memory seven decades old arises as testimony to the life-changing difference those four years used to make for generations born to immigrant parents.

The teacher's name, improbably, was Mr. Crabb. His grim face rose from a stiff rounded collar anchored by a pinched tie. His suits, buttoned over a body of stone, were always black.

He had been teaching math at Junior High School 44 since before any of us were born--a ramrod of a man displaced from some heartland town and set down among the striving little savages of the Bronx. He held us at cufflinked arm's length with disapproving eyes.

Over the years he had planted himself in the doorway to a free college education, and he was an austere gatekeeper, Godlike, judging our fitness to escape a future life of sweat in shops and factories, much as the civil servants on Ellis Island had earlier eyed our parents to decide whether they were worthy of passing from steerage into the Promised Land.

Since none of our families had money for tuition, our only hope was City College, and the only sure way of getting in was through Townsend Harris High School. The competition for places there was so fierce that admission was determined by competitive examinations. Somehow, no one remembered exactly how, Mr. Crabb had taken charge of preparing candidates from JHS 44 for those tests.

Every morning before eight, our small huddled mass waited for him on the cold stone steps of the school (no one who was late would be let in). On the dot of the hour, he marched up to unlock the front door. Once inside, he handed his bowler hat to one of us, briefcase to another, umbrella to a third, and we followed him down the hall for an hour of drill.

After a few weeks it became clear in my 13-year-old mind that those mornings of mental drudgery, boring and repetitive, had a different, darker purpose than preparing us for testing: the sheer assertion of power by a bitter old man over children he detested, exacting humiliation as the price for a chance at a better life than he thought we deserved.

After one brutal session of rote, laced with sarcasm, I went up to his desk and said, "I'm not coming any more."

"Then you won't be taking the tests," he answered without looking up.

I didn’t take the tests but somehow managed to keep my high-school grades just high enough to scrape through and get the college education that would lead to the life described in the biography on this page.

Now, David Leonhardt writes in the New York Times that the argument against college for all “encourages children, parents and schools to aim low. For those families on the fence--often deciding whether a student will be the first to attend--the skepticism becomes one more reason to stop at high school. Only about 33 percent of young adults get a four-year degree today, while another 10 percent receive a two-year degree.”

Here is one emphatic vote the other way, and damn the Mr. Crabbs of the world!

Gay Divorce

Amid all the celebrating at the Stonewall Inn and elsewhere, the advent of same-sex marriage in New York stirs in the spouse and co-author of a book by a divorce lawyer memories of how archaic and brutal that state’s divorce laws have always been.

It was only a year ago that New York, which now recognizes the inhumanity of denying legitimacy to those who want to share their lives lovingly and legally, was still forcing heterosexual couples in failed marriages into dishonest warfare that encouraged them to lie and cheat, enrich divorce attorneys and, worst of all, damage their children in protracted court fights.

Last July 1st, the state became the last in the union to legalize no-fault grounds for dissolving a marriage in a relatively humane way. Now, it joins Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and the District of Columbia as the only places in the U.S. where same-sex couples can get legally married.

Moral and religious arguments over the issue will go on, but in the presumably most sophisticated area of the country, both developments will go a long way toward preventing judges and lawyers from torturing Americans in their bedrooms and keep them in the courts and legislatures where they increasingly have their hands full doing just that.

Meanwhile, if some of New York’s newly sanctioned unions don’t work out, here is a place to get help and save time, money and heartache in dissolving them. Two small steps for mankind...

The Hostage President

Barack Obama started the week playing golf with John Boehner a few days before going on TV to proclaim a foreseeable victory in the Middle East, hoping no one would notice he was wearing handcuffs all the time.

Now, with Republicans walking out on debt ceiling talks and the Afghan victory lap clearly a mirage, the President’s chains are inescapably visible. Eric Cantor and Jon Kyl have him as tied up in Washington as Hamid Karzai does in Kabul.

The White House may still be living in some dimly remembered Age of Reason, but intransigence is clearly the prevailing political climate. A New York Times editorial decries the GOP “temper tantrum,” pointing out that they “had no intention of actually negotiating. Negotiations require listening to those on the other side and giving them something they want in exchange for some of your goals.”

Meanwhile, post-bin Laden discoveries are showing how closely our Pakistani allies and clients have been working with Al Qaeda while taking billions of U.S. aid money

In all this, we are still debating our future at home and abroad based on a fantasy world that bears little relation to what pre-9/11 Americans would recognize as reality.

Ten years ago, this nation had a budget surplus, unemployment of 4.4 percent and no wars. The foreign news headlines were about Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic being handed over to U.N. officials to be tried for war crimes against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

Much has happened to take us downhill since then, some of it inescapable, most not, but a long, hard look at what we have been doing to ourselves would involve asking how we turned into a Third World country fueled by political blackmail and spite.

Barack Obama won’t be in the White House forever, and whatever his shortcomings, do we really want to live in a country where there is no room for reasonable debate or compromise on anything?

Handcuffs won’t look good on the Presidential seal.

Palin: Genocide and Jury Duty

Her Magical Mystery Tour is on hold, Sarah Palin tells us, because “civic duty calls (like most everyone else, even former governors get called up for jury duty) and I look forward to doing my part just like every other Alaskan."

The civic-minded governor is cancelling a trip to war-torn Sudan with Franklin Graham to stop what evangelical Christians are calling “genocide” there.

“She would be a very good person to help draw attention to the plight of the Christians in South Sudan,” says the Rev. Graham. “We’ve got George Clooney, we’ve got some Hollywood-type people...But we need everybody we can find...

“Churches were burned. Pastors were nailed to trees. We have been able to identify 1,000 churches destroyed.”

But the former Governor will be tied up with the rigors of jury duty during what she has described as her family’s “favorite season” in Alaska when they usually travel north for a salmon fishing trip.

As it happens, Greta Van Susteren of Fox News, who had planned to make the trip with Palin, has also had to cancel because of urgent journalistic duties.

Choices, choices. It’s hard being a celebrity in today’s world.

Small Change for a Worn-Out War

The President’s remodeling in our Cash for Clunkers struggle reaches the salesroom with all the dings and dents of a ten-year-old lemon that has exhausted the patience of buyers who have spent almost half a trillion dollars keeping it on the road.

“The goal that we seek is achievable,” he says, “and can be expressed simply: no safe-haven from which al Qaeda or its affiliates can launch attacks against our homeland, or our allies. We will not try to make Afghanistan a perfect place. We will not police its streets or patrol its mountains indefinitely.

“That is the responsibility of the Afghan government, which must step up its ability to protect its people; and move from an economy shaped by war to one that can sustain a lasting peace. What we can do, and will do, is build a partnership with the Afghan people that endures--one that ensures that we will be able to continue targeting terrorists and supporting a sovereign Afghan government.”

Does anyone really believe that is going to happen in 2012, 2014 or ever?

The vaunted Obama rationality once again fails him on a major issue, leading to a split-the-difference formula as self-defeating as his decision two years ago to ram through a misshapen version of health care reform when he might have backed off and concentrated on bolstering the economy instead.

Barack Obama, for all his idealism, has shown a tin ear for managing big Change. Just as the monstrous abortion of health care reform in 2009 is now a Pyrrhic victory that endangers his reelection, so is the new Afghanistan drawdown a bad compromise that few close observers understand and hardly any want. Both Democrats and Republicans are criticizing it.

The timeline of his ups and downs over America’s longest and most frustrating war in history suggests a President making intellectual decisions about an enterprise that he knows in his bones has been flawed from the start and that no amount of tinkering can fix.

How else to explain the stop-and-go Surge that is now coming and going without any basic change in propping up a corrupt partner in an unwinnable war, that will keep costing American lives and money with little hope of anything tangible to show for it?

One goal of the President’s almost everyone will support--that we concentrate on “nation-building here at home.” Why do we have to wait so long to start?

Huntsman, Great White-Haired Hope?

Reaction to the newest GOP 2012 entry is a symptom of how far the politics of paralysis has gone. Virtually unknown, Jon Huntsman Jr. causes a media ripple by bringing something new to the race—-a note of sanity and civility.

That he is on speaking terms with the President and has even served in his Administration makes him either (1) a hopeless outsider in Republican primaries or (2) an alternative to the Obama-bashers who make up the field.

Substance-starved journalists are swooning over his announcement statement that “it concerns me that civility, humanity and respect are sometimes lost in our interactions as Americans...I don’t think you need to run down somebody’s rep in order to run for the office of president.”

More to the point, he closed the day by raising $1.2 million and is off on “a week-long fundraising sprint” from traditional Republican high-rollers who have been waiting for a White-Haired Hope to save them from the current clownfest.

On the blank slate of his public image, Huntsman will be drawing a picture of himself as “someone who knows that serious times demand serious leaders and won’t play the gotcha game of modern politics” rather than “a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a man who spent the last two years of his life not just serving President Obama publicly but also praising him privately as a ‘remarkable leader.’”

His position on gay marriage, among other issues, will set him apart from other aspirants, but essentially he seems to be only a different flavor in the GOP smorgasbord of tax cuts and Ryan cutbacks of social programs.

Yet, even small differences could shake up the Republican wall-to-wall strategy of Obama-bashing in an atmosphere that calls for what Thomas Friedman describes as “a full-time government” rather than “a Congress that is a full-time fund-raising enterprise that occasionally legislates and a White House that, save for 100 days, has to be in perpetual campaign mode.”

If Huntsman runs well as “Obama-lite,” at least traditional Republicans and independents will give us some clue about how they feel now about Hope and Change.

D-Day, Afghanistan

No matter what the President announces tomorrow on Drawdown Day, nobody will be happy with his decision, especially if, in Obama tradition, it is a measured move. That will neither satisfy the growing bipartisan desire to get out completely or the McCainiacs who see every Middle East conflict as an outpost for defending American liberty.

Yet...

How do we keep fighting in a country where an ambassador, as ours did last week, has to tell the president, “When Americans, who are serving in your country at great cost--in terms of life and treasure--hear themselves compared with occupiers, told that they are only here to advance their own interest, and likened to the brutal enemies of the Afghan people, they are filled with confusion and grow weary of our effort here?”

How do we keep fighting when the U.S. Conference of Mayors urges Congress to quickly end the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq and spend the money--$112 billion this year in Afghanistan--on jobs at home?

How do we keep fighting a war, about which Gen. Petraeus told Bob Woodward, “I don't think you win this war. I think you keep fighting...This is the kind of fight we're in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids' lives?"

A year and a half ago, in sending more troops, the President said, "If I did not think that the security of the United States and the safety of the American people were at stake in Afghanistan, I would gladly order every single one of our troops home tomorrow."

When he tells us what he is going to do now, will he be guided by that same thought?

Update: As the President prepares to announce his decision, a new kind of GOP opponent enters the race, Jon M. Huntsman, a former governor of Utah, who served as his ambassador to China.

“He and I have a difference of opinion on how to help the country we both love,” Mr. Huntsman says. “But the question each of us wants the voters to answer is who will be the better President, not who’s the better American.”

Whatever happens in Afghanistan, that kind of discourse would be a welcome relief on the campaign trail.

The President as Pinata

The tone of the 2012 presidential campaign is reflected in that Volkswagen commercial showing an auto-shaped piñata being whacked at a kid’s birthday party.

How this image sells the idea of an indestructible car is not clear, but judging from last week’s GOP debate and subsequent stumping, such flailing at everything Obama is the Republican strategy for selling themselves into the White House next year.

The biggest stick for beating up on the President is the economy. A party communiqué says flatly about the White House and Congressional Democrats: “They own it.”

Yet the New York Times' John Harwood reports: “Mr. Obama’s policies, for better or worse, have something to do with current employment levels and growth rates. But economic advisers to Republican politicians concede that most of the distress Americans feel now stems from the recession and financial crisis he inherited.

“Glenn Hubbard...who led the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, criticized Mr. Obama’s spending, tax and regulatory strategies for ‘actively’ retarding the recovery. Yet he added, ‘There could have been policies that made a difference--but not a sea change.’

"Mark Zandi...who advised Mr. Obama’s 2008 opponent, Senator John McCain, went further. Had he been elected president, Mr. McCain’s near-term policy choices would have largely overlapped with Mr. Obama’s, he said--and the differences would have had only marginal effects by now.”

That’s the reality, but in the battle of sound bites and slogans, will that make a difference to worried voters? For some time now, Democrats have been running on “It could have been worse,” not the catchiest phrase for buttons and banners.

As the Obama campaign gears up, one of its main aims will be to stop Republicans from piling on the President without offering viable economic solutions of their own.

“There seemed to be a unanimity of antipathy toward the president,” says David Axelrod, who recently left the White House to work on the re-election campaign, summing up the GOP debate: “I didn’t hear a lot of ideas,” only “a lot of pat partisan platitudes.”

The Democratic challenge will be to remind voters that their opponents are not bring any candy of their own to the party, only hoping to break some out of the Presidential piñata.

Mitt's Multiple Choice Heritage

In 1994, someone who looked and sounded like Mitt Romney declared, “I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country. I have since the time that my mom took that position when she ran in 1970 as a U.S. Senate candidate.”

Today, apparently the same person writes: “I am pro-life and believe that abortion should be limited to only instances of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother.

“I support the reversal of Roe v. Wade, because it is bad law and bad medicine. Roe was a misguided ruling that was a result of a small group of activist federal judges legislating from the bench.

“I support the Hyde Amendment, which broadly bars the use of federal funds for abortions. And as president, I will support efforts to prohibit federal funding for any organization like Planned Parenthood, which primarily performs abortions or offers abortion-related services.”

Back then, his opponent for the Senate, Ted Kennedy, accused Romney of being “multiple choice,” but he insisted “since Roe v. Wade has been the law for 20 years, that we should sustain and support it, and I sustain and support that law, and the right of a woman to make that choice, and my personal beliefs, like the personal beliefs of other people, should not be brought into a political campaign.”

In 1968, when his father was running for President, I spent some time with his parents. Lenore Romney was an intelligent, articulate and humane woman, and I can’t help wondering what flip-flop gene she passed on to her son from the male side of the family.

Romney Sr. went from front-runner to also-ran after switching positions on Vietnam with the claim that he had been “brainwashed” by generals and diplomats on his trip there into supporting the war.

Now on Father’s Day, his son has “evolved” 180 degrees on abortion to satisfy the Social Conservatives in his party, a chip off the old block whose campaigning a Republican colleague described as "like watching a duck trying to [expletive deleted] a football."

Back then, I thought that Romney’s mother would have been a better presidential candidate than her husband. I still do. The male Romneys are so easily brainwashed.

Update: Romney’s abortion flip is apparently not far enough because he won’t sign the Susan B. Anthony Pledge that he says might “end all federal funding for thousands of hospitals across America."

Says Michele Bachmann: “Gov. Romney should reconsider his decision not to sign the pledge just as he reconsidered his position on the life issue during the last campaign.” Wait, he is still “evolving.”

Failings of a National Father

In his Weekly Address, the President talks personally, but his musings about fatherhood have deep political resonance.

“I grew up without my father around,” he says. “He left when I was two years old, and even though my sister and I were lucky enough to have a wonderful mother and caring grandparents to raise us, I felt his absence. And I wonder what my life would have been like had he been a greater presence...

“That’s why I’ve tried so hard to be a good dad for my own children. I haven’t always succeeded, of course--in the past, my job has kept me away from home more often than I liked.”

What children need most, he concludes, are time, structure and unconditional love. True enough but not the whole story.

As President, Barack Obama has done his best at national fathering, but his own experience deprives him of an essential truth about the role: Children have to know in their bones that, when they are in trouble, their fathers will come and take them home.

One of the best parents I ever knew was a quiet, diffident man who never showed emotion, but when his teen-age son was off in India on drugs, got on the first flight and brought him back safely.

Behind all the clichés about fatherhood is the need for children to feel, no matter how bad things get, they will never be abandoned, that when they fall into a hole, someone will be there for them.

Barack Obama never had that experience and, with the best of intentions, seems unable to communicate to anxious Americans that government is not an enemy under the same national roof but a source of help and support in the hardest times.

He tells fathers to “encourage our children to turn off the video games and pick up a book...pack a healthy lunch for our son, or go outside and play ball with our daughter...teach our children the difference between right and wrong, and show them through our own example the value in treating one another as we wish to be treated.”

All well and good but, as he faces a year of pounding by Republicans, the President will have to learn an essential truth about fathers is that, when you are in trouble, they are the ones you depend on to be there to help save you.

Like it or not, American presidents from “The father of his country” on have assumed a paternal role in the society, and now as Tea Party patriots seem intent on patricide, Barack Obama will have to step up to reassure the rest of us that he understands the symbolism.

Try imagining Romney, Pawlenty, Bachmann and Gingrich doing that.

Sleaze Olympics

On the first day of the rest of his life, Anthony Weiner may take some comfort from the latest news about his role model in sexual misadventure. John Edwards has now been caught soliciting get-out-of-jail money from the 100-year-old heiress who bankrolled his original walk on the wild side. (Is that why he was smiling in his mug shot?)

As Republicans open a wide lead in the Shameless Olympics in the halls of Congress, Democrats have clinched the gold on the domestic front.

On trial for misusing election contributions from “Bunny” Mellon, Edwards is apparently redefining chutzpah with a flying visit on her private jet to see if she would compound the felony by giving him millions more to defend himself.

Whatever “package” Weiner was bragging about to his online correspondents, it seems puny in contrast to what Edwards is showing to one and all.

Hypocrisy Moves On--Sex to Money

Now that the political air has been purified by Anthony Weiner’s departure, Washington can concentrate on its other endless fount of hypocrisy--money.

Many Tea Party purists, who came to Congress to force government to live within its means, we learn, have not been doing well on that score personally. Among 87 new GOP members, the Washington Post reports, at least 30 had liabilities totaling $50,000 or more in 2010--credit card debt, unpaid student loans, mortgages on investment properties.

The zealots who campaigned on the simplistic premise that the country should emulate families have not been doing well in setting an example.

“Like the rest of America,” one Texas Congressman had proclaimed, “the government needs to tighten its belt and work within its means” as his disclosure forms now show credit card debt of $45,000 to $150,000.

“If they’re responsible for their own personal finances, then they may have a mind-set to be frugal with the federal Treasury,” says a spokesman for Taxpayers for Common Sense. “But if they can’t keep their personal finances in order, then you have to wonder how they’re going to handle the federal budget.”

As the Misery Index (unemployment and inflation) for Americans rises, their representatives in Washington keep offering slogans but no relief, and superrich Mitt Romney makes jokes on the campaign trail about his own unemployment.

On the other hand, the Obama campaign is recognizing reality by holding a lottery for $5 contributors, giving them a chance at dinner with the President if, against big odds, their names are drawn from a hat.

Nobody is selling apples on street corners yet, as they did in the Big Depression, but the signs are there.

GOP War on Obama

Three years ago, Barack Obama was campaigning against dumb wars while John McCain was musing about staying in Iraq a hundred years. Now Republican hopefuls pound the President about military moves in the Middle East even as John Boehner warns him to get Congressional approval for his action in Libya by this weekend or face being in violation of the War Powers Act.

Behind this scramble of traditional hawks and doves is the emerging theme for 2012: Everything Obama does is wrong, including going to war and getting out of it.

A New York Times report puts it politely: “The hawkish consensus on national security that has dominated Republican foreign policy for the last decade is giving way to a more nuanced view...

“A new debate over the costs and benefits of deploying the military reflects the length of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the difficulty of building functional governments and the financial burden at home in a time of extreme fiscal pressure.

“The evolution also highlights a renewed streak of isolationism among Republicans, which has been influenced by the rise of the Tea Party movement and a growing sense that the United States can no longer afford to intervene in clashes everywhere.”

Sounds good as far it goes, but politics, which used to stop at the water’s edge, is in the depths of demagoguery and sound bites on a subject that deserves serious debate. If Republicans want to question the wisdom of what we are doing in the Muddle East (no typo)--as both parties should—-Boehner’s strategy of holding a gun to the White House’s head, just as he is doing on the debt-ceiling vote, is the absolutely worst way to do it.

In Monday’s debate, nobody went as far as Ron Paul’s usual call to get out now, but the others all criticized “Obama’s wars,” sounding not a loyal opposition but the way some Democrats used to rail against George W. Bush. If Romney, Pawlenty, Bachmann, Gingrich, Santorum and Cain had anything substantive to say beyond “Obama is wrong,” it was lost in the negative cheerleading.

With the summer deadline for drawing down in Afghanistan at hand, it’s time for serious thinking about our involvement there and elsewhere, but it has go beyond campaign carping.

Update: The debate takes a more substantive tone as the newest GOP entry Jon Huntsman, a former governor and diplomat, weighs in: “Whether we like it or not, whenever we withdraw from Afghanistan, whether it’s now or years from now, we’ll have an incendiary situation,” he says. “Should we stay and play traffic cop? I don’t think that serves our strategic interests.”

That’s the right question, and it’s reassuring to hear a Republican asking it.

Kissinger, a Weiner of His Time

Introducing him to flog a new book, Stephen Colbert admiringly cites the days when Henry Kissinger chased women in his “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac” days, an arresting contrast to the fate of Anthony Weiner for pursuing similar urges in our time.

In fact, by all accounts, Kissinger actually netted some of his quarry (“When I’m boring, they think it’s their fault”) while Weiner came up empty. Have Americans become more prudish in the intervening years?

One difference is that the 20th century diplomat, widely branded a “war criminal” (I prefer self-serving snake) for his lethal secrecy, was not furtive in sexual matters. Another was that the now 88-year-old gnome, thankfully in pre-Twitter days, did not transmit photos of his body parts.

In fact, Kissinger was proud of being “a secret swinger.” When I sent Nora Ephron, in her pre-“Sleepless in Seattle” days, to interview him, a staff member, while introducing her to the alleged Great Lover, remarked, “Another Hunebelle?” The reference was to a French journalist who had written a book about her infatuation titled “Dear Henry.”

In it, Danielle Hunebelle described him as “a species of monster.” Yet at first meeting she noted, “With his sloping forehead, aquiline nose and heavy, skeptical chin, he looked like a libidinous bird...Suddenly I realized that Kissinger’s skin color was yellow, a grayish ashen kind of yellow...I looked at him tenderly. What a poor lover he must be.

“Bound hand and foot by complexes, fraught with persecution mania...His contradictions make him a species of monster...From that moment...I began to love him...For the few seconds in which I held his hand in mine, the fatness of his sausage-like fingers, as the deformation of his face just a little earlier had surprised me.”

L’affaire Hunebelle ended badly. When she learned that Kissinger was in Paris for secret Vietnam peace talks and seeing another woman, she was so distraught that she wrecked her car at learning of the betrayal.

Nora Ephron, not similarly smitten, wrote a hilarious sendup of Kissinger’s alleged love life, which did him no harm, and he went back to subverting Vietnam peace efforts and eventually gave up his bachelorhood for a suitable soulmate he had met when they first worked together for Nelson Rockefeller, a potential President who faltered, leading Kissinger to sign on with Richard Nixon.

Ephron went on to marry Carl Bernstein (of Woodward and), who helped bring down Kissinger's boss but turned out himself to be a skirt-chaser of note, whom she eviscerated in her novel and movie, "Heartburn."

For all the nostalgia over seeing Kissinger again, looking like a puffed-up toad while pontificating for Colbert and other TV interviewers, it’s somehow sad to see Weiner, politically so much more attractive, having to “take a cure” for his rampant heterosexuality.

To quote a popular novel of Kissinger’s prime, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” Apparently back then neither did lust, and Kissinger never did, but those days are long gone.