The rise of the ‘Drawbridge Republicans’

By Matt Miller, Tuesday, August 21, 6:23 AM


As Republicans head toward next week’s convention something extraordinary has come into view now that their ticket is complete.



Mitt Romney came from wealth and went on to build his own quarter-of-a-billion dollar fortune. Paul Ryan, who has never worked a day in the private sector (outside a few months in the family firm) reports a net worth of as much as $7 million, thanks to trusts and inheritances from his and his wife’s family.



Wealthy political candidates are nothing new, of course. But we’ve never had two wealthy candidates on a national ticket whose top priority is to reduce already low taxes on the well-to-do while raising taxes on everyone else — even as they propose to slash programs that serve the poor, or that (like college aid) create chances for the lowly born to rise.



Call them the Drawbridge Republicans. As the moniker implies, these are wealthy Republicans who have no qualms about pulling up the drawbridge behind them. Such sentiments used to be reserved for the political fringe. The most prominent example was Steve Forbes, whose twin obsessions during his vanity presidential runs in 1996 and 2000 — marginal tax rates and inflation — were precisely what you’d expect from an heir in a cocoon.



(In case you were wondering, Ronald Reagan wasn’t a Drawbridge because he entered office when marginal rates, at 70 percent, were truly damaging to the economy. But as GOP business leaders now tell me privately, the Clinton-era top rate of 39.6 percent, let alone today’s 35 percent, are hardly a barrier to work or investment).



Most rich Republicans who champion regressive tax plans find it necessary to at least pretend they’re doing something to help average folks. John McCain, who’s lived large for decades thanks to his wife’s inheritance, famously had trouble keeping track of how many homes he owned — but McCain also tried bravely to create a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. George W. Bush campaigned as a “compassionate conservative,” and touted education initiatives that made this claim plausible.



Today’s Drawbridge Republicans can’t be bothered. Yes, when their political back is to the wall — as Romney’s increasingly is — they’ll slap together a page of bullet points and dub it “a plan for the middle class.” But this is only under duress. The rest of the time they seem blissfully unaware of how off-key they sound. As the humorist Andy Borowitz tweeted the other day, “As a general matter, it’s a bad idea to talk about austerity if you just had a horse lose in the Olympics.”



Contrast conservative Prime Minister (and heir) David Cameron’s decision to defer his plans to lower the top 50 percent marginal rate in the UK. “When you’re taking the country through difficult times and difficult decisions,” Cameron said, “you’ve got to take the country with you. That means permanently trying to make the argument that what you’re doing is fair and seen to be fair.” As his spokesman added: “We need to ask those with the broadest shoulders to contribute the most.”



Now that’s a conservative ruling class with a conscience! Can anyone imagine Romney and Ryan saying the same?



The interesting question concerns psychology. Drawbridge Republicans are flesh and blood human beings peddling indefensible priorities. How do they manage it and still feel good about themselves? One possibility is that they’re simply missing the genes for empathy and self-awareness. (Steve Forbes always did seem a bit like a bubble boy whose inheritance left him impervious).



But for today’s GOP ticket that explanation feels off. Romney, for all his awkwardness, campaigned and governed in a liberal state, and he enacted a pioneering universal health care law that’s helped many of modest means achieve health security. Ryan is equally mysterious — the boy-next-door who pays lip service to “upward mobility” yet seems to have no notion his plans would likely produce what liberal analyst Robert Greenstein calls “the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history.”



My hunch is that extreme forms of rationalization and other defense mechanisms help Drawbridge Republicans cope with the cognitive dissonance. The growth of partisan media makes it easy to tune out disquieting dissenting views.



Whatever lies behind it, the rise of the Drawbridge Republicans makes the stakes of this election even higher. If Romney and Ryan actually win on their Drawbridge agenda, the United States will have crossed a scary new Rubicon for a supposedly advanced democracy. For years, whenever I’ve heard people criticize “limousine liberals,” I’ve always thought, well, at least that’s better than being a “limousine jerk.” Now it turns out that’s exactly what a Drawbridge Republican is.



Matt Miller is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and co-host of public radio’s “Left, Right & Center.” He writes a weekly online column for The Post.

The GOP’s fuzzy math By Matt Miller

The GOP’s fuzzy math By Matt Miller, Wednesday, July 20, 8:40 AM

It’s one thing for a political party to lose its moral bearings – after all, community values evolve, and large swaths of people and their elected representatives can end up on the wrong side of history on such questions as slavery, suffrage, and civil rights. But when a party loses its mathematical bearings – well, that’s a little shocking.



Yet that’s what’s happened to the Republican Party. The debt ceiling endgame has exposed the denial gripping the GOP in the face of the inevitable loss of “lower taxes” as the core of the party’s identity. You can feel the Republicans’ pain; tax cuts have been the party’s defining issue since Ronald Reagan rode them to power in 1980. But in an aging America, the numbers no longer work, and Republicans have failed to develop a new conservative vision to replace their fading mantra.



The “cap, cut and balance” plan passed by the House Tuesday night captures Republican denial perfectly. The plan would cap federal spending at 19.9 percent of GDP by 2018, with the goal of lowering it to18 percent over time. Similar caps have been endorsed by most of the GOP’s presidential candidates.



You’d never know from listening to Republicans that these goals are mathematically and politically unattainable.



But they are. Why? If there’s one fact you need to emblazon in your mind to make sense of the current debate, it is that Ronald Reagan ran the federal government at 22 percent of GDP back when our population was much younger. (Under President Obama, the extraordinary measures enacted to fight the recession – plus a collapse in the denominator, GDP -- have boosted spending to around 24 percent, while revenue has dropped to 15 percent from its 18-19 percent longtime average).



It is simply not plausible to argue that as we double the number of seniors on Social Security and Medicare, Uncle Sam will be able to operate at spending levels 10 to 20 percent below those over which America’s modern conservative icon presided. (Though, as my colleague Dana Milbank notes, Reagan agreed to raise taxes 11 times.) Today there’s no question: Taxes must rise.



Republican “thinking” about these facts is telling. According to the Wall Street Journal, House leaders picked 19.9 percent as their cap “because it is in line with the average spending level over the last thirty years.”



Well, sorry, GOP: The average spending levels of the last 30 years are irrelevant because we weren’t retiring 76 million baby boomers over the last 30 years. And decades ago per capita health costs for seniors were far smaller than they are today.



Let me pause so there’s no caricaturing of these views as belonging to some “tax and spend liberal.” I’ve advocated more “conservative” changes to Social Security than Paul Ryan did in his budget or his prior “roadmap.” I’ve urged progressives to realize that if we don’t slow Medicare’s outsized growth, there will be no money left for poor children, infrastructure, or R&D. And I’ve said we need to learn from countries like Singapore that get outstanding results in health care while spending a fraction of what we spend. So count me as a longtime entitlement reformer who has the arrows from my friends on the left to prove it.



Here’s the point: Even if we enacted the platonic ideal of sane entitlement reform, and trimmed defense (as we need to), Republican budget math still doesn’t come close to adding up. Instead, as my colleagues at the Center for American Progress have shown, shrinking spending to sub-Reagan levels while retiring the boomers would involve dramatic cuts in everything else Americans think of as government – from national parks to NASA to the FBI to cancer research to student loans.



So why does the GOP pretend otherwise? Because acknowledging mathematical reality is too politically painful. Because uttering this simple phrase – “to accommodate the retirement of the baby boomers, taxes will need to rise” – is forbidden by official Republican doctrine.



Because official Republican doctrine has banned honest math.



Aversion to honest math explains why the Ryan budget embraced by the GOP doesn’t balance the budget — even after Medicare changes that may prove fatal to the party -- until the 2030s and racks up at least $14 trillion in debt between now and then.



That’s because the Ryan budget cuts taxes. Balanced budget math in an aging America doesn’t work without higher taxes.



This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t cut taxes in the near-term to goose the economy. But when it comes to a long-term fiscal fix, the GOP’s math anxiety has produced months of debt ceiling charades instead of framing the debate we really need, which is this: Once the economy has more fully recovered, how do we lift taxes to fund the boomers’ retirement in ways least harmful to economic growth?



My own view is that this means slashing payroll taxes and corporate income taxes, while more than offsetting those tax cuts with higher taxes on consumption and dirty energy. But we can’t even get to this conversation until Republicans relinquish the fantasy that we can keep cutting overall taxes as America ages.



At bottom, this fantasy masks fear. Republicans’ refusal to let go of the old time religion shows how little work the party has done to craft an agenda equal to America’s current challenges. The party has abandoned problem-solving for brand preservation. If tax cuts aren’t our defining issue, Republican pols ask themselves, what distinguishes us from Democrats? Why should voters choose us?



Maybe the Gang of Six can end the GOP’s war on math, but I’m skeptical. For now, if it’s a choice between defying math and staring into this policy and political abyss, Republicans choose defiance.

July 4, 2011

The Mother of All No-Brainers By DAVID BROOKS

The Republicans have changed American politics since they took control of the House of Representatives. They have put spending restraint and debt reduction at the top of the national agenda. They have sparked a discussion on entitlement reform. They have turned a bill to raise the debt limit into an opportunity to put the U.S. on a stable fiscal course.
Republican leaders have also proved to be effective negotiators. They have been tough and inflexible and forced the Democrats to come to them. The Democrats have agreed to tie budget cuts to the debt ceiling bill. They have agreed not to raise tax rates. They have agreed to a roughly 3-to-1 rate of spending cuts to revenue increases, an astonishing concession.
Moreover, many important Democrats are open to a truly large budget deal. President Obama has a strong incentive to reach a deal so he can campaign in 2012 as a moderate. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, has talked about supporting a debt reduction measure of $3 trillion or even $4 trillion if the Republicans meet him part way. There are Democrats in the White House and elsewhere who would be willing to accept Medicare cuts if the Republicans would be willing to increase revenues.
If the Republican Party were a normal party, it would take advantage of this amazing moment. It is being offered the deal of the century: trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for a few hundred billion dollars of revenue increases.
A normal Republican Party would seize the opportunity to put a long-term limit on the growth of government. It would seize the opportunity to put the country on a sound fiscal footing. It would seize the opportunity to do these things without putting any real crimp in economic growth.
The party is not being asked to raise marginal tax rates in a way that might pervert incentives. On the contrary, Republicans are merely being asked to close loopholes and eliminate tax expenditures that are themselves distortionary.
This, as I say, is the mother of all no-brainers.
But we can have no confidence that the Republicans will seize this opportunity. That’s because the Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.
The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch in order to cut government by a foot, they will say no. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch to cut government by a yard, they will still say no.
The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities. A thousand impartial experts may tell them that a default on the debt would have calamitous effects, far worse than raising tax revenues a bit. But the members of this movement refuse to believe it.
The members of this movement have no sense of moral decency. A nation makes a sacred pledge to pay the money back when it borrows money. But the members of this movement talk blandly of default and are willing to stain their nation’s honor.
The members of this movement have no economic theory worthy of the name. Economists have identified many factors that contribute to economic growth, ranging from the productivity of the work force to the share of private savings that is available for private investment. Tax levels matter, but they are far from the only or even the most important factor.
But to members of this movement, tax levels are everything. Members of this tendency have taken a small piece of economic policy and turned it into a sacred fixation. They are willing to cut education and research to preserve tax expenditures. Manufacturing employment is cratering even as output rises, but members of this movement somehow believe such problems can be addressed so long as they continue to worship their idol.
Over the past week, Democrats have stopped making concessions. They are coming to the conclusion that if the Republicans are fanatics then they better be fanatics, too.
The struggles of the next few weeks are about what sort of party the G.O.P. is — a normal conservative party or an odd protest movement that has separated itself from normal governance, the normal rules of evidence and the ancient habits of our nation.
If the debt ceiling talks fail, independent voters will see that Democrats were willing to compromise but Republicans were not. If responsible Republicans don’t take control, independents will conclude that Republican fanaticism caused this default. They will conclude that Republicans are not fit to govern.
And they will be right.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 5, 2011

Imagining a Deficit Plan From Republicans By DAVID LEONHARDT

September 28, 2010
Imagining a Deficit Plan From Republicans By DAVID LEONHARDT
Washington

In their Pledge to America, Congressional Republicans have used the old trick of promising specific tax cuts and vague spending cuts. It’s the politically easy approach, and it is likely to be as bad for the budget as when George W. Bush tried it.

The sad thing is, a truly conservative approach to the deficit does exist. You can find strands of it among Republican governors, some of the party’s current Congressional candidates and the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, Paul Ryan.

The brief version might sound something like this: The federal government has outgrown its ability to pay for itself. Our economic future and even our national security depend on solving the problem. Yet President Obama has expanded health insurance, increased education spending and escalated a war of choice. Elect us, and fiscal responsibility won’t have to wait in line.

The detailed plan would start in the same place that Republican campaign rhetoric does, with rooting out waste and bloat. Some tasks, like mail delivery and air traffic control, could be privatized. The federal work force could be reduced, and pay for federal workers could be cut. Federal aid to states could be cut, too.

But then comes the crucial difference.

Actual fiscal conservatives acknowledge that these steps do not come anywhere close to solving the long-term deficit. By 2035, the deficit (even without counting interest payments on the federal debt) is on course to reach $1.9 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. If you reduced domestic discretionary spending to its share of the economy under Ronald Reagan and then eviscerated it an additional 20 percent, you would shrink the deficit by all of $100 billion.

The bulk of the deficit problem instead comes from three popular programs, Medicare, Social Security and the military, and they happen to be the ones the Republican pledge exempts from cuts. But it’s impossible to fix the deficit without making cuts to these programs or raising taxes. To suggest otherwise is to claim that 10 minus 1 equals 5.

“We as Republicans need to realize that you can’t just cut off the welfare queen and balance the budget,” says Rand Paul, a Senate candidate in Kentucky, who has some extreme views on other issues but is evidently pro-arithmetic. “The only way you’ll ever get close to balancing the budget is if you look at the entire budget.”

When they’re not talking for quotation, some Republicans will explain that the pledge is, of course, a political document: although it may not spell out specific budget cuts, the party is willing to make them. But I think this view misreads recent history.

Republicans controlled the White House and Congress for much of 2001 to 2006, and they turned a big surplus into a big deficit. In the last two years, they have opposed several Obama administration plans for reducing the deficit, including cuts to Medicare, weapons programs and farm subsidies, as well as tax increases on the affluent. Given this history, my colleague Ross Douthat concluded that the pledge “might create a larger deficit than the Obama alternative.”

In short, the pledge imagines a world without tough choices, where we can have low taxes, big government and a balanced budget. And therein lies the path to ever larger deficits.

•

The essential question for any would-be budget balancer is how large the federal government should be.

For most of the last century, the government has been getting bigger. Its spending equaled about 2 percent of gross domestic product in 1900, 14 percent just after World War II and, after ballooning to almost 25 percent during the financial crisis, will fall to 23 percent in the next few years.

There is a good argument that the government should grow as societies become richer. Once people can afford the basics, they want services that the private sector often does not provide, like a strong military, good schools, generous medical care and a comfortable retirement, as Matt Miller, a McKinsey & Company consultant and former Clinton administration official, has pointed out.

To me, this pattern argues for making tax increases a big part of the deficit solution. Maybe taxes would eventually rise to 23 percent of G.D.P., rather than 19 percent, as under current policy. Spending could then be cut from the 26 percent it is scheduled to reach in 2035, yet still be high enough to afford the investments that lead to prosperity. After all, the Internet, the highway system and the biotechnology sector all began as government programs.

Conservatives counter that governments just as often allocate resources badly, and there is something to this. It’s the small-government case that Mr. Paul, Mr. Ryan and governors like Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Chris Christie of New Jersey are making.

Mr. Paul emphasizes wasteful military spending that lines the pockets of military contractors rather than protecting the country. A bipartisan task force of military experts has identified cuts that would eventually equal almost 1 percent of G.D.P.

On Social Security, Marco Rubio, the Republican Senate candidate in Florida, has suggested raising the eligibility age. Two other Republican Senate candidates, Sharron Angle of Nevada and Joe Miller of Alaska, have gone further, suggesting a phaseout of Social Security. In the long run, changes to Social Security could save even more money than military cuts.

But the biggest cause of looming deficits is Medicare. Mr. Daniels, a possible 2012 presidential candidate, recently told Newsweek that he favored Medicare cuts. Mr. Ryan has been willing to get specific. For everyone now under 55, he wants to turn Medicare into a voucher program that’s much less generous than the program is scheduled to be.

Mr. Ryan’s budget blueprint offers an especially pointed contrast with the pledge. The Ryan plan calls for holding taxes at around 19 percent of G.D.P. and suggests specific cuts to bring spending in line. The pledge calls for even lower taxes — while offering almost no detail on spending cuts.

Which seems more credible?

Unfortunately, elected Republicans have often backed away from their own fiscally conservative ideas when pushed. Mr. Ryan says he supports the pledge. Ms. Angle has reversed herself on Social Security. Mr. Daniels has said tax increases should be an option, but that will be a tough position to keep in a presidential campaign.

And I get it. Voters don’t like having their taxes raised or their benefits cut. I don’t like it, either.

But, remember, when politicians tell you that they are opposed to tax increases, Medicare cuts, Social Security cuts and military cuts, they’re really saying that they are in favor of crippling deficits.

E-mail: leonhardt@nytimes.com

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

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

Chinese New Year: Year of the Rat...Romney Drops Out, claiming that if he continues, the Democrats might win and thus, so would the terrorists