At hippie epicenter, a sign of new times
Haight-Ashbury takes modern turn
By Michelle Locke, Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO - First came a moratorium on head shops. Then neighbors turned out in force to support a new development that includes an upscale grocery store. And the local street fair banned open containers of alcohol.
There are signs of new times at the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets, the neighborhood that was the epicenter of the hippie movement during the Summer of Love in 1967.
“It isn’t drugs, sex, and rock ’n’ roll anymore,’’ said longtime resident and neighborhood organizer Ted Loewenberg. “It’s a different neighborhood.’’
Drugs and music have not disappeared entirely from the Haight, and judging by the baby strollers seen rolling along the sidewalks, sex has not gone out of style, either.
Still, you know this is not your father’s Haight-Ashbury when one of the burning issues of the day involves whether a Whole Foods should move into the neighborhood.
“Haight-Ashbury is a wonderful, iconic place that wrestles with its past, present, and future,’’ says San Francisco Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, who lives in and represents the neighborhood.
A walk through the Haight illustrates his point.
Here are lovingly restored Victorian mansions, glorious with details accented with gold paint. Steps away is the slumbering form of a homeless man stretched out near the front steps of a public library. A “Tiny Tots’’ diaper-service van zipping up the street spells out the latest trend of the Haight - families.
On the main thoroughfare of Haight Street, wisps of the past are brought to life in gusts of patchouli oil wafting out of vintage clothing stores and vibrantly detailed murals painted on storefronts.
Interspersed along the street are more modern accents: bustling small grocers, upscale coffee shops, and new retailers.
One of the newer stores on Haight Street is The Booksmith, an independent bookstore operated by husband-and-wife team Praveen Madan and Christin Evans.
More than two-thirds of Booksmith customers are locals who like browsing shelves that carry a wide range of titles. Naturally, there is a robust “counterculture’’ section. The rest come from all over the world, drawn by the lure of 1967, when thousands of young people came to San Francisco, with and without flowers in their hair.
It was not a long-lived moment. By fall, residents held a “death of the hippie’’ funeral.
But the legend proved hard to kill.
“The narrative of what happened in the ’60s is so powerful people still come from all over the world; they come in here and want to know where the hippies are,’’ Madan said. “Well, the hippies have been gone for 40 years.’’
On a recent sunny morning, Jacob Rivers, 18, sat at the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets, trying to interest tourists in his geometrically detailed drawings.
Tanned and towheaded, he hails from a suburb of Minneapolis, drawn by something that happened years before his birth.
“We studied this stuff,’’ he said. “It’s a beautiful place. It’s crazy to think of the legends that went down here, you know. Jerry Garcia. Jefferson Airplane. It’s a cool place to be.’’
These days, there are fights, often at the city Planning Commission, over what to preserve and what to change to make the neighborhood more livable.
Take the proposal to bring in a Whole Foods Market as part of a mixed-use housing development on the site of a closed food store.
Calvin Welch of the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council said he does not oppose a Whole Foods store per se, although he would prefer to see local grocers at the site. But he said the project as a whole, including the housing, was out of scale with the neighborhood and would have generated too much traffic.
The project won approval from planning officials after supporters showed up at a key meeting with more than 100 people.
Historian Joel Kotkin, author of “The City: A Global History,’’ sees the fight over the heart of the Haight as quintessentially San Franciscan.
“San Francisco, in a weird way, is the most conservative place in America,’’ he said.
“People went there for a particular ambiance and, even though it really is not what it was, they are desperate to hold on to it.’’

From The Sunday London Times

Dr Obama finds a balm for the middle class
Andrew Sullivan
There are many valid criticisms to be made of American healthcare, but let me tell a story that helps explain its strengths. Only 15 years ago, the retrovirus, HIV, was killing thousands in America — six times as many young Americans have died of Aids as died in Vietnam — and researchers had never found a way to stop such a sophisticated and constantly evolving organism from burying itself in people’s immune systems and slowly destroying them. I was told in 1993 that I had a few years to live. I write this 16 years later with a stronger immune system than I have ever measured before.
America’s much-maligned healthcare system did this. Without this vast and free market in medical care and pharmaceuticals, without the potential for making large amounts of money from affluent and insured patients, the innovation of treatments and regimens would never have occurred at the pace it did. Yes, publicly funded research was also vital — but it is rightly restricted to basic science, not finessing drugs for humans. Now we have dozens of anti-HIV drugs, from several private companies, competing with each other, and my life is saved. How do I put a price on that?
Here’s the catch. This miraculous process was possible for me only because I had insurance through my employer. When I quit my job editing The New Republic, in part to grapple with HIV’s toll, my employer compassionately allowed me to stay on staff at a low salary solely to protect me from going without insurance at all. You see: once without insurance in America, I would never have been able to get it again. I would have had a “pre-existing condition” and no insurance company would have accepted me.
An uninsured freelancer with HIV had one option if he were to survive: heading fast into personal bankruptcy. If I had finally lost everything, I would then have been able to apply for public assistance. Losing everything you have ever had to prevent your own death was nearly my fate. It is the fate of many in America — not the very poor, who are helped, however badly and expensively, in hospital emergency rooms — but the working middle classes who lose their healthcare soon after they lose their job.
It is this that is at the centre of Barack Obama’s proposals for reform. Yes, finding a way to control soaring costs is essential, and Obama’s final compromise bill, especially if it is without an option for an affordable publicly provided plan, doesn’t do nearly enough. Nonetheless, what the president was really selling last week was a little more middle-class security. And that was why it was more politically lethal, I suspect, than the pundit class has yet to absorb.
Some see the potency of this move. Back in 1993, when the Clintons proposed a much more ambitious plan, the Republican strategist Bill Kristol wrote a famous memo arguing that the right should not negotiate or propose an alternative but should simply do all it could to kill the bill. In it, he shrewdly homed in on the danger as he saw it: “The long-term political effects of a successful Clinton healthcare bill will be even worse — much worse [than its medical consequences]. It will relegitimise middle-class dependency for ‘security’ on government spending and regulation. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.”
I understand this sentiment and, given my libertarian leanings, tend to resist government intervention when it is unnecessary. I opposed the Clinton plan as too centrally dictated and bureaucratic. In an ideal world, I’d like to scrap the US system entirely, sever the connection between employment and health insurance, allow individuals to buy insurance from competing healthcare exchanges, and leave the rest to fee-for-service medicine. But it is a political fact that this won’t happen in America, as solid a fact as that the NHS will not be abolished by the next Tory government.
Obama’s speech last week was therefore directed at people like me: suspicious of change and government, but aware that the current system is both inefficient and at some point cruel, even immoral. He played the Burkean card: “I believe it makes more sense to build on what works and fix what doesn’t, rather than try to build an entirely new system from scratch.” He dangled the prospect of relief: “As soon as I sign this bill, it will be against the law for insurance companies to drop your coverage when you get sick, or water it down when you need it most.” And here’s the best pitch for universal healthcare to conservatives in a long time: “That large-heartedness — that concern and regard for the plight of others — is not a partisan feeling. It is not a Republican or a Democratic feeling. It, too, is part of the American character.”
This patriotic appeal was the real import of the speech. Obama continued to frustrate both the left and right, by refusing to cede too much to either. His plan is extremely close, after all, to Republican Mitt Romney’s relatively successful universal insurance programme in Massachusetts. He wants some guarantee to ensure that people are not simply priced out of access to insurance, but he has avoided endorsing the left’s public option. He has funnelled a huge new customer base to private hospitals, insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry. If his “public option” were to pass, it would still be likely to include only 5% of all Americans — 95% would still be covered by the private sector. Now imagine if David Cameron were proposing that only 5% of working-age Britons would stay in the NHS under a Tory healthcare plan. Do you think his proposal would be deemed “socialist”?
All this is worth remembering in the context of the political brouhaha. The current proposals are nobody’s ideal, but they do create healthcare exchanges that could develop into real arenas for consumer choice; they do remove a huge amount of insecurity and anxiety from many middle-class Americans; and they amount to the passage of universal coverage in a largely private system. If this passes, Obama will become a hero to the Democratic party. And if it works, he will be a hero to everyone who, like me, once feared sickness because it meant potential bankruptcy.
This immensely complex and arcane piece of messy legislation is quite simple: it’s about baseline security for a lot of people who have little. Even a free-market conservative should be able to see that as a good thing — and take it, while working for something better.

The Beatles were a triumph of capitalism
And it was all down to Brian Epstein. It was his commercial flair that turned four musicians into a global phenomenon
Daniel Finkelstein London Times
When Brian Epstein died of an overdose of sleeping pills in the summer of 1967, he was only 32 years old. He was buried in Liverpool at the Long Lane Jewish Cemetery, mourned over by his doting mother Queenie. The Beatles, the group that Epstein had made famous, had to stay away. There would have been too many members of the press and too many fans. The rabbi told the congregation that “Brian Epstein was a symbol of the malaise of our generation”.
It was an incredibly insensitive remark. Who says such a thing at the funeral of a 32-year-old? It was also very wrong. But it did reflect one faint glimmer of understanding. Epstein was indeed a symbol of his generation. And I think understanding that helps to understand both the Beatles and the 1960s. If you write the history of the 1960s with a bigger role in it for Brian Epstein, you write a different history of the 1960s and see the present differently.
In 1965, when the Beatles received the MBE, George Harrison quipped that the letters stood for “Mr Brian Epstein”. But there hadn’t been an insignia for the group’s manager and his early death meant that there never would be one. It is easy to see why Harold Wilson hadn’t added him to the list. He was just a suit, after all, not the talent.
Yet without Epstein there wouldn’t have been the Beatles. Not as we know them, anyway. It is as simple as that.
When the lads were playing their lunchtime concerts at the Cavern Club in 1961 they were a fabulously tight and talented rock’n’roll band. But that’s all they were until Epstein offered to be their manager. It was only then that they properly became the Beatles.
He was the owner of a large local record store and Harry Epstein’s boy, son of a wealthy businessman. And easily the most impressive person who had ever offered to be involved with them. Epstein transformed the Beatles into a professional showbusiness act. He put them in suits, protected their image, added theatrical touches to their stage shows, made sure they turned up on time.
Epstein had taste, an artistic feel. Although Queenie never accepted it, her son was gay, with a taste in rough trade, and in love with his group, passionately so in John Lennon’s case. His attempt to disguise his sexuality from his mother, which culminated in an absurd plan to marry the singer Alma Cogan, led him to breakdown and contributed to his death. But it also meant he understood the sexual power of the Beatles; he shared more than a little bit of the fan’s hysteria. He helped the group to exploit it.
The Beatles weren’t his only client. He had a knack for finding new talent — Cilla Black, for one — which rarely failed him. (Though it did once. When he was taken to see the young unknown Paul Simon in a dingy folk club, he rejected him. “He’s a bit small and Jewish looking,” he remarked). Epstein acts spearheaded the British invasion of the United States and helped London to obtain its swinging reputation.
Some of his early business deals were a disaster, it has to be admitted. He basically gave away the publishing rights of the Beatles songs and lost millions with a naive merchandising deal. Paul McCartney, surveying the damage years later, remarked that Epstein “looked to his dad for business advice, and his dad knew how to run a furniture store in Liverpool”.
But Epstein’s insistence on controlling the quality of the products associated with the Beatles name was a masterstroke. It is possible to argue that the group’s entire success has rested upon this. And that it remains, even now, the central plank of the Beatles’ commercial strategy and an important reason that they have attained iconic status.
Appreciating the role of Epstein, allows one to appreciate that the Beatles are as much a triumph of commerce as of art. They were not merely brilliant musicians fusing avant-garde influences with rhythm and blues music. They were a showbiz act managed by an inspired entrepreneur. They weren’t simply class rebels against the Establishment, they were the brilliant product of capitalist enterprise, the early pioneers of globalisation.
Money normally enters the Beatles story only as a reason for their demise. When Epstein died, the group famously began to argue about management and contracts and cash. Born out of music, killed by money, that’s the usual story.
However, Tony Bramwell provides a different account. Bramwell was friends with all the group, present when Paul met John; he was Brian Epstein’s right-hand man, fixing gigs for Jimi Hendrix and mixing drinks with the Rolling Stones; and was still there when Phil Spector produced Let It Be. In his recent book Magical Mystery Tours (a wonderful insider memoir) Bramwell argues that it was penal tax rates that helped to destroy the group’s cohesion.
First told to give away vast amounts to avoid tax bills — which they did in a series of madcap ventures, offering money to any old person who dropped by with a demo tape — then told they had to make £120,000 in order to keep just £10,000. Soon their finances were in chaos and their energy sapped, as nutters beseiged Apple HQ pressing tapes on them. They also ran a clothes shop as a tax dodge.
Bramwell blames Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister, directly. “There were enough new regulations and red tape to tie up free enterprise for years ... One minute Swinging London was like a giant theme park, the envy of the world, then they — Wilson and his gang — closed it down. It was as if they went out and stamped on it.”
The reason why the influence of the 1960s endures is because it was the dawn of modern consumer capitalism. It was this culture — of commerce and consumption — rather than the counter-culture that made the era and now shapes out time. And of this era, Brian Epstein was a symbol.


daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk

Where Did All the Flowers Come From?
By CARL ZIMMER NY TIMES
Throughout his life, Charles Darwin surrounded himself with flowers. When he was 10, he wrote down each time a peony bloomed in his father’s garden. When he bought a house to raise his own family, he turned the grounds into a botanical field station where he experimented on flowers until his death. But despite his intimate familiarity with flowers, Darwin once wrote that their evolution was “an abominable mystery.”
Darwin could see for himself how successful flowering plants had become. They make up the majority of living plant species, and they dominate many of the world’s ecosystems, from rain forests to grasslands. They also dominate our farms. Out of flowers come most of the calories humans consume, in the form of foods like corn, rice and wheat. Flowers are also impressive in their sheer diversity of forms and colors, from lush, full-bodied roses to spiderlike orchids to calla lilies shaped like urns.
The fossil record, however, offered Darwin little enlightenment about the early evolution of flowers. At the time, the oldest fossils of flowering plants came from rocks that had formed from 100 million to 66 million years ago during the Cretaceous period. Paleontologists found a diversity of forms, not a few primitive forerunners.
Long after Darwin’s death in 1882, the history of flowers continued to vex scientists. But talk to experts today, and there is a note of guarded optimism. “There’s an energy that I haven’t seen in my lifetime,” said William Friedman, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
The discovery of new fossils is one source of that new excitement. But scientists are also finding a wealth of clues in living flowers and their genes. They are teasing apart the recipes encoded in plant DNA for building different kinds of flowers. Their research indicates that flowers evolved into their marvelous diversity in much the same way as eyes and limbs have: through the recycling of old genes for new jobs.
Until recently, scientists were divided over how flowers were related to other plants. Thanks to studies on plant DNA, their kinship is clearer. “There was every kind of idea out there, and a lot of them have been refuted,” said James A. Doyle, a paleobotanist at the University of California, Davis.
It is now clear, for example, that the closest living relatives to flowers are flowerless species that produce seeds, a group that includes pine trees and gingkos. Unfortunately, the plants are all closely related to one another, and none is more closely related to flowers than any of the others.
The plants that might document the early stages in the emergence of the flower apparently became extinct millions of years ago. “The only way to find them is through the fossils,” Dr. Doyle said.
In the past few years scientists have pushed back the fossil record of flowers to about 136 million years ago. They have also found a number of fossils of mysterious extinct seed plants, some of which produce seeds in structures that look faintly like flowers. But the most intriguing fossils are also the most fragmentary, leaving paleobotanists deeply divided over which of them might be closely related to flowers. “There’s no consensus,” Dr. Doyle said.
But there is a consensus when it comes to the early evolution of flowers themselves. By studying the DNA of many flowering plants, scientists have found that a handful of species represent the oldest lineages alive today. The oldest branch of all is represented by just one species: a shrub called Amborella that is found only on the island of New Caledonia in the South Pacific. Water lilies and star anise represent the two next-oldest lineages alive today.
If you could travel back to 130 million years ago, you might not be impressed with the earliest flowers. “They didn’t look like they were going anywhere,” Dr. Doyle said.
Those early flowers were small and rare, living in the shadows of far more successful nonflowering plants. It took many millions of years for flowers to hit their stride. Around 120 million years ago, a new branch of flowers evolved that came to dominate many forests and explode in diversity. That lineage includes 99 percent of all species of flowering plants on Earth today, ranging from magnolias to dandelions to pumpkins. That explosion in diversity also produced the burst of flower fossils that so puzzled Darwin.
All flowers, from Amborella on, have the same basic anatomy. Just about all of them have petals or petal-like structures that surround male and female organs. The first flowers were probably small and simple, like modern Amborella flowers.
Later, in six lineages, flowers became more complicated. They evolved an inner ring of petals that became big and showy, and an outer ring of usually green, leaflike growths called sepals, which protect young flowers as they bud.
It would seem, based on this recent discovery, that a petal is not a petal is not a petal. The flowers of, say, the paw-paw tree grow petals that evolved independently from the petals on a rose. But the genes that build flowers hint that there is more to the story.
In the late 1980s, scientists discovered the first genes that guide the development of flowers. They were studying a small plant called Arabidopsis, a botanical lab rat, when they observed that mutations could set off grotesque changes. Some mutations caused petals to grow where there should have been stamens, the flower’s male organs. Other mutations transformed the inner circle of petals into sepals. And still other mutations turned sepals into leaves.
The discovery was a remarkable echo of ideas first put forward by the German poet Goethe, who not only wrote “Faust” but was also a careful observer of plants.
In 1790, Goethe wrote a visionary essay called “The Morphology of Plants,” in which he argued that all plant organs, including flowers, started out as leaves. “From first to last,” he wrote, “the plant is nothing but a leaf.”
Two centuries later, scientists discovered that mutations to genes could cause radical transformations like those Goethe envisioned. In the past two decades, scientists have investigated how the genes revealed through such mutations work in normal flowers. The genes encode proteins that can switch on other genes, which in turn can turn other genes on or off. Together, the genes can set off the development of a petal or any other part of an Arabidopsis flower.
Scientists are studying those genes to figure out how new flowers evolved. They have found versions of the genes that build Arabidopsis flowers in other species, including Amborella. In many cases, the genes have been accidentally duplicated in different lineages.
Finding those flower-building genes, however, does not automatically tell scientists what their function is in a growing flower. To answer that question, scientists need to tinker with plant genes. Unfortunately, no plant is as easy to tinker with as Arabidopsis, so answers are only beginning to emerge.
Vivian Irish, an evolutionary biologist at Yale, and her colleagues are learning how to manipulate poppies because, Dr. Irish points out, “poppies evolved petals independently.”
She and her colleagues have identified flower-building genes by shutting some of them down and producing monstrous flowers as a result.
The genes, it turns out, are related to the genes that build Arabidopsis flowers. In Arabidopsis, for example, a gene called AP3 is required to build petals and stamens. Poppies have two copies of a related version of the gene, called paleoAP3. But Dr. Irish and her colleagues found that the two genes produced different effects. Shutting down one gene transforms petals. The other transforms stamens.
The results, Dr. Irish said, show that early flowers evolved a basic tool kit of genes that marked off different regions of a stem. Those geography genes made proteins that could then switch on other genes involved in making different structures. Over time, the genes could switch control from one set of genes to another, giving rise to new flowers.
Thus, the petals on a poppy evolved independently from the petals on Arabidopsis, but both flowers use the same kinds of genes to control their growth.
If Dr. Irish is right, flowers have evolved in much the same way our own anatomy evolved. Our legs, for example, evolved independently from the legs of flies, but many of the same ancient appendage-building genes were enlisted to build those different limbs.
“I think it is pretty cool that animals and plants have used similar strategies,” Dr. Irish said, “albeit with different genes.”
Dr. Irish said, however, that her studies of petals were only part of the story. “Lots of things happened when the flower arose,” she said. Flowers evolved a new arrangement of sex organs, for example. “A pine tree has male cones and female cones,” she said, “but flowers have male and female organs on the same axis.”
Once the sex organs were gathered together, they underwent a change invisible to the naked eye that might have driven flowers to their dominant place in the plant world.
When a pollen grain fertilizes an egg, it provides two sets of DNA. While one set fertilizes the egg, the other is destined for the sac that surrounds the egg. The sac fills with endosperm, a starchy material that fuels the growth of an egg into a seed. It also fuels our own growth when we eat corn, rice or other grains.
In the first flowers, the endosperm ended up with one set of genes from the male parent and another set from the female parent. But after early lineages like Amborella and water lilies branched off, flowers bulked up their endosperm with two sets of genes from the mother and one from the father.
Dr. Friedman, of the University of Colorado, Boulder, has documented the transition and does not think it was a coincidence that flowering plants underwent an evolutionary explosion after gaining an extra set of genes in their endosperm. It is possible, for example, that with extra genes, the endosperm could make more proteins.
“It’s like having a bigger engine,” Dr. Friedman said.
Other experts agree that the transition took place, but they are not sure it is the secret to flowers’ success. “I don’t know why it should be so great,” Dr. Doyle said.
As Dr. Friedman has studied how the extra set of genes evolved in flowers, he has once again been drawn to Goethe’s vision of simple sources and complex results.
Flowers with a single set of female DNA in their endosperm, like water lilies, start out with a single nucleus at one end of the embryo sac. It divides, and one nucleus moves to the middle of the sac to become part of the endosperm.
Later, a variation evolved. In a rose or a poppy, a single nucleus starts out at one end of the sac. But when the nucleus divides, one nucleus makes its way to the other end of the sac. The two nuclei each divide, and then one of the nuclei from each end of the sac moves to the middle.
Duplication, a simple process, led to greater complexity and a major change in flowers.
“Nature just doesn’t invent things out of whole cloth,” Dr. Friedman said. “It creates novelty in very simple ways. They’re not radical or mysterious. Goethe already had this figured out.”

Obama’s in the ER but he’ll get his reforms
The right’s healthcare scare tactics are hitting home – but to little purpose
Andrew Sullivan Times of London
The media love drama, and the prospect of a sudden, Icarian fall to earth by the dashing new president is too good a story to miss. The summer has been crammed with YouTube clips and television news reports featuring the angrier members of the Republican right railing against Barack Obama’s plans to inflict euthanasia on their grandmothers, abort their children and put them in concentration camps.
No, I’m not kidding. One of the most popular far-right websites, WorldNetDaily (with 5m readers a month), has argued that Obama’s healthcare reforms appear designed “to create the type of detention centre” that people “fear” could be used as “concentration camps for political dissidents, such as occurred in Nazi Germany”.
Last week, in a fracas at a town hall meeting, an elderly man had his little finger bitten off. Not quite the storming of the Bastille, but not nothing either.
This is a circus, but circuses get ratings, and they also shift the mood. Behind the theatrics, there is little doubt that worries about overhauling an industry as big as the entire British economy have deepened. The majority of Americans, with great healthcare, are understandably wary of change. The uninsured are a small minority and not as politically involved as elderly voters terrified by Republican claims that they are all about to be denied treatment. Obama’s hang-back strategy — designed to avoid a repetition of Hillary Clinton’s hands-on failure in 1993-4 — has allowed opponents to define the issue negatively.
There has been a political cost for the president. His approval ratings have slid from close to 70% to around 50%. That’s not as steep a slide as Bill Clinton managed in the same period, but it’s still worrying. His decline among independent voters is a bad sign and his pragmatism has weakened the passion of his own party base to support him. On Wednesday the president will give a speech to Congress on the reforms. He will need to be on good form.
Nonetheless, I remain convinced Obama will win this fight. Not totally; not without political cost; but win it he shall. And the strategy is really very simple. The most popular elements of the bill will be kept in and the most contentious left out.
The fundamental issue of costs will be deferred. A bill that prevents insurance companies from denying coverage to people with pre-existing illnesses; that creates healthcare exchanges, where people can buy their own insurance policy subsidised by the government; that brings agreed price reductions by the drug companies in return for all these new, previously uninsured clients: this will pass and be popular. How could it not? The option of a government-run insurance plan to compete with private ones will be either dispensed with or held in reserve. If, after a few years, health costs keep soaring and the private companies have not mended their free-spending ways, it could be brought back.
Obama has a solid majority and can achieve all this with Democratic votes alone. So why is he in such trouble? Partly it is that this kind of reform rightly stirs scepticism, and Obama has allowed a hapless and divided Congress to take the lead, muddying the message. Partly it is that the hard right is becoming more and more extreme and its fears have eclipsed the hopes of Obama’s supporters. But the most critical part, in my view, is the public understanding that after two massive bank bailouts and a vast stimulus package, with two still-intractable wars, the US cannot afford even the modest 10-year trilliondollar package Obama is proposing. And Obama’s inability to cut spending while the economy is so fragile means he is constrained from offering fiscal reassurance.
So, tactically, Obama is on the defensive. Strategically? Again, he is stronger than he now appears. When the health insurance bill is passed and elderly Americans are not rounded up into concentration camps and granny isn’t subjected to euthanasia, and when many uninsured people gain a peace of mind they have never felt before, and people become able to change job without fearing loss of insurance, the Republican scare tactics may come to seem absurd.
Moreover, the Republicans have failed to lay out their proposals for dealing with the same problems. There are some worthwhile ideas out there: guaranteeing insurance only for catastrophic or chronic illness, vouchers for free check-ups and tax-free health savings accounts to pay for medicines and routine treatment. These proposals go largely unheard, though, drowned out by anti-Obama scaremongering. A party that has tried to kill what may well become a popular measure and has offered no alternative is not thinking strategically.
Imagine next year. Obama has a healthcare plan and a carbon emissions scheme in place, both of which duck some core difficult questions but are still big moves away from the era of George W Bush. His stimulus, designed to kick in with more force in 2010, helps to push an already recovering economy into growth. The troops begin to come back from Iraq in larger numbers. Stocks maintain momentum; banks keep paying back their bailout money, giving the government a profit; and Obama calls a fiscal-responsibility summit to begin to chart a path back to budget sanity.
It won’t turn out that easily, but it’s a plausible scenario. The strategy of pushing much of the stimulus money into an election year was, in retrospect, a shrewd if cynical ploy from Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff. The Democrats will almost certainly lose seats in the Senate in the 2010 mid-term elections, as incumbent parties do, but even in the worst-case (and highly unlikely) scenario, a Republican takeover of the House, Obama’s options are no worse than Clinton’s were in 1994. Clinton, you may recall, failed to get healthcare and yet was re-elected handsomely.
And what will the Republicans be saying then? At some point, they need ideas — yet no ideological heavy lifting is currently being done. Worse, their most credible candidate for 2012, Mitt Romney, enacted a healthcare reform in Massachusetts very similar to Obama’s national plan. How does a party attack a healthcare reform when its own candidate endorsed just such a scheme in his own state?
Well, I guess they can run Sarah Palin or Dick Cheney. But Obama has already defeated both of them. He took his time this summer, hung back and let his enemies do their worst. They did. He took a beating. But, as with the Clintons and John McCain during the election campaign, he survived their tactical hits by retaining a strategic cunning. He still has it. Whether he can retain it is what the next year will tell us.

The Summer of Our Discontent
By JOE QUEENAN Wall Street Journal
At midnight on Monday, when Labor Day ends, the summer of 2009 will officially pass into the annals of history. Good riddance. If there is a less scintillating summer on record, it's hard to remember it. By any standards—cultural, horticultural, political, cinematic, jurisprudential, meteorological—this is the least eventful summer since 1491. It started raining in June and never stopped. Health-care reform didn't get anywhere. The tomatoes were uneatable. Congress accomplished nothing. All the movies stunk. There were no good summer reads. The Jonas Brothers maliciously tried to pass themselves off as entertainers. Kate and Jon ruled the roost. As the summer slogged toward its sad, ignominious conclusion—just when the nation needed some bucking up, some leadership, perhaps even a few good chuckles—the president retreated to Martha's Vineyard, where he made a point of getting himself photographed acting really, really cool for a change. That left Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to provide all the last laughs. If it hadn't been for the exploits of the peregrinatory Lothario Mark Sanford and that prickly cop up in Cambridge, there would have been no fun at all this summer.

This is the summer when nothing exciting happened. In fact, the most exciting thing that did happen was the eruption of angry town hall meetings all across the nation whose sole purpose was to prevent anything from happening. Elsewhere, there was not a whole lot to report. Sonya Sotomayor's Supreme Court nomination did not morph into an ideological Thermophylae where a pitched battle for, yea, the very soul of the nation hung in the balance. Gitmo did not get shuttered. Mr. Obama stubbornly refused to pick a fight with anybody. Tina Fey didn't do any funny new impressions. Joe Biden didn't say anything ridiculous. What were the odds of that?

America fared no better in more lighthearted spheres. There was no life-affirming little film that came out of nowhere to capture the American people's imagination the way "Slumdog Millionaire" did. The 200-1 longshot Tampa Bay Rays did not dominate the world of baseball the way they did last summer; the New York Yankees and their 26 World Championships did. Rafael Nadal, the most thrilling tennis player since John McEnroe, did not show up for Wimbledon. Lance Armstrong, the greatest bicyclist ever, did not emerge from retirement to win the Tour de France, inspiring cancer survivors everywhere; somebody from Spain, who did not have cancer, did. And oh yes, the Los Angeles Lakers won their 15th NBA championship.

This was a summer well described as déjà vu all over again. Teenagers wearing gladiator sandals, to the beach, to the prom, to their commencement exercises, to state prison, was not a new look. Neither were racy tattoos on freshmen at Sarah Lawrence. The most exciting car introduced this year will not be available until November 2010 and looks exactly like every compact car produced in the past 15 years. When Apple introduced its Snow Leopard operating system in August, it contained no exciting, revolutionary new features. None. The ballyhooed 40th anniversary of Woodstock turned out to be a tragicomic exhumation of legendary bands whose biggest stars were either long dead or too proud to attend. Great! Remind us once again how wonderful things were 40 years ago during the Summer of Love! Only this time, the mood was less SDS than AARP. Anyway, nobody showed up. By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half-a-dozen strong.

This was also the summer when journalists kept trying to tell the American people that they were missing something really important, when deep inside they knew they were not. No matter how many times they were told that "Mad Men" was the most riveting program since "Big Love," and that missing out on "True Blood" was a crime of cultural obtuseness on a par with failing to watch "John From Cincinnati," most Americans found it hard to get excited about an ironic TV program dealing with midcentury modern admen. They got more excited about the news that Tom DeLay would appear this fall on "Dancing With the Stars." It is never a good sign when the most exciting thing on television is a dancing Republican.

This was the summer when all the beach reading was atrocious, when all the best sellers announced that America was going to hell in a handbasket—Hey! There's an original idea!—and when the long-awaited new novel by Dan Brown failed to appear. There were no electrifying new cookbooks, no "Freakonomics," no mystifying reading suggestions by Oprah. This summer, the entire city of Chicago did not read "To Kill a Mockingbird," nor did a new translation of "Anna Karenina" win a surprise summer following among high school dropouts. Instead, everyone read more stuff about vampires. The book that got the most attention dealt with a weird frathouse in Arlington, Va., frequented by people like…Mark Sanford. Once again, South Carolina's plucky, unpredictable governor was the only one providing any laughs.

Pop music provided no respite from this hegemony of dreariness. Bruce Springsteen went out on tour with an album lionizing gallant working stiffs. Then he left for Europe. Madonna went to Bucharest and upbraided the Romanians for being mean to Gypsies. Just what the Gypsies needed: Madonna in their corner. Then Eminem came out of retirement, as if that was going to cause society to pop the champagne corks. Meanwhile, everywhere you looked photos of the sullen, posturing Jonas Brothers—Menudo for white folks—stared back at you. Annexing Keith Richards's 1965 tilted-sunglasses look and Joey Lawrence's 1994 hair, the Jonas Brothers looked about as edgy and dangerous as a trio of gherkins.

The seen-it-before sense was particularly acute in the movies. More "X-Men" movies. More "Terminator" movies. More "Harry Potter" movies. More "Da Vinci Code" movies. With the exception of "Inglourious Basterds," which posits a world in which Nazis are dapper, poly-lingual, and actually kind of amusing, all the moves we looked forward to were duds. "Terminator Salvation" was a monstrosity. Sasha Baron Cohen's willfully offensive "Bruno" came and went so fast nobody had a chance to be offended buy it. Judd Apatow's "Funny People" wasn't funny. There was no Batman film starring a meteoric young talent who was already dead; instead, we got yet another Transformer movie, where rising star Shia LaBeouf—who looks like the young George W. Bush—got upstaged by the ordnance. Last year's offbeat comic classic was "Tropic Thunder"; this year's offbeat comic classic was a movie about Julia Child. What kind of year is it when a movie starring Julia Roberts is a bomb and a movie about Julia Child is a hit?
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Oh yes, this was the summer when Woody Allen released a movie about a miserable, self-loathing New York-based neurotic.

The summer of 2009 was the summer when nothing positive happened. The stock market went up but it didn't help the economy. The classic bear market "sucker rally," which lifted stocks by 50%, still left the Dow 5,000 points short of its all time high. In other words, those who had lost 53% of their life's savings had now only lost 38%. Golly! Pass me another Dos Equis! Toxic assets were still on the books, mortgage refinancings slowed to a trickle, no one could get a loan to start a business. Housing starts remained at apocalyptic lows, people kept getting laid off, people kept getting furloughed. The press kept writing stories about people getting laid off and furloughed. Then journalists started getting laid off, and those that had not been laid off started writing stories about how journalists getting laid off—or furloughed—was hurting the economy because now there would be even fewer people to write stories about people who had been laid off. Or furloughed.

Obviously this summer could not possibly measure up to the standards of the summer of 2008. It did not have the millennial hoopla supplied by Barack Obama's stunning ascent to the highest office in the land. It did not have Sarah Palin. It did not have the return of the Weathermen to the national stage and the enthralling, quixotic candidacy of Mike Huckabee. Nor did it have the astonishing demise of Bear Stearns, the implosion of AIG, the ritual seppuku of the American auto industry. It did not have Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Lehman Brothers, Countrywide Financial or routine 500-point one-day drops in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It did not have the overnight collapse of the global economic system, with the concomitant, looming possibility that life as we know it would be extinguished.

So, obviously, 2008 was going to be a tough act to follow.

No one is suggesting that the summer of 2008 was an event we would like to see repeated. But there can be no denying that it had…well…pizzazz. Mindful of this, couldn't the summer of 2009 at least have made some kind of an effort? Couldn't it have given it the old college try? What kind of summer is it when people go to the beach and the only thing they talk about is health care reform? What kind of a summer is it when people have fist fights about whether or not the United States has the 37th-best health-care system in the world? What kind of a summer is it when people actually read the 1,200-page health-care "document" and TiVo the Budget Director's most recent appearance on "The Daily Show"? What kind of a summer is it when people can cite the most chimerical figures supplied by the Budget Director? What kind of a summer is it when the American people even know the Budget Director's name?

Another reason the summer of 2009 seems so ghastly is because other countries are living through infinitely more exciting times. First, the Iranians treated themselves to a bona fide stolen election. Then the Afghans followed suit. Not to be outdone, the Pakistanis put the Taliban in charge of the top tourist draw in that zany, unpredictable nation. Gosh, that worked out well! The North Koreans were up to their old kleptocratic tricks, and the Mexicans, Venezuelans and Colombians kept their nations reliably anarchic. Meanwhile, back home in the states we had…town-hall meetings about…health care.

Sadly, in the summer of 2009, some of the nation's most reliable entertainers remained on the sidelines. Brad and Angie did not break up. Michael Moore did not make a movie suggesting that al Qaeda provided better health care to employees than GM. Paris Hilton kept a distressingly low profile. Cher stayed home. Indeed, speaking of Cher, this summer will be remembered as the summer when the only thriving businessmen were morticians. Nobody actually did anything important this summer; nothing significant got accomplished; the headlines were dominated by people who (a) were checking out for good, and (b) whose best years were behind them.

Yes, this summer only the Grim Reaper came through in the clutch. Yet in the end the Celebrities Crossing the Styx epidemic turned out to be quite unpleasant because it let slip the dogs of eulogy. When Michael Jackson died, we were informed, a part of us all died. A part of us also died when Walter Cronkite went to meet his maker, as a golden age of American journalism evaporated beneath the sands of time. When Farrah Fawcett bought the farm, yet another part of us receded into the ether as our emotional connection with an earlier, more innocent time was sundered. The real haymaker was when Teddy Kennedy breathed his last, for then and only then could one say that the misty, mythical splendor and impossible dreams of Camelot had disappeared from the planet for good. We would not look on the likes of Jackson and Kennedy and Cronkite and Fawcett again, we were reminded again and again by the people that get paid to say these things. The Republic would never be the same without them. Only Ed McMahon's death failed to provoke such an outpouring of transcontinental anguish. In all likelihood, so it appeared, the Republic would survive McMahon's passing. The Republic was bloodied, but the Republic was unbowed. For that which did not kill us only made us stronger.

Death, even at the highest levels, is no substitute for good clean fun. That's because, when you get right down to it, death isn't anywhere near as interesting as life. Which is why the handful of still-breathing individuals who did try to prevent this summer from being completely lethal, the ones who did bridle at the idea of letting the freshly deceased grab all the headlines, are to be congratulated. Just this week, it was reported in the New York Post that roving philanderer and erstwhile Slate magazine columnist Eliot Spitzer is considering a return to political life. Well, bring it on! Down in Dixie, Mr. Spitzer's fellow political cadaver Mark Sanford climbed out of his tomb long enough to say that he is not stepping down from office, no sirree, Bob. Such obdurateness, truculence and refusal to accept reality is to be applauded. These guys may be nuts. They may be unprincipled. They may be utterly conscienceless. But talking about Eliot Spitzer and Mark Sanford is a lot more fun than talking about health care.

Joe Queenan is a freelance writer in Tarrytown, N.Y.
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W1

Missing Richard Nixon
By PAUL KRUGMAN NY TIMES
Many of the retrospectives on Ted Kennedy’s life mention his regret that he didn’t accept Richard Nixon’s offer of a bipartisan health care deal. The moral some commentators take from that regret is that today’s health care reformers should do what Mr. Kennedy balked at doing back then, and reach out to the other side.
But it’s a bad analogy, because today’s political scene is nothing like that of the early 1970s. In fact, surveying current politics, I find myself missing Richard Nixon.
No, I haven’t lost my mind. Nixon was surely the worst person other than Dick Cheney ever to control the executive branch.
But the Nixon era was a time in which leading figures in both parties were capable of speaking rationally about policy, and in which policy decisions weren’t as warped by corporate cash as they are now. America is a better country in many ways than it was 35 years ago, but our political system’s ability to deal with real problems has been degraded to such an extent that I sometimes wonder whether the country is still governable.
As many people have pointed out, Nixon’s proposal for health care reform looks a lot like Democratic proposals today. In fact, in some ways it was stronger. Right now, Republicans are balking at the idea of requiring that large employers offer health insurance to their workers; Nixon proposed requiring that all employers, not just large companies, offer insurance.
Nixon also embraced tighter regulation of insurers, calling on states to “approve specific plans, oversee rates, ensure adequate disclosure, require an annual audit and take other appropriate measures.” No illusions there about how the magic of the marketplace solves all problems.
So what happened to the days when a Republican president could sound so nonideological, and offer such a reasonable proposal?
Part of the answer is that the right-wing fringe, which has always been around — as an article by the historian Rick Perlstein puts it, “crazy is a pre-existing condition” — has now, in effect, taken over one of our two major parties. Moderate Republicans, the sort of people with whom one might have been able to negotiate a health care deal, have either been driven out of the party or intimidated into silence. Whom are Democrats supposed to reach out to, when Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who was supposed to be the linchpin of any deal, helped feed the “death panel” lies?
But there’s another reason health care reform is much harder now than it would have been under Nixon: the vast expansion of corporate influence.
We tend to think of the way things are now, with a huge army of lobbyists permanently camped in the corridors of power, with corporations prepared to unleash misleading ads and organize fake grass-roots protests against any legislation that threatens their bottom line, as the way it always was. But our corporate-cash-dominated system is a relatively recent creation, dating mainly from the late 1970s.
And now that this system exists, reform of any kind has become extremely difficult. That’s especially true for health care, where growing spending has made the vested interests far more powerful than they were in Nixon’s day. The health insurance industry, in particular, saw its premiums go from 1.5 percent of G.D.P. in 1970 to 5.5 percent in 2007, so that a once minor player has become a political behemoth, one that is currently spending $1.4 million a day lobbying Congress.
That spending fuels debates that otherwise seem incomprehensible. Why are “centrist” Democrats like Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota so opposed to letting a public plan, in which Americans can buy their insurance directly from the government, compete with private insurers? Never mind their often incoherent arguments; what it comes down to is the money.
Given the combination of G.O.P. extremism and corporate power, it’s now doubtful whether health reform, even if we get it — which is by no means certain — will be anywhere near as good as Nixon’s proposal, even though Democrats control the White House and have a large Congressional majority.
And what about other challenges? Every desperately needed reform I can think of, from controlling greenhouse gases to restoring fiscal balance, will have to run the same gantlet of lobbying and lies.
I’m not saying that reformers should give up. They do, however, have to realize what they’re up against. There was a lot of talk last year about how Barack Obama would be a “transformational” president — but true transformation, it turns out, requires a lot more than electing one telegenic leader. Actually turning this country around is going to take years of siege warfare against deeply entrenched interests, defending a deeply dysfunctional political system.