The President Joins a Pitiful Pantheon

Year-end lists are not my thing, but 2013 undeniably places Barack Obama in a category that overcomes admiration with judgment.

“They Must Know What They’re Doing or They Wouldn’t Be Where They Are” is the title of an imaginary volume a leading book publisher and I conceived half a century ago to show the captain of the Titanic, the designer of Ford’s ill-fated Edsel, LBJ directing the Vietnam War and other examples of low acumen in high places.

Since then, the list has grown with Nixon at Watergate, Jimmy Carter's bumbling on Iran captives, Bill Clinton and Monica’s dress, George W's Iraq occupation, Alan Greenspan handling the housing bubble and Heckuvajob Brownie during Katrina with new candidates arriving warp speed.

This year the most intelligent man to occupy the White House in decades sadly takes his place in that pitiful pantheon. Is there any other explanation for Obama’s botch of health care reform and mishandling of the legality of NSA spying  than incompetence triumphing over good intentions?

“You can’t beat brains,” JFK liked to say, but emotional intelligence--“the ability to identify, assess, and control the emotions of oneself, of others, and of groups”--is something else, a skill not easily compatible with this President’s background as a law professor.

Recent personal experience prompts me to recall a lifetime of pain over the inability of lawyers such as Washington’s ruling class in all branches of government to deal with the human outcomes of what they instinctively do. Winning an argument is not justice. Outmaneuvering others is no guarantee of fairness.

Sadly, Barack Obama has the spiritual qualities to overcome such shortcomings but has been hobbled by a bad economy not of his making, thinly disguised racism and an unprecedented breakdown of decency in Congress.

But in looking back at the year, there is no alternative to putting him in the company of the inept. The White House must reboot to save the President's remaining two year.

Peter O'Toole

Obituaries will recall the actor who has died at 81 for his bravura role in the 1962 epic, “Lawrence of Arabia” and rightly so but, in an old movie lover’s heart, he will be treasured for more modest qualities of witty self-deprecation.

Those whose tastes predate the Cineplex can savor that in “How to Steal a Million” (1966), a romantic comedy available on Netflix, and as a bonus, be introduced to the ethereal Audrey Hepburn at her most magical.

But for full appreciation of the O’Toole gift for parodying his own propensity for hamminess, nothing will do but “My Favorite Year” (1982), in which he takes himself over the top as a laughing stock and lands on his feet with warm-hearted sentiment.

Not recommended for those who can’t get enough of Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller but who might harbor a vulnerability to retro human comedy.

Why and How Magazines Will Survive

With fewer readers and less advertising, periodicals of ink on paper seem doomed to disappear. But they won’t.

A survivor of an even more acute crisis at the dawn of TV can testify that magazines will adapt and survive. The reasons are embedded in the human desire not only to know what’s happening in the world but understand its deeper meaning.

The Internet stuffs Americans with information but leaves them starved for understanding, a task that has moved up the media food chain to newspapers like the New York Times. Yet beyond that daily context lies a complex world unseen by sentient members of the best-educated generation in human history.

Magazine editors are unique among journalists in that they invent their readers. Rather than report news over which they have no control, they fill pages with whatever interests or obsesses them and, like magnets, draw attention of those who find the results to their taste, delivering what one editor called an attitude toward the world on a regular basis.

TV arrived in the 1950s and took away magazines’ function of comforting entertainment, killing off many but nudging survivors toward special interests by age, gender and sophistication. Fiction-filled women’s magazines gave way to Cosmopolitan and Self and later Ms.; Esquire went from barber-shop pinups to sharp cultural comment.

It was soon joined by New York, which last week suffered half-death in print, giving birth to the New Journalism to mirror a new kind of politics with a new kind of reporting. Tom Wolfe wrote about Radical Chic and Gloria Steinem profiled the man who was moving into the White House in 1968 ("When Richard Nixon is alone in a room, is there anyone there?")

As a magazine editor during that time, I learned that the job meant more than telling people what they want to know. More important was telling them what they don’t know they want to know until you tell them.

That opportunity still exists and is filled by digging under the surface from magazines such as the New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone along with hundreds of smaller circulation and unfamiliar names that cater to those who want to go beyond what social critic Lewis Mumford a century ago called “deprivation by surfeit” in our society,” the increasing production of everything that ignores “the need for evaluation, correction, selection and social assimilation.”

Unseen but important, in a society that has made a profit center out of Attention Deficit Disorder, thousands of magazines will continue to produce context and correction for those who want and need it.

Tea Party Overboard, Finally

The House passes a two-year budget deal to release Congress as a hostage from sequester insanity by a vote of 332-94. Half the naysayers are GOP diehards, half liberal Democrats.

This sudden lurch toward two-party give-and-take should come as no surprise, according to a new Gallup poll that finds the Tea Party dropping past a tipping point, with a slim majority viewing them unfavorably for the first time.

Now the real work in Washington begins: finding government’s way back to some semblance of traditional rationality. One sign is Speaker John Boehner, who for two years has let extremists hogtie his House is now pushing back, solemnly asserting he is now “shocked, shocked” to find there has been gambling in the casino.

"You know, they pushed into this fight to defund 'Obamacare' and to shut down the government," Boehner tells reporters. "Most of you know, my members know, that wasn't exactly the strategy that I had in mind...

"But if you recall, the day before the government reopened… one of these groups stood up and said, well, we never really thought it would work. Are you kidding me?"

Democrats too will have to adjust to a new climate, as Nancy Pelosi tells her troops to “embrace the suck” and get on with moving forward next year to regain some of the ground lost in the long Washington siege.

If there is a seismic shift back toward traditional American government next year, it could be helped by new leadership on both sides of the aisle. Congress may be leaving Washington less depressed for the holidays, but the true tests will come when they come back for a new year.

Can sanity survive the holidays?

Will Paul Ryan Replace Boehner?

The Deal is even bigger than it appears on the surface. As the first break in two years of wall-to-wall Tea Party obstruction in the House of Representatives, it forebodes a new alignment there.

Paul Ryan, who ran for VP last year as a policy wonk and ended up exposed as an habitual liar, is now in line to pull the House GOP together as the next Speaker. Lying can be a disability one heartbeat from the Oval Office, but it’s part of the job description for a leader in Congress.

“It is clear that the conservative movement has come under attack on Capitol Hill today,” says a broadside from the hard Right, and John Boehner as Speaker in taking most of the heat for the deal with Patty Murray and the Democrats while Ryan is exempted from their anger.

All this suggests that Boehner’s two-year straddle of Tea Party zealots and saner GOP members of his caucus is approaching its end. Under the circumstances, it won’t be his even loonier Iago, Eric Cantor, who will be replacing him to pull the party together.

Would Ryan be any improvement? Judging from his performance this week, his ascension would be a step in the right (or center) direction. The man who gave up his life-long idolatry of Ayn Rand in a heartbeat has demonstrated some aptitude for flexibility.

“He has been a marvelous soldier in coming to this agreement,” enthuses a House Tea Party member.

The way things are going, it will be no surprise to see him leading the troops after Congress reconvenes early next year.

The Pope and the President

Year’s end finds Francis I enshrined as Person of the Year and Barack Obama consigned to opinion-poll Hell.

How many reflections on life today crowd into that comparison?

Words are easier than deeds. As admirable as the spirit and pronouncements of the new Pontiff are, he dwells in symbolism, aspiration and hope, a realm Obama occupied five years ago when he was chosen Person of the Year for 2008 before moving into the White House.

Power corrupts but absolute power can be liberating. In the Vatican, Francis I reigns supreme and, with dazzling humility, sets a new tone for the Catholic Church. In Washington, the new President encountered a cockpit of hate to be thwarted at every turn into five years of political impotence.

To err is human and forgive divine but not in politics. Francis I tells an anxious world that sins of selfishness can be overcome by modesty and love of fellow humans while Obama is pummeled for attempting to save people from suffering and death with an imperfect solution, originally prompted in large part by wall-to-wall political opposition.

Time Magazine can exalt but time itself diminishes. Francis I occupies a magazine cover in his first months on the world stage. As he moves into making pronouncements and decisions about issues that have racked the Catholic Church for years, will near-universal admiration survive? Barack Obama can tell him all about loss of faith by fervent admirers.

Human hope never dies. Even at the low point of his tenure, the President can glimpse some daylight in a bipartisan budget deal that the House will vote on tomorrow. Miracles may never cease.

For the New Year those imbued by good feeling can only wish Persons of the Year past and present the best of luck in their spiritual and mortal endeavors on behalf of us all.

How Good Does the Economy Have to Get?

Numbers improve, but the President gets no credit. So deeply is the anti-Obama narrative embedded in the debate over income inequality that, even with better numbers, 61 percent of Americans continue to be negative about the economy--a majority at all age and income levels, most independents and 80 percent of Republicans.

Only among Democrats, people with a postgraduate education and blacks do a majority see anything hopeful.

To break through all this resistance, the President is recruiting Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff John Podesta, who has been in private life at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning public policy research group.

Even before he joins the White House, Podesta lays out the Obama argument in Politico:

“Income inequality in the United States today has reached levels last seen during the Roaring ’20s. Over the last three decades, the top 1 percent of incomes have risen by 279 percent, while the bottom fifth of workers have seen an increase of less than 20 percent. In 1979, the middle 60 percent of households took home 50 percent of U.S. income. By 2007, their share was just 43 percent.

“These trends have continued since the end of the Great Recession. Ninety-five percent of income gains since 2009 have gone to the top 1 percent of earners. In 2012, the top 10 percent took home more than 50 percent of the nation’s income—a record high. After a brief period in the late 1990s during which incomes rose across the board, median wages stagnated during the 2000s, and have remained depressed during the economic recovery.”

The President himself made the case for attacking income inequality, but it fell on deaf ears.

What will it take to get most Americans to listen to and understand what is in their best interests for the future?

Person of the Year Pyramid

That sound under the earth’s surface is Henry Luce, founder of Time, spinning in his tomb as an Egyptian General, Turkish Prime Minister and Miley Cyrus win his creation’s popular poll for Person of the Year.

In a Twitter coup, the Sphinx roared from the Middle East to outvote the editors’choices, including Pope Francis, President Obama, Ted Cruz, Edward Snowden and a gay rights activist who sued for inheritance rights.

Why not? In a world where notoriety is amok, attention knows no national boundaries, political meaning or moral distinctions. Anyone can be Googled up to the heights of fame.

When he started Time 90 years ago, Luce’s aim was to make sense of “the million little chaoses of raw news.” That time is long gone. Now his inheritors just dive into it and stir the publicity pot.

Miley Cyrus may be the best symbol for our culture after all.

Why Shouldn't Magazines Die?

One of the best around goes bi-weekly because not enough readers and advertisers are funneling money into it every week.

In a postmortem, Megan McArdle, a former magazine writer who now labors for Bloomberg News, writes, “Hearing that New York magazine can’t make it as a weekly is, for a professional journalist, rather like being told that your teddy bear has cancer.”

But something more vital than a comforting childhood relic is expiring. In the age of being flooded by instant information, as magazines die, Americans are losing one of their few ways of understanding what it all means.  

A century ago, social critic Lewis Mumford pointed out that, although science and technology assume constantly increasing consumption of goods and knowledge is desirable, it can lead to “deprivation by surfeit.”

With increasing speed and productivity, Mumford wrote, “we have ignored the need for evaluation, correction, selection and social assimilation.”

Today’s journalism validates his theory as clearly as do the clogging of highways, the overwhelming of air-traffic control and the breakdown of political discourse. We are in a hurry to get somewhere without being sure of the destination and how to keep from falling over one another.

Relegating magazines to dentists’ waiting rooms and airline flights morphs them into the same kind of time-killers as the media causing the confusion.

In the half-obituary for New York, as cynics smarmly cluck over the passing of “dead-tree journalism,” a retired practitioner may be forgiven for lamenting what Americans are losing in their psychic landscape.

A Day That Lives in Infamy and Me

On December 7, 1941 I was the age my twin grandsons are now, 17. Along with the Cuban Missile Crisis and 9/11/2001, it is etched in memory as the world-shaking time of a long life. For those their age, it is ancient history. For me, remembering in detail is a way of hoping with all my heart that they and their generations will never have to experience anything like it.

It was a different America then. News of the Japanese attack came from bulletins that broke into radio programs and spread by word of mouth over the phone, on streets of cities and house to house in small towns.

That Sunday, I was a college student with a part-time job in a New York hospital, standing next to a young man with a dazed grin, staring through a picture window at a nurse in a white mask holding up a swaddled armful inches from our eyes. She gently shook the sleeping baby into a red-faced wail, then drew the curtain.

In those days, fear of germs kept newborns in a nursery while mothers spent a week in hospital beds. The babies were brought in to be breast-fed, then carried back to their cocoons. During that time, the new father would get only one quick look, and my job was to lead him to the window. The babies were all alike. The real show was on our side of the glass: a man’s eyes flooding with pride, wonder and worry.

But on December 7, 1941, sudden death six thousand miles away shattered the tableaus of new life. Happy faces at mothers’ bedsides turned to stone, nurses and doctors looked lost behind their masks of composure. My stomach churned as I climbed to the Third Avenue El to go home. As the train hurtled over familiar streets, I felt cold and exposed.

The next day, I was in the Great Hall of City College, holding a half-eaten sandwich, my eyes on a huge glowing mural behind the stage, a black-robed graduate amid flying cherubs and, in togas, the figures of Wisdom, Discipline and Alma Mater pointing the way to a bright future.

From a loudspeaker the voice of the only President I could remember (FDR took office on my ninth birthday) was telling of a day that will live in infamy and announcing we were at war. I was suddenly wrenched into a world beyond my familiar slivers of the Bronx and Harlem connected by a subway ride.

The following days were a thrilling blur of rumor and fear. A history professor stopped a lecture on Victorian life. “You’ll hear the Japanese have poisoned the water and Nazi subs are off Staten Island,” he said, with a reassuring grimace. “Nothing will happen. Go home, do your homework.”

Every night at 8:55, breaking into the flow of radio comedy and dopey drama, the chilling voice of Elmer Davis told of battles in Europe and the Pacific. Older boys from my neighborhood were fighting in unimaginable places, and I would soon be with them.

World War II came to us in slow motion and seemed unreal until we read the next day's newspaper. Why, then, did that unseen war affect our lives so much more deeply than the 24/7 images and endless words about the Middle East, which now so easily slide out of national consciousness?

World War II was everybody's war, fought by our fathers, sons, husbands, brothers and those of the people next door and down the street. In little more than a year, I knew I would be among them. We were all in it together.

If my friends and I had known we would be called "The Greatest Generation," we would have wondered what was so unusual about doing what we had to do. And it would have saddened us to know that our children and grandchildren would have to fight and die when the nation's survival was not so clearly at stake.

Now Japan and Germany are among the least warlike nations on earth, but what have we the victors learned? 

Mandela's American Connection

As he passes from life into legend as the remarkable man who went from 27 years in South African prisons to the country’s President who would end apartheid and reunite his nation with spiritual grace, Nelson Mandela is for most Americans a distant figure.

In his lifetime, we watched from afar and marveled. It is only now, in celebrating him as an historical figure, that Americans are reminded of his connection to their own racial odyssey during those momentous years.

On the PBS NewsHour, much of the tribute to Mandela’s passing is taken up by his interviews over the years with Charlayne Hunter-Gault, now 71, a remarkable American journalist who, to those of us who knew her, embodied our own racial struggles and went on to celebrate his.

Daughter of a US Army chaplain, in 1961 Charlayne Hunter became part of the civil rights movement when, after court battles, she and Hamilton Holmes became the first two African-American students to enroll in the University of Georgia and were met by jeering crowds who, after smashing her dormitory windows with bottles and bricks, had to be dispersed by tear gas.

Naturally she was suspended “for her own safety” but returned to campus by a court order days later.

She graduated in 1963 after meeting and marrying a fellow journalism student secretly, because he was white and they could have been prosecuted under existing Southern laws against miscegenation. They had a child and the marriage ended amicably when she moved to New York to start a journalism career that would span reporting for the New York Times to PBS.

After winning awards, she moved to South Africa in 1997 and her life work fused with Mandela’s in the remarkable interviews now being seen on the PBS tribute to him.

Now in the New Yorker Hunter-Gault recalls: “I interviewed Mandela in 1994, a few days before he was to be sworn in as President of the Republic of South Africa. I apologized to him for not being able to be at the inauguration itself, explaining that there was hardly anything on earth that would make me miss that historic occasion, but that my son Chuma was graduating from Emory University, in Atlanta, on the same day. And I needed to fly back for it. At that, Mandela relaxed his stiff, about-to-be-interviewed posture, leaned forward slightly in his chair, and smiled, with an enveloping warmth.

“’Of course you have to be there. You can always interview me,” he said.’

“I found myself responding, ‘Thank you, Tata’-—just what a child of Mandela would have called him.”

Those of us who watched from afar are reawakened and heartened by reliving Nelson Mandela’s story and reminded of his American counterpart, Martin Luther King, and a journalist, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, whose own life was touched by both.  

The President Addresses a Deaf Nation

Barack Obama’s “best speech” on the economy goes unheard, like the tree in the GEICO commercial. The ambient health-reform noise leaves him looking like the nation has pressed a mute button.

More response comes from implacable haters than admirers. “For all of their mutual public admiration, Presidents Clinton and Obama react differently to political trouble,” huffs the Wall Street Journal. “Bill moved to the middle, while Barack always moves left. So it's no surprise that Mr. Obama is responding to his ObamaCare rollout slump by doing his best Elizabeth Warren imitation.”

If an estimable man in the White House speaking truths about the nation’s economy can be drowned out by liars and buffoons, where does American democracy go from here?

It was no doubt the President’s intention to rise above the Obamacare din and ask voters to see how far they have fallen in the past decades.

In addition, he pointed out, to “increased inequality, we’ve seen diminished levels of upward mobility in recent years. A child born in the top 20 percent has about a 2-in-3 chance of staying at or near the top. A child born into the bottom 20 percent has a less than 1-in-20 shot at making it to the top. He’s 10 times likelier to stay where he is. 

“In fact, statistics show not only that our levels of income inequality rank near countries like Jamaica and Argentina, but that it is harder today for a child born here in America to improve her station in life than it is for children in most of our wealthy allies--countries like Canada or Germany or France. They have greater mobility than we do, not less.”

If that sobering truth is not heard above all the partisan noise and posturing to arouse debate about where America is heading, what will?

A poll shows American women may be turning against Obamacare and Democrats for coming elections, to GOP delight. But those who have or plan to have children may want to consider the ultimate cost.

The price for tuning out the President now will be paid by future generations.

"Smiling Through the Apocalypse"

Where are the sharp-tongued scribes of yesteryear? When I was a book publisher in 1970, I sent into the world a three-pound thousand-page Esquire doorstop about the 1960s edited by my long-departed friend Harold Hayes, who immortalized a decade with the work of Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, William F. Buckley, Gore Vidal and William Styron, among other literary writers.

That was before the death of irony in this century, where vitriol now passes for wit and meanness for meaning.

Such nostalgia is prompted by Peggy Noonan’s latest emanation about the President:

“Mr. Obama’s problem now is that people think he is smart.

“They think, as they look at his health-care vows, that either he didn’t know how bad his program was, what dislocations it would cause, what a disturbance it would be to the vast middle class of America.

“Or he knew, and deliberately misled everyone...

“They think he knowingly quelled people’s fears when he knew they had every reason to be afraid.

”Which makes him just another dishonest pol, just another guy hiding in the deliberately obscure paragraph on page 1,037 of the omnibus comprehensive reform bill.

“He has taken himself down, lowered his own stature.

“Commentators like to decry low-information voters—-the stupid are picking our leaders. I think the real problem is low-information leaders. They have so little experience of life and have so much faith in magic—-in media, in words-—that they don’t understand people will get angry at you when you mislead them, and never see you the same way again.”

There is much to criticize in the President’s history with the ACA, but dishonesty does not make the list of any fair-minded critic, with such sledgehammer logic.

If Noonan represents GOP “thinkers,” there should be little wonder that party Neanderthals are yowling about impeachment in Congress. Too bad that William F. Buckley isn’t still around to show us the wit and elegance that true Conservatives used to display.

Then again he would probably be considered too tame for Fox News and the Wall Street Journal.

Those who still think words matter will want to rinse their minds with Barack Obama’s eloquent discourse today on the American economy.

A $1500 Stitch in Time

Outrageous hospital charges are a cliché by now but impossible to ignore in the health-care debate for fear of a taking a cheap shot, something unknown in an emergency room.

“A day spent as an inpatient at an American hospital,” says a New York Times report, “costs on average more than $4,000, five times the charge in many other developed countries...The most expensive hospitals charge more than $12,500 a day. And at many of them, including California Pacific Medical Center, emergency rooms are profit centers. That is why one of the simplest and oldest medical procedures--closing a wound with a needle and thread--typically leads to bills of at least $1,500 and often much more.”

When I was a kid in the Great Depression, the only classmate whose family had a house rather than an apartment was a doctor’s son, but the first floor of their brownstone was his father’s offices and waiting room. It was like living over a store, except that the head of the house drove an expensive car to make house calls (in those days, doctors actually visited sick patients).

My first college summer job was in the print shop of a hospital, where the forms were for patient treatment, not charges.

All this may seem primitive and, absent today’s life-saving technology, it was. But even so, patients were treated as people, not units in a profit center.

Now, concludes the Times report: “In theory, health care consolidation can lead to economies of scale, but not if it produces complex supersize systems. Excess administrative costs accounted for about $190 billion of the $2.5 trillion medical bill of the United States in 2009, the Institute of Medicine estimated this year--money that could be used for other purposes.”

Like patient care, for example.

According to one expert, “There is a big flurry of consolidation and the effects depend on what the objective of the health care system is. If the intent is to improve care and bend cost curves, then networks can do so. If the objective is to corner the market and demand higher rates, then that will happen.” Research shows that today’s hospital mergers drive up prices.

Medical advances have led to longer and better lives for millions of Americans, but the intrusion of corporate profiteers, religious fanatics and political posturers has turned the Hippocratic Oath into Hypocritical Greed.

Pyrrhic Victories for Both Parties

If and when the ACA finally works, what will be left of Barack Obama’s power to make things happen? If and when a Republican finally retakes the White House, what will remain of the GOP’s ability to govern?

Both parties should step back and consider what happened to the Greek King Pyrrhus who defeated the Romans but lost so much in doing so that his name is enshrined in history as a symbol for losing by winning.

Pyrrhic victories loom for both parties in Washington’s war of attrition. In California, Republicans are reduced to putting up a fake site to mislead constituents looking for health care. In the White House, the President’s staff keeps taking hits for inadequacy, tries to bribe insurers to let people keep their policies and braces for another Darrell Issa attack on “lies” about Obamacare.

As approval ratings plummet for both President and Congress, David Brooks asks Americans an apt question, “How much emotional and psychic space should politics take up in a normal healthy brain?”

His answer: “Government is the hard work of creating a background order, but it is not the main substance of life. As Samuel Johnson famously put it, ‘How small, of all that human hearts endure,/That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.’ Government can set the stage, but it can’t be the play.”

As the season of peace on earth and good will approaches, it may be past time to tune out tinpot politicians and turn TV sets into those Christmas eve fireplaces for the whole month.

Debate Obamacare, Ignore Infrastructure

A commuter train derails in the Bronx, killing four and injuring scores, while Congress squabbles over health care reform.

No connection? Only for those who were politically asleep for the past three years while the GOP in Washington brutally stripped budgets that might have allowed states and municipalities to perform minimum maintenance on a crumbling American infrastructure.

No matter what turns out to be the proximate cause of the Bronx disaster, untold similar “accidents” are waiting to happen on rail lines, roads, bridges, in tunnels and other aging features of a man-made public transportation system built by a robust American society and now dangerously decaying under a cowering one.

What are we doing to America or at least guilty of letting happen to a nation that was once the envy of the world?

Falling apart is a weak description. In 2009, the American Society of Civil Engineers assigned a D grade to the nation’s infrastructure, estimating it would take $2.2 trillion from all levels of government over five years to repair it to adequacy.

With that deadline coming up the end of this year, the Tea Party has assured a grade of F if the examination is repeated.

As investigators look at the track, signal system, crew performance and other factors in the Bronx derailment, one thing is certain: The underlying conditions for such events are growing worse by the day, and no report will address that.

“Accidents will happen,” fatalists may shrug. But ideological neglect is no accident. While the Tea Party savors possible political gain next year over Obamacare woes, will voters hold them to account for the unseen loss of lives they have intentionally inflicted on Americans going about their daily business?

Someone should connect those dots for them.

Life as a Contact Sport

Reflections of an old scold: Holiday shopping and eating call up thoughts about styles of day-to-day living as a key to human happiness.

Two days before Thanksgiving, I had a harrowing time in a large supermarket that normally provides a satisfying experience of leisurely food shopping for the son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren I live with now, bringing home their favorite foods as an expression of love.

This time was different, as if zombies with carts had invaded the place, racing full steam ahead to knock over anyone in their paths, in glassy-eyed competition for everything on the shelves, a preview of what they would be doing elsewhere for bigger game on Black Friday.

Couple this with memories of holidays past, watching different eating styles, those who happily take whatever is put on their plates in contrast to others piling up food as if universal famine were the menu for the next day.

Why and how does so much anxiety pervade days that call for reflection, calm and appreciation of goodness in the precarious lives of human beings? What makes them sour what should be the sweetness of life?

Outside of Norman Rockwell scenes in American homes, the dramas go on in the nation’s capital, with the same divergence of hope and doom about the embattled effort to keep more people alive and well in the future.

If there is a national dystopia, it comes somewhere from our hearts and minds, not family tables or checkout counters. If we can’t bring back those Rockwell days, we can at least try to remember them as we stuff ourselves with too much food and electronic junk on days that should bring out the best in us all.

President 2016: What Are the Odds?

Never mind the talking heads, consider the opinions of people who put money where their mouths are. If you consult leading bookies, Hillary Clinton and Chris Christie will vie for the Presidency three years from now, and the winner will be...Mrs. Clinton.

Those who believe the former First Lady will reoccupy the White House after 2016 can bet on her against odds of only 2-1. Her leading Republican opponent Christie is posted at 10-1.

Life imitates horse-racing as a new CNN poll shows Christie leading the GOP pack among voters with 24 percent after his New Jersey landslide, ahead of Rand Paul (13), Paul Ryan (11), Ted Cruz (10) and Marco Rubio (9).

On the bookie tote board, Rubio is 12-l with Paul, Ryan and Jeb Bush 20-1 and Cruz trailing at 33-1.

As for Democrats who might challenge Clinton, they offer Elizabeth Warren (25-1), Joe Biden (33-1) and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (40-1).

At this point, all this is at the fun-and-games stage, but the real-life dynamic is building toward a turbulent 2016.

A new CNN poll on reality, not what-ifs, shows less than a quarter of the public saying the economy is improving, while nearly four in ten see it as getting worse.

If Barack Obama and the GOP Congressional naysayers fail to get it together in the next three years, could a third-party candidate emerge? The bookies will be keeping out a watchful eye.

The Obamas' Pie in the Sky

Whatever the First Family was grateful for this Thanksgiving, they did it in high American style with nine kinds of pie—-huckleberry, pecan, chocolate cream, sweet potato, peach, apple, pumpkin, banana cream and coconut cream.

Not exactly in line with the First Lady’s healthful low-calorie crusade, but a day of indulgence in hard times is understandable, literally and figuratively.  

In their holiday interview with Barbara Walters, Barack and Michelle Obama were serving political pie in the sky as well.

“I've gone up and down pretty much consistently throughout," the President said about his poll standing. "But the good thing about when you're down is that usually you got nowhere to go but up...

"I continue to believe and absolutely convinced that at the end of the day, people are going to look back at the work we've done to make sure that in this country, you don't go bankrupt when you get sick, that families have that security. That is going be a legacy I am extraordinarily proud of."

The First Lady echoed him: "You're going to have people who don't like what you do, but you better have your own vision, and you better have your own will and your own passion and determination. Know that life requires work and sacrifice and sometimes it's painful, but there is a lot of joy and there is a lot of hope and possibility."

The day after the holiday, the Obamas visited a group of fasters on the National Mall to pressure Congress to act on the immigration pending on Capitol Hill.

From feast to famine, the couple who live in the White House is undoubtedly committed to making life better for Americans in every way possible.

“Americans,” he says, “deep down, care about each other and want to do the right thing. And we're going make sure that we do everything we can to help folks who are out there working hard, trying to make it."

Michelle Obama agrees, noting that her husband has “a level of patience and focus and tenacity and calm that just doesn't come by anyone. I definitely don't.”

On the day after, the First Couple may be serving pie in the sky, but these days, most Americans could use a second helping.

It's Broke and Nobody is Fixing It

In a Thanksgiving eve news dump, the White House delivers more bad news about Obamacare and, at this rate, is poised to fill Christmas health-care stockings with lumps of coal.

The Administration slips in a one-year delay for small businesses to go online to buy insurance for their employees through the new federal marketplace website, another blow to smooth implementation of the ACA.

Companies with fewer than 50 employees were to begin selecting coverage through the Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP), an online exchange this month. With the delay, they will have to find coverage through an agent or broker.

In addition, to avoid a Black Friday on the website, officials urge users to go easy on “the still-fragile HealthCare.gov.” lest it collapse under a post-holiday crush of new customers.

This is not what success looks like. More and more, Obamacare seems broke and nobody is fixing it.

The outlook is so grim that it reduces a sane observer to quoting Eric Cantor without mockery.

“Once again,” says the House Majority Leader, “President Obama has unilaterally delayed another major portion of Obamacare, and once again, he has tried to bury bad news around a holiday hoping nobody will notice...The president's latest one-year delay is another sign that Obamacare's issues run much deeper than a failing website.”

If that isn’t a symptom of a sick society, what is?

For die-hard optimists, the best advice is take two aspirin and try to sleep until after the New Year.