Ignorant America
by Tunku Varadarajan The Daily Beast
How is it possible that a fifth of this country believes Obama is Muslim, without any evidence?
I have just returned from London, which I pronounce to be a saner city, by far, than New York. And the one question I was asked repeatedly—by friends, by cabbies, even by complete strangers seated next to me at a cricket match—was how on earth a fifth of all Americans could maintain, in the absence of any respectable evidence to support their belief, that Barack Obama is Muslim. (The Pew poll that uncovered this fevered, adamant state of mind made quite a splash in Britain, where the natives rather enjoy feeling superior to Americans.)

The fact that this mind-boggling disconnect between perception and reality does not worry Obama himself is proof, perhaps, of his sang-froid, and maybe of a certain weary resignation. On a broader canvas, the fact that the disconnect exists at all suggests that something is very wrong with America's political discourse—and certainly on its fringes. It suggests ignorance, of course, but a very provocative, toxic ignorance, one in which there is an imperviousness to facts in the pursuit of political warfare. This is not dumbness, or denseness, or illiteracy, but belligerent unenlightenment.

But what does all this stem from? And is the explanation for it as simple as David Brooks suggests, in pinning the blame on "mental flabbiness" and a national "metacognition deficit"? And how is the Obama-is-a-Muslim brand of ignorance different from the other sorts of disconnects between perception and reality that are rife in American society, not merely in politics, but in our approaches to science, culture, history and business?

In order to make some sense of these questions, I undertook a Taxonomy of American Ignorance and Misperceptions. The exercise is impressionistic and personal, one with which many readers will, doubtless, take issue. It is intended, largely, to provoke debate.

Political bias can be a fleeting sickness; profound ignorance, on the other hand, can be incurable.

1. Baseless Belief as Confirmation of Bias

In a letter to The New York Times in response to the Brooks piece, Scott O. Lilienfield, a psychology professor at Emory, wrote that much of our political discourse is marked by "rampant confirmation bias," in which people "deny, dismiss, and distort evidence" that is not consistent with their beliefs. The fifth of Americans who hold that Obama is Muslim are unquestionably those for whom the president can do no right. Casting him as a Muslim is a convenient—and provocative—form of devaluation in a society which is fearful of Muslims in general. "Muslimers"—if I may put it that way—are of the same ilk as "birthers," those who maintain (again, without a shred of evidence) that Obama was not born in the United States, rendering him ineligible for the White House. (Obama's Muslimization is a way to render him ineligible, culturally, to be an American president.)

"Truthers" are the left-wing counterparts of these cohorts on the right, holding—again, in the face of all evidence and common sense—that the United States government was itself the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. (Twenty-two percent of Americans believe that George W. Bush knew about the attacks in advance; and since there is likely to be little or no overlap between these Americans and those 18 percent who think Obama is Muslim, we have a frightening 40 percent who subscribe to a demonstrably cockamamie belief.)

Less malign than these examples, but equally bereft of fact, are the assertions that Tim Geithner worked for Goldman Sachs; and that Obama signed the Troubled Assets Relief Program into law. In the case of the latter, nearly half of all Americans think TARP was Obama's, not Bush's, law, a baseless projection on to Obama of a populist rage against bailouts. Equally populist (and baseless) is the ascription to Geithner of a Goldman identity: Goldman has, in many ways, become the bête noire in a wider disaffection with Wall Street; and the "Goldmanization" of Geithner is the economistic version of the "Muslimization" of Obama.

2. Subjective Belief as Confirmation of Bias

This category is related to the first, in that it operates as a propulsor of bias; but it is also different in significant ways. Certainly, it is a more respectable state of mind, in that it is based on an interpretation—and not a rejection—of a set of facts. It is also more in the nature of misperception and interpretive crudity, rather than ignorance. Examples of this category would be the frequently expressed view that George W. Bush is (or was, as president) an "idiot," usually due to—as this piece by Joe Scarborough asserts—his "smackdowns with the English language." Assertions of these kinds are willfully blind to Bush's perfectly good academic record, and to the fact that he was elected as president not once, but twice, by the American people. Were tens of millions of voting Americans missing something that only Scarborough (and the like) could see? The same is true for the belief that Joe Biden is a "dope," usually expressed by opponents on the right who are reacting to a vice-presidential "gaffe" or two, but sometimes subscribed to by liberals as well, as in this editorial from the New York Daily News.

3. Subjective Perception in Need of a Reality Check

Here we branch out into fields other than politics. Take the growing perception that India is a superpower. The reality: The country can barely organize the Commonwealth Games, a podunk sporting event that has no business to exist anymore. Or DDT, anathematized by greens and environmentalists ever since Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, way back in 1962, in which she linked the pesticide to the deaths of birds. The reality: It may be one of the world's greatest public-health success stories.

The business world provides us with numerous examples of beliefs that are as widespread as they are injudicious, or misinformed. To take but a few: that Goldman executives are overpaid; that H-P is a great company; that bonds are safe; and that Google's Eric Schmidt is a genius.

Goldman rakes in a vast amount, that is true. But they actually do something for the pay. Everyone forgets that they offer a valuable function for clients, providing access to capital to the stock and bond market. This involves sales and trading, and all manner of international relations. They raise billions and billions and take a 2 to 5 percent piece as a fee. Everyone thinks they just sit around in Armani suits and collect money, which is nonsense. Theirs is a high-stress milieu, which requires a level of skill and experience very few have to offer. As for H-P, it was a great company, perfecting calculators and instruments; but with PCs, they are just a barrier between customers and Microsoft. (They do have an excellent printer business, though, making money selling ink at rates much higher than gasoline.)

Are bonds safe, as perceptions hold? A 10-year Treasury bond currently pays or yields just about 2.5 percent. People are buying them or barreling into bond funds because most believe that Treasuries are safe: Heck, they're backed by the U.S. government! But if inflation starts to rise, rates could go up. Bond values have an inverse rate with their yield: If rates rise to 3.5 percent, those 2.5 percent-yielding bonds drop in value (because folks can buy new ones that pay 3.5 percent, so the 2.5 percent yielding ones are worth less).

And Schmidt? To get a sense of his judgment: While at Sun Microsystems, he was the executive who fought against a project known as Oak, which later became known as Java, which is a major language of the entire Internet—and which Oracle (who bought Sun) is suing the pants off Google for using without paying enough for it.

4. Sheer, Unvarnished Ignorance

This last category is the least complex, but arguably the most depressing. It deals with simple ignorance and benightedness, an incompleteness of education, a widespread failure to absorb knowledge. Every country has a percentage of people who do not know the answer to basic questions, and in some countries—particularly those in the Third World, where education is not widely available—the percentage will be very high. In America, however, there is a stubborn strain of vacuous unawareness that reflects no credit on American society. How to digest the fact that 24 percent of Americans do not know who their country won its independence from? Or that only 40 percent of Americans believe in evolution?

On reflection, I am less worried by the fact that a fifth of the inhabitants of this great country believe that Obama is Muslim than by the fact that 60 percent of them are unwilling, or unable, to accept the scientific basis of evolution. I suspect that Obama, too—for all his personal angst over the Muslim aspersion—will be with squarely with me on this one. Political bias can be a fleeting sickness; profound ignorance, on the other hand, can be incurable.

American Account: There is still hope for a robust recovery
The federal deficit remains untamed, but with jobs being created and share prices unchanged the US economy could bounce back.

Irwin Stelzer London Times
The American economy is in serious trouble, and the remaining weapons we have to prevent a double dip are few indeed. We will try to avoid a long period of deflation of the sort that doomed Japan to a lost decade, but are not confident we can. That’s a free translation of what the Federal Reserve Board’s monetary policy committee said after last week’s meeting.
Of course, central bankers are not so blunt. The Fed’s committee actually said that “the pace of recovery in output and employment has slowed in recent months”.
The economy “remains constrained by high unemployment, modest income growth, lower housing wealth, and tight credit . . . housing starts remain at a depressed level. Bank lending has continued to contract”.
The Fed could have mentioned:
•Revised economic data that show the recent recession to have been the worst of the post-war years;
•The slowdown in economic activity in China;
•The absence of any long-term plan to rein in the deficit;
•The possibility of a “shock” to the world banking system if Greece defaults on its sovereign debt as seems increasingly likely;
•The negative effect of the rise in healthcare and, soon, energy costs;
•The 2.6% decline in already depressed pending home sales in June, despite record low mortgage rates;
•The 1.2% decline in factory sales, indicating that the manufacturing recovery might be stalling;
•The rise in inventories of durable goods;
•The widest trade deficit since October 2008;
•The increasing number of workers unemployed for so long that their skills are atrophying.
The worse news is that the bad news cited above is only the tip of the iceberg: the lethal out-of-sight 90% is a more dangerous threat to the good ship Robust Recovery.

Let’s start with the state of the nation’s finances. The federal deficit remains untamed, at 10% of GDP, topping the decade’s pre-Obama high of 3.5% in 2004. Given the slowing of the recovery, a reasonable argument can be made that continued spending is needed, but not unless it is combined with a medium-term plan for bringing the deficit under control. No such plan is on the horizon, in part because “kicking the can down the road” — leaving every problem to the next generation of politicians — has become a feature of American political life.
The Fed has not really emptied its quiver, even with interest rates in effect at zero The second longer-term problem is the Obama-created imbalance between the private sector that creates wealth and the public sector that depends on it. A recent analysis by USA Today, based on government compensation data, shows that federal government employees earn, on average, twice as much as private-sector workers.
That situation was exacerbated last week when Congress decided to spend $26 billion to prevent lay-offs of teachers and other state employees, partly paying for this state bailout with higher taxes on companies doing business overseas.
Then there is the perverse incentive created by a badly structured tax system.
A small-business owner in New Jersey took to the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal to point out that it costs him $74,000 to pay an employee $59,000 a year, when taxes and benefits are factored in. But when the employee pays her taxes, she is left with only $44,000. So the gap between his cost of hiring and her incentive to work is substantial. Not a prescription for full employment.
Still, all is not lost. Most economists believe the economy will not drop into double-dip territory. Corporate earnings are at the record highs reached before the downturn. Companies have a $2 trillion hoard that they will soon have to spend or continue the emerging trend of increasing dividends, something that corpocrats are always reluctant to do. Business spending on equipment and software is increasing at an inflation- adjusted annual rate of more than 20%, the most rapid since the latter part of the 1990s, far outstripping the rate of upturn that characterised past recessions.
Moreover, the Fed has not really emptied its quiver, even with interest rates in effect at zero. Last week it decided to stop shrinking its portfolio and instead to reinvest cash coming from maturing mortgages into Treasury IOUs, keeping long-term interest rates low to encourage businesses to borrow and invest. If necessary, the Fed can resume money creation, known as quantitative easing (QE), leading pundits to joke that Fed chairman Ben Bernanke might decide to captain the QE2.
Then there is fiscal policy. A new Congress will be in place next year and is likely to have more deficit hawks than the existing bunch. If the election returns do follow the polls, the proba- bility of a saner federal fiscal policy will increase, especially if the presidential deficit-reduction commission can come up with suggestions for a politically acceptable mix of tax increases and spending cuts, perhaps using the Cameron-Osborne model of roughly £4 of spending cuts for every £1 of tax increases as a guide.
All of which brings me to share prices. Last week’s Fed confession that the economy was not moving along at the pace it had expected rattled markets. Take heart: after dropping about 3% on the day after the Fed’s announcement, the Standard & Poor’s index of 500 stocks hit 1,093, the level that prevailed at the close of business last year, before ending the week at 1,079. For investors, though not for in-and-out traders, there has been much ado about very little: the tailwinds provided by good profits have been offset by the headwinds created by negative economic reports.

In the end, with the fuss created by the Fed report behind us, a longer-than-one-week look shows that jobs are indeed being created in the private sector, share prices are relatively unchanged, retail sales are sluggish but nevertheless up a bit, profits are ample, and businesses have started to reinvest. The American economy just might once again prove to be the engine that could.

Irwin Stelzer is a business adviser and director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute

Feel the love, Hitch — it will survive you

Andrew Sullivan London Times
A believer salutes the refusal of cancer-stricken British-born controversialist Christopher Hitchens to renounce his atheism
"I’m dying,” my longtime friend Christopher Hitchens replied to the ubiquitous American question, “How are you doing?” Hitchens followed up with the necessary caveat, “We all are.”
Then, in the interview earlier this month, my fellow British-born controversialist addressed the question that will always dog a famously public atheist as he faces extinction: would he have a deathbed conversion? Hitchens replied with admirable clarity that impending death did not affect his unbelief one iota.
In fact, he insisted we should discount in advance any rumours in that regard. If he were to turn to the divine at the hour of his death, it could only be because sickness or dementia or drugs had caused him to lose his mind. For Christopher, in the end, is a believer in something — in reason, as the defining quality of what it is to be fully human.
I’ve known and loved Christopher for more than two decades. For me, his illness is not a moment for debate but for grief. But Hitch rarely fails to turn an experience into a column, so allow me to join in. The great divide between us was not my love of Ronald Reagan and his contempt for him, or my journey away from the American right and his drift towards some parts of it. It was my faith and his unbelief.
He teases me mercilessly about it and we have spent some long evenings talking of it. All I can say is that his composure and, if he would pardon the word, grace in the teeth of cancer are as great an advertisement for atheism as I can imagine. If I were persuadable, I would be persuaded.
I feel a little about this the way James Boswell felt about David Hume when he, too, was in the presence of the visibly dying sceptic. Hume remained of the faith but more than a little wobbly. “I asked him if it was not possible that there might be a future state,” Boswell wrote. “He answered that it was possible that a piece of coal put upon the fire would not burn; and he added that it was a most unreasonable fancy that we should exist for ever.”
The human being, for good and ill, is more than reason. Reason must govern us, but it cannot explain us How can one not respect that kind of integrity to the end? Damon Linker, the brilliant young American writer, also thought of Primo Levi’s recollection of a cathartic moment in a concentration camp. In October 1944, Levi wrote, “naked and compressed among my naked companions with my personal index card in hand, I was waiting to file past the ‘commission’ that with one glance would decide whether I should go immediately into the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. For one instance I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then, despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed; one does not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing”.
Linker notes how this is the real divide between those of us with religious faith and those without it. It is really about the limits of reason, whether it defines us as human or whether, in the end, as Pascal had it, we must press past reason to reach the ultimate truth. A Christian, Linker wrote, “believes that the experience of suffering discloses essential truths that cannot be discovered or known in any other way. What are these truths? That we are fundamentally weak and needy creatures. That we are anxious animals, longing for someone or something to soothe us, to protect us from and relieve us of our worries”.
Christianity’s radical claim is that it is in suffering alone that we approach our defining condition, mortality, just as Jesus’s intense suffering on the cross makes sense only as an act of God’s solidarity with us in this mortal, existential panic. The position you take on this cannot be reduced to an argument. It is much deeper than that. It connects to the great question of theodicy: how can an omnipotent God allow such suffering?
I have some experience of this. In my late twenties I watched one of my closest friends die of Aids. There was one night when we lay on his sickbed together, his once-strong muscular body now a fragile, feverish coil of bones. I asked him — because I knew no one else would and I was his only HIV-positive friend — what he thought was coming. He said he saw it as a great black nothingness coming towards him. All I could do was hold him. What on earth could I possibly say?
And yet I do not believe it. I revere reason and respect atheism. (And I think the writer who most taught me about the need for mutual respect between atheists and believers was an atheist, Albert Camus.)
Hitch is dying as he lives — with integrity and passion. And since we all die, in the end, alone it is an impertinence even to enter this zone of another’s last things. But for me the human being, for good and ill, is more than reason. Reason must govern us, but it cannot explain us. We live alone in a universe so vaster than we are and with an expiration date that defies our own attempt to understand it. We are wired to fear death and suffering — and in the spiritual transcendence of death and suffering we exercise our greatest humanity.
The moments I have felt closest to God have been when I have been stripped of every security, the moments when I have felt no human love, known no safe home, witnessed unspeakable cruelty — and was rescued by nothing but His ineffable, boundless and yet intimate caritas.
This is not an argument, I know. It can easily be dismissed as wish fulfilment. All I can say is: this is not how I experienced these moments. They were real. In suffering I have felt and known God reach into my life and grab me by the scruff of my neck and shake me with the brusque affection of a father’s compassion.
I know Christopher feels none of this, has never felt any of this — which puzzles but does not vex me. Friendship, in the end, is about the lack of any desire to change another person. It is about loving him as he is. And in that love there is the only human redemption and, in my view, the true intimation of the divine.
That love, I feel sure, will survive him. And me. For it is connected to something greater than both of us.

Attacking Social Security

By PAUL KRUGMAN NY TIMES
Social Security turned 75 last week. It should have been a joyous occasion, a time to celebrate a program that has brought dignity and decency to the lives of older Americans.
But the program is under attack, with some Democrats as well as nearly all Republicans joining the assault. Rumor has it that President Obama’s deficit commission may call for deep benefit cuts, in particular a sharp rise in the retirement age.
Social Security’s attackers claim that they’re concerned about the program’s financial future. But their math doesn’t add up, and their hostility isn’t really about dollars and cents. Instead, it’s about ideology and posturing. And underneath it all is ignorance of or indifference to the realities of life for many Americans.
About that math: Legally, Social Security has its own, dedicated funding, via the payroll tax (“FICA” on your pay statement). But it’s also part of the broader federal budget. This dual accounting means that there are two ways Social Security could face financial problems. First, that dedicated funding could prove inadequate, forcing the program either to cut benefits or to turn to Congress for aid. Second, Social Security costs could prove unsupportable for the federal budget as a whole.
But neither of these potential problems is a clear and present danger. Social Security has been running surpluses for the last quarter-century, banking those surpluses in a special account, the so-called trust fund. The program won’t have to turn to Congress for help or cut benefits until or unless the trust fund is exhausted, which the program’s actuaries don’t expect to happen until 2037 — and there’s a significant chance, according to their estimates, that that day will never come.
Meanwhile, an aging population will eventually (over the course of the next 20 years) cause the cost of paying Social Security benefits to rise from its current 4.8 percent of G.D.P. to about 6 percent of G.D.P. To give you some perspective, that’s a significantly smaller increase than the rise in defense spending since 2001, which Washington certainly didn’t consider a crisis, or even a reason to rethink some of the Bush tax cuts.
So where do claims of crisis come from? To a large extent they rely on bad-faith accounting. In particular, they rely on an exercise in three-card monte in which the surpluses Social Security has been running for a quarter-century don’t count — because hey, the program doesn’t have any independent existence; it’s just part of the general federal budget — while future Social Security deficits are unacceptable — because hey, the program has to stand on its own.
It would be easy to dismiss this bait-and-switch as obvious nonsense, except for one thing: many influential people — including Alan Simpson, co-chairman of the president’s deficit commission — are peddling this nonsense.
And having invented a crisis, what do Social Security’s attackers want to do? They don’t propose cutting benefits to current retirees; invariably the plan is, instead, to cut benefits many years in the future. So think about it this way: In order to avoid the possibility of future benefit cuts, we must cut future benefits. O.K.
What’s really going on here? Conservatives hate Social Security for ideological reasons: its success undermines their claim that government is always the problem, never the solution. But they receive crucial support from Washington insiders, for whom a declared willingness to cut Social Security has long served as a badge of fiscal seriousness, never mind the arithmetic.
And neither wing of the anti-Social-Security coalition seems to know or care about the hardship its favorite proposals would cause.
The currently fashionable idea of raising the retirement age even more than it will rise under existing law — it has already gone from 65 to 66, it’s scheduled to rise to 67, but now some are proposing that it go to 70 — is usually justified with assertions that life expectancy has risen, so people can easily work later into life. But that’s only true for affluent, white-collar workers — the people who need Social Security least.
I’m not just talking about the fact that it’s a lot easier to imagine working until you’re 70 if you have a comfortable office job than if you’re engaged in manual labor. America is becoming an increasingly unequal society — and the growing disparities extend to matters of life and death. Life expectancy at age 65 has risen a lot at the top of the income distribution, but much less for lower-income workers. And remember, the retirement age is already scheduled to rise under current law.
So let’s beat back this unnecessary, unfair and — let’s not mince words — cruel attack on working Americans. Big cuts in Social Security should not be on the table.

Tribal leaders turn against the Taleban after year-long negotiations
Hardline Taleban fighters have made Sangin the most dangerous spot in Afghanistan but they have lost the initiative in recent weeks, British commanders say
Veronique de Viguerie London Times

British commanders believe that they are close to achieving a significant tribal uprising against the Taleban that could lead to the reintegration of hundreds of insurgents fighting around Sangin, the most dangerous place in Afghanistan.
Officials have spent more than a year in delicate negotiation with tribal groups in and around the town in central Helmand where more than a hundred British soldiers have been killed.
The number of violent incidents in Sangin has fallen by about 80 per cent in the past month. British commanders believe that this is partly the result of tribal leaders delivering on a promise to restrain tribal elements aligned with the Taleban and to expel the insurgents.
“We have been pushing for this for 12 months,” Colonel Paul James, commander of 40 Commando battlegroup in Sangin, said. “They have responded positively. They are certainly not fighting us.”
A surge of Nato forces, with the arrival of a US Marine Corps battalion that has blocked infiltration routes into Sangin, has also been important.
Violence had started to decline before Western and Afghan forces mounted a series of joint offensives around Sangin. Codenamed Operation Sangin Sunrise, they were designed to expel hardline “out of area” Taleban.
Colonel James did not believe that the gains were temporary. “Having a battalion of US Marine corps, on top of a UK Commando battalion, is frankly decisive,” he said. He added that local defence initiatives with the tribes were expected to offset the subsequent reduction in forces.
From as many as 30 attacks a day at the end of June there are now fewer than half a dozen attacks daily. On July 29 there were no incidents. “I am wary of declaring success but we have certainly turned a corner,” Colonel James said.
Brigadier Richard Felton, the commander of Task Force Helmand, described the apparent tribal shift as promising but said: “Like a lot of things in Afghanistan it doesn’t mean they will definitely deliver.”
When an attempted uprising near Sangin in 2007 against the Taleban failed, British forces were blamed for not offering support. Many rebellion leaders were killed or forced to flee.
“I don’t think it was recognised last time as an opportunity. I don’t think Isaf was in a position to support it. I think that opportunity exists again,” Colonel James said.
British officials believe that a respected and notably uncorrupt new district Governor in Sangin, Mohammad Sharif, has been a significant factor in changing the dynamics in the area. Daoud Ahmadi, a spokesman for the Helmand governor, said: “Some of the tribes around Sangin have turned back from the Taleban and begun supporting the Government.”
Mr Ahmadi said that several factors had contributed to the shift. One was the replacement of government officials in Sangin after a ten-day consultation with tribal leaders; another was a growing revulsion with the Taleban’s cruelty, such as the hanging in June of a seven-year-old child for allegedly spying for Western forces.
The Times spoke to tribal sources inside Sangin who appeared to confirm the shift. One 60-year-old tribal elder, who cannot be identified, said: “Before, tribes gave space to the Taleban, gave food, support in the night. Now they are not letting them into the irrigated areas [around Sangin].”
The man also mentioned the hanging as an event that had provoked the backlash against the insurgents. “People believe now that the Government will support us. If there is peace they will start reconstruction.”
Another tribal elder said: “Security has become better. It was a very good idea to sack the old officials in Sangin. I can’t say all the people believe in the Government but some people start to believe a little

Putin’s RussiaRussia shows worrying signs of political degeneration rather than modernising
Times of London
The most damaging criticism of Sir John Major as Prime Minister was that he was in office but not in power. The same could be said of President Medvedev of Russia. Since taking office two years ago, he has lived in the long shadow cast by Vladimir Putin, his predecessor. Now, in this summer’s raging fires, it is Mr Putin, adopting his favourite role as national action man, who is offering to save the country, while Mr Medvedev remains tamely in the Kremlin.
Mr Putin accepted the apparent demotion to Prime Minister in 2008, to observe the limit of two terms in office, preserving the veneer of democracy. To have resisted would have made it impossible to claim any respect for the constitution. But Mr Putin has retained the influence he wielded in two four-year terms as head of state. There is no obstacle to his returning to the presidency at the 2012 election for a further two terms. The danger is that he will use a future spell as President to erode Russia’s democracy even more.
Russia’s political institutions have shallow roots. They have been created in the two decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and are now being moulded to fit an overbearing personality. It is no surprise that Mr Putin preferred Mr Medvedev as his successor as President. Many jokes, in Moscow and Washington, portray Mr Medvedev as no more than a puppet.
That is not entirely fair. Mr Medvedev has talked the talk of a liberal, and created political space in which it is possible to argue for modernisation and diversification away from the oil and gas industries. But he is not fully in charge of policy and has not been able to advance real reform. He appears to have conceded that, in his recent announcement that he does not wish to run against Mr Putin for the presidency in 2012.
Mr Putin has given his undeclared campaign impetus with a showy visit to the Ryazan region, devastated by forest fires, where he took the controls of a plane to douse flames. In a now-established feature of the Russian summer, when he poses against assorted backdrops as a symbol of national manliness, he had himself pictured at a bikers’ convention astride a motorcycle in an open-necked black shirt, mirror sunglasses (and no helmet).
He knows his appeal. There is popular pressure for harsh action against terrorists; suicide attacks on Moscow’s metro in March killed 38 people. There is scepticism that Europe has much to offer Russia’s ailing economy. The once-flourishing middle class, the basis of hopes for the spread of liberal values, is now shrunken and quiet.
Mr Putin calls himself a democrat. But he has shown that he prefers control. He curbed the powers of the Federation Council, the upper house of parliament, and of regional governments. Newspapers and broadcasters have moved into the hands of his allies. The shooting of Anna Polikovskaya, a journalist who exposed official corruption, remains unsolved. The horrific murder in London of Alexander Litvinenko, a critic of Mr Putin, has been treated with insouciance by the legal system. His military intrusion into Georgia, meddling in the Ukraine, encouragement of Iran’s nuclear deception and his opening to Hamas have all stymied Western efforts to resolve conflict.
Mr Medvedev has two years remaining in office to demonstrate that he is his own man. Russia’s democratic credentials will depend on it.

Sea Island Co. to file Chapter 11, sell properties

By J. Scott Trubey and Dan Chapman Atlanta Journal Constitution
A Golden Era Ends!
Sea Island Co., operator of the famed Georgia coastal resort since the 1920s, will file for bankruptcy protection today and announce a deal to sell most of its assets, according to the company’s top executive.
The buyers are investment firms Oaktree Capital Management, of Los Angeles, and Avenue Capital Group, of New York, Sea Island Chairman Bill Jones III said in an e-mail late Tuesday to residents of the resort’s gated community.
Jones sent the e-mail shortly after The Wall Street Journal first published news of the impending sale and bankruptcy filing on its website.
A partnership formed by funds run by Oaktree and Avenue will pay a bargain-basement price of $197.5 million if the deal is approved in the bankruptcy process, a person familiar with the deal told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Sea Island Co. includes The Cloister at Sea Island and the Lodge at St. Simons, along with residential and golf properties. For most of its history the resort near Brunswick has been a favored vacation spot among affluent southerners, including many from metro Atlanta, along with occasional celebrities.
The sell-off and bankruptcy follow a disastrously ill-timed bid to take the resort into the luxury stratosphere.
The company rebuilt The Cloister and reopened it in 2006; rooms now start at $395 a night and suites go for as much as $5,000. It launched a new golf and horse community whose home sales -- on lots priced at $1 million or more -- were supposed to help finance the upscale expansion.
Executives hoped to appeal to a broader, wealthier clientele from around the world.
But the effort left Sea Island Co. with about $500 million in debt, and the recession torpedoed the high-end strategy.
Sea Island Co. said last winter that it was exploring a possible sale.
In his e-mail Tuesday evening, Jones, the scion of the family that has owned the resort since 1926, said he was “pleased to share with you that we have reached what we believe to be a favorable outcome . . .”
In describing the Oaktree-Avenue partnership, Jones said, “I want to assure you we have reached an agreement with a buyer who appreciates the value of Sea Island.”
Marc Lasry, principal in Avenue Capital, has a home at the resort.
Jones said the Chapter 11 filing will enable the sale to be “completed in an orderly manner.”
Jones also said the resort will remain open during the process.
“We will continue to operate our business as usual throughout this process,” he wrote.
Earlier Tuesday, Jones and Sea Island Co. President David Bansmer scheduled a meeting today with members of Sea Island’s gated residential community to update them on the effort to find a solution to the company’s woes.
Michael Geczi, a Chicago-based spokesman hired by the Sea Island Co., declined to comment Tuesday evening.
Woody Woodside, executive director of the Brunswick-Golden Isles Chamber of Commerce, said: “This comminity has supported this institutiton for generations, and with the issues they have had during these hard economic times, I hope with this closure we can move forward.”
Woodside said the Jones family “has contributed a lot of prosperity” to the area, adding he hopes the new owners “will continue those trends.”
-- Rachel Tobin Ramos contributed to this article

Labour will never have an heir to Tony Blair

Daniel Finkelstein London Times

The former Prime Minister’s memoirs will be out soon. The big question he needs to answer is: why did Blairism die?
Today I want you to take a moment to look around you, to think for a second or two about your colleagues in the office. And as you do so, consider this. Do you know whether they have siblings? If they do, are those siblings older or younger? The chances are that you haven’t got a clue about most of them.
Which is odd. Because in your own family, the birth order is, I’d guess, pretty important in the way members behave. Yet it doesn’t seem to carry. Watch children at home and it is not hard to see the elder one dominate the younger. But look at a class full of children and it is very hard to tell which of them is a younger sibling and which an elder one.
The point of this is rather simple. In different circumstances, people behave differently. Yet we often fail to realise it. We catch a glimpse of someone’s behaviour and think that we have looked deeply into their soul. And we make what social psychologists call the fundamental attribution error. When we observe people’s conduct, we are are quick to ascribe it to enduring features of their personality, attaching too little weight to the circumstances in which they found themselves.
So, Tony Blair. In a few weeks’ time the former Prime Minister will publish his memoirs. And I think his allies have set him a big question to answer.
From both Alastair Campbell’s diary and Peter Mandelson’s memoirs, Gordon Brown emerges as an intolerable bully, pushing the Prime Minister around. He refuses to allow Mr Blair to be involved in central policy questions, is rude and uncooperative, shouts when he doesn’t get his way and absents himself when he feels like it. His behaviour drove the Prime Minister crazy.
Yet Mr Blair did nothing about it. He allowed his friends to be traduced, his policies obstructed and his period in office shortened. Through all this he kept his Chancellor in office. And then he stood by and allowed Gordon Brown to become Prime Minister, knowing full well that he would prove a terrible one and would probably lead the Labour Party to defeat.
It’s quite a charge sheet. So should Mr Blair accept that, for all his great strengths, for all his charm, charisma and imagination, he is, deep down rather weak? Should he cop a plea, agree that he should have moved against Brown, and acknowledge that a downside of his likeability is his dislike of falling out with people?
Or should he make a different argument? Should Mr Blair tell his readers that to ascribe his behaviour to a weak personality is to make the fundamental attribution error? Should he argue that it was circumstances, not his disposition, that made him act as he did?
I think that this is nearer the truth. But I also think that this truth is, once you consider it, scarcely more palatable for Mr Blair.
Whenever Mr Campbell or Lord Mandelson complained to their friend that he was being weak with Mr Brown, Mr Blair responded by inviting them to consider the circumstances. The first step in a move against Mr Brown would have been simple — to move him or to reduce his responsibilities. But things wouldn’t have been simple after that. Resignation and party warfare would have followed. And even at the high point of his leadership Mr Blair did not think he would win such a war.
Were he to offer this defence in his memoirs, he might repel the attack that he was weak. Instead, however, he would be accepting the idea that even at his height, even at the peak of his popularity, he could not prevail in his own party. He would be accepting a verdict that is (correctly) much less damning of Blair the man in favour of one that is (correctly) much more damning of Blairism the project.
This is not of mere historical interest. Five years ago the question about the future of British politics was who would be the heir to Blair. As each day goes by it becomes clearer that the answer is nobody.
The Labour leadership election is being fought without a Blairite candidate. The only contender to be described in this way — David Miliband — was an employee of Mr Blair but is not, and never has been, a Blairite. Indeed, Peter Mandelson records that Mr Blair had been reluctant to appoint his young adviser as head of the policy unit in 1997 because he viewed him “as a bit too inflexible and possibly not new Labour enough”.
Yet saying that he isn’t new Labour isn’t quite right. David Miliband shared the desire to create Labour anew — I remember him talking to me excitedly about it in the early 1990s. He was new Labour all right. What he wasn’t — and isn’t — prepared to do is to go as far as Tony Blair.
Mr Blair opposed higher tax rates, wanted to privatise large parts of public service provision, opposed most government intervention in the economy, and was a liberal interventionist in foreign policy.
Peter Mandelson (and possibly not even he) is the only other senior Labour figure to go remotely that far. Mr Blair is a unique figure in Labour’s history and he will remain unique in future. There was never anyone else like him in Labour’s senior ranks, and there won’t be in future either.
With Blair goes Blairism and so too go the Blairites.
Look at David Miliband’s pronouncements in what passes for his manifesto. He wants a High Pay Commission, a living wage and employee representatives to sit on company pay boards. He believes that the bank levy should be doubled, that charitable status for private schools should be removed and that a mansion tax should be introduced. There would also be an “active industrial policy”, “private sector reform” and closing “the class gap in education”.
There isn’t a single item that cuts in the other direction. And even then he may be defeated by his more left-wing brother.
As Mr Blair’s own party moves away from him, and the Government, which once thought of following him, finds itself instead clearing up the financial mess, Mr Blair’s memoirs will have be very persuasive if one is not to finish them concluding that Blairism has petered out in failure. It’s fortunate for him that persuasiveness is his Mastermind topic.

daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk

Patricia Neal, an Oscar Winner Who Endured Tragedy, Dies at 84

By ALJEAN HARMETZ NY TIMES
Patricia Neal, the molasses-voiced actress who won an Academy Award and a Tony but whose life alternated surreally between triumph and tragedy, died at her home in Edgartown, Mass., on Sunday. She was 84 and lived in Manhattan and Martha’s Vineyard.
The death was announced by a friend, Edward S. Albers.
In 1964 Ms. Neal received an Oscar as best actress for her performance as the tough, shopworn housekeeper who did not succumb to Paul Newman’s amoral charm in “Hud.” But a year later she had three strokes, leaving her in a coma for three weeks. Although she was semiparalyzed and unable to speak afterward, she learned to walk and talk again.
Despite a severely impaired memory that made it difficult to remember dialogue, she returned to the screen in 1968 as the bitter mother who used her son as a weapon against her husband in the screen version of Frank Gilroy’s play “The Subject Was Roses.” Once again, she was nominated for an Academy Award.
Her career had started swiftly and brilliantly. Before she was 21, she had swept the major acting prizes for her Broadway debut in Lillian Hellman’s “Another Part of the Forest.” As the rapacious Regina Hubbard who could hold her own in a family of vipers, Ms. Neal received a Tony, a Donaldson Award and a New York Drama Critics Award. Her photograph was on the cover of Life magazine.
Signed to a seven-year contract by Warner Brothers, she went to Hollywood as the sought-after young actress of her day. She had talent, a husky, unforgettable voice and an arresting presence but no training in acting in front of a camera. Of her movie debut opposite Ronald Reagan in the comedy “John Loves Mary” (1949), Bosley Crowther, the movie critic for The New York Times, wrote that she showed “little to recommend her to further comedy jobs” and added, “Her way with a gag line is painful.”
Yet Ms. Neal had already been assigned the role that Barbara Stanwyck and other top actresses coveted — the leonine Dominique in the film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s best-selling novel “The Fountainhead” (1949). As Dominique was swept away by the uncompromising, godlike architect Howard Roark, the 23-year-old actress fell passionately in love with the 48-year-old movie star who played Roark, Gary Cooper. Their affair burned brightly for three years but ended when Mr. Cooper chose not to leave his wife and daughter.
“The Fountainhead” was a failure. Ms. Neal saw it at a Hollywood premiere. “You knew, from the very first reel, it was destined to be a monumental bomb,” she said. “My status changed immediately. That was the end of my career as a second Garbo.”
Ms. Neal’s next movie, “Bright Leaf” (1950), an epic story of a 19th-century tobacco farmer played by Mr. Cooper, was also a failure. Ill served by Warner Brothers, Ms. Neal acquired screen technique while being wasted in a series of mediocre movies. The exceptions were the screen version of John Patrick’s play “The Hasty Heart” (1950), in which she played a nurse who tries to comfort a dying soldier, and “The Breaking Point” (1950), based on Ernest Hemingway’s “To Have and Have Not,” in which she played a tramp opposite John Garfield.
“Warners finally let me know they weren’t so keen on my staying on,” Ms. Neal said in an interview. “They didn’t fire me. I took the hint.”
Ms. Neal was 27 years old and apparently washed up in Hollywood after five years and 13 movies when Lillian Hellman insisted that Ms. Neal star in the Broadway revival of her play “The Children’s Hour” in 1952. And it was at Ms. Hellman’s house that Ms. Neal met a writer of macabre short stories, Roald Dahl — the man she would marry in 1953 and who would be the father of their five children during a troubled, 30-year marriage that was marred by tragedy.
In 1957, Ms. Neal triumphantly returned to the screen in Elia Kazan’s “A Face in the Crowd.” Demonstrating an authority, a range and a subtlety that she had lacked before, she won acclaim for her portrayal of a radio reporter who builds the career of a folksy guitarist (played by Andy Griffith).
As the 1950s ended, she appeared to great acclaim in “Suddenly Last Summer” in London and “The Miracle Worker” on Broadway then went on to even greater screen success in “Hud” and “In Harm’s Way” with John Wayne. Riding the crest, she signed to star in the John Ford movie “Seven Women.” But at 39 and pregnant with her fifth child, she was struck down by the strokes.
Patsy Lou Neal was born in the coal mining town of Packard, Ky., on Jan. 20, 1926, to a mine manager for the Southern Coke and Coal Company and the daughter of the town doctor. Ms. Neal was raised in Knoxville, Tenn. At 10, she attended an evening of monologues in the basement of the Methodist church and wrote a note to Santa Claus: “What I want for Christmas is to study dramatics.” By the time she entered high school, Patsy Neal was giving monologues at every Knoxville social club and had won the Tennessee State Award for dramatic reading.
In 1942, the summer before her senior year, she was chosen to apprentice at the prestigious Barter Theater in Virginia. After two years as a drama major at Northwestern University, Ms. Neal learned that the Theater Guild needed a tall girl to play the lead in Eugene O’Neill’s “A Moon for the Misbegotten” and headed for New York. Alfred de Liagre, the producer of “Voice of the Turtle,” gave her a job understudying the two female leads and insisted that his patrician-looking new actress should call herself Patricia.
Success came quickly and easily. Ms. Neal replaced Vivian Vance in the road company of “Voice of the Turtle” and she had fourth billing in “Bigger than Barnum,” a Broadway-bound play that closed in Boston. When she played a backwoods girl who allies herself with the devil in “Devil Takes a Whittler” in summer stock in Westport, Conn., she was seen by Eugene O’Neill, who became her mentor, and much of the Broadway theater establishment. In less than 24 hours, she had two offers to star on Broadway. Ms. Neal turned down Richard Rodgers’ offer of the lead in “John Loves Mary” for “Another Part of the Forest.”
During her affair with Cooper, she became pregnant. She had an abortion and according to her 1988 autobiography, “As I Am,” (written with Richard DeNeut), she cried herself to sleep for 30 years afterward. “If I had only one thing to do over in my life,” she wrote, “I would have that baby.”
Desperate to have children, she married Mr. Dahl even though, she wrote in her autobiography, she did not then love him. A former R.A.F. fighter pilot who later became a renowned writer of edgy children’s books (“James and the Giant Peach,” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”), Mr. Dahl took control of Ms. Neal’s life. After their four-month-old son, Theo, was left brain-damaged when his pram was crushed between a taxicab and a bus on a New York street in December 1960, Mr. Dahl decided that they would move permanently to the village of Great Missenden in England. Two years later, their eldest daughter, Olivia, who was 7, died of measles encephalitis, perhaps for want of sophisticated medical care that would have been available in a big city.
Ms. Neal survived the aneurysm because of the knowledge Mr. Dahl had acquired during the years when Theo had eight brain operations. After the shunt that drained fluid from Theo’s brain kept clogging, Mr. Dahl worked for two years with a retired engineer and a neurosurgeon to design and manufacture a better one, the Wade-Dahl-Till valve.
When Ms. Neal collapsed in their rented Beverly Hills house, Mr. Dahl knew enough about her symptoms to immediately call one of the leading neurosurgeons in Southern California. Fourteen days after a seven-hour operation to stop the bleeding, the neurosurgeon told Mr. Dahl that his wife would live. But he added, “I’m not sure whether or not I’ve done her a favor.”
Mr. Dahl badgered his wife into getting well. He nagged her into walking, held things out of her reach until she managed to ask for them, arranged for hours of physical and speech therapy each day. She learned to read again. When Ms. Neal could not understand a Beatrix Potter book she was reading to her son, her husband told her not to mind because “The Tale of Pigling Bland” was “Potter’s toughest book.” Six months after her brain operation, Ms. Neal gave birth to a healthy daughter and Mr. Dahl insisted that the brace on which she relied be taken off her shoes.
Early in 1967, he announced that she was ready to perform and that she would give a speech in New York that spring at a charity dinner for brain-damaged children. Terrified, Ms. Neal worked day after day to memorize the speech, which she delivered to thundering applause. As she wrote in her autobiography, “I knew at that moment that Roald the slave driver, Roald the bastard, with his relentless scourge, Roald the Rotten, as I had called him more than once, had thrown me back into the deep water. Where I belonged.”
The story of Ms. Neal’s illness and recovery was made into a television movie in 1981, with Glenda Jackson and Dirk Bogarde playing Pat and Roald. Two years later, Ms. Neal and Mr. Dahl were divorced after Ms. Neal discovered that her husband had been having a long affair with one of her best friends. Mr. Dahl died in 1990.
She is survived by her four children, Tessa, Ophelia, Theo and Lucy; a brother, Pete Neal; a sister Margaret Anne VanderNoord; 10 grandchildren and step grandchildren and a great-grandchild.
In her later years, Ms. Neal put her time and energy into raising money for brain injured children and adults. In dozens of speaking engagements, she demonstrated that a brain injury was not necessarily the end of life or of joy. ”I can’t see from one eye,” she said in 1988. “I’ve been paralyzed. I’ve fallen down and broken a hip. Stubbornness gets you through the bad times. You don’t give in.”

How to Lose an Election Without Really Trying

By FRANK RICH NY Times
COULD George W. Bush be a kind of Gipper-in-reverse and win yet one more for the Democrats? Clearly this White House sees him as the gift that will keep on giving. The 2010 campaign against the Bush administration is in full cry, with President Obama leading the charge. The Republicans are “betting on amnesia,” he confidently told the claque at a recent fund-raiser. “They don’t have a single idea that’s different from George Bush’s ideas.” It’s now the incessant party line.
Sounds plausible, but it’s Obama who’s on the wrong side of that bet, to his own political peril.
Betting on amnesia is almost always a winning, not a losing, wager in America. Angry demonstrators at health care town-hall meetings didn’t remember that Medicare is a government program, and fewer and fewer voters of both parties recall that the widely loathed TARP was a Bush administration creation supported by the G.O.P. Congressional leadership. So many Republicans don’t know Obama is a natural citizen — 41 percent in a poll last week — that we must (charitably) assume some of them have forgotten that Hawaii was granted statehood. The G.O.P. chairman is sufficiently afflicted with amnesia that he matter-of-factly regaled an audience with the counterfactual observation that the war in Afghanistan, Bush’s immediate response to 9/11, began under Obama.
The president is also wrong when he says that every single current G.O.P. idea is a Bush idea. Many are not. And those that are not are far more radical.
A political campaign built on Obama’s faulty premises cannot stand — or win. The polls remain as intractable as the 9.5 percent unemployment rate no matter how insistently the Democrats pummel Bush. To add to Democratic panic, there’s their “enthusiasm gap” with the Tea-Party-infused G.O.P., and the Rangel-Waters double bill coming this fall to a cable channel near you. Some Democrats took solace in one recent poll finding that if Republican economic ideas were branded as “Bush” ideas, the pendulum would swing a whopping 49 percentage points in their favor. But even in that feel-good survey, only a quarter of the respondents were worried that a G.O.P. Congress would actually bring back Bush policies.
Bleak as this picture looks for the Democrats, it is so only up to a point. No one knows what will happen on an Election Day almost three months away. One encouraging sign for the party in power is the over-the-top triumphalism of the right. Conservative pundits are churning out daily prognostications with headlines like “Ten More Reasons Dems Are Toast.” A recent Wall Street Journal front-page news story hyping a far-fetched Republican scenario for retaking the Senate was something of a nostalgic throwback to the kind of wishful thinking that inspired “Dewey Defeats Truman.”
But rather than wait for miracles or pray that Bushphobia will save the day, Democrats might instead start playing the hand they’ve been dealt. Elections, the cliché goes, are about the future, not the past. At the very least they’re about the present. It’s time voters were told just how far right the G.O.P. has lurched since Bush returned to Texas. And the White House might also at long last — at very long last — craft a compelling message, not to mention a plan, to offer real hope to the jobless. Repeated boasts of a resurgent auto industry (where the work force is 30 percent smaller than prerecession) won’t persuade anyone, and neither will repeated assurances that legislation passed months ago will kick in over the long haul. Some 16.5 percent of America’s workers are now either unemployed and trying to find a job, involuntarily working part time, or have stopped looking for work altogether. That figure doesn’t even include the many Americans who’ve had to settle for jobs for which they are overqualified.
For Obama even to stipulate that the G.O.P. has ideas about how to deal with this crisis is generous. Consultants are telling Republicans to advance no new programs at all, given how far a simple no to the president has taken them thus far, and they are following orders. But what we can discern of the Republican “ideas” lying in wait almost makes Bush’s conservatism actually seem compassionate.
The public is largely unaware of this because the conservative establishment in both Washington and the press has been relentless in its effort to separate the G.O.P. from the excesses of the Palin-Fox-Beck-Breitbart bomb throwers and from wacky Tea Party senatorial candidates like Sharron Angle of Nevada and Rand Paul of Kentucky. To hear most non-Fox conservative pundits tell it on Sunday talk shows or op-ed pages, these unruly radicals are just a passing craze. The new post-Bush G.O.P., we’re told, is exemplified by responsible, traditional small-government conservative governors like Mitch Daniels (of Indiana) or Chris Christie (of New Jersey).
But it’s Daniels and Christie who are the anomalies. The leaders who would actually take over should the Republicans regain Congress are far closer to the revolutionaries than most voters imagine. Take Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who has been relentlessly promoted by the right as the intellectual golden boy of the G.O.P. and who would be elevated to chairman of the powerful budget committee in a Republican House. His much publicized “Roadmap for America’s Future” — hailed by Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard as “the most important proposal in domestic policy” since Reagan’s voodoo economics — not only revives the failed Bush proposal of partially privatizing Social Security but tops him by replacing Medicare with a voucher system that, like Ryan’s skewed tax cuts, would benefit the superrich while raising taxes and medical costs for everyone else.
Ryan’s proposal has only 13 co-sponsors in the House (out of 178 G.O.P. members). That number is low, he recently conceded, because his colleagues are “talking to their pollsters, and their pollsters are saying: ‘Stay away from this. We’re going to win an election.’ ” Once that election is won, the road will be clear and the ideologues will take over the asylum. Ryan’s radicalism will be abetted by the new House speaker, John Boehner, who didn’t even wait for the BP well to be plugged to announce that “a moratorium on new federal regulations” would be “a great idea.”
In the theoretically more sober Senate, the G.O.P.’s rightward shift is arguably even more drastic. The pernicious Bush economic orthodoxy — tax cuts as a magic elixir to both create jobs and reduce deficits — remains gospel even as two veterans of Reaganomics, Alan Greenspan and David Stockman, have gone public over the past week to disavow it. But factor in the Senate’s rush to xenophobia, and Bush, who pushed hard for immigration reform, starts to look like Nelson Mandela.
Now we have a Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, joined by such onetime “moderates” as John McCain and Charles Grassley, calling for hearings to “look into” the 14th Amendment. That Reconstruction landmark, guaranteeing citizenship to anyone born in America, was such a prideful accomplishment of the old Party of Lincoln that the official G.O.P. Web site has been showcasing it to counter the Republicans’ current identity as a whites-only country club. Even Lindsey Graham — who could rightfully be anointed “This Year’s Maverick” by The Times Magazine as recently as July 4 — has joined the 14th Amendment revisionists and is slurring immigrants as baby machines who come to America to “drop a child” for nefarious purposes. The Hispanic-bashing has gotten so ugly that Michael Gerson, the former Bush speechwriter, wrote last week that Graham and McCain “may never fully recover” their reputations.
Given this spectacle, Obama and the Democrats are, if anything, flattering the current G.O.P. by accusing it of being a carbon copy of Bush. But even if the Democrats sharpen their attack, they are doomed to fall short if they don’t address the cancer in the American heart — joblessness. This requires stunning emergency action right now, August recess be damned. Instead we get the Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, offering the thin statistical gruel that job growth has returned “at an earlier stage of this recovery than in the last two recoveries.”
The tragically tone-deaf Geithner is on his latest happy-days-are-almost-here-again tour. He made that point in multiple television appearances as well as in a Times Op-Ed page article in which he vowed to “do more” to give workers “the skills they need to re-enter the 21st-century economy.” On the same day his essay appeared last week, The Times ran a front-page report on “99ers,” the growing band of desperate jobless Americans who have exhausted their 99 weeks of unemployment insurance benefits. The 99er featured in Michael Luo’s article, a 49-year-old unemployed corporate worker named Alexandra Jarrin, is a late-in-life college graduate and onetime business school student who owes $92,000, as she put it, “for an education which is basically worthless.” She’s on the verge of homelessness not because she lacks the skills she needs to re-enter the 21st-century economy. She and countless others like her, skilled and unskilled, lack jobs, period.
The Democrats have already retreated from immigration and energy reform. If they can’t make the case to Americans like Alexandra Jarrin that they offer more hope for a job than a radical conservative movement poised to tear down what remains of the safety net, they deserve to lose.

Logic heralds the big day for gay marriage

Andrew Sullivan London Sunday Times
A landmark ruling in California insisting there is no argument for restricting civil marriage rights has turned the tide for same-sex weddings

The federal judge who struck down California’s ban on same-sex marriage as violating the US constitution’s guarantees of due process and equal protection under the law has an interesting history.
Vaughn Walker was first nominated to the bench by Ronald Reagan, at the recommendation of the then attorney-general Ed Meese. He was, moreover, passionately opposed by liberal Democrats, because he was allegedly insensitive to gays. Then the first President George Bush renominated him and he sailed through.
Walker has a record of being soft on white-collar crime and is a devotee of the right-wing Chicago school of law and economics. I mention this because today’s Republican party establishment sees him as a flaming leftie for asserting in what can only be called a stupendously full-throated ruling that there is simply no rational basis at all for denying full equality to gay men and lesbians in civil marriage.
But he’s not a flaming leftie, as his record proves. Nor was the federal judge in Massachusetts who recently ruled that the Defence of Marriage Act, barring federal recognition of civil marriages, was unconstitutional. Nor was the chief justice in the Iowa supreme court that brought marriage equality to that state. Nor was the judge in Connecticut who struck down a same-sex marriage ban there. Nor was the chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court that first brought full marriage rights to Americans.
They were all appointed by Republican governors or presidents. The California case that advanced last week was argued by Ted Olson, who was the solicitor-general in the first Bush administration and a lion of the conservative judiciary. The decision was hailed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, the state’s Republican governor, who supports marriage rights for gays, and all but ignored by President Barack Obama, a Democrat, who opposes gay marriage (having once supported it). In the Supreme Court itself, the two most far-reaching pro-gay decisions were written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee.
It’s easy and facile to see gay marriage as a right-versus-left issue. It is both a liberal and a conservative issue, representing the liberal ideal of civil equality and the conservative values of commitment and responsibility. And it is above all about family, which is neither a liberal nor a conservative institution. It is a human one, to which gay people have always belonged since the beginning of time.
But what the decision last week in California did was to subject the question to something non-ideological: factual scrutiny. The ruling insisted that there is simply no rational argument for restricting civil marriage rights to heterosexuals. Walker asserted as fact that civil marriage is no longer defined by procreation or assigned gender roles. Many married couples have no children and many do not conform to traditional husband-wife norms.
It’s hard to argue the position that something that has always been the case should always remain the case Walker also asserted as fact that being gay is not a choice; and therefore offering gay people straight marriages is not a fair deal.
He said there is no conceivable state interest in reducing the number of gay people in its jurisdiction and then made a simple case that “permitting same-sex couples to marry will not affect the number of opposite-sex couples who marry, divorce, cohabit, have children outside of marriage or otherwise affect the stability of opposite-sex marriages”.
Walker argued, moreover, that these points were not in any factual dispute — and left those facts in the federal judicial record for further litigation, possibly all the way to the Supreme Court.
He concluded that the defenders of the marriage ban, proposition 8, offered no factual evidence to back their claims that marriage equality would harm society, or that gay couples were incapable of the commitment marriage requires. And so he concluded that proposition 8 represented nothing but an assertion of heterosexuals’ inherent superiority to homosexuals — and this could not be squared with the equal protection that the US constitution demands.
And what was fascinating about the reaction to his ruling was that none of his conservative critics actually rebutted his arguments with fact. They denounced the ruling as a function of Walker’s sexual orientation (he is gay) or as a judicial usurpation of the majority’s view that marriage is by definition heterosexual.
The first criticism is bizarre: if gay judges are not allowed to rule in gay rights cases, are women not allowed to rule in ones dealing with sexism? And if gay judges should disqualify themselves from a particular case because of personal bias, why shouldn’t straight ones? The second is the only coherent position left. It is that marriage has always been between a man and a woman and therefore we should not change it. Call it the argument purely from tradition. It’s a respectable position.
The trouble with this argument is that it would also mean racial segregation in schools would still be in force, blacks would still be barred from marrying whites in many states, and the judiciary could never protect a minority from a majority’s electoral power, or respond to changing understanding of human nature and society.
It’s also now true, to go all Burkean on you, that same-sex marriage is already part of the social fabric in five states, the capital city of Washington and several countries, and has been informally around for centuries. It’s hard to argue the position that something that has always been the case should always remain the case, when that horse has left the barn door swinging.
So we are left with a question of timing. Does this case force the issue too soon? Could it lead to a premature Supreme Court decision that strikes down marriage rights for gays, when public opinion is moving swiftly in favour of marriage equality anyway? Many gay activists fear so, which is why few were that thrilled with Walker’s trial. No one knows for sure what will happen if this case reaches the Supreme Court — in a few years’ time. But what we do know is no one controls these things.
This is what social change is like. It bubbles up from below, it impacts upon the world of ideas, it shifts understanding of the law, it produces defeats at first, then a few victories. It provokes backlash and debate and emotional intensity. But in the end, the arguments matter. In the end, the facts count. And what has just happened is that a conservative judge made the most definitive case yet for marriage rights for gays by the simple logic and overwhelming evidence that have been there for ages.
The arc of history is long and uneven, but gays may soon arrive as full members of the families we came from — and know the place for the first time

NY TIMES Editorial
Marriage Is a Constitutional Right

Until Wednesday, the thousands of same-sex couples who have married did so because a state judge or Legislature allowed them to. The nation’s most fundamental guarantees of freedom, set out in the Constitution, were not part of the equation. That has changed with the historic decision by a federal judge in California, Vaughn Walker, that said his state’s ban on same-sex marriage violated the 14th Amendment’s rights to equal protection and due process of law.
The decision, though an instant landmark in American legal history, is more than that. It also is a stirring and eloquently reasoned denunciation of all forms of irrational discrimination, the latest link in a chain of pathbreaking decisions that permitted interracial marriages and decriminalized gay sex between consenting adults.
As the case heads toward appeals at the circuit level and probably the Supreme Court, Judge Walker’s opinion will provide a firm legal foundation that will be difficult for appellate judges to assail.
The case was brought by two gay couples who said California’s Proposition 8, which passed in 2008 with 52 percent of the vote, discriminated against them by prohibiting same-sex marriage and relegating them to domestic partnerships. The judge easily dismissed the idea that discrimination is permissible if a majority of voters approve it; the referendum’s outcome was “irrelevant,” he said, quoting a 1943 case, because “fundamental rights may not be submitted to a vote.”
He then dismantled, brick by crumbling brick, the weak case made by supporters of Proposition 8 and laid out the facts presented in testimony. The two witnesses called by the supporters (the state having bowed out of the case) had no credibility, he said, and presented no evidence that same-sex marriage harmed society or the institution of marriage.
Same-sex couples are identical to opposite-sex couples in their ability to form successful marital unions and raise children, he said. Though procreation is not a necessary goal of marriage, children of same-sex couples will benefit from the stability provided by marriage, as will the state and society. Domestic partnerships confer a second-class status. The discrimination inherent in that second-class status is harmful to gay men and lesbians. These findings of fact will be highly significant as the case winds its way through years of appeals.
One of Judge Walker’s strongest points was that traditional notions of marriage can no longer be used to justify discrimination, just as gender roles in opposite-sex marriage have changed dramatically over the decades. All marriages are now unions of equals, he wrote, and there is no reason to restrict that equality to straight couples. The exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage “exists as an artifact of a time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage,” he wrote. “That time has passed.”
To justify the proposition’s inherent discrimination on the basis of sex and sexual orientation, he wrote, there would have to be a compelling state interest in banning same-sex marriage. But no rational basis for discrimination was presented at the two-and-a-half-week trial in January, he said. The real reason for Proposition 8, he wrote, is a moral view “that there is something wrong with same-sex couples,” and that is not a permissible reason for legislation.
“Moral disapproval alone,” he wrote, in words that could someday help change history, “is an improper basis on which to deny rights to gay men and women.”
The ideological odd couple who led the case — Ted Olson and David Boies, who fought against each other in the Supreme Court battle over the 2000 election — were criticized by some supporters of same-sex marriage for moving too quickly to the federal courts. Certainly, there is no guarantee that the current Supreme Court would uphold Judge Walker’s ruling. But there are times when legal opinions help lead public opinions.
Just as they did for racial equality in previous decades, the moment has arrived for the federal courts to bestow full equality to millions of gay men and lesbians.

Court Rejects Same-Sex Marriage Ban in California

By JESSE McKINLEY and JOHN SCHWARTZ
SAN FRANCISCO — Saying that it discriminates against gay men and women, a federal judge in San Francisco struck down California’s voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage on Wednesday, handing supporters of such unions at least a temporary victory in a legal battle that seems all but certain to be settled by the Supreme Court.
Wednesday’s decision is just the latest chapter in what is expected to be a long battle over the ban — Proposition 8, which was passed in 2008 with 52 percent of the vote. Indeed, while striking down Proposition 8, the decision will not immediately lead to any new same-sex marriages being performed in California. Vaughn R. Walker, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in San Francisco, immediately stayed his own decision, pending appeals by proponents of Proposition 8, who seem confident that higher courts would hear and favor their position.
But on Wednesday the winds seemed to be at the back of those who feel that marriage is not, as the voters of California and many other states have said, solely the province of a man and a woman.
“Proposition 8 cannot withstand any level of scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause,” wrote Judge Walker. “Excluding same-sex couples from marriage is simply not rationally related to a legitimate state interest.”
Supporters of Proposition 8 said that the decision defied the will of the people of California, and could well be an issue in November’s midterm elections.
“This is going to set off a groundswell of opposition,” said Jim Garlow, the pastor of Skyline Church in La Mesa, Calif., and a prominent supporter of Proposition 8. “It’s going to rally people that might have been silent.”
Wednesday’s decision applied only to California and not to the dozens of other states that have either constitutional bans or other prohibitions against same-sex marriage. Nor does it affect federal law, which does not recognize such unions.
Still, the very existence of federal court ruling recognizing same-sex marriage in California, the nation’s most populous state, set off cheers of “We won!” from crowds assembled in front of the courthouse in San Francisco. Evening rallies and celebrations were planned in dozens of cities across the state and several across the nation.
In West Hollywood, Ron Cook, 46, an accountant who is gay, said he was thrilled by the decision. “If the court had come back and upheld it,” he said. “I would have moved out of the state.”
The plaintiffs’ case was argued by David Boies and Theodore B. Olson, ideological opposites who once famously sparred in the 2000 Supreme Court battle between George W. Bush and Al Gore over the Florida recount and the presidency. The lawyers brought the case — Perry v. Schwarzenegger — in May 2009 on behalf of two gay couples who said that Proposition 8 impinged on their constitutional rights to equal protection and due process.
On Wednesday, Mr. Olson called the decision a “victory for the American people,” and anyone who had been denied rights “because they are unpopular, because they are a minority, because they are viewed differently.”
For advocates of gay rights, same-sex marriage has increasingly become a central issue in their battle for equality, seen as both an emotional indicator of legitimacy and as a practical way to lessen discrimination.
“Being gay is about forming an adult family relationship with a person of the same sex,” said Jennifer Pizer, the marriage project director for Lambda Legal in Los Angeles, who filed two briefs in support of the plaintiffs. “So denying us equality within the family system is to deny respect for the essence of who we are as gay people.”
But Andrew Pugno, a lawyer for the defense, said Proposition 8 had nothing to do with discrimination, but rather with the will of California voters who “simply wished to preserve the historic definition of marriage.”
“The other side’s attack upon their good will and motives is lamentable and preposterous,” Mr. Pugno said in a statement.
During the trial, which ended in June, plaintiffs offered evidence from experts on marriage, sociology and political science, and emotional testimony from the two couples who had brought the case. Proponents for Proposition 8 offered a much more straightforward defense of the measure, saying that same-sex marriage damaged traditional marriage as an institution and that marriage was historically rooted in the need to foster procreation, which same-sex unions cannot, and was thus fundamental to the existence and survival of the human race.
But Judge Walker seemed skeptical of those claims. “Tradition alone, however,” he wrote, “cannot form the rational basis for a law.”
Even before appeals to higher courts, Judge Walker seemed ready to continue to hear arguments, telling both sides to submit responses to his motion to stay the decision by Friday, at which point he could lift or extend it.
How the decision might play politically was also still unclear. In 2004, same-sex marriage was seen as a wedge issue that helped draw conservatives to the polls, and Richard Socarides, who advised President Bill Clinton on gay rights issues, said that this decision could be used as a rallying cry for Republicans again. “But Democrats and most importantly President Obama will now have to take sides on whether gays deserve full equality,” Mr. Socarides wrote in an e-mail.
In California, it could also affect the race for governor. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, has been vocal in his support of same-sex marriage in his current role as California attorney general and hailed the decision on Wednesday. Meg Whitman, a Republican, has taken the position that marriage should be between a man and a woman — in line with the language of Proposition 8 — though she says that she strongly supports the state’s domestic partnership laws, which afford many of the same rights as marriage.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in a statement on Wednesday supported the ruling, saying it “affirms the full legal protections” for thousands of gay Californians.
Some gay rights activists initially feared the case, believing that a loss at a federal level could set back their more measured efforts to gain wider recognition for same-sex marriage, which is legal in five states and the District of Columbia. But those concerns seemed to fade as the trial began, and on Wednesday, the mood was of elation and cautious optimism that Mr. Boies and Mr. Olson’s initial victory might change the debate.
Kate Kendell, executive director for the National Center for Lesbian Rights, said that she believed that there were members of the Supreme Court who “have a very deep-seated bias against L.G.B.T. people,” meaning lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender. But, she added, “This legal victory profoundly changes the conversation” by involving “folks in the legal world and the policy world who were previously unmoved by this struggle.”
For those who had actually filed the suit, Wednesday’s victory, while measured, also seemed sweet.
“This decision says that we are Americans, too. We too should be treated equally,” said Kristin M. Perry, one of the plaintiffs. “Our family is just as loving, just as real and just valid as anyone else’s.”
Jesse McKinley reported from San Francisco, and John Schwartz from New York. Malia Wollan contributed reporting from San Francisco, and Rebecca Cathcart from West Hollywood, Calif

Doctor Who has landed to restrain the United States
The immortal Time Lord himself is teaching the US that there are non-violent ways to defeat evil

Andrew Sullivan London Sunday Times
The Sunday Times Published: 1 August 2010Comment (1)Recommend (0) I realised the other day that I must have spent more hours of my life watching Doctor Who than any other television programme (with the possible exception of The Simpsons). As a boy on Saturday evenings, the anticipation was intense as the classic signature tune began — and those 25 minutes invariably sped by way too fast.
My dreams and nightmares as a child were often of being one of the Doctor’s assistants, bravely facing down Yetis and the green death. Those dreams didn’t really end, believe it or not, till my late twenties.
The series affected me in other ways, too. I confess to once having a confusing boyhood crush on Patrick Troughton’s sidekick, Jamie, and being more scared of the Cybermen than the Daleks, because, I reckoned, the Daleks could not get up the stairs to my bedroom at night.
And now, in my forties, I’m hooked again on the re-energised series, and finding Matt Smith one of the darker, better Doctors of all time, despite being a Tom Baker man myself. Yes, I got my mum to knit me a long school scarf in Baker’s honour. And yes, I was mocked for it.
But Doctor Who — like Star Trek but smarter — was not just entertainment to me. It expressed values, a world-view, a way of countering evil that never succumbed to true superhero shenanigans or raw violence. And that’s why its new and striking popularity in the US is so welcome. The debut of the new season on BBC America drew 1.2m viewers, a record for the cable channel — making it the second-most watched cable show in its time slot for the coveted 25-54 demographic. It is winning an entirely new generation of American fans, becoming the global brand it always intended to be.
And in post-Bush America, I’d argue, that’s a very good thing. I think of the Doctor as a kind of antidote to Jack Bauer of the hit series 24. If Bauer represented the primitive, aggressive American response to jihadist evil in the wake of 9/11, the Doctor represents a more decent, more British approach, as we get a better grip on the enemy we face and how to defeat it.
Note the first important point: the Doctor never denies that there is evil in the universe. He is not a moral relativist; he cannot be dismissed as a pacifist. But his first instinct is to defeat evil with non-violence. And this, of course, is the exact opposite of 24. The premise of 24 is that evil can only truly be stopped by force and ultimately only defeated by torture. In that sense, 24 was the pop-cultural emanation of the Dick Cheney era, which was why Cheney himself honoured the show’s producers in Washington at the time. As The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer once explained: “Bauer invariably chooses coercion. With unnerving efficiency, suspects are beaten, suffocated, electrocuted, drugged, assaulted with knives, or more exotically abused; almost without fail, these suspects divulge critical secrets.”
Dr Who expressed values, a world-view, a way of countering evil that never succumbed to true superhero shenanigans or just raw violence It is simply impossible to think of the Doctor deploying these tactics. In fact, torture is almost always a hallmark of the evil the Doctor is trying to confront. Even when death and destruction are the only way out of a trap the aliens or monsters have created, the Doctor tries to get them to think of their own interests, and leaves the choice in the end to them. He is the reluctant killer, forced to it only when everything else has failed. For Bauer, the enemy is so evil it must be confronted with violence and torture first.
In 24, we are all afraid, terrorised, potential victims of terror. Even Jack Bauer has a morbid fear of what terrorists can do — which explains his torture-first-ask-questions-later ethic. In Doctor Who, the terror many of us felt as kids was alleviated by the preternatural, cheery charm of the Doctor.
At the first glimpse of an alien monster, we all fled behind the couch. But the Doctor would often approach it, curious, interested, quizzical and somehow above its lethal threats. Yes, the Doctor was immortal — but in his multiple regenerations, he faced a kind of death. This fearlessness seemed borderline insane to me as a boy. Walking up to a Dalek was not something I’d ever consider myself. But watching it made me revere the Doctor even more. His confidence in his intelligence seemed to overpower fear.
The gimmick used by 24, of course, is that the action all takes place within one terrifying day. It exists in the constant present. There is almost no context, no history, no long look back at the American past and tradition. The new Doctor Who is a kinetic whirlwind, but it is also saturated in history. He is a Time Lord, after all. And the ability to go back in time, as well as forward, to stay in one tiny island on a speck of a minor galaxy while experiencing it in any age and any time makes it a peculiarly historical sci-fi show. We meet Shakespeare and Queen Victoria; we return to the second world war; we get a feel for the past and for the Doctor’s empathy for the addled English heart and soul. And I think that matters. It places the Doctor in a moral context. He is an inveterate individualist with a respect for other cultures and ways of life. Upon encountering the strange, his impulse is curiosity — not disgust or fear.
I know it’s excessive to read too much into two unconnected television shows. But they resonate with me, as an Anglo-American. There is within America, a deep strain of raw violence, inherited from the desert and mountain west’s confrontation with wilderness and the south’s long history of torturing and enslaving a subject people. There is also a cult of the present, of never looking back, of seeing developments such as 9/11 as without precedent, when, in context, there is always some kind of precedent.
A society whose former attorney-general, Alberto Gonzales, once described the Geneva conventions as “quaint” is not one dedicated to the lessons of history. But within Britain, history lingers. The sprightly sceptic is often a hero; intelligence is not regarded as a weakness but as a strength. Restraint is sometimes necessary and the imperial hangover has left a deeper respect for alien cultures than in an America which, for all its diversity, remains still somewhat divorced from the wider world, and a little paranoid about it. There are other strains in America as well, of course — the less paranoid legacy of Roosevelt and Eisenhower, the cheeriness of Reagan and the calm reason of Obama. And it’s perhaps silly to think that a little resurgence of Doctor Who means anything at all. But it gives me hope nonetheless. It reminds me of why Britain is still so necessary for America, as a balancing and civilising force in the projection of western power. And it reminds me of my childhood. When things were simpler. And a single man with two hearts could stand for something decent. And endure.

andrewsullivan.com

American account: Main Street wilts as Wall Street grows stronger

Irwin Stelzer Times of London
A battle is brewing between those who want to maintain the level of economic stimulus and those who wish to cut the deficit immediately

There are two wars going on that will affect how the economy performs for the rest of this year. The first is a battle for attention between the general economic news and the profits performance of America’s leading companies.
The second is a battle between austerity advocates and the more-stimulus-please crowd. Let’s start with the first battle.
The news about the economy has diminished hope that the recovery will be rapid and robust.
A slowdown in private-sector job creation is producing talk of a “jobless recovery” that, along with the persistent refusal of the housing market to recover, is damaging consumer confidence.
Home sales are at near-record lows, and the supply of unsold homes, including repossessed homes, is rising. Some 60% of housing analysts are expecting home prices to decline this year. It is difficult for consumers to have a bounce in their step as they walk down a street with repossession signs. They fret that they might be next in the unemployment queue, perhaps unable to meet their mortgage payments.
The Federal Reserve Board’s survey of business conditions around the country is far from a tale of unremitting gloom. “Economic activity has continued to increase, on balance, since the previous survey,” it said. But several areas of the country report only “modest” increases or a slowing of manufacturing activity.
A moderate recovery is not good enough to produce a feel-good factor on the street that matters most to politicians facing an election fewer than 100 days from now — Main Street. New hiring on Wall Street, which by and large is doing well, actually adds to the grumpiness of Main Street, which feels left behind by the policies adopted by the government to get the economy moving.
Against all this are reports that corporate earnings are up more than 20% in the second quarter and headed for even larger gains in the current quarter. FedEx and UPS, which can’t make money unless they are moving goods, are reporting healthy increases in profits, due in part to shipments of electronic goods from Asia, not exactly a creator of American jobs. Ford, which mortgaged all its assets four years ago and eschewed government (taxpayer) help, reported its most profitable half in more than a decade.
When David Cameron visited President Barack Obama they agreed to the 'different strokes for different folks' approach General Electric, which participates in almost every sector of the American economy, announced a 20% increase in its dividend. Verizon, a good indicator of the health of the telecoms business, reported gains that exceeded expectations, as did AT&T. Apple reported a 90% increase in earnings, giving it the highest non-holiday quarter ever. And Intel says the second quarter was the best in its 42-year history as large companies began replacing the computers that had become a bit out of date during the recession.
It is fair to say that some of the volatility in share prices is due to the fact that investors see good earnings reports from key companies, and then hear about trends in the overall economy that suggest a full, jobs-rich recovery might be a long time coming.
Some days the earnings reports win the battle, on others a gloomy economic report takes precedence. When the new jobs report is released at the end of next week it might well tip the balance between gloom and glee for the rest of the summer.
Early reports from Manpower, TrueBlue and Robert Half International — agencies that provide employers with temporary workers — suggest that employers prefer these temps to adding full-time staff. My guess is that this preference is due in part to the inability of employers to predict the healthcare costs associated with permanent staff. They are also waiting to see how much of any incremental profits they will keep after the taxman swoops.
The second battle is in the field of policy. When David Cameron visited President Barack Obama they agreed to the “different strokes for different folks” approach. Cameron will attack Britain’s deficit, Obama will borrow more to fund a second stimulus. Both make good arguments. The austerity advocates say that by cutting spending and the deficit America would keep interest rates down, increase business confidence that taxes will not rise, and encourage businesses to spend their $2 billion cash hoard.
The borrow-and-spend group, led by the president and his chief economic adviser Larry Summers, say that the recovery is so fragile that now is not the time to rein in spending. They want another stimulus now and deficit reduction later.
As with most arguments about economic theory, both parties cite the same data. The president says that without his $862 billion stimulus, the recession he inherited would have become a deep depression, and that the paltry growth in jobs, although not all he hoped for, is a lot better than the huge job losses occurring when he took office.
Opponents say that the stimulus squeezed out private-sector spending, transferred resources from the more efficient private sector to the less efficient public sector, and built up deficits that will burden future generations with higher taxes that will curtail consumer spending.
Democrats in Congress, ordinarily counted on to support the administration’s spending plans, are less inclined to study the economic runes than the polls. Since some 63% of Americans favour deficit reduction, even if that means a somewhat slower recovery, they are resisting some of the president’s new spending initiatives.
These two battles — macroeconomic data vs earnings reports, and deficit- cutting vs borrow-and-spend — will continue to be fought until clearer signs emerge about the economic outlook, perhaps when the jobs report is released.
Next up is a fight over whether to raise taxes on “the rich”, including the entrepreneurs who create most of the jobs, or leave the Bush tax cuts in place when they expire at year-end. The president wants to soak “the wealthiest” but some of his troops on his right flank, fearing that a tax increase will slow the economy and, worse still, antagonise voters, are inclined to desert him in this battle.

Irwin Stelzer is a business adviser and director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute