fighting words SLATE
Palin's Pals
Sarah Palin's brand of populism is dangerous and deceptive.

By Christopher Hitchens
Writing about Sarah Palin in Newsweek last month, I pointed out the crude way in which she tried to Teflon-ize herself when allegations of weird political extremism were made against her. Thus, she had once gone to a Pat Buchanan rally wearing a pro-Buchanan button, but only because she thought it was the polite thing to do. She and her husband had both attended meetings of the Alaskan Independence Party—he as a member—but its name, she later tried to claim, only meant "independent." (The AIP is a straightforward secessionist party.) She didn't disbelieve all the evidence for evolution, only some of it. She hadn't exactly said that God was on our side in Iraq, only that God and the United States were on the same side. She says that she left Hawaii Pacific College after only one year because the climate was too sunny for an Alaskan*; her father (whom she considers practically infallible) tells her most recent biographers that she quit because of the preponderance of Asian and Pacific islanders: "They were a minority type thing and it wasn't glamorous. So she came home." And so on. As I tried to summarize the repeated tactic:
So there it is: anti-Washington except that she thirsts for it, and close enough (and also far enough away to be "deniable") to the paranoid fringe element who darkly suggest that our president is a Kenyan communist.
Last week, the new darling of the right did her best to vindicate me. She appeared on the radio show of a certain Rusty Humphries, another steaming and hearty slice of good-old U.S. prime, and was asked whether she would make an issue of President Barack Obama's birth certificate. Her response: "I think the public rightfully is still making it an issue. I think it's a fair question." That was on Thursday, Dec. 3. On Friday, she had published a second "thought" on her Facebook page, reassuring all and sundry that: "At no point have I asked the president to produce his birth certificate, or suggested that he was not born in the United States."
Well, exactly. Of course she hasn't. She just thinks it's a good idea for others to do that, in their "rightful" way, since, after all, it is "a fair question."
Could anything be more cowardly and contemptible? Alexander Pope came up with a few lines about this sort of second-hand, third-rate innuendo-mongering:
Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings,This painted child of dirt that stinks and stings:Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoysYet wit ne'er tastes and beauty ne'er enjoys.So well-bred spaniels civilly delightIn mumbling of the game they dare not bite.
What price the courageous frontier huntress now—an empty-headed echo chamber for rumor-mongers and freaks who shoots from ambush and then runs away? Some condescending right-wing intellectuals are calling her style "populist" and comparing it with Andrew Jackson and William Jennings Bryan. The true name for it is demagogy, descending from Joseph McCarthy, Robert Welch, and the nastier elements of the old Nixon gang—people to whom slander and defamation was second nature.
I think I can guess why Palin moved so quickly to soften her raw-meat appeal to Rusty's crowd. On Saturday night, she was due to put on a black dress and be a featured guest at the Gridiron Club dinner in Washington, D.C. It was time to don the fake finery of wit and beauty again. (I do hope this isn't why the press, which gives this annual gala, went so utterly soft on her "birther" garbage over the course of last weekend.) The person who has been introducing Palin into the more exalted social and political circles of the capital, and who has already arranged her appearance at the Alfalfa Club, is Fred Malek. Two things about Malek are worth bearing in mind.
The first is that he was an important member of the Nixon administration, a senior figure on the Republican National Committee, and the campaign manager for the re-election of George H.W. Bush in 1992. With his Carlyle Group and other corporate connections and his mansion in suburban McLean, Va.,* Malek is almost the prototypical "establishment" Washington insider and consiglieri Republican, against whom Palin's adoring book-tour crowds, in their pathetic dreams, imagine her to be a crusader. But her preposterous book Going Rogue is larded with praise for the wise support and advice of this leathery old Beltway bandit. Populism? Hah! Unless, that is, you count Jew-baiting as a form of populism, which I suppose in a way it is. (Bryan, that other foe of Darwin, was also a fan of the Klan.)
Because the second thing to note about Malek is that he was the man who drew up a list of Jews to be fired from the civil service under the Nixon administration. I am surprised that so many people have allowed themselves to forget this—and that Palin has never been asked a single question about it. In the early 1970s, Nixon, whose White House tapes show consistent evidence of anti-Semitic paranoia, gave orders that the Bureau of Labor Statistics be purged of what he called a "Jewish cabal." The job of drawing up the list was given to Malek, whose information led to what was called the "reassignment" of some officials within the Labor Department. Malek later tried to give a weaselly excuse for his conduct, but was caught by my Slate colleague Timothy Noah.
It beats me why such a disgusting character is still received in polite circles, except that now at least he's back doing the sort of task to which he is best-suited. He has found an unscrupulous and uncultured political neophyte who will happily act as a megaphone for any kind of libel and insinuation—Obama's "palling around with terrorists" was, I suppose, the money shot of the last campaign—and then later revise and extend her remarks. Nasty work if you can get it. Malek, now so near old age, must be pinching himself at his good fortune.
At least Richard Nixon had the ill fortune to look like what he was: a haunted scoundrel and repressed psychopath. Whereas the usefulness of Sarah Palin to the right-wing party managers is that she combines a certain knowingness with a feigned innocence and a still-palpable blush of sex. But she should take care to read her Alexander Pope: That bloom will soon enough fade, and it will fade really quickly if she uses it to prostitute herself to the Nixonites on one day and then to cock-tease the rabble on the next.
Correction, Dec. 7, 2009: This article originally misspelled the Virginia suburb of McLean. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
Correction, Dec. 8, 2009: This article originally misstated that Sarah Palin attended the University of Hawaii. (Return to the corrected sentence.)Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution.

From The London Times
Dame Judi Dench: ‘I am very un-divaish’
Ahead of her new film, Britain’s greatest actress talks about her life, career and why politicians are failing the arts
Tim Teeman
You will never want to be on the receiving end of the Dench glare. The mouth tightens, the hoods on the eyes flare. I had asked what she thought of the prospect of a Conservative government and the glare was her response, followed by five seconds of silence and then the sullen pronouncement: “I’m not too hot about that.” Gordon Brown needn’t feel smug, though. She just sighed at his name and said quietly: “I’m not much a fan of any of them now.”
Indeed, Dame Judi Dench, 75, dressed today in black, would like it to be known that she is nobody’s national treasure. She may be one of our most esteemed actresses, but she begs that we divest ourselves of the twinkly, matronly image we have of her. She doesn’t help herself; she’ll soon pop up reprising her role as Miss Matty Jenkyns on the BBC’s Cranford Christmas special.
“National treasure? I hate that. Too dusty, too in a cupboard, too behind glass, too staid,” she says tartly in that wonderful, commanding yet playful croak of hers. “I don’t want to be thought of as recognisable — I always want to do the most different thing I can think of next. I don’t want to be known for one thing, or as having done huge amounts of Shakespeare and the classics. I hate speaking as myself. I could never do a one-woman show. But I love being part of a company. On stage I am not trying to be myself, I’m trying to be someone else, the more unlike me the better. I remember someone who saw me in Juno and the Paycock said I was completely unrecognisable. How marvellous. I’ve done two sitcoms, lots of films. Look at my character [an obsessive, damaged stalker] in Notes on a Scandal. You wouldn’t want to ask her around.” Of the actor who once said he expected her to be a “saint”, she sniffs: “Well, he can’t have known me that well.”
In her new film, Rob Marshall’s star-stuffed musical Nine, Dench plays the brisk and sagacious wardrobe mistress, with sharp bob, to Daniel Day-Lewis’s agonising film director: a bracing comic role that undercuts the film’s more ponderous tendencies, as Day-Lewis’s life and work are complicated by the ravishing likes of Penélope Cruz, Nicole Kidman and Marion Cotillard. Dench has sung before — in her career-defining Sally Bowles in a Sixties production of Cabaret, in The Comedy of Errors, The Merry Wives of Windsor and A Little Night Music — and thinks Marshall is “a genius. I went to see him and we didn’t get to the coffee. I just said, ‘Yes please’.”
She followed the advice of Hal Prince, the musicals’ producer, who once told her it was essential she sang in the same voice she spoke in, “my broken-glass voice” as Dench calls it. Many of Nine’s musical numbers take place on a soundstage. “I liked that. I’m more comfortable on stage, where there is an audience to tell a story to, as opposed to a film set where you are not in charge at all. On stage you can hear an audience’s reactions. Within two minutes of a play starting you know how the evening will go. On film you’re more reliant on the director. The moment he leaves you, you’re like a child learning to walk.”
Marshall treated his troupe as a company of players, although at the world premiere in London last week its producer Harvey Weinstein said Dench was the film’s “diva”. She roars. “I had no film career until Mrs Brown, which Harvey oversaw. He gave a lunch for me at the time and I told him I had his name tattooed on my bum. I hadn’t, I had my make-up lady design something that I showed him. He’s never forgotten it.” So she isn’t a diva? “I am very un-divaish,” Dench says. “Very rarely in 52 years in the business have I met anyone who has behaved in a selfish way.” What about Sophia Loren, who plays Day-Lewis’s mother in Nine? “I’d never met her and she arrived on set just as I was about to perform my number. She sat and watched. I said to Rob: ‘I can’t have ever been more frightened than at this moment.’ It was like someone had given me an enormous injection. I suddenly had to be on the ball.”
When she was young, growing up in York, Dench had wanted to be a ballerina. Her parents took her and her brothers to the theatre and she remembers going backstage at one production and seeing “an actor who had looked so wonderful on stage out of his wig, sitting wearing a vest and braces and the magic went rather. Later, when I did Toad of Toad Hall, I suggested we keep our make-up on in case of any similar young-person visits.” As a teenager she wanted to be a theatre designer, but gave up on that after seeing a stripped-down production of King Lear at Stratford, where an enormous flat disc was the only furnishing on the stage. “It was my Road to Damascus moment. I was completely bewitched by it. I knew I’d never be that good.”
She went to Central, the acting school, where mime ignited her actorly passion. Her first role was as Ophelia in Hamlet. She’s played Juliet in Romeo and Juliet and Lady Macbeth. On television, she and her late husband, Michael Williams, played a married couple in A Fine Romance; with Geoffrey Palmer she appeared in the sitcom As Time Goes By. Since 1995 she’s played an icy M in the Bond films. Her awards tally embraces ten Baftas, seven Laurence Olivier Awards, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, two Golden Globes, an Oscar (Best Supporting Actress, for Shakespeare in Love) and a Tony Award.
“The passion doesn’t lessen over time,” Dench says, “but you get more anxious. You always worry about getting employed. But I love what I do.” What? Surely her exalted position means that she is insulated from such insecurities. “No, no, no, that’s a fallacy,” she insists. “You become more anxious. You’re only as good as the last thing you did. But that anxiety feeds what you’re doing. It gives you energy. It’s very much part of me. You know that right behind you, stretching back as far as you can see, are other people wanting to play the same part and probably better than you.”
She “loathes, loathes” ageing. “I don’t like it at all. Suddenly I get up out of a chair and can’t rush across the room. But there’s nothing I can do about that, alas. My energy levels are OK, but I can’t see very well. People have to come up and wave at me. If a restaurant is too dark I can end up talking to the backs of chairs.”
Glenda Jackson once said she’d given up acting because she didn’t want to end up playing the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, I say. “Nor me,” says Dench. “I was offered it a few years ago by Peter Hall and I told him where to get off. You get asked to do ‘flashback’ parts, except you’re the one having the flashback, you’re never in the flashback itself.” In defiance of ageing, she will be playing Titania in Hall’s Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Rose Theatre, Kingston, early next year. “I could do it tonight. I played her at school, then the first fairy, then Hermia. Then I played Titania for Peter in 1962, then the film. If it’s not stuck in there” — pointing to her head — “it’s never going to be. Shakespeare is like a song, it keeps a very strong meter in your mind.”
Not everything Dench touches assumes a golden sheen. Last year, the play Madame de Sade got terrible reviews. “I didn’t read them,” she says. “Once, a long time ago, I read some bad reviews and I made the decision not to read the reviews. You get some critics who don’t like you, or the play. But they don’t to do it every night. I don’t want to be affected like that. I loved doing Madame de Sade. A friend told me not to apologise for myself or the play, and I won’t. Then I cast it all off and go and put my feet up under the chimney with my family”(her daughter Finty and Finty’s son Sammy).
Williams died nine years ago. Does she miss him? “You bet. I don’t expect you ever get over that. Time changes something, I suppose, but you miss the basic things. Michael was a realist, down to earth, a Lancashire man. I’m a Yorkshire woman and so that was pretty volatile, I suppose. He was Cancerian, I’m Sagittarian. He would say: ‘I’m always rushing for the dark, you’re always rushing for the light. If we hold in the middle, there’s a kind of balance’.”
Could she find love with anyone else? “It’s not something that’s ever happened. I’ve loved living in the same house, in the same grounds with my family. Sammy was 4 when Michael died and he does look extraordinarily like him sometimes.” She says she can feel lonely (“Who doesn’t, that’s why I have a theatre family”), but she doesn’t think she’ll ever remarry. Does she think about dying? “Yes, I think about it all the time, but I push it to the back of my mind.” Why? “Because of fear, of course.”
Just as Dench scoffs at being a national treasure, she says she doesn’t feel fulfilled. “No, no, no, no, I hope not. Being fulfilled is closing the drawer again and I don’t want to do that just yet. I’d bore myself silly. I wouldn’t learn anything new. I’d just sit around and I hate wasting time. I hate waste of any kind. I love quiz programmes. I am riveted by The Weakest Link but I’d be too terrified to appear on it.”
Part of playing Titania isn’t just to cock a snook at ageing, but to support the Rose Theatre. “I’m doing my bit to keep it open.” She is angry about the Government’s funding and attitude to the arts. “I am concerned, of course, that they’ve taken a lot of the subsidy to the arts away for the Olympics.” She sighs. “There’s no question that the recession has had an effect on the arts, especially on British films. Things are not being greenlit as much and it is more difficult for people to get work.
“When you go abroad people always talk with such love about British theatre, but the irony is it’s not appreciated by the Government as it should be. The state of the arts has always been, and will always be, precarious. But there is something so alarming about the huge cuts made to companies, particularly when you read of the astronomical amounts some people are earning.” Should funding be set and ring-fenced? “Yes it should. I mourn that there are so many repertory companies that aren’t around any more. I don’t want the arts to take the form of a reality programme. I heard somebody say the other day that it is good if people can bring drink and food into a theatre and get up and go if they don’t like the play. Well, yes, go out if you don’t like it, but where do you draw the line? They tell people not to take pictures of us on stage but when you look up you see 100 red lights twinkling at you.”
Celebrity culture has led to a “quick fix” mentality on the part of younger actors, Dench says. “They think a big part will change their life, without any back-up. Young actors go into a run and don’t do all the performances. That would have been unheard of at one time. I know I can sustain a run because of my training.”
All this rumbling anger may help to get rid of her kindly image — still more so if the rumours of her having a foul temper are true. “Of course I have a temper,” Dench scoffs. “Who hasn’t? And the older I get the more angry I get about things. It’s not sudden anger, it smoulders and then if I really let it go on for a bit the shit hits the fan. I get very angry about general injustice. I get angry about the way people say ‘Tomorrow X will make a speech about X’. Just let them say it. I get furious about the whole business of not allowing conkers in school, and banning things because they are supposedly dangerous. I am riveted by the current Iraq inquiry, though angry already because I feel it will end with a report and nobody’s actually going to be arraigned for what happened.”
Would she like to see Bush or Blair in court? “I’d like the buck to stop somewhere and know where that buck stops.” A moment later she gives me the Dench glare over the prospect of Prime Minister Cameron. However, she is looking forward to making the next Bond movie the year after next. “They’re exciting. They give you street cred. Everything is so beautifully made. I get to say frightfully cool things and behave in an autocratic way and give Bond a hard time. What could be better?”
Her close friend Maggie Smith has just come through breast cancer and Dench also worries about illness. “You get up one morning and can’t walk across the room and you think: ‘Oh Christ, what’s packed up now?’ ” As for plastic surgery, “I’ve considered it, but I’m too old now. Every time I go to America I wonder if there is some process where it could all be sucked out and I could be out of there in time for dinner” — she pulls her barely wrinkled skin back on her face — “but I’m frightened it would all drop off under the anaesthetic.”
Dench says she is an optimist (“a glass half-full person”) and is naturally warm. Oh dear, the “national treasure” thing may have to stick, I say. She fixes me with a look almost as bad as the Dench glare: she is suddenly the crisp, haughty, commanding M. “Please stop using that phrase,” she says coldly. “And it is your mission to make sure everyone else does too.” I’ll accept the mission, though I’m not banking on its success.
Nine is released on Dec 26

From The Sunday London

America wakes up to the shift in global power
Andrew Sullivan
Last Tuesday night was a sobering affair if you are a supporter of America’s engagement with the world. In his defining speech on Afghanistan at the West Point military academy, Barack Obama’s own tone was extremely sober, and at times he seemed close to choking up as he weighed sending more young men and women into the wastes of Helmand. His audience of West Point cadets sat silently for the most part, some even fighting off sleep.
The pundits regretted that Obama had not pulled off a Henry V peroration, as if announcing a ninth year of counterinsurgency in a country thousands of miles away could be compared to Agincourt. And the polling found a public deeply ambivalent about extending the war further, while also afraid of the consequences of too rapid a departure.
This was a chastened rather than confident America. And it isn’t hard to see why. Obama emerged as a candidate, and then as a president, precisely because Americans saw that their country was so far off track. But the reason change was vital then is why the atmosphere is now so dire, and Obama’s inability to overcome it all (what human could?) has brought Americans back to the sobriety of their current predicament.
I’ve long feared this moment would come. It feels like the late 1970s but with no cheerful Ronald Reagan in the wings and no obvious course of action to break out of the morass. The weekly news magazines are again full of ruminations on American decline; China’s emergence as the source of most of the world’s raw wealth creation has left Americans feeling left behind. I’ve never experienced such widespread gloom in the 25 years I’ve lived here.
The frustration of wars where victory seems impossible and of an economy now revealed as a Potemkin one, leveraged on debt and fraud and froth, is the reason. But the wars are the fundamental cause. The only thing more damaging to a superpower than never using military power is using it in such a way as to demonstrate its futility.
In some ways, Iraq and Afghanistan broke America the way Vietnam did. They demonstrated to the world that the most powerful military machine in world history could not defeat Islamist insurgencies or repair broken countries without absurd costs and ambiguous results.
To have experienced the blow of 9/11 and to watch almost a decade later as young Americans die for a kleptocracy in Kabul and a sectarian bazaar in Baghdad is to experience a deeply demoralising and discouraging morass. Osama Bin Laden, moreover, remains at large — eight years after the worst mass murder in US history. And he is sheltered by a supposed alleged ally that has received enormous sums of aid.
Americans see all of this as they lose jobs in vast numbers, or see their wealth vanish in a collapsing housing market, or struggle to send their children to college or even a doctor. They know, too, that even with all this sacrifice and effort, their security remains tenuous.
That’s why no president could have announced, as some Republicans wanted, an indefinite massive campaign in Afghanistan. It simply isn’t sustainable — politically or economically. The country is more broke than at any time since the second world war in a global economy still vulnerable to another relapse.
There is also a limit to how much pressure you can put on a military that has undertaken deployments far lengthier and more intense than any previous conflict. And there is growing scepticism that America really can afford the kind of global role it assumed after the cold war.
The polls reflect this mood with stark clarity. The Pew survey has polled Americans for decades on their attitude towards the wider world — measuring how unilateralist and isolationist the mood is, or how multilateral and interventionist. The latest results, announced last week, were striking.
The percentage of Americans now saying that the US should “mind its own business” and let the rest of the world get on with it is now higher than it ever was during the Vietnam war and higher than it was in the low point of the Carter era. A full 49% of Americans now favour isolationism. The previous peaks were 41% in 1995 and 1976; at the height of the Vietnam war, the isolationist position mustered only 35%.
For the first time, most Americans also see China as the pre-eminent economic power; and 47% believe that Afghanistan will revert to the Taliban once the US leaves.
This is an America still traumatised by 9/11 and deeply frustrated by its inability to reverse or rectify its potency almost a decade later. It is an America slowly coming out of denial about the profound strategic costs of two failed wars and occupations, where even success now seems to be at a cost not worth bearing.
It would be foolish, however, to think this could never change. If the US extricates itself from Iraq without that country imploding and if the Afghan surge actually shifts the dynamic on the ground, perceptions may shift once more.
If the CIA captures or kills Bin Laden, some closure might be possible. The death penalty for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed after a civil trial in New York could restore Americans’ faith in their system, while finally achieving some kind of justice for the victims of 9/11. And the economy could turn around more powerfully than most predict. Nonetheless, this feels like an inflection point to me. Americans pinned their hopes on a young president and he has performed, in my judgment, about as well as one could have hoped for. But the superpower bluff has been called, the leverage is gone.
Obama arrived in China last month as a fiscal supplicant, not the leader of the free world. He cannot corner the Iranian regime without Russian or Chinese support. He cannot even get Israel, a country receiving $3 billion a year in aid and protected by America’s veto at the United Nations, simply to cease its construction of settlements in East Jerusalem or the West Bank.
These are not a consequence of his poor diplomacy; they are a consequence of a new world reality, where American power has been eviscerated by two intractable wars and a level of debt more typical of a South American country in the 1970s than a global hegemon.
America does not have a traditional empire the way Britain once did. Instead it has a neo-empire of military bases, vast armies and navies, aid agencies, spy services and covert operations. It is an empire that is premised on a massive debt controlled by others, and an empire where “shock and awe” has been demonstrated as futile against an asymmetric and nebulous enemy as a Wizard of Oz with the curtain pulled back. The spell has been undone.
The Bush wars may come to be seen as this neo-empire’s version of the Suez crisis — the moment when its power remained but its future clout evaporated. The difference, of course, is that Britain in the late 1950s had a friendly superpower to whom she could surrender global hegemony. America has no such luxury. And neither, one might add, does Europe.
www.andrewsullivan.com

From The Sunday London Times
Now Barack Obama gets down to work on job creation
Irwin Stelzer: American Account
Modestly, moderately, jobs. These are the three words that cover just about everything that is going on in America’s political economy. The latest summary prepared by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reports that “economic conditions have generally improved modestly;... consumer spending ... picked up moderately; ... manufacturing conditions [are] ... moderately improving across the country”.
Perhaps most important, the report noted that goods inventories are lean, so lean that one-third of all manufacturers report that their customers’ inventory levels are too low, and only 7% that they are too high. If the White House economist Larry Summers is right that the level of inventories is among the more important indicators of future economic activity, the bare shelves and warehouses will produce a pick-up in orders and in economic growth.
It is certainly true that car showrooms have been so denuded of vehicles that manufacturers are upping next year’s production schedules. Ford plans to make 58% more vehicles in the first quarter of 2010 than it did in the same period this year, and GM plans a 75% boost from the depressed level earlier this year. One cheer only: these increases are from last year’s very depressed levels.
The moderate improvement includes an increase in manufacturing activity in November for the fourth consecutive month; a rebound in new orders; a rise in pending home sales (contracts out, but not completed) for the ninth consecutive month to the highest level since March 2006; and sales of jewellery, not a necessity in most homes, have risen in each of the past three months.
So much for “moderate”. Friday’s jobs report was hardly that. After months in which hundreds of thousands of jobs have gone, such lay-offs totalled a mere 11,000 in November, the lowest level in two years. The unemployment rate dropped from 10.2% in October to 10.0% last month, the working week lengthened and the job-loss figures for September and October were revised down by 159,000. Good news for President Barack Obama.
However, the president knows three things. First, one month does not make a trend. Second, 38% of the unemployed have been out of work for more than six months. Third, the 15.4m workers classified as unemployed do not include those so discouraged they have dropped out of the workforce, and those involuntarily working only part-time. Add those in, and the total comes to 26.5m direct victims of the recession, or 17.2% of the total workforce (down from 17.5% last month). Throw in their families, and their still-employed but nervous neighbours, and you have a block of voters unlikely to smile on those of his party colleagues who will be seeking their votes next year.
So the president “pivoted”, to use the new Washington buzz word. He has been concentrating on healthcare and Afghanistan, but voters tell pollsters their biggest concerns are jobs and the deficit. Obama will now concentrate on those issues, with jobs top of his new agenda, and the deficit to be shuttled off to a bipartisan commission for study.
As for jobs, last week he invited union leaders, economists, businessmen and others to a “jobs creation” summit. Since he already knows what he is going to recommend when he addresses the nation on Tuesday, this was a public-relations stunt.
The liberals in attendance favoured more government spending, perhaps $200 billion more, on a variety of programmes, including grants to states to stall planned lay-offs of bureaucrats, the hiring of workers to build bridges and other infrastructure, and subsidies to encourage homeowners to hire workers to weather-proof their homes — cash-for-caulkers. They also want the banks’ repayments of bailout funds to be used to extend unemployment benefits.
The businessmen have a different prescription for what ails the jobs market. They favour a mix of less regulation, lower corporate taxes, granting more visas to immigrants who want to start businesses, and some certainty as to what the president is planning to do in the coming months.
Small businesses create most of the jobs in an economy such as ours. But they find it impossible to plan on expanding because they do not know what it will cost to take on more staff. What they do know is that if the healthcare bill passes in anything like its current version, their healthcare costs will rise. They know, too, that if the pledges the president is about to make at the Copenhagen climate-change seminar are ratified by Congress, their energy costs will shoot up. And that both of the above mean higher taxes for them.
This is not exactly a setting in which businessmen, especially those running small firms, see a bright future. Uncertainty about some things, certainty about even worse things — so hunker down, don’t hire just yet, wait and see if things turn out as badly as it now seems likely they will.
It is fashionable these days to talk about “take aways”, what attendees take away from a conference. My guess is that Obama’s “take away” is consistent with his view that activist government cannot leave job creation to the private sector, but also that he must dispel the notion that he is hostile to the private sector. So a mix of spending and incentives for small businesses to hire will be laid out in Tuesday’s speech.
Obama’s goal will be to keep the unemployment rate heading down, even if he has to create government-funded jobs to do it. My Hudson Institute colleague, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, points out in a recent column that in 1850 Frederich Bastiat noted that jobs provided by the government are seen, those displaced by higher taxes or snatched from private-sector firms are not — at least, not in the short run.
The president’s congressional allies have no interest in the long run — in which they will be dead, electorally, if the economy suffers a relapse. They want action this day. Which is just what their president intends to give them.
Irwin Stelzer is a business adviser and director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute
stelzer@aol.com

The Ghost Ship ‘W.W.’
By DICK CAVETT
NY TIMES
Your responses to my column about the lad, Buck, and the subject of fame, delighted, amused and moved me. What explains the fact that there is so much good writing among the readers? (Even “You are not very funny, Mr. Cavett . . . ” got to me, providing good contrast, lest the compliments turn my head.) There is stuff in those “letters” that is as good as anything turned out by us alleged pros.
Dare one say sometimes better?
Several readers raised the subject: what of the time when fame has fled? I’m grateful to them because it reminded me of an almost vanished memory of that very thing.
Readers who’ve achieved a number of years nearer the minimal end of the age scale might feel the need of a dose of Wikipedia upon hearing the moniker “Walter Winchell.” It had been a name to strike terror into the cardiac area of even the powerful. (Burt Lancaster’s character J.J. Hunsecker, the powerful newspaper columnist in “Sweet Smell of Success,” was based on Winchell.) This notorious figure, in his time as household a name as can be, outlived his fame and died forgotten. And widely unlamented.
There was quite a stretch between the time I first tuned in — with most of America — to the distinct and famous voice on Sunday night radio and my meeting him.For some reason, I recall that my dad and I were in our Nebraska basement, shelling black walnuts we’d gathered in the woods. On this particular night, the famous voice, akin to heavy dice being rattled in a metal cup, fired off at lightning speed the show’s signature opening: “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea, let’s go to press! Washington . . . ” Etcetera.
On that memorable night, “W.W.” stunned the nation with the unthinkable words, “. . . and a president who does not know what the h-e-double-l is going on.” (H.S.T. was the sitting White House occupant so described.)
It was a bombshell, almost as if full-frontal nudity had been displayed on the cover of The Reader’s Digest. But Winchell’s accreted clout at the time was sufficient armor. He was a media figure full of unprecedented power. Among other things.
Much of Winchell’s fortune was his voice. Sharp, tangy, forceful and dramatic, it produced goosebumps over the radio, where voice was all. It was a favorite of “impressionists” (not Monet and so forth, you understand).
Walter Winchell had been a veritable king and he had a good, long reign. Then fame ended. But he did not, doomed to years and years of has-been-ism.
He was old and I wasn’t when we met. The mirror had tuned around: I was on T.V. by then, so the faded Winchell knew of the hot kid on the cover of Time who had shelled walnuts in Nebraska to the sound of his voice.
I got a close-up look of what it means when fame has fled. It ain’t a pretty thing.
Surprised that he was still alive, I had him on my show. This must have been in the late ’60s. He was elderly but not creaky, and gamely agreed to exhibit a bit from his early vaudeville dancing days. The old boy brought down the house with a skillfully executed tap routine. My wife cried, watching it. His celebrity was, by then, a dim memory, and he was grateful to me for causing some renewed recognition on the street after a very long time.
My reward? An evening out with Winchell at the Copa. Yes, the legendary Copacabana night club, which, like him, had seen better days. The headliner, the popular (and cheerfully bibulous) Tony Martin warbled a medley of his past hits for us, surrounded by the renowned and luscious Copa Girls — many now Copa Grannies, I should think.
W.W. had collected me, driving his own car. He was fadedly elegant in a tuxedo not of the latest cut, the butt of a snub-nosed .38 peeping from the cummerbund.
“Expecting trouble, Walter?” I ventured.
“Always, my boy. In my game, you have to.”
Winchell had fear-induced influence most everywhere, and in his heyday had acquired from his cop friends the sort of official police car radio forbidden to ordinary citizens, allowing him to habitually cruise the night and, upon hearing of a crime in progress, speed there for a column item.
“They never give me a ticket for speeding,” he boasted to me. A moment too soon. Minutes later, we got one. Somewhere on lower Park Avenue, while responding to a police call.
To his chagrin, my companion of the night’s name and visage cut no ice with the young rookie.
Despite the lives he purportedly ruined when at his peak — careers made and destroyed with a few words in his column or on the air — it was still sad to see the old lion now toothless. At one precinct we’d visited earlier, where in better times a chorus of, “Hey, Walter!” would have gone up, only an ancient sergeant knew who he was. Walter devoured the scrap.
To the young cops, he was a cipher. My knowledge of his past victims — said, even, to include a few suicides — at that moment didn’t matter. That evening, as I accompanied him on his nightly prowl, I felt like quietly paying someone to say, “Hey, ain’t you Walter Winchell?”
And then it happened. At one precinct, a young gendarme with a good ear suddenly said, “Hey, Pop. Say something else! Talk again.” He did.
“Oh, my God! I know who you are!”
W.W. beamed.
“You’re the announcer on ‘The Untouchables’!”
Someone had been smart enough to cast the uniquely voiced Winchell — an excellent actor with, once, the most instantly identified voice in America — to narrate “The Untouchables,” the then popular T.V. crime series about the tough cop Eliot Ness in Prohibition Chicago. Winchell’s staccato delivery was perfect for the intermittent narration bits.
At the moment of recognition, Winchell grinned and seemed to visibly drop 20 years. To almost anyone not a victim of his past predations, it would be hard not to be moved by that moment, seeing the effect on the old fellow. Fame — though vastly reduced to a voice-over — had administered a craved injection.
Delighted, the former giant grabbed a pen and, eagerly and gratefully — although it had not been sought — signed an autograph.

NY TIMES
Johnson, Gorbachev, Obama
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Imagine you’re a villager living in southern Afghanistan.
You’re barely educated, proud of your region’s history of stopping invaders and suspicious of outsiders. Like most of your fellow Pashtuns, you generally dislike the Taliban because many are overzealous, truculent nutcases.
Yet you are even more suspicious of the infidel American troops. You know of some villages where the Americans have helped build roads and been respectful of local elders and customs. On the other hand, you know of other villages where the infidel troops have invaded homes, shamed families by ogling women, or bombed wedding parties.
You’re angry that your people, the Pashtuns, traditionally the dominant tribe of Afghanistan, seem to have been pushed aside in recent years, with American help. Moreover, the Afghan government has never been more corrupt. The Taliban may be incompetent, but at least they are pious Muslim Pashtuns and reasonably honest.
You were always uncomfortable with foreign troops in your land, but it wasn’t so bad the first few years when there were only about 10,000 American soldiers in the entire country. Now, after President Obama’s speech on Tuesday, there soon will be 100,000. That’s three times as many as when the president took office, and 10 times as many as in 2003.
Hmmm. You still distrust the Taliban, but maybe they’re right to warn about infidels occupying your land. Perhaps you’ll give a goat to support your clansman who joined the local Taliban.
That’s why so many people working in Afghanistan at the grass roots are watching the Obama escalation with a sinking feeling. President Lyndon Johnson doubled down on the Vietnam bet soon after he inherited the presidency, and Mikhail Gorbachev escalated the Soviet deployment that he inherited in Afghanistan soon after he took over the leadership of his country. They both inherited a mess — and made it worse and costlier.
As with the Americans in Vietnam, and Soviets in Afghanistan, we understate the risk of a nationalist backlash; somehow Mr. Obama has emerged as more enthusiastic about additional troops than even the corrupt Afghan government we are buttressing.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal warned in his report on the situation in Afghanistan that “new resources are not the crux” of the problem. Rather, he said, the key is a new approach that emphasizes winning hearts and minds: “Our strategy cannot be focused on seizing terrain or destroying insurgent troops; our objective must be the population.”
So why wasn’t the Afghan population more directly consulted?
“To me, what was most concerning is that there was never any consultation with the Afghan shura, the tribal elders,” said Greg Mortenson, whose extraordinary work building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan was chronicled in “Three Cups of Tea” and his new book, “From Stones to Schools.” “It was all decided on the basis of congressmen and generals speaking up, with nobody consulting Afghan elders. One of the elders’ messages is we don’t need firepower, we need brainpower. They want schools, health facilities, but not necessarily more physical troops.”
For the cost of deploying one soldier for one year, it is possible to build about 20 schools.
Another program that is enjoying great success in undermining the Taliban is the National Solidarity Program, or N.S.P., which helps villages build projects that they choose — typically schools, clinics, irrigation projects, bridges. This is widely regarded as one of the most successful and least corrupt initiatives in Afghanistan.
“It’s a terrific program,” said George Rupp, the president of the International Rescue Committee. “But it’s underfunded. And it takes very little: for the cost of one U.S. soldier for a year, you could have the N.S.P. in 20 more villages.”
These kinds of projects — including girls’ schools — are often possible even in Taliban areas. One aid group says that the Taliban allowed it to build a girls’ school as long as the teachers were women and as long as the textbooks did not include photos of President Hamid Karzai. And the Taliban usually don’t mess with projects that have strong local support. (That’s why they haven’t burned any of Mr. Mortenson’s schools.)
America’s military spending in Afghanistan alone next year will now exceed the entire official military budget of every other country in the world.
Over time, education has been the single greatest force to stabilize societies. It’s no magic bullet, but it reduces birth rates, raises living standards and subdues civil conflict and terrorism. That’s why as a candidate Mr. Obama proposed a $2 billion global education fund — a promise he seems to have forgot.
My hunch is that if Mr. Obama wants success in Afghanistan, he would be far better off with 30,000 more schools than 30,000 more troops. Instead, he’s embarking on a buildup that may become an albatross on his presidency.

From The Sunday London Times
Cool cat Barack Obama must count on his nine lives
Is the aloof president at risk of alienating today’s emotional US?
Andrew Sullivan
If you were to come up with a very short phrase summing up Barack Obama’s core identity, you could do a lot worse than the rat pack-era term “cool cat”. The coolness is now legendary: the poise during every political earthquake in the campaign, the steady willingness not to take the Clinton bait, the refusal even to raise an eyebrow at the Palin circus and that elegant lope as he walks into a state dinner.
The writer Christopher Hitchens has long seen Obama as essentially feline in his manner: “Does not the very mien of our new president suggest something lithe and laid-back, agile but rested, cool but not too cool? I think it might be rather nice to have a feline for president, even if only after enduring so many dogs. The metaphor also puts us in mind of a useful cliché: that cats have nine lives and an ability to land noiselessly and painlessly on their feet.”
Obama also has the emotional distance of many cats — a self-sufficiency that limits the kind of bond you might feel with him. It’s not the Ronald Reagan alien-like distance from other humans, even his own children — which was just weird. It’s not awkward George Bush Sr Waspiness. It is, rather, a self-possession from which one draws enormous comfort — thank God he’s not so obviously out of his depth like his predecessor — and that provokes sudden spasms of resentment: what makes him so bloody above-it-all anyway?
This is especially notable in a period such as today when America is roiling with emotion. Unemployment continues to rise and unofficially is close to 17%; the anger of rural white America in the face of global change is hard to miss on any cable news channel; the left that helped Obama to gain office is furious that Guantanamo is still open, that gay rights are left on the shelf, that the banking sector has so far been coddled, not clobbered, and that health reform is headed back to the policy centre. With large swathes of the country “going rogue”, can a president with preternatural calm resonate? Can he bring the people with him?
This debate already happened in 2008. The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, for example, has always seen Obama as a bit of a cold fish, aloof, too unwilling to punch back, too arrogant to explain himself too much. Dowd worried that in the campaign the Clintons brought more raw human emotion to the trail and Obama often seemed to coast too cockily until he had to rescue himself.
In the campaign Dowd was nearly right (Obama did let the Clintons get back off the mat too many times), but in the end wrong (look who got elected). But in campaign mode, Obama could harness all the emotion behind him for change. In government? He comes off as some kind of high Bismarckian Tory at times — calculating and cold.
You see this in the almost clinical way Obama has played the politics of taking on George Bush Jr’s interrogation, detention and rendition policies. The way in which two key White House appointees, Greg Craig and Phil Carter, have been dispatched in a matter of weeks for insisting that Obama live up to his campaign promises on accountability for past torture is chilling in its raw calculation. Ditto Obama’s disciplined refusal to act on gay rights any time soon — and his rhetorical restraint during Iran’s green revolution. The determination to figure out the best and most detailed way forward in Afghanistan, even during a war in which allies are waiting and enemies are watching, and to take his time ... well, this is also a sign that we are dealing with one very, very cool character.
The paradox is: in today’s populist, emotional climate, coolness can be eclipsed in the political drama and thereby rendered moot. In many ways Sarah Palin is the extreme counter-example. She plays a short game. She deploys no substantive policy content and no interest whatever in actual government. But she channels pure emotion, identity and rage very effectively in a country where unemployment is soaring. As such, she is a political nightmare, someone whom most Americans would never entrust with actual responsibility, but a cultural phenomenon who thereby wields political power.
Will this kind of heat — however irrational, however impulsive — overwhelm the cool emanating from the White House in this period of discontent? Not should it — but will it? That is the question.
In all this, Obama reminds me of Bush Sr in government and of Reagan in campaigning. It’s a dream combo in many ways — in theory. Whether it can work out in practice at this emotional and turbulent moment in American history is another question.
He has stayed aloof most of the time in the health insurance debate, while his opponents unleashed an emotional tsunami. He still hasn’t taken a specific position on several key elements in the bill — which won’t be passed, if at all, until next year. He has refrained from all but the smallest expressions of populism, even as his more partisan supporters want to see investment bankers’ heads placed on spikes above Wall Street’s pillars. He seems to have little human ego at stake as he fails to get headline-dominating concessions in diplomatic summits. What matters to him appears to be long-term gains and structural shifts — not short-term feelings.
Will this sell in troubled America? Do Americans need a more emotive, empathetic figure? Franklin D Roosevelt was aloof, but he let rip some populist rants every now and again and his fireside chats helped to forge an emotional bond with Americans. Is Obama’s coolness responsible for his approval ratings falling back to normal levels?
My own sense is that in many ways the drama and anxieties of the first decade of this century make public anger and fear more politically potent — but also generate a yearning for calm and stability at the centre. Sixteen years of Clinton family melodrama and Bush global brinkmanship have led Americans to appreciate a certain cerebral calculation in the White House. No Drama Obama remains something of a relief. And that’s especially true as America’s news media continue to devolve into more and more populist partisanship.
In other words, he’s got this. His biggest risk is if the economy turns south a second time next year and he has to pick between a second unpopular stimulus and soaring debt, or no second stimulus and soaring debt and unemployment anyway. At that point no president could easily survive — unless the hot-headed populist opposition seems too risky an option. His lowest risk is that his own party will turn on him the way the Republicans turned on the first Bush, another aloof president doing the right, calm, long-term things in too tempestuous and short attention span a time.
I doubt the Democrats will turn on him the way the GOP once did with the first Bush. Obama has a much stronger tie to his own party than Bush Sr had with his. His race makes anger a cultural liability — and is anyway alien to him. His authority in his own party dwarfs Bush Sr’s in his — Obama won an election while Bush inherited his from Reagan. Obama’s best cool-cat model should be John F Kennedy — the Kennedy whose long-term political prospects we never got to test because he was taken from us so soon.
Obama? I pray for his safety daily — and not just because I pray for every president’s safety. But because I remain fascinated by the enormous implications if, in the long run, this cat lands on his feet.
www.andrewsullivan.com

From The Sunday London Times
Beware the powerful fantasy world of Sarah Palin, Warrior Princess
The US vice-presidential candidate’s memoir mocks the truth, but she remains a possible future American leader
Andrew Sullivan
What can one say about one of the most compelling and bizarre works of “non-fiction” on the market, Going Rogue by Sarah Palin?
I have to say it stymies me somewhat. Treating it as some kind of factual narrative to check (as I began to), or comparing its version of events with her previous versions of the same events (as I have), and comparing all those versions with what we know is empirical reality, is a dizzying task. The lies and truths and half-truths and the facts and non-facts are all blurred together in a pious purée of such ghastly self-serving prose that, in the end, the book can really be read only as some kind of chapter in a cheap 19th-century edition of Lives of the Saints.
It is a religious book, full of myths and parables. And Sarah is fast becoming a religious icon of sorts for what is now the Republican base. On the first day of her tour, she dragged her infant with Down’s syndrome everywhere she went, even waving his hand to the crowds at one point as his little head swung back and forth. Here is the Madonna with child and a child that is an emblem of everything those who oppose abortion believe in.
Yet the book is also crafted politically, with every single detail of the narrative honed carefully for specific constituencies. The pro-life base is nurtured; various Republican allies are flattered; former sparring partners in the McCain campaign are lacerated; the evil liberal media are portrayed as a pack of ravenous hounds (even though they were unable to get an open press conference from her in the entire campaign, a fact unique in modern American political history).
It is also some kind of manifesto — but not in the usual sense of a collection of policy proposals. It is a manifesto for a certain identity — the heartland religious fundamentalist who is bewildered and angry at the world America no longer controls, at the debt and government that now dominate and at the liberal elites they hold responsible (even though the Republicans have been in power for a generation). This image is not, of course, made up out of whole cloth. Palin is indeed a feisty Alaskan and a genuine triumph of red-state feminism. But her narrative is embellished and embroidered to such an extent, it resembles not so much a memoir as a work of magical realism.
If you treat it as a factual narrative you will soon falter. Among the few early reactions were those of Nicolle Wallace — a McCain campaign staffer — who said of one passage: “It is pure fiction. No such discussion took place.” A reporter Palin says targeted her daughter Piper after a press conference was never at the press conference cited. Palin’s claim that she was personally billed $50,000 for vetting is point blank denied by the McCain campaign. Palin’s account of her record in the Exxon Valdez lawsuit was described last week by the chief lawyer for the case as “the most cockamamie bullshit”. I could go on. None of this is particularly surprising. Palin has a long and documented record of saying things that are empirically untrue but asserting them as if her own imagination is the only source of objective reality.
So you simply read the book as if it is fiction and enjoy it. Or you read it as non-fiction and believe that Palin is a magical mythical figure who defies the laws of time and space and normal human nature.
Take one story that every mother will relate to: the drama of her delivery of her fifth child, Trig. She tells us that at eight months pregnant with a child she knew had Down’s syndrome and would need special care at birth, she got on a plane from Alaska to Dallas, Texas, to attend an energy conference. Most airlines won’t allow this but Alaska Airlines did. Palin then tells us that at 4am on her first night in Dallas, “a strange sensation low in my belly woke me and I sat up straight in bed”. In an interview she gave with the Anchorage Daily News just after Trig’s birth, she confirmed that she had amniotic fluid leaking at that point.
So she was a mother eight months pregnant with a special-needs child thousands of miles from home. She wakes up in the middle of the night with contractions and amniotic leakage and she tells her husband she doesn’t want to call her doctor because it would wake her up at 1am. And she is the sitting governor of a state and her doctor is a close personal friend. Not only that, but she gives the speech as planned in the afternoon, during which she makes a rather good joke. She then tells us what happens next: “Big laughs. More contractions.”
After the speech, does she then go to a local hospital to get checked out? Nah. She gets on two separate aeroplanes all the way back to Alaska, with a stopover in Seattle, because she is determined to have the child in her home town and she just knows that the contractions and amniotic leakage are not signs of imminent delivery. She has had four previous kids so she has experience. “I still had plenty of time ... It was a calm, relatively restful flight home,” she explains of the next 15 hours.
You might imagine that an airline would have some qualms about letting a woman in some sort of labour at eight months, and pregnant with a Down’s syndrome child, get on a long transcontinental flight. What if the baby were born in mid-flight? The plane would have to be diverted. What if something happened to the baby? The airline could be liable. Palin never told the flight attendants. Couldn’t they tell, one might innocently ask. In the Anchorage Daily News story about the birth, Alaska Airlines said: “The stage of her pregnancy was not apparent by observation. She did not show any signs of distress.” Palin makes Xena, the warrior princess, seem fragile.
It is this image of a frontierswoman, capable of almost anything, fiercely independent, fathomlessly brave, totally unflappable, driven and blessed by faith in God, resisting the evil cynicism and hatred of the eastern elites, ambushed by hostile interviewers, persecuted by her godless enemies and carrying on as an “iron lady” of Alaskan dimensions, that makes her such a powerful cultural and political icon. Her physical beauty doesn’t hurt either.
That is why, despite the fact that she quit the only key political office she had held in her first term for no good reason, she remains a viable candidate for the next presidential election. In a steep recession, with intractable wars abroad, with unemployment rising and paranoia deepening, Palin knows America wants a spiritual and cultural saviour. And God has chosen her.
www.andrewsullivan.com