January 9, 2012

Where Are the Liberals? By DAVID BROOKS

Why aren’t there more liberals in America?

It’s not because liberalism lacks cultural power. Many polls suggest that a majority of college professors and national journalists vote Democratic. The movie, TV, music and publishing industries are dominated by liberals.

It’s not because recent events have disproved the liberal worldview. On the contrary, we’re still recovering from a financial crisis caused, in large measure, by Wall Street excess. Corporate profits are zooming while worker salaries are flat.

It’s not because liberalism’s opponents are going from strength to strength. The Republican Party is unpopular and sometimes embarrassing.

Given the circumstances, this should be a golden age of liberalism. Yet the percentage of Americans who call themselves liberals is either flat or in decline. There are now two conservatives in this country for every liberal. Over the past 40 years, liberalism has been astonishingly incapable at expanding its market share.

The most important explanation is what you might call the Instrument Problem. Americans may agree with liberal diagnoses, but they don’t trust the instrument the Democrats use to solve problems. They don’t trust the federal government.

A few decades ago they did, but now they don’t. Roughly 10 percent of Americans trust government to do the right thing most of the time, according to an October New York Times, CBS News poll.

Why don’t Americans trust their government? It’s not because they dislike individual programs like Medicare. It’s more likely because they think the whole system is rigged. Or to put it in the economists’ language, they believe the government has been captured by rent-seekers.

This is the disease that corrodes government at all times and in all places. As George F. Will wrote in a column in Sunday’s Washington Post, as government grows, interest groups accumulate, seeking to capture its power and money.

Some of these rent-seeking groups are corporate types. Will notes that the federal government delivers sugar subsidies that benefit a few rich providers while imposing costs on millions of consumers.

Other rent-seeking groups are dispersed across the political spectrum. The tax code has been tweaked 4,428 times in the past 10 years, to the benefit of interests of left, right and center.

Others exercise their power transparently and democratically. As Will notes, in 2009, the net worth of households headed by senior citizens was 47 times the net worth of households led by people under 35. Yet seniors use their voting power to protect programs that redistribute even more money from the young to the old and affluent.

You would think that liberals would have a special incentive to root out rent-seeking. Yet this has not been a major priority. There is no Steve Jobs figure in American liberalism insisting that the designers keep government simple, elegant and user-friendly. Sailors scrub their ships. Farmers clear weeds. Democrats have not spent a lot of time scraping barnacles off the state.

Worse, in an attempt to match Republican rhetoric, Democratic politicians are perpetually soiling the name of government for the sake of short-term gain. How many times have you heard Democrats from Carter to Obama running against Washington, accusing it of being insular, shortsighted, corrupt and petty? If the surgeon himself thinks his tools are rancid, why shouldn’t you?

In the past few weeks, the Obama administration has begun his presidential campaign by picking a series of small fights with the Republican-led House over things like recess appointments. These vicious squabbles may help Obama in the short term by making him look better than Republicans in Congress. But they will only further discredit Washington over the long run.

Life is unfair. Republican venality unintentionally reinforces the conservative argument that government is corrupt. Democratic venality undermines the Democratic argument that Washington can be trusted to do good.

Liberalism has not expanded because it has not had a Martin Luther, a leader committed to stripping away the corruptions, complexities and indulgences that have grown up over the years.

If you’ll forgive some outside advice, President Obama might consider running for re-election as Luther. It’s not enough to pick a series of small squabbles and then win as the least ugly man in the room. He might run as someone who believes in government but sees how much it needs to be cleansed and purified.

Make the tax code simple. Make job training simple. Make Medicare simple. Every week choose a rent-seeker to hold up for ridicule and renunciation. Change the Congressional rules. Simplify the legal thickets that undermine responsibility.

If Democrats can’t restore Americans’ trust in government, it really doesn’t matter what problems they identify and what plans they propose. No one will believe in the instrument they rely on for solutions.

Weiner in a Box JoAnn Wypijewski

Weiner in a Box JoAnn Wypijewski
June 15, 2011

Of all the restrooms in all the schools and bars and gas stations across this great land, rare is the stall inside of which someone has not paused to draw a penis. Erect, with tight scrotum on one end and a cartoon squirt at the other, it is characterized by a vigorous arcing line and a paucity of detail; no hairs or veins or rippled skin, no great variation in size or proportion, a Unipenis, really, the signal hieroglyph of our age. When we have blown or glutted or pummeled ourselves into extinction, alien archaeologists will find this symbol on crumbling viaducts and leeching scrap heaps, in the ruins of our cities and the overgrown remnants of our public libraries, and they will conclude, “Here was their god.”



Then they will find the cellphone of Andrew Breitbart with a close-up photo of a real penis, and they will say, “Here was His votary”… except if they dig any further and find a photo of that photo being offered like a two-bit peep attraction from Breitbart’s chubby hand; if they excavate a video clip from the Opie & Anthony radio show and witness the grown-ups’ little-boy glee upon passing the photo around (“Wowie!”); if they unearth a snippet of sound from a press conference, a reporter shouting, “Were you fully erect?” above the din; if they stumble upon a tranche of brittle headlines and scratchy TV clips, each one mixing the jokester’s fun and voyeur’s thrill with the bile of the moral disciplinarian; if they come upon a trove of the electronic currency of our time—an average porno site, an average episode of Jersey Shore, an average month of posts to guyswithiphones—and then discover, finally, the recorded spectacle of Representative Anthony Weiner’s tear-stained confession, a man brought low by a picture of a hard-on in boxer shorts.



Then the aliens will rub their antennas together and decide, “Here was an insane people.”



It is different for us. Social insanity may be our condition, but while we have a few brain cells left we have to try to make sense of the phenomena of the day. The Weiner scandal seems nuttier than most because, besides Weiner’s astounding recklessness, almost from the first report of sexting between the Congressman and a female fan the national media revealed themselves to have the sexual maturity of a seventh grader. That is probably a slur against seventh graders, who in many schools now range in age from 11 to 15, and at the older end are no doubt not only more nimble at fingering their cellphones and masking their identities than the Congressman but also more reasonable about the nature of sexual play in the era of instant messaging than the average reporter. The papers, the networks, the cable channels, the blogs, every news machine that led or almost led with the Weiner story for two weeks may not have used the words chosen by
hollywoodlife.com to announce “New Naked Pictures of Anthony Weiner Emerge—Eww!” But in one way or another all betrayed the same giddy revulsion. Weiner was creepy, icky, weird, sick, a pervert—Eww!



The news machine deserves derision, but it’s too easy to wave off its adolescent obsession and Weiner’s as a distraction from really important politics: to say sex, panic, the tug of war between the private and public, the urge to take risks and the urge to punish, are trivial next to the stuff cooked up by the ghouls in Congress calling for Weiner’s head.



Sex scandals are politics by other means. At the simplest level this one is a matter of partisan combat. Breitbart has made scandal his capital. No matter of principle is at stake; the point is simply to win one for his side. He dissembles about his motives, and that’s politics too. He doesn’t care about whether all public figures are models of probity; he may not care about what people do sexually at all. Weiner texts Lisa, a Las Vegas blackjack dealer, “Wow, a Jewish girl who sucks cock!” Breitbart froths: “Can you imagine if one of these errant girls, you know in Nevada or the porn star, said, ‘Hey, you know what? I want some legislation passed. How about if you vote yes, even though you’re thinking no on this?’”



Both are farcical; each playing his part in a game of Catch Your Opponent With His Pants Down. For Weiner, the dangerous possibility of discovery had to be part of the thrill. But Breitbart didn’t just come up with an absurd example to fit a generalizable concern about “misbehaving” and the corrupting influence of backdoor alliances. He has no such concern. If he did, his websites would have pilloried Senator John Ensign, the Nevada casino heir who gave his best friends, a husband-wife team, important political jobs (and lent them money for a house they couldn’t afford, paid their kids’ tuition for a school they couldn’t afford, basically controlled their economic life) and then seduced the wife, fired the husband, sent him away to be a lobbyist, inveigled his Senate staff into activity they all knew was illegal, fired the wife once she withheld favors, finally paid the couple off with a measly $96,000 from his parents, and occupied the Senate for two more years until a damning Ethics Committee report hastened his resignation this spring.



It’s silly to talk of right-wing conspiracy. Breitbart is merely doing what political players have done for centuries: using sex to mobilize a constituency and achieve an end.



The media are doing something similar: using sex to sell papers and ads, obviously, but also, less consciously, to channel the anxieties of the age. Every story America has told itself—that it is strong, tough, cocky; that its problems are mere chinks in an otherwise solid roadbed; that it can outsmart, outfox and one-up its opponents; that it’s still got the juice, the balls, the mojo—has always been chauvinistic and phallocentric. Now those boasts sound tinny, desperate, like Weiner’s denials. Congress is a cesspool, no matter who controls it. The presidency is unaccountable, no matter who occupies it. There are only falling stars. The wars grind on, work drains away, privacy is as unreliable as the market, and… gosh, your mate does spend a lot of time on the computer at night, and, gosh, the kids are always in their rooms, and what is everybody saying and seeing and sending while alone, in the dark, in front of a glowing screen?



This is America’s first full-out political techno-sex scandal, and novelty often whistles up confusion. (Progressives who cheered Chris Lee’s swift fall following a bare-chested posting on Craigslist might reconsider what they celebrated; in terms of ideological, as opposed to tactical, sexual politics, the right won there too.) The tittering compulsion of so much commentary reflects that confusion, a lack of sure footing, for all the grown-ups’ professed sophistication, in the virtual world. Had Weiner been caught in a hotel room on top of, say, Lisa, amid their mutual cries of “big cock” and “tight pussy” and had there been a black book with other women’s names on the bedside table, the press would have had a good time with the story, but no one would call Weiner a pervert; he’d be a stud. As it is, what made the sex here safe, its noncarnality—no contact, no fluids, no baby, no payment, no strings—now makes it sick. The usual social controls aren’t operative.



Confusion in novelty cuts at least two ways, though. In the 1980s Gerry Studds survived a scandal over an affair with a 17-year-old Congressional page; Barney Frank survived a scandal over a male prostitute who was using the Congressman’s home as a bordello. Both men stepped out of the closet in the swirl of scandal, the first members of Congress to do so. It mattered that for decades already, countless anonymous others had fought and dreamed and died and, most important, lived so that homosexuality would be sprung from the cages of mental illness and blackmail bait. It mattered, years later, when Bill Clinton was being impeached, that pro-sex feminists and libertines of all stripes had long been moving the culture to recognize sexual reality. In this latest scandal the press solemnly reports Clinton’s disapproval of Weiner as if erstwhile presidential behaviors once deemed outrageous and unpleasant, if not quite sick—lying about an affair, engaging in blowjobs, rimming, cigar games, etc.—were just what people do, maybe embarrassing when hung on the line for a public pawing, but deeply human. Their disgust may be hypocrisy, but their nonchalance is the result of sexual politics.



When it comes to the Internet fantasyland, people are way ahead of politicians and the press in sorting out the relationship between individual secrets and social honesty, but it’s still a private-public Wild West. If some livable synthesis finally emerges from the clash of alienation and liberation on this new sexual terrain, it won’t be because we listened to the haters and the shamers. Sex is so much more than they have ever imagined.

The Party of No By ROSS DOUTHAT

November 14, 2010
The Party of No By ROSS DOUTHAT
By offering up their joint recommendation last week for balancing the budget, the co-chairmen of Barack Obama’s fiscal commission didn’t solve our deficit problem once and for all, or clear a path through the political thickets facing would-be budget cutters. But Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson performed a valuable public service nonetheless: the reaction to their proposals demonstrated that when it comes to addressing the long-term challenges facing this country, the Democrats, too, can play the Party of No.

Last week’s media coverage sometimes made it sound as if Bowles and Simpson were taking the same amount of fire from left and right. But the reaction from Republican lawmakers and the conservative intelligentsia was muted, respectful and often favorable; the right-wing griping mostly came from single-issue activists and know-nothing television entertainers. The liberal attacks, on the other hand, came fast and furious, from pundits and leading Democratic politicians alike — starting with the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, who pronounced the recommendations “simply unacceptable” almost immediately after their release.

Liberals defended this knee-jerk response on the grounds that the commissioners’ vision, ostensibly bipartisan, was actually tilted toward Republican priorities. And it’s true that Bowles and Simpson proposed more spending cuts than tax increases over all. But most of the programs and tax breaks that they suggested trimming — from farm subsidies to Defense Department bloat and the home-mortgage tax deduction — represent the American welfare state at its absolute worst. And the duo went out of their way to avoid balancing the budget on the backs of the poor. (Social Security, for instance, would be strengthened through a mix of tax increases and benefit cuts for wealthier seniors; retirees close to the poverty line would see their benefits increase.)

Their proposals certainly weren’t flawless, but they did manage to include good ideas from right and left alike. And it’s illuminating, and very depressing, that Democrats were so immediately outraged by a plan that reduces corporate welfare, makes Social Security more progressive, slashes the defense budget, raises the tax rate on millionaires’ summer homes — and does all of this while capping the government’s share of gross domestic product, not at some Scrooge-like minimum but at the highest level in modern American history.

Needless to say, none of the liberal lawmakers attacking the Simpson-Bowles proposals offered alternative blueprints for restoring America’s solvency. The Democratic Party has plans for many things, but a balanced budget isn’t one of them.

But pondering what Nancy Pelosi and her compatriots are rejecting gives us a pretty good sense of what they’re for. It’s a world where the government perpetually warps the real estate and health care marketplaces, subsidizing McMansions and gold-plated insurance plans to the tune of billions every year. It’s a world where federal jobs are sacrosanct, but the private sector has to labor under one of the higher corporate tax rates in the developed West. It’s a world where the Social Security retirement age never budges, no matter how high average life expectancy climbs. And it’s a world where federal spending rises inexorably to 25 percent of G.D.P. and beyond, and taxes rise with it.

Liberals sometimes justify this vision by arguing that government has to permanently subsidize the middle class and affluent in order to maintain public support for any safety net at all. (Most voters won’t support a system of basic social insurance for the poor, the theory goes, unless they’re getting something out of it as well.) And they defend the ever-rising tax rates required to finance these ever-expanding entitlements by noting that America thrived economically in the wake of World War II, when income-tax rates were much higher than they are today.

The first argument ignores the lessons of liberalism’s usual teacher, Western Europe, where governments have successfully reduced spending on their pension and entitlement systems without compromising their commitment to their neediest citizens. The second argument ignores the fact that the postwar United States didn’t have any serious economic competitors (the rest of the globe having been brought to its knees by total war), whereas today, an overtaxed America would struggle to compete with China and India and Brazil.

But the deeper problem is that the entire approach treats Americans as moral midgets, incapable of providing for the elderly and indigent without being bribed with giveaways and propped up with subsidies. The alternative sketched by Bowles and Simpson last week has its weaknesses, but it has this great virtue: It treats Americans not as clients but as citizens, and not as children but as adults.

Presidential Horse Race, the 2008 Version By MICHIKO KAKUTANI... THE BATTLE FOR AMERICA 2008 -The Story of an Extraordinary Election By Dan Balz and H

August 11, 2009
Books of The Times
Presidential Horse Race, the 2008 Version By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
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THE BATTLE FOR AMERICA 2008 -The Story of an Extraordinary Election By Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson

415 pages. Viking. $29.95.

Nine months after the presidential election of 2008, is there anything new or revealing to say about that momentous event? Can a post-mortem on the marathon campaign preceding that vote shed any new light on the participants or the process?

Given the voluminous coverage of that race, it might seem as if the obvious answer to these questions were no. But “The Battle for America 2008,” a new book by Dan Balz, the lead political reporter for The Washington Post, and his former Post colleague Haynes Johnson, actually makes for engaging reading — for both politics addicts interested in small new details and the more casual reader interested in a broad, savvy overview of the run-up to a historic election.

Yes, many of the authors’ observations — about subjects as diverse as voters’ disillusion with George W. Bush and the politics of the primary calendar — have been made many times before. Yes, many of their accounts of the ups and downs of the campaign — Barack Obama’s surge in Iowa; Hillary Rodham Clinton’s comeback in New Hampshire; the long, hard slog through states like South Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania — are very, very familiar. And yes, their discussions of the issues at stake in campaign 2008, including racial politics, the Iraq war and a dangerously faltering economy, retrace well-trodden ground.

But if the authors fail to reframe the election in any significant new way, their retrospective does prove useful in reminding us — 200-plus days into the Obama presidency, as reporters point to declining approval numbers and stubborn obstacles to overhauling health care — of the daunting odds that Mr. Obama overcame to win the White House in the first place.

The authors quote Mr. Obama, then the junior senator from Illinois, as saying that he started out in 2006 giving himself “25 percent odds, you know, maybe 30” of winning it all, and the first glimpse they give us of the candidate is a snapshot of an underdog, still very much in the shadow of the front-runner, Mrs. Clinton. He is sitting aboard his modest six-seat chartered airplane on March 4, 2007, waiting to take off from Selma, Ala., after participating in ceremonies commemorating the 42nd anniversary of the voting rights march there.

As Mr. Obama’s plane waits, Mr. Balz and Mr. Johnson write, “two motorcades of black S.U.V.’s roll onto the tarmac” and stop by “two large, sleek Gulfstream jets.” Bill Clinton, accompanied by his Secret Service detail and his aides, gets into one and promptly takes off, while Mrs. Clinton and her entourage pile into the second jet.

Mr. Obama’s plane is scheduled to depart next, but the engine won’t start: “The battery is dead. Don’t worry, the pilot tells Obama, airport crews are searching for a long extension cord. They’ll plug it into a generator in the lobby and run it from the terminal back to the plane to jump-start the engine. Still, the plane won’t start. While Obama and his aides are cramped inside the plane, sweltering in a cabin without air-conditioning, they watch as Hillary’s Gulfstream takes off. Bemused, Obama tells his young aides, ‘I guess this really is a grass-roots campaign.’ ”

The authors of “The Battle for America” remind us that “for much of 2007, it looked as if Hillary Clinton would win it all,” that her advisers tried to promote an image of strength and inevitability because they “paid lip service to the fact that voters wanted change” but were “more concerned about voter resistance to electing the first woman president.”

Promoting Mrs. Clinton as a candidate of experience in a change election was only one of her advisers’ many miscalculations, along with the early squandering of money, the failure to get an efficient Iowa operation up and running early in the game and an inability or unwillingness to mount a credible fight for the caucus states in February.

As Mr. Balz and Mr. Johnson see it, Bill Clinton also played a substantial role in derailing Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. They argue that his vociferous attacks on Mr. Obama in South Carolina ignited talk of racial politics, “damaged his wife’s candidacy” and not only cost her heavily in that state but also “redrew the landscape heading into Super Tuesday.”

“It seemed for a time,” the authors write, “that his once certain political touch and instincts eluded him and the rest of the Clinton campaign.” In addition, they detail a series of phone calls between Mr. Clinton and Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts in which, they say, the former president tried to win an endorsement for his wife but seemed to further alienate Mr. Kennedy — who, they report, was concerned that “the campaign was sliding into divisiveness, and held the Clintons principally responsible.”

The vicious infighting and bureaucratic gridlock of the Clinton campaign have already been chronicled at length by other reporters — most notably, in articles by Joshua Green in The Atlantic and Gail Sheehy in Vanity Fair — but Mr. Johnson and Mr. Balz do a nimble job here of contrasting its often spectacular dysfunction with the agility and enthusiastic innovation of the Obama campaign.

Senator John McCain’s campaign also emerges in these pages as being “under severe stress internally,” suffering from early fund-raising problems and a bitter culture clash between McCain 2000 and Bush 2004 staff members.

In the course of this book the authors reveal that David Plouffe, who oversaw the blueprint for Mr. Obama’s winning Iowa strategy and who helped construct a game plan based around the building of a new electorate, told Mr. Obama in April 2008 that “he wanted to step down after the primaries”: he was, the authors say, “worn out, having managed the campaign from the first day and on through the most rigorous nomination battle ever,” and his wife was “due to deliver their second child days before the election.”

Mr. Balz and Mr. Johnson report that Mr. Obama “implored him to stay” and that Mr. Plouffe eventually decided he couldn’t leave because the campaign, after the long primary battle, was behind schedule in both the vice-presidential selection process and convention planning.

Given the outcome of the Democratic nomination battle and the general election, this book’s descriptions of each campaign’s initial strategies are illuminating. Perhaps fatefully, Mr. McCain — who had been savaged by the Bush machine in 2000 and who would suffer in 2008 from being linked to the unpopular president — would end up authorizing “a campaign apparatus patterned after Bush’s 2004 re-election committee, a huge operation that was in sharp contrast to the lean campaign he ran in 2000” and that was ill suited to his temperament and strengths as a candidate.

Whereas some of Mrs. Clinton’s advisers, the authors say, wanted to reintroduce her and refute some voters’ impression of her as chilly and distant, the strategist Mark Penn — who comes across in this volume as a pugnacious and highly divisive figure — argued that “former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher should be Hillary’s role model.” An 11-page memorandum he sent her shortly before Christmas 2006 played down the threat posed by Mr. Obama, while indulging in what the authors call “pure flattery” of his client.

“We have incredible image strengths,” the memo boasted, adding that “people don’t just like Hillary Clinton, they love her.”

In contrast, Mr. Balz and Mr. Johnson observe, a November 2006 memo sent to Mr. Obama by his chief adviser, David Axelrod, “was notable for its unsparing critique of his client.”

Mr. Axelrod warned Mr. Obama that if he decided to run for president, he would have to address his own “willingness and ability to put up with something” he had “never experienced on a sustained basis: criticism.” The memo went on: “I don’t know if you are Muhammad Ali or Floyd Patterson when it comes to taking a punch. You care far too much what is written and said about you. You don’t relish combat when it becomes personal and nasty.”

The Axelrod memo also pointed out that an outgoing president nearly always defines the next election, that people rarely seek someone in the mold of the outgoing executive (certainly not after the presidency of George W. Bush) and that in 2008 voters were going to be looking for an alternative to the qualities of stubbornness, hyper-partisanship and ideological certainty that Democrats, independents and disaffected Republicans associated with Mr. Bush.

Mr. Axelrod went on to argue, presciently it turned out, that Mr. Obama’s profile — his embodiment of change, along with his eagerness to challenge old dogmas of right and left — fit this historical moment better than Mrs. Clinton’s and that if he were right, Mr. Obama could catalyze a political movement and prevail against substantial odds.

“You will never be hotter than you are right now,” the memo concluded, adding that “there are many reasons to believe that if you are ever to run for the presidency, this is the time.”

Hiding a Mountain Of Debt By David S. Broder

Hiding a Mountain Of Debt By David S. Broder
Sunday, March 29, 2009; A15



With a bit of bookkeeping legerdemain borrowed from the Bush administration, the Democratic Congress is about to perform a cover-up on the most serious threat to America's economic future.

That threat is not the severe recession, tough as that is for the families and businesses struggling to make ends meet. In time, the recession will end, and last week's stock market performance hinted that we may not have to wait years for the recovery to begin.

The real threat is the monstrous debt resulting from the slump in revenue and the staggering sums being committed by Washington to rescuing embattled banks and homeowners -- and the absence of any serious strategy for paying it all back.

The Congressional Budget Office sketched the dimensions of the problem on March 20, and Congress reacted with shock. The CBO said that over the next 10 years, current policies would add a staggering $9.3 trillion to the national debt -- one-third more than President Obama had estimated by using much more optimistic assumptions about future economic growth.

As far as the eye could see, the CBO said, the debt would continue to grow by about $1 trillion a year because of a structural deficit between the spending rate, averaging 23 percent of gross domestic product, and federal revenue at 19 percent.

The ever-growing national debt will require ever-larger annual interest payments, with much of that money going overseas to China, Japan and other countries that have been buying our bonds.

Reacting to this scary prospect, the House and Senate budget committees took the paring knife to some of Obama's spending proposals and tax cuts last week. But many of the proposed savings look more like bookkeeping gimmicks than realistic cutbacks. The budget resolutions assume, for example, that no more money will be needed this year to bail out foundering businesses or pump up consumer demand, even though estimates of those needs start at $250 billion and go up by giant steps.

Republicans on the budget committees offered cuts that were larger and, in some but not all instances, more realistic.

But the main device the Democratic budgeteers employed was simply to shrink the budget "window" from 10 years to five. Instantly, $5 trillion in debt disappeared from view, along with the worry that long after the recession is past, the structural deficit would continue to blight the future of young working families.

The Democrats did not invent this gimmick. They borrowed it from George W. Bush, who turned to it as soon as his inherited budget surpluses withered with the tax cuts and recession of 2001-02. But Obama had promised a more honest budget and said that this meant looking at the long-term consequences of today's tax and spending decisions.

There are plenty of people in Congress for whom the CBO report was no surprise, and some of them have proposed a solution that would confront this reality. Kent Conrad, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, and Judd Gregg, its ranking Republican, have offered a bill to create a bipartisan commission to examine every aspect of the budget -- taxes, defense and domestic spending, and, especially, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Congress would be required to vote promptly, up or down, on its recommendations, or come up with an alternative that would achieve at least as much in savings.

In the House, Democrat Jim Cooper of Tennessee and Republican Frank Wolf of Virginia have been pressing a similar proposal but have been regularly thwarted.

The roadblock in chief is Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House. She has made it clear that her main goal is to protect Social Security and Medicare from any significant reforms. Pelosi has not forgotten how Democrats benefited from the 2005-06 fight against Bush's effort to change Social Security. Her party, which had lost elections in 2000, 2002 and 2004, found its voice and its rallying cry to "Save Social Security," and Pelosi is not about to allow any bipartisan commission to take that issue away from her control.

The price for her obduracy is being paid in the rigging of the budget process. The larger price will be paid by your children and grandchildren, who will inherit a future-blighting mountain of debt.

State of Shame By SCOTT TUROW

December 10, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
State of Shame By SCOTT TUROW

Chicago

HERE in Chicago, where we are accustomed to news that challenges the thresholds of belief, we awoke Tuesday to find that our governor, Rod Blagojevich, had become the second Illinois chief executive in a row to be subjected to criminal charges.

The 76-page criminal complaint implies that Mr. Blagojevich was such an inveterate schemer that despite being the obvious target of a three-year federal grand jury investigation into trading state jobs and contracts for campaign contributions, he had to be taken out of his house in handcuffs to prevent him from selling off the Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama.

Even by Chicago's picaresque standards, Tuesday's developments are mind-boggling, even more so to a former federal prosecutor like me with an understanding of some of the nuances of the federal criminal justice system. The most worrisome element is that Mr. Blagojevich's shameless behavior seems to have put Chicago's United States attorney, the estimable Patrick Fitzgerald, into the unenviable position of having to bring a case before he was ready.

Mr. Fitzgerald has lived by the Machiavellian motto that if you shoot at the king, you had better kill the king. Mr. Fitzgerald's highest-profile prosecutions — like those of I. Lewis Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, and of Mr. Blagojevich's predecessor as governor, George Ryan — have been assembled methodically, with an almost obsessive desire to tie down evidentiary details before charges are returned.

Furthermore, Mr. Fitzgerald has a history of trying not to use the justice system to pre-empt the operation of other democratic institutions. Thus, despite a more than five-year investigation, the Ryan indictment was withheld until after the governor left office in 2003, and Mr. Fitzgerald did not oppose a defense request to schedule Mr. Libby's perjury and obstruction justice trial after the 2006 midterm elections.

Undoubtedly one of the events Patrick Fitzgerald has no desire to influence is his own possible reappointment as United States attorney for four more years (all United States attorneys can be replaced by the incoming administration). Mr. Fitzgerald's effectiveness as a prosecutor is unquestioned, and the state's senior senator, the Democrat Dick Durbin, has said Mr. Fitzgerald can stay in the job if he wants to.

But the Justice Department may have other thoughts. Mr. Fitzgerald has held the job since October 2001, some may argue that a position with such extraordinary discretionary powers should not lay in the same hands for 12 years.

Moreover, Mr. Fitzgerald's bare-knuckle methods have rankled many in the Chicago bar. For example, he got George Ryan's chief of staff, Scott Fawell, to testify against his former boss by threatening to imprison Mr. Fawell's girlfriend for perjury.

In his news conference Tuesday, Mr. Fitzgerald indicated that he hadn't planned to indict Governor Blagojevich until next spring, meaning that the prosecutor was going to wait until his own fate was decided. Instead, with wiretap evidence piling up that showed that Mr. Blagojevich was intent on selling the Obama seat in exchange for a substantial personal benefit, like a high-paying job for himself or his wife, Mr. Fitzgerald was forced to make the arrest. He decided that he could not even wait for the grand jury investigating Mr. Blagojevich to meet on Thursday and indict him.

Bypassing the grand jury and proceeding through a criminal complaint instead effectively puts the case against Mr. Blagojevich on the express route. Mr. Fitzgerald will now have only 20 days to either give the governor a preliminary hearing — which would amount to free discovery for his defense lawyer — or return an indictment. Given Mr. Fitzgerald's frank appeal for information from the public at his news conference, it's obvious that his case is not fully buttoned up, and that Mr. Blagojevich forced the prosecutor's hand.

All of this news comes with personal chagrin for me because I was Governor Blagojevich's first appointment to the Illinois Executive Ethics Commission, a body created his first year in office. (For the record, I have never made a campaign donation to him.) The commission judges ethics complaints against state officials, supervises ethics instruction, and tries to carry out an overall mandate to improve the ethical climate in Illinois.

Ethics reform in Illinois is often regarded as an oxymoron, and I admit that the commission's arduous efforts to strengthen our ethics laws have met with little success. Speaking solely for myself, I hope the governor's arrest galvanizes public outrage and at last speeds reform.

One change that is obviously indispensable is overhauling the campaign contribution laws in Illinois, where there are literally no limits on political donations — neither how big they can be or who can give them. The lone exception is a law, passed over a Blagojevich veto, that takes effect Jan. 1, prohibiting large state contractors from donating to the executive officer who gave them the business. Otherwise, anybody — union officials, regulated industries, corporations, lobbyists — can throw as much money as they like at Illinois politicians.

This astonishing state of affairs persists 32 years after the Supreme Court, in Buckley v. Valeo, recognized "the actuality and appearance of corruption resulting from large individual financial contributions" in approving limits on such donations to candidates for federal office. One can only hope that even in Illinois we are too ashamed now to tolerate business as usual.

Scott Turow is writing a sequel to his novel "Presumed Innocent."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/opinion/10turow.html?sq=Turow&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print

http://snipurl.com/83jve

Roll Over, Abe Lincoln By TIMOTHY EGAN

December 10, 2008
Op-Ed Guest Columnist
Roll Over, Abe Lincoln By TIMOTHY EGAN

For some time now, the most unpopular governor in the United States, Rod Blagojevich of Illinois, has been treated like a flu virus at a nursing home.

"He's kryptonite," one state representative called him in a Chicago Magazine profile last February. "Nobody wants to get near him."

But it wasn't until Tuesday, and the filing of a 76-page criminal complaint centered around the auctioning of a Senate seat, that we got a full X-ray of politics at its sickest.

Putting aside the peculiar dialect of desperation that made the governor sound like a John Malkovich character in a David Mamet play, the complaint showed a man trolling the depths of darkness.

The beloved Cubs, the sainted Warren Buffett, editorial writers from the Chicago Tribune, even financing for a children's hospital — all were targets or leverage points for a shakedown.

The surprise is that he didn't offer to sell out exclusive rights to deep-dish pizza.

If the world was roused by the sight from Chicago barely one month ago, hundreds of thousands of people streaming into Grant Park to celebrate the triumph of possibility over tainted history, the arrest of Governor Blagojevich on a dark and drizzly Chicago dawn was quite the opposite image.

Abe Lincoln may have rolled over once in pleasant surprise at the election of Barack Obama, and another time in revulsion at Blagojevich's arrest, as prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said. More likely, Abe did a triple lutz in his grave on Tuesday.

If nothing else, Blagojevich did Obama the favor of a nonendorsement quote for the ages. According to the federal transcript, the governor showed disgust, barely a week after Obama's election, that he could not get anything in return for offering the Senate seat to an ally of the president-elect.

"They're not willing to give me anything except appreciation," the governor says, as outlined in the criminal complaint.

It would be somewhat comforting if there were a larger lesson here, or a map out of the banality of evil. But there is no trend or modern twist, no evidence of a greater criminal web, no overarching moral. Like a kid who beats up old ladies just because he knows no other way, the allegations against Blagojevich amount to what Fitzgerald called a crime spree, of the political variety.

The prosecutor's narrative of plotting bad intentions and narcissism — Blago actually thought he was a viable candidate for president in 2016 — is a particularly graphic example of why some men see things as they are and ask: what's in it for me?

Fitzgerald, who prosecuted Scooter Libby under the pressure of a White House not used to getting questioned by anyone, is the son of a Manhattan doorman and the product of Catholic schools at their finest. It's unlikely that his dad ever heard anything to match the conversations captured by federal wiretaps in Illinois.

Like all damaged politicians, the Blagojevich in the complaint knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

What's a Senate seat worth? "Golden," and the governor vowed that he would not give it up for nothing.

How about help for the Tribune Company's attempt to sell Wrigley Field and the Cubs? That would require getting rid of editorial writers who had called for his resignation. Fire them all, Blagojevich is quoted as having said, adding, "And get us some editorial support."

Aid for a children's hospital? That would require a contribution of at least $50,000.

On and on it goes, trash talk of the want-to-be-rich-and-infamous. Even by Illinois standards, where the path from the Statehouse to the jailhouse holds the footprints of numerous governors, Tuesday's arrest and complaint was breathtaking.

"If it isn't the most corrupt state in the United States," said Robert Grant, a F.B.I. special agent, "it's one hell of a competitor."

On Monday, the eve of his arrest, Blagojevich showed that he could include hubris among his many flirtations with disaster. At a rally of out-of-work factory hands soiled by his presence, he all but asked to be followed and recorded.

"I should say if anybody wants to tape my conversations, go right ahead," he said. "I can tell you whatever I say is always lawful."

Then, like Huey Long at his most egregious, he cast himself as the person who has nothing to sell but an honest day's labor. If you were to tape him, he added, you would hear a governor "who tirelessly and endlessly figures out ways to help average, ordinary working people."

Substitute one word — himself — for working people, and you have the essence of Governor Blagojevich.

Timothy Egan writes Outposts, a column at nytimes.com.

Maureen Dowd is off today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/opinion/10egan.html?sq=Egan&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print

http://snipurl.com/83jrk

A Psychologist Helps Repackage Democrats' Message By SHAILA DEWAN and ROBBIE BROWN

October 30, 2008
A Psychologist Helps Repackage Democrats' Message By SHAILA DEWAN and ROBBIE BROWN

ATLANTA — Democrats up and down the ballot have been trying to reverse the Republican rhetorical dominance that made "liberal" an unsavory label, and many have found help in a slender document percolating through their party's hierarchy.

It is called the "Message Handbook for Progressives From Left to Center," and, along with a companion piece on health care, it was created by Drew Westen, a psychology professor at Emory University here who was virtually unknown in political circles before this election cycle. Several Democratic consultants say it is the first systematic, data-driven effort to mold the language of the left to fit the sensibilities of the center.

Dr. Westen's advice can be heard when Alisha Thomas Morgan, running for re-election to the Georgia House in a conservative suburb of Atlanta, uses the word "leadership" in place of "government" and speaks about the middle class instead of the poor.

Or when Andrew Gillum, a city commissioner in Tallahassee, Fla., who is fighting a ballot initiative against same-sex marriage, tells members of his predominantly black church of the human desire for dignity and respect instead of lecturing them on the evils of discrimination.

Democrats of higher office who have heard Dr. Westen have also shifted their rhetoric, as when Senator Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana, fending off a Republican challenger, not only says that "health care is a right for every citizen" but pointedly adds, "Particularly citizens who are working hard every day."

Dr. Westen advises jettisoning wonkish 12-point plans in favor of direct emotional appeals that can compete with those evoked by Republicans using terms like "family values" and "the war on terror."

"We are a centrist nation," he said in an interview, "but people prefer center-left to center-right, even in conservative parts of the country, if they hear equally strong messages on both sides."

Liberal candidates, especially those running in not-so-liberal territory, have latched on to his approach.

"There's almost a rebirth, or a pride, that we can really talk about what we believe and not do so shamefully," Mr. Gillum said, adding that Dr. Westen's advice had given him the confidence to speak his mind even on conservative talk radio. "If we communicate it through our stories and our real-life examples, if they don't agree with you then they can at least understand where you come from."

Dr. Westen's ideas began to catch on when he was writing "The Political Brain," a scientific explanation of the central role of emotion in politics, published in 2007, that urged Democrats to stop cowering and fight back.

Among those with whom he has had audiences are Howard Dean, the Democratic national chairman, and Young Elected Officials, a national group of left-leaning city council members and state legislators. During the primaries, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., now Senator Barack Obama's running mate, recommended "The Political Brain" to his campaign staff. Bill Clinton is a fan.

Even Frank Luntz, the architect of many Republican rhetorical successes, says Dr. Westen is fostering a sea change.

"It's as though the Republicans have fallen back 15 years in their communication," Mr. Luntz said, "at the very moment when Democrats vaulted ahead 15 years."

Mr. Luntz said the Obama campaign often mirrored Dr. Westen's approach. Though Dr. Westen has not worked for the campaign in an official capacity, he has offered guidance, both directly and in his Huffington Post columns.

Instead of using euphemisms like "pro-choice" and "reproductive health," his handbook suggests, liberal candidates might insist that it is un-American for the government to tell men and women when to start a family or what religious beliefs to follow, arguments that test well in focus groups with conservatives and independents. On illegal immigration, he recommends, candidates who have said their plan would "allow" immigrants to become citizens should instead say they will "require" it.

"The idea," Dr. Westen said, "is to start to rebrand progressives using language that's as evocative as the language of the other side, and stop using phrases that just turn people off."

The handbook does not offer a script so much as a menu of options, each of which was poll-tested against conservative arguments. On economics, for example, one message begins with "I want to see the words 'Made in America' again." Another reads, "We need leaders who don't just talk about family values but actually value families."

Celinda Lake, a prominent Democratic strategist in Washington, said of the handbook: "I think people have been overjoyed to have it. I don't think we have rooted our message in the kind of systematic understanding of values and networks of values that Drew uses."

Dr. Westen is not the first to try to whip Democratic messaging into shape. But several political consultants said his scientific approach — based largely on recent advances in the study of how the brain reacts to political speech — and his advocacy of plain talk made him more effective.

Bill Jones, a moderate Democrat in a conservative, wealthy section of suburban Atlanta, said talking to Dr. Westen had helped him make the decision to run for Congress against the Republican incumbent, Representative Tom Price.

Among other recommendations, Dr. Westen encouraged Mr. Jones to make his background as an Air Force veteran a prominent part of his biography. "It wasn't a contrived approach like 'how can we create a persona?' " Mr. Jones recalled. "It's 'be the person you are.' "

In a candidates' forum at a church on a recent Saturday afternoon, Bobbie Smith, 77, listened while her husband, a veteran, exchanged war stories with Mr. Jones. Ms. Smith, who identified herself as a conservative-leaning independent, said she had seen Mr. Jones's television commercials, co-produced by Dr. Westen. "I liked the down-to-earth talk," she said. "Common words for common people."

Not everyone has jumped wholeheartedly onto the Westen bandwagon. Though praising Dr. Westen's work, Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, the research wing of the Democratic Leadership Council, said he worried that it focused too much on the message rather than substance.

But Paul Begala, a commentator and Democratic strategist who was an adviser to President Clinton, said that with candidates like Mr. Jones, Dr. Westen was helping to shape the future of the party.

"The fact that they're doing this in Georgia is really, really, really important," Mr. Begala said. "Great politicians often come out of enemy territory. Ronald Reagan came from Hollywood, and it made him tougher and smarter."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/30/us/politics/30message.html?_r=1&sq=Repackage%20Democrat&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print

http://snipurl.com/7sig3

Recommended Readings for Candidates

June 1, 2008
SURVEY; Truth to Power Survey
The Book Review asked a handful of writers to recommend books for the presidential candidates. Their suggestions are below.
LORRIE MOORE
For Obama: ''The Portrait of a Lady,'' by Henry James. A virtuous orphan is plotted against by a charming, ruthless couple the orphan once trusted and admired.
For Clinton: ''Macbeth,'' by William Shakespeare. The timeless tale of how untethered ambition and early predictions may carry a large price tag.
For McCain: ''Tales From the Brothers Grimm.'' In case more are needed.
* * * * *
JUNOT DÍAZ
I believe in books as only a deep reader can, but even I cannot imagine that any book would change any of our candidates. But just in case:
McCain: War Hero needs to read his fellow Vietnam vet Joe Haldeman's novel ''The Forever War.'' McCain's willingness to keep the nation in Iraq for, say, 100 years is a sign that for all his war hero posturing McCain has truly forgotten the young people we've damned to this folly we call Iraq. Perhaps Haldeman's marvelous novel will crack Pharaoh's heart. But don't bet on it.
Hillary: What to recommend to a driven, brilliant, flawed woman who has no problem threatening to obliterate Iran, should they attack Israel? I recommend Peter Balakian's ''Black Dog of Fate,'' in an attempt to cure her of her genocidal impulses. Armenians know all about being ''obliterated,'' and perhaps that nation's suffering and miraculous survival will crack Pharaoh's heart. But don't bet on it.
Obama: A warrior-hearted black man running for president in a country that bends over backward to deny its white supremacist tendencies? Now here's a cat who truly is an optimist, who really believes. For the honorable senator I recommend Leslie Marmon Silko's ''Ceremony,'' a) because it's a perfect novel about our country and b) because ''Ceremony'' is all about love and hope, and Senator Obama is going to need a ton of both to get through this one with his warrior-heart intact.
* * * * *
SCOTT TUROW
I have met all three of the presidential candidates, two quite briefly, but I know that each exhibits an acute literary sensibility as measured by the standard that most authors secretly employ: they are familiar with my work. (At least they said they were -- they are politicians after all.)
More seriously, I would recommend the same three books to each. The first is ''Anna Karenina,'' the fullest rendering I know of the complexity of human motivation and thus a precious warning against seeing the world as full of villains.
The second is any book about the Swedish warship Vasa. Completed in 1628, the Vasa was envisioned by King Gustavus Adolphus as the most formidable military vessel in history. It sank after sailing less than a mile, drowning dozens of crew members. Some said that many of the ship's designers, and a number of royal counselors, were aware that the vessel was unstable, but all were terrified of breaking the news to the king.
Finally, I would recommend reading about the underappreciated presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower was a far more fluent writer than his stumbling performances behind a microphone suggested, so I would choose his memoir, ''Mandate for Change.'' Ike was the last nonpolitician elected president, and his moderate vision of American government and the restrained use of American power provide potent lessons in how to truly govern from the center.
* * * * *
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
Forget the personality claptrap: our next president will need to know how to restructure the carbon-based economy, pronto. I assume all the candidates have read ''An Inconvenient Truth,'' by Al Gore, so they understand that anything they promise will have to be delivered without cheap fossil fuels. For further reading, Bill McKibben's ''Deep Economy'' and Frances Moore Lappé's ''Getting a Grip'' offer new definitions of progress and economy with an eye toward the human aptitudes for resourcefulness and community.
Our candidates are understandably preoccupied with the only species that votes, but I suggest some perspective on the consequences of ignoring all the others. I prescribe E. O. Wilson's ''Future of Life'' and, for follow-up care, Annie Dillard's ''Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.''
They could finish with any novel by Wendell Berry. (My favorite is ''Jayber Crow.'') While the farmlands and rural towns of our nation are mostly overlooked, it's worth remembering that many people still live in them, retaining skills of self-sufficiency and neighborly cooperation that wait to be valued in the world to come.
* * * * *
JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN
Thanks for an opportunity to school the stars. As required reading for Obama I assign ''The Prince'' (Machiavelli), a manual detailing strategies for handling situations when turning the other cheek won't do; for McCain ''The Little Prince'' (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry), a lyrical narrative about loving that's not taming but loving by letting go; and in the spirit of gender equity, since there is only one female candidate, two books for Clinton -- ''Black Beauty'' (Anna Sewell), a tale from the horse's mouth about the trials and triumphs of being a dark horse; and any volume by Miss Manners that reminds a reader civility matters, even in presidential campaigns.
* * * * *
STEVEN PINKER
All three candidates should read all three of these books, but McCain gets first crack at Bob Harris's ''Who Hates Whom: Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts, and Various Things Blowing Up.'' A lighthearted overview of the insurrections and civil wars in the world today, it will help you tell your Sunnis from your Shiites, remember which Congo is which (it's so hard to keep them straight!) and remind you whether the Waziris are on our side or not.
Obama has dibs on Sam Harris's ''Letter to a Christian Nation.'' Some have criticized the uncompromising tone of this atheist best seller, but it's mild stuff compared with the acid you guys have been flinging around. The book will put you in touch with the fastest-growing religious minority in this country, help you understand why our European allies consider us so backward and encourage you to keep your distance from kooks who call themselves spiritual leaders.
Clinton should read, and then quickly pass along, ''Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts,'' by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. A half-century of research in psychology has shown that we all overtrust our memory, judgment and rectitude. Nothing could be more important in a president than an awareness of this universal flaw.
* * * * *
KATHRYN HARRISON
For Clinton: ''The Denial of Death,'' by Ernest Becker. Just in case she wants to know what the rest of us have been wondering for years: What makes Hillary tick? An irrefutable explanation of vaunting ambition, the urge to heroism and the cost of our own good opinions of ourselves. Every person should read this book, politicians first.
For Obama: ''The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation,'' by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón. The perfect predebate review -- missing none of the essence and all of the droning of the national commission's report. It's a rare person -- Hillary? -- who could slog through the original's 600 pages and retain the necessary arsenal of facts to deploy.
For McCain: ''The Worst Journey in the World,'' by Apsley Cherry-Garrard. It's going to be a long, hot summer for Mr. McCain, and what better company for the inevitable tumbles into existential doubt, fear of the unknown and mind-bending exhaustion than this classic of human striving, valor and folly at subzero temperatures?
* * * * *
GARRY WILLS
Politicians rarely read whole books (their attention moves from this person they need to the next), so I commend, to each of the busy finalists of this year, an essay by Samuel Johnson. The essays are wells of deep wisdom.
For McCain: The Rambler No. 11, on anger in old age.
For Obama: The Rambler No. 196, on the illusions of young hope.
For Clinton: The Rambler No. 79, on demonizing one's opponents.
They can profit from such wisdom -- as can we all.
* * * * *
JOHN IRVING
Obama might find some relief in the writings of the Rev. Billy Graham, for -- amid the tedious homilies of the evangelist -- Senator Obama could take consolation that his own incendiary minister, who has praised Louis Farrakhan, isn't the only embarrassing minister around.
Clinton might find ''Macbeth'' a challenge -- namely, to somehow read or see the play and not take the character of Lady Macbeth personally.
And poor old John McCain -- who is even older and more old-fashioned than I am -- should be forced to read Evan S. Connell's ''Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn.'' With all due respect for Senator McCain's military education and his heroic service in Vietnam -- and as truly dumbfounded as I am by his support of the war in Iraq -- I sincerely urge Senator McCain to read Connell's brilliant account of the utter folly of Gen. George Armstrong Custer and the Battle of Little Bighorn. With any luck, and stubborn though he is, he might learn that engaging the enemy isn't always such a swell idea.
* * * * *
ERIC FONER
''The standard of American political discussion,'' the historian Charles Francis Adams observed in 1901, ''is not now so high as not to admit of elevation.'' Knowledge of the past, he thought, was essential to such improvement. As the same is true today, I suggest that the candidates read:
William Appleman Williams, ''Empire as a Way of Life,'' because it reveals how deeply rooted in our history is the desire to reshape the world in the American image, and makes clear the disastrous consequences of imperial hubris.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., ''The Politics of Upheaval: 1935-1936,'' because it demonstrates how the marriage of engaged social movements and an activist government can promote the common good even in the most dire economic circumstances, and offers an alternative vision to the market fundamentalism that now dominates American politics.
Mae M. Ngai, ''Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America,'' because it traces the ever changing political and juridical definitions of ''citizen'' and ''alien,'' providing a historical perspective sorely lacking in current debates over immigration.
At the risk of sounding self-promoting, I hope they can also read my own ''Story of American Freedom'' and perhaps become inspired to make ''freedom'' once again what it has been in the past: a rallying cry for social justice, rather than the sterile shibboleth it has become in the hands of the current administration.
* * * * *
FRANCINE PROSE
I'd advise all three candidates to take a brisk march through the Norton Anthology of American Literature, as well as certain American classics, for a crash (or refresher) course in who -- as a nation -- we are, and how we got to be this way: Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards for a notion of how important it is to resist our country's periodic eruptions of harsh, punitive Puritanism; ''Moby-Dick'' for (among other things) a warning about the dangers of fanaticism and monomania; Walt Whitman for his passionate humanism, his celebratory spirit, his love of the physical and of the body; Emily Dickinson for an essential dash of mystery and beauty; ''Huckleberry Finn'' for its wit, its trenchant social analysis, its moral conscience; and the sermons of Martin Luther King for a model of the heights that rhetoric and oratory can reach. Finally, I'd suggest they read Fanny Trollope's ''Domestic Manners of the Americans'' and Hunter S. Thompson's ''Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72'' as helpful reminders of the fact that someone with a bracing sense of humor and a highly developed consciousness of the absurd is (whether they know it or not) always present, always watching everything they do.
* * * * *
GEORGE PACKER
Clinton is assigned ''The Myth of Sisyphus,'' by Albert Camus, whose hero rises above his fate only when he becomes conscious of its tragic absurdity: ''The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.''
McCain is assigned ''The Forever War,'' by Dexter Filkins (coming in September -- galleys available upon the senator's request), written not by a defeatist but by a reporter whose every romantic notion of Iraq and war was obliterated by sustained contact with experience: ''We waited in silence as the sun set. The stillness outside seemed the measure of our ignorance. The insurgents were coming, and now they were not. They were watching us.''
Obama is assigned ''Sister Carrie,'' by Theodore Dreiser, set in his own Chicago, but about the sort of American he doesn't know: ''She was a fair example of the middle American class -- two generations removed from the emigrant. Books were beyond her interest -- knowledge a sealed book. In the intuitive graces she was still crude. She could scarcely toss her head gracefully.''
* * * * *
STACY SCHIFF
The temptation to hand around copies of ''The March of Folly'' is great, with a large-print edition for anyone who suggests we'll be in Iraq for 100 years. But look; it's summer. These people have starred in a grueling reality show for 17 months now. Frankly it's amazing that -- apart from Bill Clinton -- no one has spontaneously combusted. So I say let them read fiction, which the current administration has proved is more potent than fact anyway. Everyone gets Lampedusa's ''The Leopard,'' because there's no better portrait of a society grappling with its own decline. Copies all around of Roth's ''The Human Stain'' as well; moral bankruptcy surely tops our other stunning defaults. And what could be more appropriate after a year and a half on the campaign trail than a novel about impersonation?
Lastly, three copies please of ''Main Street.'' All talk of the Scranton lace-making relatives aside, none of these candidates have been there in a while.
For Senator Obama, a gem from another anxious, bloated, speculative age, ''The Great Gatsby,'' that perfect tale of the American dream gone off the road.
As a reminder of the price of idealism, especially in an inflationary era, ''The Quiet American'' for Senator McCain. This is no time to be an innocent abroad.
Senator Clinton should curl up with ''Middlemarch.'' I can't think of another novel in which our heroine survives both the perils of baking (metaphorical) cookies and the realization that she might not want to. Dorothea has made a mistake. And admits it.
Naturally the overachiever will read all six. The canny overachiever will do so between ''Harry Potter'' jackets.
* * * * *
THOMAS MALLON
All three candidates have written memoirs well in advance of this election year, unlike the contenders of long ago who counted on third-person ''campaign biographies'' to introduce them to the public outside their home states. In at least one historical instance, the author of the biography wound up being better known to posterity than the candidate he helped make president. I would urge our three senators to have a look at Nathaniel Hawthorne's ''Life of Franklin Pierce'' (1852), in which the writer specifies qualities that supposedly recommend his old college chum for the highest position in the land.
Any history of Pierce's hapless presidency might serve as a cautionary tale for aspirants to the office, but Hawthorne's artful pre-presidential tribute can remind them, at this stage of things, not to take too seriously even the best-written endorsements and encomia, which inevitably proceed, at least in part, from the secret hope of reward. In Hawthorne's case that would come in the form of the United States consul's office in Liverpool, England, where he served until shortly after his bewildered friend Pierce was denied renomination in 1856.
* * * * *
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL
For all three:
Robert Scheer's ''Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America.'' This indictment of the military-industrial complex explains why any president committed to preserving our Republic must end a policy of permanent war. It is also a reminder, as is Jonathan Schell's ''Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger,'' of the insanity of our nuclear strategy and the arrogance of our hypermilitarized foreign policy.
Charlie Savage's ''Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy'' makes urgent a question virtually absent from this campaign so far: how does the next president rebuild a constitutional order dismantled by executive coup in the name of a false security? ''Takeover'' is also a reproach to the complacency of a press corps that lubricated the tracks for this administration's executive power grab. See also David Cole and James X. Dempsey's ''Terrorism and the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties in the Name of National Security.''
Naomi Klein's ''Shock Doctrine,'' for exploding the myth that free markets and democracy always go hand in hand.
Taylor Branch's trilogy of biographies of Martin Luther King Jr., ''Parting the Waters,'' ''Pillar of Fire'' and ''At Canaan's Edge'' -- essential reading for any president who cares about the struggle over democratic citizenship, and how the power of movements, fused with electoral politics, contributes to civilizing change.
For McCain, who has copped to not knowing anything about economics: John Kenneth Galbraith's ''Affluent Society,'' an eloquent articulation of the values both moral and political of a mixed economy. Barbara Ehrenreich's ''This Land Is Their Land: Reports From a Divided Nation'' for a dispatch from the premier reporter on the underside of capitalism. And to understand the paycheck-to-paycheck, two-job, real-life economics most Americans live by, he should pick up her ''Nickel and Dimed'' as well.
For Obama: William Greider's ''Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American Democracy.'' By exposing the reality of how the money power in Washington shafts ordinary people, Greider tells citizens how they can take back their battered democracy -- and a president how he can lead the way.
Rick Perlstein's ''Nixonland'' traces Nixon's role in shaping a peculiar kind of right-wing populism -- a mythical reimagining of American political life in which a besieged ''silent majority'' is forever fending off the depredations and condescension of liberals, intellectuals and elites of all stripes. It is clear the right is intent, as it has been in every recent election, on turning its opponent into a latter-day George McGovern. No matter how miscast Obama is in that part, ''Nixonland'' will give him unrivaled insight into what the G.O.P. has planned for him.
For Obama and Clinton: Eric Alterman's ''Why We're Liberals.'' Read it to remember that ''liberal'' is a label with a proud, patriotic history and one whose primary tenets are shared by supermajorities of the American people. Rather than run from it, they should claim it proudly, as John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt did, and then dare their opponents to continue to defame it.
* * * * *
MICHAEL POLLAN
I would urge the three presidential candidates to read -- or reread -- two books from the 1970s that could help them confront the deepening (and now deeply intertwined) problem of our food and energy economies. Long before either climate change or the obesity epidemic were on the national scope, Wendell Berry's ''Unsettling of America'' made the case for a way of life and a kind of agriculture that might have averted both -- and could still make an important contribution to solving these problems. In ''Diet for a Small Planet,'' Frances Moore Lappé shone a light on the wastefulness and environmental costs of meat-eating, predicting that humanity's growing appetite for meat would lead to hunger for the world's poor. Together these two visionary writers -- who fell out of favor during the cheap-food and cheap-energy years that began in the '80s and are just now coming to a calamitous close -- still have much to say about the way out of our current predicament.
* * * * *
ORLANDO PATTERSON
I recommend four books for our candidates, and since these are perilous social and economic times, I confine my selection to the social sciences.
''Understanding America: The Anatomy of an Exceptional Nation,'' edited by Peter H. Schuck and James Q. Wilson, should be required reading for all three candidates. What is unique about America? What drives its vitality in economic, cultural and social affairs? Why is it so envied and reviled in the rest of the world? Why are its politics so peculiar? Why is it so culturally fraught? These questions have perplexed Westerners, and Americans trying to understand their own society, for two centuries. The one thing all are agreed on is that America is exceptional. It is to an understanding of just how distinctive a nation it is that this work is dedicated. The editors have assembled a distinguished group of specialists who explore all aspects of the society in accessible language: its economy, bureaucracy, legal and criminal justice systems, political and popular culture, military, religion, family life and media, as well as the role of race, immigration, health care and philanthropy, to list only some of the subjects examined. If the candidates want an authoritative up-to-date portrait of the vast, complex and endlessly fascinating country they hope to lead, this is the book for them. (Fair disclosure: I wrote the chapter on black Americans. But the other 20 are indispensable.)
If McCain and Hillary Clinton really want to understand the Obama phenomenon, especially his popularity among younger Americans, then their bedside reading must include Richard D. Alba and Victor Nee's ''Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration.'' Assimilation has become a dirty word among American intellectuals and opinion leaders, especially with the ascendancy of the multicultural ideal. Diversity celebrates difference and the politics of identity, while assimilation is spurned either as a myth or as Anglo-conformity posing as ''melting pot.'' But beneath the diverse currents that crisscross American life runs a deep, invincible force -- one that selects, integrates and fashions the broad, sometimes cruel but ever transforming course of American civilization. That force is assimilation. What it did for European immigrants a century ago it is now doing in our new immigration age, in sublime indifference to the mean-spirited politics and academic cacophonies that distort and misrepresent it. This magnificent work, arguably one of the finest pieces of sociological craftsmanship in recent decades, reveals assimilation as the ''master trend'' in American history, a potent process that constantly redefines the mainstream, embodied and expressed at one temporal bend in the figure of an Andrew Jackson, at another in a John Kennedy and now, it would appear, in the person of Obama.
Why did the good citizens of Seattle riot against the meeting of so obscure a bureaucracy as the World Trade Organization? Why do the banana producing states of the Eastern Caribbean universally hate Bill Clinton? Like protesters all over Europe and the developing world, they object to globalization and its negative and unfair consequences. However, as the Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz argues in his wise, readable and very balanced work ''Globalization and Its Discontents,'' globalization has brought, on the whole, much good to the third world, and is a positive force in the reduction of world poverty. So why is it so reviled? In answering this question Stiglitz casts the light of a powerful, dispassionate and compassionate mind, thoroughly informed by his years in international development agencies and as an adviser to the Clinton administration who often found himself at odds with the president's habit of serving individual commercial interests at the expense of hundreds of thousands of third world farmers. The problem, he shows, in a work that is urgently recommended to all three candidates, is not globalization itself, but the fundamentally flawed and often unfair one-size-fits-all economic policies pursued by international agencies like the I.M.F. and the World Bank, as well as the hypocrisy of advanced countries that force poor nations to reduce tariffs and subsidies to the poor while keeping their own trade barriers and subsidies, to the detriment of their own consumers and the devastation of poor third world farmers.
Every Tom, Dick and Harry, every journalist facing fading ratings, every politician bent on substituting rhetoric for action, is calling for a conversation on race. These attempts invariably fail, or make matters worse. That's because, as Richard Thompson Ford, a law professor at Stanford, shows in his incisively argued work ''The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse,'' the rituals of racial transaction in America are too often plagued by people playing the race card. Blacks do it too often; but so do whites. What's worse, as we have witnessed in the primary campaigns, both sides accuse the other of playing it. What's really going on? It is imperative that the candidates find out, if only to make sure they don't do it, and that they recognize it when opponents and advisers play this corrosive game. Ford's book excavates this ''national patois,'' as he calls it, and shows how dangerous and short-sighted it can be, as well as the ways in which it distorts good policy aimed at helping the minority poor. Senator McCain, who recently revisited the Katrina disaster with refreshing candor, will find Ford's critique of the use of the race card by black leaders of interest; Clinton will find much to contemplate in his chapters on racism by analogy and profiling; and Obama, a former constitutional lawyer, will surely be intrigued by Ford's ingenious defense of affirmative action.
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CURTIS SITTENFELD
I think all the candidates would enjoy John Burnham Schwartz's newish novel, ''The Commoner.'' The main character is based on Japan's Empress Michiko, who in 1959 was the first ''commoner'' to marry into the imperial family. I suspect the candidates would identify with the ritual and decorum demanded of the empress while at the same time they'd be transported into a richly detailed foreign world. My second recommendation, since no doubt campaigning is exhausting and even presidential candidates deserve a giggle, is Stephen Colbert's ''I Am America (and So Can You!).'' The ''Sex and Dating'' chapter alone will surely, at least for a few minutes, help them forget superdelegate tallies, clingy bitter Pennsylvanians and our next 100 years in Iraq.
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ROBERT PINSKY
Three suggestions -- which of course the candidates may have read already.
Robert M. La Follette (foreword by Allan Nevins): ''La Follette's Autobiography: A Personal Narrative of Political Experiences.'' McCain, in particular, might find much to admire and consider in the straight-talking La Follette, among the most admired and forceful United States senators ever to hold the office. Many of the great Progressive's insights seem prophetic, all three candidates might agree.
William Carlos Williams: ''In the American Grain.'' A fundamental work of American literature, this book's vivid prose refreshes familiar characters and events. It is as though the reader is learning for the first time about Columbus, Montezuma, Raleigh, Cotton Mather, Aaron Burr, Daniel Boone, Benjamin Franklin. If Obama has not already read this great, compact book he might find renewed inspiration in Williams's large vision and detailed perception of the United States and its past. For any politician, Williams's stripping away of cliché might feel exhilarating.
Willa Cather, ''The Song of the Lark.'' For me, the greatest work ever written about ambition in an American context. Cather's account of an artist's life begins with the deprivation, loneliness and yearning of a small town on the Plains. Her character Thea Kronborg's life journey also includes other American terrains: the landscape and pre-Columbian artifacts of the Southeast, and her eventual entry into the great world, beginning in Clinton's home city, Chicago.
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GORE VIDAL
I can only answer in the negative: I want them not to read The New York Times, while subscribing to The Financial Times.

John Edwards endorses Barack Obama

endorsement came last night with appearance with Barack in Grand Rapids, MI

The Potomac primaries

Obama and McClain sweep MD, DC and VA....Obama now has delegate lead...McCain leads Huckabee in VA only by a few percentage points

Super Tuesday Results

Obama, Clinton split the states
- Clinton carries big states (NY, CA)
- Obama carries the most states (CT, GA and western caucus states, CO, MT, WY)

John McCain does not clinch
-Huckabee seeps South
-Romney carries western caucus states