While normal people were out having fun Saturday night, I was home in front of the TV. But I wasn’t enjoying the Olympics. Your diligent columnist was dutifully watching Barack Obama and John McCain answer the Rev. Rick Warren’s questions at Saddleback Church. Virtue is sometimes rewarded. The event was worth watching — and for me yielded three conclusions.

First, Rick Warren should moderate one of the fall presidential debates.

Warren’s queries were simple but probing. He was fair to both candidates, his manner was relaxed but serious, and he neither went for “gotcha” questions nor pulled his punches. And his procedure of asking virtually identical questions to each candidate during his turn on stage paid off. It allowed us to see the two giving revealingly different answers to the same question.

So, I say, with all due respect to Jim Lehrer, Tom Brokaw and Bob Schieffer — the somewhat nondiverse group selected by the debates commission as the three presidential debate moderators — one of them should step aside for Warren.

Second, it was McCain’s night.

Obama made no big mistakes. But his tendency to somewhat windy generalities meant he wasn’t particularly compelling. McCain, who went second, was crisp by contrast, and his anecdotes colorful.

Now I’m not entirely unbiased (!), so I don’t quite trust my initial judgment in such matters. But it was confirmed the next morning. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported on “Meet the Press” that “the Obama people must feel that he didn’t do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context. ... What they’re putting out privately is that McCain ... may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama.”

There’s no evidence that McCain had any such advantage. But the fact that Obama’s people made this suggestion means they know McCain outperformed him.

Third, Obama and McCain really do have different “worldviews,” to use Rick Warren’s term.

Perhaps the most revealing moment was the two candidates’ response to a question about evil. Yes, evil — that negation of the good that, Friedrich Nietzsche to the contrary notwithstanding, we seem not to have moved beyond.

Warren asked whether evil exists and if it does, “do we ignore it? Do we negotiate with it? Do we contain it? Do we defeat it?”

Obama and McCain agreed evil exists and couldn’t be ignored. But then their answers diverged.

Obama said that “we see evil all the time” — in Darfur, on the streets of our cities, in child abusers. Such evils, he continued, need to be “confronted squarely.” And while we can’t “erase evil from the world,” we can be “soldiers” in the task of confronting it when we see it.

But, Obama added, “Now, the one thing that I think is very important is for us to have some humility” as we confront evil. Why? Because “a lot of evil has been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil.” After all, “just because we think our intentions are good doesn’t always mean that we’re going to be doing good.”

It’s nice to see a liberal aware of the limits of good intentions — indeed, that the road to hell is paved with them. But here as elsewhere, Obama stayed at a high level of abstraction. It would have been interesting if Warren had asked a follow-up question: Where in particular has the United States in recent years — at home or especially abroad — perpetrated evil in the name of confronting evil? Hasn’t the overwhelming problem been, rather, a reluctance to effectively confront evil — in Darfur, or Rwanda, or pre-9/11 Afghanistan?

John McCain appears to think so. Unlike Obama, he took the question about evil to be in the first instance about 9/11. McCain asserted that “of course evil must be defeated,” and he put “radical Islamic extremism,” Al Qaeda in particular, at the top of his to-defeat list. In this context, McCain discussed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and concluded by mentioning “the young men and women who are serving this nation in uniform.”

So while Obama talked of confronting evil, McCain spoke of defeating it. Obama took the view that evil is generally abroad in the world; McCain focused on radical Islam and 9/11. Obama claimed that all of us must be metaphorical “soldiers” against evil; McCain paid tribute to actual American soldiers. And McCain couldn’t resist saying again Saturday night that if he has to follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell to get him and bring him to justice, he’ll do so.

Rick Warren remarked Saturday night that he wanted to help us understand Obama’s and McCain’s different worldviews. He accomplished his purpose.

Oh, and that "cone of silence" crap we were handed?  A tissue of lies...  Here's Mr. Krugman:

By rights, John McCain should be getting hammered on economics.

After all, Mr. McCain proposes continuing the policies of a president who’s had a truly dismal economic record — job growth under the current administration has been the slowest in 60 years, even slower than job growth under the first President Bush. And the public blames the White House, giving Mr. Bush spectacularly low ratings on his handling of the economy.

Meanwhile, The Times reports that, according to associates, Mr. McCain still “dials up” Phil Gramm, the former senator who resigned as co-chairman of the campaign after calling America a “nation of whiners” and dismissing the country’s economic woes as nothing more than a “mental recession.” And Mr. Gramm is still considered a top pick for Treasury secretary.

So Mr. McCain would seem to offer a target a mile wide: a die-hard supporter of failed economic policies who takes his advice from people completely out of touch with the lives of working Americans.

But while polls continue to show that the public, by a large margin, trusts Democrats more than Republicans to handle the economy, recent polling shows that Barack Obama has at best a small edge over Mr. McCain on the issue — four points in a recent Time magazine poll, and he is one point behind according to Rasmussen Reports, which does automated polling. And Mr. Obama’s failure to achieve a decisive edge on economic policy is central to his failure to open up a big lead in overall polling.

Why isn’t the Obama campaign getting more traction on economic issues?

It’s not the Republican offensive on offshore drilling. It’s true that many Americans have apparently been misled by bogus claims about gas price relief. But as I’ve already pointed out, Democrats in general retain a large edge on economic issues.

Nor is there any valid basis for the complaints, highlighted in Sunday’s Times, that Mr. Obama isn’t offering enough policy specifics. Delve into the Obama campaign Web site and you’ll find plenty of policy detail. And the campaign’s ads reel off lots of specific policy proposals — too many, if you ask me.

No, the problem isn’t lack of specifics — it’s lack of passion. When it comes to the economy, Mr. Obama’s campaign seems oddly lethargic.

I was astonished at the flatness of the big economy speech he gave in St. Petersburg at the beginning of this month — a speech that was billed as the start of a new campaign focus on economic issues. Mr. Obama is a great orator, yet he began that speech with a litany of statistics that were probably meaningless to most listeners.

Worse yet, he seemed to go out of his way to avoid scoring political points. “Back in the 1990s,” he declared, “your incomes grew by $6,000, and over the last several years, they’ve actually fallen by nearly $1,000.” Um, not quite: real median household income didn’t rise $6,000 during “the 1990s,” it did so during the Clinton years, after falling under the first Bush administration. Income hasn’t fallen $1,000 in “recent years,” it’s fallen under George Bush, with all of the decline taking place before 2005.

Obama surrogates have shown a similar inclination to go for the capillaries rather than the jugular. A recent Wall Street Journal op-ed by two Obama advisers offered another blizzard of statistics almost burying the key point — that most Americans would pay lower taxes under the Obama tax plan than under the McCain plan.

All this makes a stark contrast with the campaign of the last Democrat to make it to the White House, who had no trouble conveying passion over matters economic.

In his speech accepting the Democratic nomination in 1992, a year in which economic conditions somewhat resembled those today, Bill Clinton denounced his opponent as someone “caught in the grip of a failed economic theory.” Where Mr. Obama spoke cryptically in St. Petersburg about a “reckless few” who “game the system, as we’ve seen in this housing crisis” — I know what he meant, I think, but how many voters got it? — Mr. Clinton declared that “those who play by the rules and keep the faith have gotten the shaft, and those who cut corners and cut deals have been rewarded.” That’s the kind of hard-hitting populism that’s been absent from the Obama campaign so far.

Of course, Mr. Obama hasn’t given his own acceptance speech yet. Al Gore found a new populist fervor in August 2000, and surged in the polls. A comparable surge by Mr. Obama would give him a landslide victory this year.

But it’s up to him. If Mr. Obama can’t find the passion on economic matters that has been lacking in his campaign so far, he may yet lose this election.

And he'll bloody well deserve to.

So far, the international economic consequences of the war in the Caucasus have been fairly minor, despite Georgia’s role as a major corridor for oil shipments. But as I was reading the latest bad news, I found myself wondering whether this war is an omen — a sign that the second great age of globalization may share the fate of the first.

If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, here’s what you need to know: our grandfathers lived in a world of largely self-sufficient, inward-looking national economies — but our great-great grandfathers lived, as we do, in a world of large-scale international trade and investment, a world destroyed by nationalism.

We're supposed to learn from our mistakes, on all levels, not just personally. But, history doesn't support that notion, now, does it? Krugman gives us an example and then points out the head-in-the-sand responses from current analysts.

Some analysts tell us not to worry: global economic integration itself protects us against war, they argue, because successful trading economies won’t risk their prosperity by engaging in military adventurism. But this, too, raises unpleasant historical memories.

Shortly before World War I another British author, Norman Angell, published a famous book titled “The Great Illusion,” in which he argued that war had become obsolete, that in the modern industrial era even military victors lose far more than they gain. He was right — but wars kept happening anyway.

We haven't learned from history, and it's time we do.

Three months ago, an earthquake struck China’s Sichuan Province, killing nearly 70,000 people. Xian Tianquan was at home with his wife in the village of Pengshua at the time. They made a dash to get outside. Xian’s wife was just ahead of him, crossing the threshold of their house when the frame collapsed. She was killed instantly.

The village was cut off from outside help for three days. Xian took his wife’s body and carried it up to the hills, where he buried her.

This week, he sat on the spot of her death, telling the story with a matter-of-fact, almost cheerful air. A small group of villagers was hanging around, and the interview, outside under a tarp, was a communal affair. The villagers joked with each other and smiled frequently in a manner I found hard to fathom as they described the horrible events from May.

I asked Xian if he had thought about leaving the village after what had happened. The idea had never crossed his mind, he said. Many families lost people (a nearby kindergarten building collapsed), and if the healthy left, who would look after the young ones and the elders? Members of the village now share cooking duties and help each other with everything.

I asked if people in the village have suffered any psychological aftershocks from the trauma. Another villager, Tan Fubian, piped up and said that they just try not to think about it. Then I asked about the reconstruction.

To my eyes, this part of the region looks forlorn. Houses and stores have been reduced to empty shells. Piles of rubble line the streets. In one town, an elderly man stood atop some concrete stairs laboriously swinging a hammer in an attempt to destroy them. There’s little construction equipment in the residential areas.

Tan pointed out that the government had established priorities. Public buildings like hospitals, schools and government offices would be rebuilt first. Private houses after that.

I asked if the villagers were watching the Olympics, and wondered if the lavish spending on the Games could better be used to address their own needs. “Our problems are temporary,” one villager responded. “The Olympics are for the national community.” Last Friday, the whole village had gathered (just by the spot where Xian’s wife had died) to have a feast and watch the opening ceremony.

We’d visited the village without warning and selected our interview subjects at random, but some of the answers were probably crafted to please the government. Still, there was no disguising the emotional resilience and intense mutual support in that village. And there was no avoiding the baffling sense of equanimity. Where was the trauma and grief?

The next day we approached Qi Chengbin, a retired food vendor in the city of Dujiangyan. Qi was working in the garden outside his six-story apartment building when the quake hit. His only child, an 18-year-old son, was taking a nap inside when the entire building collapsed on top of him.

Qi never saw his son or any of his possessions again. His own wounds were treated and his son’s body was cremated by the military. Qi says he hopes to have a funeral for the boy, but he hasn’t had a chance to organize it.

When I asked about the psychological effects of such a shock, Qi emphasized the positive. The government had provided free medical care. Within nine days, he had been resettled in a one-room apartment in a temporary housing camp. He’d lived through China’s dark days, and this apartment was nicer than any place he’d lived in the 1960s.

Moreover, the government had given him everything he now owns. “The government wants us to look on the positive side,” he said.

There were no pictures of his dead son around, but from under his bed he pulled a photo album that had been at his mother-in-law’s at the time of the quake. I thought he would betray some emotion as he passed around photos of his handsome, scholarly looking boy. There was nothing. He kept speaking in that pragmatic tone, just as Xian had done. Qi’s wife added that she was very satisfied with all that had been done for them.

These were weird, unnerving interviews, and I don’t pretend to understand what’s going on in the minds of people who have suffered such blows and remained so optimistic. All I can imagine is that the history of this province has given these people a stripped-down, pragmatic mentality: Move on or go crazy. Don’t dwell. Look to the positive. Fix what needs fixing. Work together.

I don’t know if it’s emotionally sustainable or even healthy, but it raises at least one interesting question. When you compare these people to the emotional Sturm und Drang over lesser things on reality TV, you do wonder if we Americans are a nation of whiners.

How like Bobo — to be dumbstruck that not everyone in the world reacts exactly as he, the model for us all, would react...  Here's Mr. Krugman:

So far, the international economic consequences of the war in the Caucasus have been fairly minor, despite Georgia’s role as a major corridor for oil shipments. But as I was reading the latest bad news, I found myself wondering whether this war is an omen — a sign that the second great age of globalization may share the fate of the first.

If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, here’s what you need to know: our grandfathers lived in a world of largely self-sufficient, inward-looking national economies — but our great-great grandfathers lived, as we do, in a world of large-scale international trade and investment, a world destroyed by nationalism.

Writing in 1919, the great British economist John Maynard Keynes described the world economy as it was on the eve of World War I. “The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth ... he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world.”

And Keynes’s Londoner “regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement ... The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion ... appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice.”

But then came three decades of war, revolution, political instability, depression and more war. By the end of World War II, the world was fragmented economically as well as politically. And it took a couple of generations to put it back together.

So, can things fall apart again? Yes, they can.

Consider how things have played out in the current food crisis. For years we were told that self-sufficiency was an outmoded concept, and that it was safe to rely on world markets for food supplies. But when the prices of wheat, rice and corn soared, Keynes’s “projects and politics” of “restrictions and exclusion” made a comeback: many governments rushed to protect domestic consumers by banning or limiting exports, leaving food-importing countries in dire straits.

And now comes “militarism and imperialism.” By itself, as I said, the war in Georgia isn’t that big a deal economically. But it does mark the end of the Pax Americana — the era in which the United States more or less maintained a monopoly on the use of military force. And that raises some real questions about the future of globalization.

Most obviously, Europe’s dependence on Russian energy, especially natural gas, now looks very dangerous — more dangerous, arguably, than its dependence on Middle Eastern oil. After all, Russia has already used gas as a weapon: in 2006, it cut off supplies to Ukraine amid a dispute over prices.

And if Russia is willing and able to use force to assert control over its self-declared sphere of influence, won’t others do the same? Just think about the global economic disruption that would follow if China — which is about to surpass the United States as the world’s largest manufacturing nation — were to forcibly assert its claim to Taiwan.

Some analysts tell us not to worry: global economic integration itself protects us against war, they argue, because successful trading economies won’t risk their prosperity by engaging in military adventurism. But this, too, raises unpleasant historical memories.

Shortly before World War I another British author, Norman Angell, published a famous book titled “The Great Illusion,” in which he argued that war had become obsolete, that in the modern industrial era even military victors lose far more than they gain. He was right — but wars kept happening anyway.

So are the foundations of the second global economy any more solid than those of the first? In some ways, yes. For example, war among the nations of Western Europe really does seem inconceivable now, not so much because of economic ties as because of shared democratic values.

Much of the world, however, including nations that play a key role in the global economy, doesn’t share those values. Most of us have proceeded on the belief that, at least as far as economics goes, this doesn’t matter — that we can count on world trade continuing to flow freely simply because it’s so profitable. But that’s not a safe assumption.

Angell was right to describe the belief that conquest pays as a great illusion. But the belief that economic rationality always prevents war is an equally great illusion. And today’s high degree of global economic interdependence, which can be sustained only if all major governments act sensibly, is more fragile than we imagine.

But down at number seven on that list, economist/astute observer of politics, Paul Krugman made the following important point about "bipartisanship."

What I mean, instead, is that know-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party’s de facto slogan has become: “Real men don’t think things through.”

...

In any case, remember this the next time someone calls for an end to partisanship, for working together to solve the country’s problems. It’s not going to happen — not as long as one of America’s two great parties believes that when it comes to politics, stupidity is the best policy.

To the victors should go the spoils.  If the voters choose a president and a Congress of the same party, as existed in spirit from 2000 to 2006 and in fact from 2002 to 2006, then that party should get the chance to run the place according to their own platforms.

Why give ground to the losing side on any point if the voters themselves have decided they want to give your way a go for a while?  If they don't like the results, I'm sure they'll let you know in 2010.

In August 1924, the small nation of Georgia, occupied by Soviet Russia since 1921, rose up against Soviet rule. On Sept. 16, 1924, The Times of London reported on an appeal by the president of the Georgian Republic to the League of Nations. While “sympathetic reference to his country’s efforts was made” in the Assembly, the Times said, “it is realized that the League is incapable of rendering material aid, and that the moral influence which may be a powerful force with civilized countries is unlikely to make any impression upon Soviet Russia.”

“Unlikely” was an understatement. Georgians did not enjoy freedom again until 1991.

Today, the Vladimir Putins and Hu Jintaos and Mahmoud Ahmadinejads of the world — to say nothing of their junior counterparts in places like Sudan, Zimbabwe, Burma and North Korea — are no more likely than were Soviet leaders in 1924 to be swayed by “moral influence.” Dictators aren’t moved by the claims of justice unarmed; aggressors aren’t intimidated by diplomacy absent the credible threat of force; fanatics aren’t deterred by the disapproval of men of moderation or refinement.

The good news is that today we don’t face threats of the magnitude of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Each of those regimes combined ruthless internal control, a willingness to engage in external aggression, and fervent adherence to an extreme ideology. Today these elements don’t coexist in one place. Russia is aggressive, China despotic and Iran messianic — but none is as dangerous as the 20th-century totalitarian states.

The further good news is that 2008 has been, in one respect, an auspicious year for freedom and democracy. In Iraq, we and our Iraqi allies are on the verge of a strategic victory over the jihadists in what they have called the central front of their struggle. This joint victory has the potential to weaken the jihadist impulse throughout the Middle East.

On the other hand, the ability of Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas to get away with murder (literally), and above all the ability of Iran to pursue its nuclear ambitions effectively unchecked, are setbacks for hopes of peace and progress.

And there is no evidence that China’s hosting of the Olympics has led to moderation of its authoritarianism. Meanwhile, Russia has sent troops and tanks across an international border, and now seems to be widening its war against Georgia more than its original — and in any case illegitimate — casus belli would justify.

Will the United States put real pressure on Russia to stop? In a news analysis on Sunday, the New York Times reporter Helene Cooper accurately captured what I gather is the prevailing view in our State Department: “While America considers Georgia its strongest ally in the bloc of former Soviet countries, Washington needs Russia too much on big issues like Iran to risk it all to defend Georgia.”

But Georgia, a nation of about 4.6 million, has had the third-largest military presence — about 2,000 troops — fighting along with U.S. soldiers and marines in Iraq. For this reason alone, we owe Georgia a serious effort to defend its sovereignty. Surely we cannot simply stand by as an autocratic aggressor gobbles up part of — and perhaps destabilizes all of — a friendly democratic nation that we were sponsoring for NATO membership a few months ago.

For that matter, consider the implications of our turning away from Georgia for other aspiring pro-Western governments in the neighborhood, like Ukraine’s. Shouldn’t we therefore now insist that normal relations with Russia are impossible as long as the aggression continues, strongly reiterate our commitment to the territorial integrity of Georgia and Ukraine, and offer emergency military aid to Georgia?

Incidentally, has Russia really been helping much on Iran? It has gone along with — while delaying — three United Nations Security Council resolutions that have imposed mild sanctions on Iran. But it has also supplied material for Iran’s nuclear program, and is now selling Iran antiaircraft systems to protect military and nuclear installations.

It’s striking that dictatorial and aggressive and fanatical regimes — whatever their differences — seem happy to work together to weaken the influence of the United States and its democratic allies. So Russia helps Iran. Iran and North Korea help Syria. Russia and China block Security Council sanctions against Zimbabwe. China props up the regimes in Burma and North Korea.

The United States, of course, is not without resources and allies to deal with these problems and threats. But at times we seem oddly timid and uncertain.

When the “civilized world” expostulated with Russia about Georgia in 1924, the Soviet regime was still weak. In Germany, Hitler was in jail. Only 16 years later, Britain stood virtually alone against a Nazi-Soviet axis. Is it not true today, as it was in the 1920s and ’30s, that delay and irresolution on the part of the democracies simply invite future threats and graver dangers?

Here's Mr. Krugman:

The draft Democratic Party platform that was sent out last week puts health care reform front and center. “If one thing came through in the platform hearings,” says the document, “it was that Democrats are united around a commitment to provide every American access to affordable, comprehensive health care.”

Can Democrats deliver on that commitment? In principle, it should be easy. In practice, supporters of health care reform, myself included, will be hanging on by their fingernails until legislation is actually passed.

What’s easy about guaranteed health care for all? For one thing, we know that it’s economically feasible: every wealthy country except the United States already has some form of guaranteed health care. The hazards Americans treat as facts of life — the risk of losing your insurance, the risk that you won’t be able to afford necessary care, the chance that you’ll be financially ruined by medical costs — would be considered unthinkable in any other advanced nation.

The politics of guaranteed care are also easy, at least in one sense: if the Democrats do manage to establish a system of universal coverage, the nation will love it.

I know that’s not what everyone says; some pundits claim that the United States has a uniquely individualistic culture, and that Americans won’t accept any system that makes health care a collective responsibility. Those who say this, however, seem to forget that we already have a program — you may have heard of it — called Medicare. It’s a program that collects money from every worker’s paycheck and uses it to pay the medical bills of everyone 65 and older. And it’s immensely popular.

There’s every reason to believe that a program that extends universal coverage to the nonelderly would soon become equally popular. Consider the case of Massachusetts, which passed a state-level plan for universal coverage two years ago.

The Massachusetts plan has come in for a lot of criticism. It includes individual mandates — that is, people are required to buy coverage, even if they’d prefer to take their chances. And its costs are running much higher than expected, mainly because it turns out that there were more people without insurance than anyone realized.

Yet recent polls show overwhelming support for the plan — support that has grown stronger since it went into effect, despite the new system’s teething troubles. Once a system of universal health coverage exists, it seems, people want to keep it.

So why be nervous about the prospects for reform? Because it’s hard to get universal care established in the first place. There are, I’d argue, three big hurdles.

First, the Democrats have to win the election — and win it by enough to face down Republicans, who are still, 42 years after Medicare went into operation, denouncing “socialized medicine.”

Second, they have to overcome the public’s fear of change.

Some health care reformers wanted the Democrats to endorse a single-payer, Medicare-type system for all. On the sheer economic merits, they’re right: single-payer would be more efficient than a system that preserves a role for private insurance companies.

But it’s better to have an imperfect universal health care plan than none at all — and the only way to get a universal health care plan passed soon is to inoculate it against Harry-and-Louise-type claims that people will be forced into plans “designed by government bureaucrats.” So the Democratic platform emphasizes choice, declaring that Americans “should have the option of keeping the coverage they have or choosing from a wide array of health insurance plans, including many private health insurance options and a public plan.” We’ll see if that’s enough.

The final hurdle facing health care reform is the risk that the next president and Congress will lose focus. There will be many problems crying out for solutions, from a weak economy to foreign policy crises. It will be easy and tempting to put health care on the back burner for a bit — and then forget about it.

So I’m nervous. The history of the pursuit of universal health care in America is one of missed chances, of political opportunities frittered away. Let’s hope that this time is different.

One more thing: if we do get real health care reform, a lot of people will owe a debt of gratitude to none other than John Edwards. When Mr. Edwards dropped out of the presidential race, I credited him with making universal health care a “possible dream for the next administration.” Mr. Edwards’s political career is over — but perhaps he and his family can take some solace from the fact that his party is still trying to make that dream come true.

I agree with Dr. Krugman, but I think he totally misses the mark by objecting to offshore drilling.  There seems to be a dearth of discussion on why exactly we shouldn't do it.  I assume the strongest argument is environmental, but a casual look around the Texas and Louisiana coast doesn't seem to support that.  I have yet to be convinced of a significant environmental externality.

A lack of immediate relief to gasoline consumers is not an argument for not drilling.  Fundamentally, I think the federal government does not have the authority to prevent drilling (the states are another story).  But even if we leave that aside, a drilling ban needs to be justified by a clear and present danger not captured by markets.  All I'm hearing right now is "the oil companies don't need those concessions."  By what measure?  Why not let the oil companies make that decision?

Writing in this morning’s New York Times, Paul Krugman wearily observed something many of us here on Earth have known for quite some time now — that the Republicans, once hailed as the “party of ideas,” have now become the “party of stupid.” Indeed.

As if to lend credence to that claim, John McCain and his aides — despite having been ridiculed by Paris Hilton earlier in the week — have decided that labeling Obama a “celebrity” is a theme still worth flogging. A new television ad released today featuring the “C-word” (no, not that one) opens by asking: “Is the biggest celebrity in the world ready to help your family?” Groan.

Some deeply cynical pundits believe that no matter how shameful, childish and breathtakingly stupid this particular line of attack may be, such clowning could nevertheless prove to be highly effective in discrediting Obama. Perhaps. After all, most of us can easily remember the ludicrous framing of “character” issues from the past. John Kerry looks French — and he wind-surfs!

But step away from conventional coverage of the press corps and the nattering nabobs of the cable news networks and the view is a little different:

McCain complains that his opponent is too much of a glamour puss to be President — usually while doing a badly lit photo op in the dairy aisle of a Midwestern supermarket. But Obama is merely appropriating the pop cultural syntax of our time, speaking to voters in the visual language of our celebrity-crazed, media-saturated, consumer-driven age. Sure, it can be derided as shallow and trivial, but this is how you infiltrate people’s head space in the 21st Century. It’s one of the reasons Obama is reaching voters who never paid much attention to politics before (like all those kids snapping up Obama “superhero” T-shirts at Comic-Con last week). These days, when more people read People than Newsweek, when some of our best friends are celebrities — when we know more about Brad and Angelina’s kids than our neighbor’s and have a more intimate relationship with Oprah than with our doctors — star power isn’t such a terrible thing to have if you happen to be running for President of the United States.

For obvious reasons, the idea of “star power” and celebrity as good things doesn’t exactly cheer me, although I have to admit that it would be quite amusingly ironic if the McCain attacks backfired and the GOP was hoisted on their own petard of “stupidification” for a change.

Smart, cute, Japanese girls who write blogs are A-OK with me.

Smart, white guys who practice writing Japanese every day are also number one in my book.

If I ever decide to use that room in my apartment that has the refrigerator and microwave in it, I will make these お弁当 every day.

Why watch TV in English? It's all election nonsense, and you already decided to vote for Obama months ago. Why not watch a Japanese Drama? I recommend のだめカンタービレ.

Economist and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman has the skills to pay the bills. This week he is on fire.

Paul Krugman, The New York Times, August 8, 2008

So the G.O.P. has found its issue for the 2008 election. For the next three months the party plans to keep chanting: “Drill here! Drill now! Drill here! Drill now! Four legs good, two legs bad!” O.K., I added that last part.

And the debate on energy policy has helped me find the words for something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Republicans, once hailed as the “party of ideas,” have become the party of stupid.

Now, I don’t mean that G.O.P. politicians are, on average, any dumber than their Democratic counterparts. And I certainly don’t mean to question the often frightening smarts of Republican political operatives.

What I mean, instead, is that know-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party’s de facto slogan has become: “Real men don’t think things through.”

In the case of oil, this takes the form of pretending that more drilling would produce fast relief at the gas pump. In fact, earlier this week Republicans in Congress actually claimed credit for the recent fall in oil prices: “The market is responding to the fact that we are here talking,” said Representative John Shadegg.

What about the experts at the Department of Energy who say that it would take years before offshore drilling would yield any oil at all, and that even then the effect on prices at the pump would be “insignificant”? Presumably they’re just a bunch of wimps, probably Democrats. And the Democrats, as Representative Michele Bachmann assures us, “want Americans to move to the urban core, live in tenements, take light rail to their government jobs.”

Is this political pitch too dumb to succeed? Don’t count on it.

Read More Here

Dear Dr. Kierkegaard,

All my life I’ve been a successful pseudo-intellectual, sprinkling quotations from Kafka, Epictetus and Derrida into my conversations, impressing dates and making my friends feel mentally inferior. But over the last few years, it’s stopped working. People just look at me blankly. My artificially inflated self-esteem is on the wane. What happened?

Existential in Exeter

Dear Existential,

It pains me to see so many people being pseudo-intellectual in the wrong way. It desecrates the memory of the great poseurs of the past. And it is all the more frustrating because your error is so simple and yet so fundamental.

You have failed to keep pace with the current code of intellectual one-upsmanship. You have failed to appreciate that over the past few years, there has been a tectonic shift in the basis of good taste.

You must remember that there have been three epochs of intellectual affectation. The first, lasting from approximately 1400 to 1965, was the great age of snobbery. Cultural artifacts existed in a hierarchy, with opera and fine art at the top, and stripping at the bottom. The social climbing pseud merely had to familiarize himself with the forms at the top of the hierarchy and febrile acolytes would perch at his feet.

In 1960, for example, he merely had to follow the code of high modernism. He would master some impenetrably difficult work of art from T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound and then brood contemplatively at parties about Lionel Trilling’s misinterpretation of it. A successful date might consist of going to a reading of “The Waste Land,” contemplating the hollowness of the human condition and then going home to drink Russian vodka and suck on the gas pipe.

This code died sometime in the late 1960s and was replaced by the code of the Higher Eclectica. The old hierarchy of the arts was dismissed as hopelessly reactionary. Instead, any cultural artifact produced by a member of a colonially oppressed out-group was deemed artistically and intellectually superior.

During this period, status rewards went to the ostentatious cultural omnivores — those who could publicly savor an infinite range of historically hegemonized cultural products. It was necessary to have a record collection that contained “a little bit of everything” (except heavy metal): bluegrass, rap, world music, salsa and Gregorian chant. It was useful to decorate one’s living room with African or Thai religious totems — any religion so long as it was one you could not conceivably believe in.

But on or about June 29, 2007, human character changed. That, of course, was the release date of the first iPhone.

On that date, media displaced culture. As commenters on The American Scene blog have pointed out, the means of transmission replaced the content of culture as the center of historical excitement and as the marker of social status.

Now the global thought-leader is defined less by what culture he enjoys than by the smartphone, social bookmarking site, social network and e-mail provider he uses to store and transmit it. (In this era, MySpace is the new leisure suit and an AOL e-mail address is a scarlet letter of techno-shame.)

Today, Kindle can change the world, but nobody expects much from a mere novel. The brain overshadows the mind. Design overshadows art.

This transition has produced some new status rules. In the first place, prestige has shifted from the producer of art to the aggregator and the appraiser. Inventors, artists and writers come and go, but buzz is forever. Maximum status goes to the Gladwellian heroes who occupy the convergence points of the Internet infosystem — Web sites like Pitchfork for music, Gizmodo for gadgets, Bookforum for ideas, etc.

These tastemakers surf the obscure niches of the culture market bringing back fashion-forward nuggets of coolness for their throngs of grateful disciples.

Second, in order to cement your status in the cultural elite, you want to be already sick of everything no one else has even heard of.

When you first come across some obscure cultural artifact — an unknown indie band, organic skate sneakers or wireless headphones from Finland — you will want to erupt with ecstatic enthusiasm. This will highlight the importance of your cultural discovery, the fineness of your discerning taste, and your early adopter insiderness for having found it before anyone else.

Then, a few weeks later, after the object is slightly better known, you will dismiss all the hype with a gesture of putrid disgust. This will demonstrate your lofty superiority to the sluggish masses. It will show how far ahead of the crowd you are and how distantly you have already ventured into the future.

If you can do this, becoming not only an early adopter, but an early discarder, you will realize greater status rewards than you ever imagined. Remember, cultural epochs come and go, but one-upsmanship is forever.

Bobo's so cute when he gets all pissy.  Here's Mr. Krugman:

So the G.O.P. has found its issue for the 2008 election. For the next three months the party plans to keep chanting: “Drill here! Drill now! Drill here! Drill now! Four legs good, two legs bad!” O.K., I added that last part.

And the debate on energy policy has helped me find the words for something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Republicans, once hailed as the “party of ideas,” have become the party of stupid.

Now, I don’t mean that G.O.P. politicians are, on average, any dumber than their Democratic counterparts. And I certainly don’t mean to question the often frightening smarts of Republican political operatives.

What I mean, instead, is that know-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party’s de facto slogan has become: “Real men don’t think things through.”

In the case of oil, this takes the form of pretending that more drilling would produce fast relief at the gas pump. In fact, earlier this week Republicans in Congress actually claimed credit for the recent fall in oil prices: “The market is responding to the fact that we are here talking,” said Representative John Shadegg.

What about the experts at the Department of Energy who say that it would take years before offshore drilling would yield any oil at all, and that even then the effect on prices at the pump would be “insignificant”? Presumably they’re just a bunch of wimps, probably Democrats. And the Democrats, as Representative Michele Bachmann assures us, “want Americans to move to the urban core, live in tenements, take light rail to their government jobs.”

Is this political pitch too dumb to succeed? Don’t count on it.

Remember how the Iraq war was sold. The stuff about aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds was just window dressing. The main political argument was, “They attacked us, and we’re going to strike back” — and anyone who tried to point out that Saddam and Osama weren’t the same person was an effete snob who hated America, and probably looked French.

Let’s also not forget that for years President Bush was the center of a cult of personality that lionized him as a real-world Forrest Gump, a simple man who prevails through his gut instincts and moral superiority. “Mr. Bush is the triumph of the seemingly average American man,” declared Peggy Noonan, writing in The Wall Street Journal in 2004. “He’s not an intellectual. Intellectuals start all the trouble in the world.”

It wasn’t until Hurricane Katrina — when the heckuva job done by the man of whom Ms. Noonan said, “if there’s a fire on the block, he’ll run out and help” revealed the true costs of obliviousness — that the cult began to fade.

What’s more, the politics of stupidity didn’t just appeal to the poorly informed. Bear in mind that members of the political and media elites were more pro-war than the public at large in the fall of 2002, even though the flimsiness of the case for invading Iraq should have been even more obvious to those paying close attention to the issue than it was to the average voter.

Why were the elite so hawkish? Well, I heard a number of people express privately the argument that some influential commentators made publicly — that the war was a good idea, not because Iraq posed a real threat, but because beating up someone in the Middle East, never mind who, would show Muslims that we mean business. In other words, even alleged wise men bought into the idea of macho posturing as policy.

All this is in the past. But the state of the energy debate shows that Republicans, despite Mr. Bush’s plunge into record unpopularity and their defeat in 2006, still think that know-nothing politics works. And they may be right.

Sad to say, the current drill-and-burn campaign is getting some political traction. According to one recent poll, 69 percent of Americans now favor expanded offshore drilling — and 51 percent of them believe that removing restrictions on drilling would reduce gas prices within a year.

The headway Republicans are making on this issue won’t prevent Democrats from expanding their majority in Congress, but it might limit their gains — and could conceivably swing the presidential election, where the polls show a much closer race.

In any case, remember this the next time someone calls for an end to partisanship, for working together to solve the country’s problems. It’s not going to happen — not as long as one of America’s two great parties believes that when it comes to politics, stupidity is the best policy.

"Maverick No More"

Obama Responds to Heckler and Leads Town Hall in Reciting Pledge

Obama in the Twin Cities

• McCain camp plans a short acceptance speech for McCain.  Acceptance speech?  How presumptuous!
• Walter Shapiro: The fact the campaigns have kept their Veep picks secret means its more likely they won't be controversial. They wouldn't risk springing a bold surprise at the last minute.
• Another Boehner Boner? He states that the American people want Speaker Pelosi hung.
• Will the traditional media re-examine McCain's own adulterous affairs that broke up his first marriage and ultimately led him to the much younger and wealthier heiress, Cindy McCain?
• Team Obama: McCain's DHL deal in which he and then lobbyist/now campaign manager Rick Davis worked to approve, which now threatens 8,000 jobs in Ohio, is a "critical turning point in the campaign." It has the intersection of sleazy lobbying at the helm of McCain's campaign, McCain's sleazy responsiveness to lobbyist overtures, and the effects on the economy.
• Here's Obama's Radio Ad on the Ohio DHL Deal.
• John Edwards discloses that he had an affair, contrary to his repeated assertions to the contrary.
• Hillary gives a hearty speech in support of Obama in Nevada today.
• Time Magazine: McCain "The One/Moses" ad was not just a little sophomoric bit of sarcastic fun -- it was created by a GOP operative with close ties to the conservative evangelical community to deliberately dog whistle to the "Obama is the antichrist" chatter. It uses language and themes recognizable to the community.
• Local Phoenix paper publishes extensive profile on McCain, delving into some aspects of his record he'd rather keep buried.

• Wall Street Jounal's Kimberley Strassel: the bipartisan effort to pass energy legislation (the "Gang of 10") is a horrible thing because it undermines the one partisan Republican talking point they think they have going for them: they want to "drill now, right here!" In other words, actually working productively to actually solve the problem is wrong - being obstructionist to score political points is right. Thanks, GOP.
• McCain campaign returns suspicious contributions solicited by Mr. Abu Naba'a.
• Paul Krugman. GOP is the party of stupid.
• NY Times: McCain awkwardly tries to weasel his way out of a PR disaster in Ohio caused by his campaign manager acting as a lobbyist for a foreign shipping company, and by his own actions as a Senator which just happened to support the wishes of his lobbyist/campaign manager (Rick Davis). The small Ohio town stands to lose about 8,000 jobs thanks to the foreign shipping company deciding to shut down the local operations in Ohio.
• The Atlantic obtains 200 internal emails from Hillary's campaign and plans to publish about 130 of them next week.
• Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) overwhelmingly defeats controversial challenger, Nikki Tinker.

When you try to talk with McCain staffers about vice-presidential prospects, as I did last week, the normally garrulous become guarded and the usually talkative turn taciturn. Still, here’s what I was able to discern.

John McCain apparently intends to announce his pick after the Democratic convention. There’s been thought given to announcing McCain’s selection the day after Barack Obama’s Thursday night Aug. 28 acceptance speech, to try to minimize Obama’s postconvention bounce.

But the current inclination is to wait until after Labor Day weekend, which ends with President Bush’s speech Monday, the first night of the G.O.P. convention. Then the McCain camp would hope to seize attention Tuesday with the V.P. announcement. A strong pick, followed by the V.P. nominee’s remarks Wednesday and then McCain’s speech Thursday, could provide a good launch into the last 60 days of the campaign.

So, who would be a strong pick? Some V.P. candidates fit one theory of the campaign, others another. And there seem to be at least four competing theories in the McCain camp, which, while not entirely mutually exclusive, point in different vice-presidential directions.

1. We’re going to defeat Obama straight up.

If McCain is ahead of or close to Obama in the polls, there will be a strong temptation to do no harm with the V.P. choice. The leading noncontroversial selections — broadly acceptable to Republicans, conservative but not too conservative, young but not too young — are Tim Pawlenty, the second-term governor of Minnesota, and Rob Portman, former Ohio congressman, Bush trade representative and budget director.

2. We need to accentuate Obama’s key vulnerability — inexperience.

If McCain’s central theme is going to be that he’s ready and Obama isn’t, he needs a running mate who reinforces that message — someone experienced who’d be seen as ready to govern. This points to former rival Mitt Romney, whom McCain has come to respect, or former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, whom McCain likes. It’s true that Ridge is pro-choice, which might be a problem. Or could the pick of Ridge signal to independents that McCain is broadening the party, while pro-lifers could be reassured that Ridge would defer to President McCain in this area?

3. Don’t fight the public desire for change; co-opt it.

The public wants change but is nervous about Obama. Why not allow people to vote for experience and the next generation of leadership at the same time?

This implies a young and different V.P.: the 37-year-old governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal; 44-year-old Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska; or Eric Cantor, the 45-year-old Virginia congressman. Party pros would have fainting spells about the unseasoned Jindal and Palin in particular — but party pros are often wrong, and if Jindal or Palin performed well as candidates, the upside would be considerable.

The two young governors also have this advantage: They’re very popular with conservatives, especially social conservatives. And they’re real reformers. They’ve begun to do in Baton Rouge and Juneau what many voters would like to see done in Washington. Principled conservatism and vigorous reform could be a winning combination.

4. The public is really sick of politics as usual in Washington.

In his convention speech, McCain could say something like this:

“I will give you a reform administration that will put politics aside to work for all Americans. I pledge to turn the page on 16 years of often petty and mean-spirited partisanship so we can tackle the big challenges we face. So I pledge that neither I nor my vice president will seek re-election. Neither I nor my vice president will spend a day, an hour, a minute campaigning or raising money — not for ourselves nor for anyone else. There will be no political office in my White House — there will be no place for a Dick Morris, or (with all due respect) a Karl Rove.”

This opens up several unconventional V.P. possibilities. They include some who would reinforce the notion of a war presidency above politics, like Senator Joe Lieberman and Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Or perhaps someone with economic or domestic policy expertise — like New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, old McCain friend and FedEx C.E.O. Fred Smith or new McCain insider and former EBay C.E.O. Meg Whitman.

Most of the campaign staff strongly prefers a selection from the first two categories — do no harm or reinforce experience. McCain himself, on the other hand, is intrigued by the bolder possibilities of youth or bipartisanship.

And he could be especially intrigued by Sarah Palin and Meg Whitman. I run into plenty of moderate and conservative women who don’t consider themselves feminists but would be pleased to see a qualified woman on the ticket.

Especially if Obama picks a man, rejecting hope and change in favor of the same old patriarchy — won’t McCain be tempted to say: cherchez la femme?

McCain sucks and his VP choice won't help that.  Here's Mr. Cohen:

It’s not quite the Dreyfus Affair, at least not yet. But France is divided again over power and the Jews.

While the United States has been debating The New Yorker’s caricature of Barack Obama as a Muslim, France has gone off the deep end over a brief item in the country’s leading satirical magazine portraying the relationship between President Nicolas Sarkozy’s fast-rising son, Jean, and his Jewish fiancée.

The offending piece in Charlie Hebdo, a pillar of the left-libertarian media establishment, was penned last month by a 79-year-old columnist-cartoonist who goes by the name of Bob Siné. He described the plans — since denied — of Jean Sarkozy, 21, to convert to Judaism before marrying Jessica Sebaoun-Darty, an heiress to the fortune of the Darty electrical goods retailing chain.

“He’ll go far in life, this little fellow!” Siné wrote of Sarkozy Jr.

He added, in a separate item on whether Muslims should abandon their traditions, that: “Honestly, between a Muslim in a chador and a shaved Jewess, my choice is made!”

Nobody paid attention for a week: Siné is a notorious provocateur whose strong pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist views have in the past crossed the line into anti-Semitism. I’d say he’s far from alone in that among a certain French left.

But this is the summer, news is slow, and since a journalist at the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur denounced the article as “anti-Semitic” on July 8, France has worked itself into a fit of high intellectual dudgeon.

The storm is gusting at high velocity, but I’ll try to take things in order. Philippe Val, the editor of Charlie Hebdo, requested an apology from Siné, to which the veteran “chroniqueur” replied, with some brio it must be said, that he would much rather cut off his testicles.

That did it for Val, who promptly fired Siné, who shot back by bringing legal action against the paper for “defamation.”

In the land of Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards, the stage was now set for a great French drama, Internet-powered this time. The country, its blogs in overdrive, has split between defenders of the ousted Siné in the name of free speech and supporters of Val in the name of barring anti-Semitic hate speech.

Plantu, perhaps the country’s best-known cartoonist, has rallied to Siné’s defense by portraying the editor, Val, as a jack-booted Nazi and calling Charlie Hebdo “the paper where everything is allowed — even firing a cartoonist!”

Several political bloggers have asked why Val, in the name of free speech and solidarity with a Danish newspaper under fire, bravely republished cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad, but drew the line at Siné’s caricaturing of the purported relationship between Jews, money and an opportunistic young Sarkozy with a nascent political career in the department of Hauts-de-Seine, near Paris.

On the other side, in a statement in Le Monde called “For Philippe Val and a Few Principles,” a panoply of intellectuals including Elie Wiesel, Claude Lanzmann, Robert Badinter and Bernard-Henri Lévy declared that “once again, once too often, Siné has crossed the line between humor and insult, caricature and hatred.”

Lévy, in an eloquent front-page commentary in the same newspaper, drew out the ugly French history — from 19th-century anti-Semitic tracts about money-grubbing Jews through the Dreyfus affair to innuendo about President Sarkozy’s partly Jewish heritage — that, in his view, makes Siné poisonous to the point of unacceptability.

“We have not made too much of the ‘Siné Affair,’ ” Levy concluded. He compared it to Michel Foucault’s “secretion of time” — a small thing that condenses “the spirit and malaise of an epoch.”

I don’t agree with Lévy. I think too much has been made of Siné and his feeble attempts at humor and that firing him risks stirring, rather than assuaging, what remains of French anti-Semitism.

Let’s be clear on three things. Siné clearly nurses some vile views about Jews. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as refracted in France through a growing Muslim population and virulent anti-Zionism among leftists, has produced new forms of anti-Semitism. There are murmurings in a Catholic Right French establishment about Sarkozy’s rise and the Jewish backgrounds of several people close to him.

These are not, however, sufficient reasons for turning Siné into a martyr by making too much of his bad joke. I’m with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who wrote in 1919 that: “I think we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death.”

I know, American First Amendment freedoms are distinct from French practice. Here, for example, denying the Holocaust is a crime. But I remain a free-speech absolutist. In that spirit, I defended the publication of the Prophet Muhammad cartoons. Curtailing speech is generally far more dangerous than allowing even vile views to be aired, not least by a cantankerous has-been like Siné.

And now here's Mr. Krugman:

A year ago, as the outlines of the current financial crisis were just becoming clear, I suggested that this crisis, unlike a superficially similar crisis in 1998, wouldn’t end quickly.

It hasn’t.

The good news, I guess, is that we’ve been experiencing a sort of slow-motion meltdown, lacking in dramatic Black Fridays and such. The gradual way the crisis has unfolded has led to an angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin debate among economists about whether what we’re suffering really deserves to be called a recession.

Yet even a slo-mo crisis can do a lot of damage if it goes on for a year and counting.

Home prices are down about 16 percent over the past year, and show no sign of stabilizing. The pain from this bust is widely spread: there are millions of American families who didn’t buy mortgage-backed securities and haven’t lost their houses, but have nonetheless been impoverished by the destruction of much or all of their home equity.

Meanwhile, the job market has deteriorated even more than you’d guess from the jump in the headline unemployment rate. The broadest measure of unemployment, which takes into account the rapidly rising number of workers forced to take cuts in paid hours and wages, has risen from 8.3 percent to 10.3 percent over the past year, roughly matching its high point five years ago.

And there’s no end to the pain in sight.

Ben Bernanke and his colleagues at the Federal Reserve have cut the interest rates they control repeatedly since last September. But they haven’t managed to reduce borrowing costs for the private sector. Mortgage rates are about the same as they were last summer, and the interest rates many corporations have to pay have actually gone up. So Fed policy hasn’t done anything to encourage private investment.

The problem is fear: private-sector finance has dried up because investors, burned by their losses on securities that were supposed to be safe, are now reluctant to buy anything that isn’t guaranteed by the U.S. government. And the proliferation of special rescue packages — the TAF, the TSLF, the Bear Stearns deal, the Fannie-Freddie thing — may have staved off blind panic, but has fallen far short of restoring confidence.

Oh, and those tax rebates Congress and the White House agreed to mail out have already done whatever good they’re going to do. Looking forward, it’s hard to see how consumers can keep spending even at their current rate — which means that things will probably get considerably worse before they get better.

What more can policy do? The Fed has pretty much used up its ammunition: nobody thinks that additional interest-rate cuts would accomplish much (and there’s a faction at the Fed that wants to raise rates to fight inflation).

And nothing much can or should be done to support home prices, which are still much too high in inflation-adjusted terms. Nor can Washington prevent a continuing credit crunch: overextended, undercapitalized financial institutions have to rein in their lending, and it’s not realistic to expect the public sector to pick up all the slack — especially when quasipublic institutions like Fannie and Freddie are also in trouble.

There is, however, a case for another, more serious fiscal stimulus package, as a way to sustain employment while the markets work off the aftereffects of the housing bubble. The “emergency economic plan” Barack Obama announced last week is a move in the right direction, although I wish it had been bigger and bolder.

Still, Mr. Obama is offering more than John McCain, whose economic policy mainly amounts to “stay the course.”

Incidentally, it’s surprising that the lousy economy hasn’t yet had more impact on the campaign. Mr. McCain essentially proposes continuing the policies of a president whose approval rating on economics is only 20 percent. So why isn’t Mr. Obama further ahead in the polls?

One answer may be that Mr. Obama, perhaps inhibited by his desire to transcend partisanship (and avoid praising the last Democratic president?), has been surprisingly diffident about attacking the Bush economic record. An illustration: if you go to the official Obama Web site and click on the economic issues page, what you see first isn’t a call for change — what you see is a long quote from the candidate extolling the wonders of the free market, which could just as easily have come from a speech by President Bush.

Anyway, back to the economy. I titled that column about the early stages of the financial crisis “Very Scary Things.” A year later, with the crisis still rolling, it’s clear that I was right to be afraid.

Of all of the craziness going on in the political blogosphere today, including race cards, celebrities, whining, expensive shoes, etc., the thing that jumped out at me (and was pointed to by Paul Krugman and Dick Polman and Matt Yglesias) is this Wall Street Journal piece about why Barack Obama might be "too skinny" to be president.  The headline actually says "too fit."

So here's the quote that's getting batted around:

But in a nation in which 66% of the voting-age population is overweight and 32% is obese, could Sen. Obama's skinniness be a liability? Despite his visits to waffle houses, ice-cream parlors and greasy-spoon diners around the country, his slim physique just might have some Americans wondering whether he is truly like them.

Absolutely unbelievable.  Why does the question have to be whether our overweight American nation will accept a svelte, in-shape president and not whether a fit president will be able to get this nation moving again, literally?

I say it now.  If Barack Obama loses this election and exit polls show that the difference was the "he's too fit" vote, I'm moving to Sweden (or some other "skinny" country).

We’re about to enter our 19th consecutive year of Truman-envy. Ever since the Berlin Wall fell, people have looked at the way Harry Truman, George C. Marshall, Dean Acheson and others created forward-looking global institutions after World War II, and they’ve asked: Why can’t we rally that kind of international cooperation to confront terrorism, global warming, nuclear proliferation and the rest of today’s problems?

The answer is that, in the late 1940s, global power was concentrated. The victory over fascism meant the mantle of global leadership rested firmly on the Atlantic alliance. The United States accounted for roughly half of world economic output. Within the U.S., power was wielded by a small, bipartisan, permanent governing class — men like Acheson, W. Averell Harriman, John McCloy and Robert Lovett.

Today power is dispersed. There is no permanent bipartisan governing class in Washington. Globally, power has gone multipolar, with the rise of China, India, Brazil and the rest.

This dispersion should, in theory, be a good thing, but in practice, multipolarity means that more groups have effective veto power over collective action. In practice, this new pluralistic world has given rise to globosclerosis, an inability to solve problem after problem.

This week, for the first time since World War II, an effort to liberalize global trade failed. The Doha round collapsed, despite broad international support, because India’s Congress Party did not want to offend small farmers in the run up to the next elections. Chinese leaders dug in on behalf of cotton and rice producers.

In a de-centered world, all it takes is a few well-placed parochial interests to bring a vast global process tumbling down.

And the Doha failure comes amid a decade of globosclerosis. The world has failed to effectively end genocide in Darfur. Chinese and Russian vetoes foiled efforts to impose sanctions on Zimbabwe. The world has failed to implement effective measures to deter Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The world has failed to embrace a collective approach to global warming. Europe’s drive toward political union has stalled.

In each case, the logic is the same. Groups with a strong narrow interest are able to block larger groups with a diffuse but generalized interest. The narrow Chinese interest in Sudanese oil blocks the world’s general interest in preventing genocide. Iran’s narrow interest in nuclear weapons trumps the world’s general interest in preventing a Middle East arms race. Diplomacy goes asymmetric and the small defeat the large.

Moreover, in a multipolar world, there is no way to referee disagreements among competing factions. In a democratic nation, the majority rules and members of the minority understand that they must accede to the wishes of those who win elections.

But globally, people have no sense of shared citizenship. Everybody feels they have the right to say no, and in a multipolar world, many people have the power to do so. There is no mechanism to wield authority. There are few shared values on which to base a mechanism. The autocrats of the world don’t even want a mechanism because they are afraid that it would be used to interfere with their autocracy.

The results are familiar. We get United Nations resolutions that go unenforced. We get high-minded vows to police rogue regimes, but little is done. We get the failure of the Doha round and the gradual weakening of the international economic order.

A few years ago, the U.S. tried to break through this global passivity. It tried to enforce U.N. resolutions and put the mantle of authority on its own shoulders. The results of that enterprise, the Iraq war, suggest that this approach will not be tried again anytime soon.

And so the globosclerosis continues, and people around the world lose faith in their leaders. It’s worth remembering that George W. Bush is actually more popular than many of his peers. His approval ratings hover around 29 percent. Gordon Brown’s are about 17 percent. Japan’s Yasuo Fukuda’s are about 26 percent. Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel and Silvio Berlusconi have ratings that are a bit higher, but still pathetically low.

This is happening because voters rightly sense that leaders lack the authority to address problems.

The bottom line is that presidential candidates can talk grandly about global partnerships, but it’s meaningless without a mechanism to wield authority. A crucial question in an authority crisis is: Who has a strategy for execution?

The best idea floating around now is a League of Democracies, as John McCain and several Democrats have proposed. Nations with similar forms of government do seem to share cohering values. If democracies could concentrate authority in such a league, at least part of the world would have a mechanism for wielding authority. It may not be a return to Acheson, Marshall and the rest, but at least it slows the relentless slide towards drift and dissipation.

Here's Mr. Krugman:

Recently the Web site The Politico asked Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, why she was blocking attempts to tack offshore drilling amendments onto appropriations bills. “I’m trying to save the planet; I’m trying to save the planet,” she replied.

I’m glad to hear it. But I’m still worried about the planet’s prospects.

True, Ms. Pelosi’s remark was a happy reminder that environmental policy is no longer in the hands of crazy people. Remember, less than two years ago Senator James Inhofe — a conspiracy theorist who insists that global warming is a “gigantic hoax” perpetrated by the scientific community — was the chairman of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee.

Beyond that, Ms. Pelosi’s response shows that she understands the deeper issues behind the current energy debate.

Most criticism of John McCain’s decision to follow the Bush administration’s lead and embrace offshore drilling as the answer to high gas prices has focused on the accusation that it’s junk economics — which it is.

A McCain campaign ad says that gas prices are high right now because “some in Washington are still saying no to drilling in America.” That’s just plain dishonest: the U.S. government’s own Energy Information Administration says that removing restrictions on offshore drilling wouldn’t lead to any additional domestic oil production until 2017, and that even at its peak the extra production would have an “insignificant” impact on oil prices.

What’s even more important than Mr. McCain’s bad economics, however, is what his reversal on this issue — he was against offshore drilling before he was for it — says about his priorities.

Back when he was cultivating a maverick image, Mr. McCain portrayed himself as more environmentally aware than the rest of his party. He even co-sponsored a bill calling for a cap-and-trade system to limit greenhouse gas emissions (although his remarks on several recent occasions suggest that he doesn’t understand his own proposal). But the lure of a bit of political gain, it turns out, was all it took to transform him back into a standard drill-and-burn Republican.

And the planet can’t afford that kind of cynicism.

In themselves, limits on offshore drilling are only a modest-sized issue. But the skirmish over drilling is the opening stage of a much bigger fight over environmental policy. What’s at stake in that fight, above all, is the question of whether we’ll take action against climate change before it’s utterly too late.

It’s true that scientists don’t know exactly how much world temperatures will rise if we persist with business as usual. But that uncertainty is actually what makes action so urgent. While there’s a chance that we’ll act against global warming only to find that the danger was overstated, there’s also a chance that we’ll fail to act only to find that the results of inaction were catastrophic. Which risk would you rather run?

Martin Weitzman, a Harvard economist who has been driving much of the recent high-level debate, offers some sobering numbers. Surveying a wide range of climate models, he argues that, over all, they suggest about a 5 percent chance that world temperatures will eventually rise by more than 10 degrees Celsius (that is, world temperatures will rise by 18 degrees Fahrenheit). As Mr. Weitzman points out, that’s enough to “effectively destroy planet Earth as we know it.” It’s sheer irresponsibility not to do whatever we can to eliminate that threat.

Now for the bad news: sheer irresponsibility may be a winning political strategy.

Mr. McCain’s claim that opponents of offshore drilling are responsible for high gas prices is ridiculous — and to their credit, major news organizations have pointed this out. Yet Mr. McCain’s gambit seems nonetheless to be working: public support for ending restrictions on drilling has risen sharply, with roughly half of voters saying that increased offshore drilling would reduce gas prices within a year.

Hence my concern: if a completely bogus claim that environmental protection is raising energy prices can get this much political traction, what are the chances of getting serious action against global warming? After all, a cap-and-trade system would in effect be a tax on carbon (though Mr. McCain apparently doesn’t know that), and really would raise energy prices.

The only way we’re going to get action, I’d suggest, is if those who stand in the way of action come to be perceived as not just wrong but immoral. Incidentally, that’s why I was disappointed with Barack Obama’s response to Mr. McCain’s energy posturing — that it was “the same old politics.” Mr. Obama was dismissive when he should have been outraged.

So as I said, I’m very glad to know that Nancy Pelosi is trying to save the planet. I just wish I had more confidence that she’s going to succeed.

Continuing today's theme of "news and issues that are going relatively unreported," I bring you Krugman's post about the Economics of Catastrophe.  The catastrophe to which he refers is the potential damage to the earth caused by global climate change.

How many times have you seen a disaster movie and wondered what all of the death and destruction would mean on your ability to go to the supermarket and pick up your week's groceries?  My mind occassionally strays to the scenario in which climate change raises sea levels, intensifies storms, destroys infrastructure and housing, and generally just wreaks havoc on my comfortable, predictable existence.

What would I do if such a thing were to happen?  The 90% drop in world GDP represented above is a way of saying that our collective standard of living would be returned to something approximating the early 1800s without roads, bridges and canals.  Or, better yet, my big city, American life would become more like East Africa.  No more clean water from a tap in my house.  No more heat and air conditioning.  No more ice.

I've gotten to like things like, oh, insulation, clothes dryers, ceiling fans and sidewalks.  With a 90% drop in GDP, I could probably kiss all of that good bye.

Now, will it be as bad as all that?  Not likely.  In fact, Krugman says that statistically, the 90% drop is a bit of stretch:

And here’s the thing: on any sort of expected-welfare calculation, the small probability of catastrophe dominates the expected loss. Suppose that there’s a 99% chance that Lomborg is right, but a 1% chance that catastrophic climate change will reduce world GDP by 90%. You might be tempted to disregard that small chance — but if you’re even moderately risk averse (say, relative risk aversion of 2 — econowonks know what I mean), you quickly find that the expected loss of welfare isn’t 0.5% of GDP, it’s 10% or more of GDP.

So the question remains: how can economic policies and business decisions be made in a system that has traditionally depended on a baseline of certainty.  The free market assumes at the very least that there won't be any natural disasters and that if there are, they will be quick, localized and able to be fixed (hence, insurance).  Without that certainty, it all goes out of whack.

Economics, the dismal science indeed.

Life is full of disappointments.

Early Friday, I went to the Real Clear Politics Web site, as I do every morning, for my fix of political news and commentary. I perked up when I saw the third entry on the list of that day’s notable articles — “No. 44 Has Spoken.”

“Hank Aaron has spoken? Wow,” I thought as I clicked through.

Nope. The article was by Gerhard Spörl, the chief editor of Der Spiegel’s foreign desk. “No. 44” didn’t refer to the uniform number of the man some of us still consider the true all-time major-league home-run champion. It referred to the next president of the United States. The article’s premise was that an Obama victory is a foregone conclusion: “Anyone who saw Barack Obama at Berlin’s Siegessäule on Thursday could recognize that this man will become the 44th president of the United States.”

So it wasn’t Hank Aaron speaking. It was just another journalist fawning over Obama. That was a disappointment. But disappointment was quickly replaced by the healthier emotion of annoyance.

“Nicht so schnell, Herr Spörl,” I thought, drawing on what Obama would consider my embarrassingly limited German. Not so fast.

Don’t the American people get a chance to weigh in on this in November? Maybe they’ll decide it’s more important to have John McCain as commander in chief than Barack Obama as orator in chief. Maybe they’ll further suspect that 200,000 Germans can’t be right.

I was cheered up by this notion.

But the next morning, as I drove around the Washington suburbs, I saw not one but two cars — rather nice cars, as it happens — festooned with the Obama campaign bumper sticker “got hope?” And I relapsed into moroseness.

Got hope? Are my own neighbors’ lives so bleak that they place their hopes in Barack Obama? Are they impressed by the cleverness of a political slogan that plays off a rather cheesy (sorry!) campaign to get people to drink milk?

And what is it the bumper-sticker affixers are trying to say? Do they really believe their fellow citizens who happen to prefer McCain are hopeless? After all, just because you haven’t swooned like Herr Spörl doesn’t mean you don’t hope for a better world. Don’t McCain backers also have hope — for an America that wins its wars, protects its unborn children and allows its citizens to keep more of their hard-earned income?

But what if all those “got hope?” bumper stickers spur a backlash? It might occur to undecided or swing voters that talk of hope is not a substantive plan. They might be further put off by the haughtiness of Obama’s claim to the mantle of hope. This hope restored my spirits.

Before they fell again. Later that day, I read a report of a fund-raising letter from Obama on behalf of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, arguing that “We must have a deadlock-proof Democratic majority.”

Yikes.

But then it occurred to me that one man’s “deadlock-proof” Democratic majority is another’s unchecked Democratic majority. Given the unpopularity of the current Democratic Congress, given Americans’ tendency to prefer divided government, given the voters’ repudiations of the Republicans in 2006 and of the Democrats in 1994 — isn’t the prospect of across-the-board, one-party Democratic governance more likely to move votes to McCain than to Obama?

So I cheered up once again. For it will become increasingly obvious, as we approach November, that the Democrats will continue to control Congress for the next couple of years. But if the voters elect Obama as president, they’ll be putting Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in untrammeled control of our future.

In 1948, a Republican Congress, which had taken power two years before with great expectations after a decade and a half of Democratic control, had become unpopular. Harry Truman lambasted it as a no-good, do-nothing Congress — and he rode that assault to the White House. We’ll soon start hearing more from McCain about the deficiencies of today’s surge-opposing, drilling-blocking, earmark-loving Congress.

And McCain will then assert that if you don’t like the Congress in which Senator Obama serves in the majority right now, you really should be alarmed about a President Obama rubber-stamping the deeds of a Democratic Congress next year. A President McCain, on the other hand, could check Congressional appetites — as well as work across the aisle with a Democratic Congress in a bipartisan spirit where appropriate.

And so I drifted off into a pleasant daydream. It’s election night, and a victorious John McCain is waving around the Spiegel article, “No. 44 Has Spoken” — just as Harry Truman, 60 years ago, triumphantly held aloft the early edition of the Nov. 3, 1948, Chicago Tribune, with its banner headline, “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

Life may be full of disappointments. But it’s also full of surprises.

Here's Mr. Cohen, from Paris:

This is the time and the city to deconstruct Obama. Barack was bad in Berlin and pitch-perfect in Paris. Is it just that he’s a Rive Gauche kind of guy? Or is something deeper at work?

Obama looks like America reinvented; he summons from Europeans that imagined land of opportunity, foreign to their tired shores and confined spaces, that F. Scott Fitzgerald rendered at the end of “The Great Gatsby:”

“For a transitory, enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”

Europeans demand wonderment of the United States, perhaps because they still regard Fitzgerald’s “fresh, green breast of the new world” as their invention. Beyond his bellicosity, Europeans will never forgive George W. Bush his dullness. No dream was ever stirred from that pinched presidential mouth.

Enter the loose-limbed African-Kansan-Hawaiian hybrid commensurate with Camelot. But Berlin is not his stage. After J.F.K.’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” and Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Obama could not invoke the new in a setting so replete with cold-war ghosts.

Everything was wrong: a Victory Column setting when he’s not yet victorious, a jejune weave from fighting Communism to fighting terrorism, and an accumulation of worthy platitudes. Presence was absence: the semiotics of yesterday’s world cascaded from America’s Homo Novus.

“This,” Obama told nuclear-energy hating Berliners, “is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.”

Yes, Barack, and let us build lovely castles in the sky that the locusts of infamy will never unravel.

Obama made a brilliant speech about race shot through with the truth yielded by personal experience and a questing mind. He made a poor speech about the cold war’s lessons because he never lived it. Originality ceded to orthodoxy.

Instead of speaking in the Tiergarten, he should have spoken in the Jardin du Luxembourg, a setting consistent with his challenge to conventional thinking.

Paris is more his town and it showed. The Obama-Sarkozy two-step was riveting. Obama passed his critical commander-in-chief test: he was precise, strong, reassuring — all Berlin blather banished.

Beside him, the French president couldn’t keep his mouth still, as if gnawing on the meaty, vivifying novelty of so seductive an American friend. Nicolas Sarkozy could not even bring himself to pronounce John McCain’s name:

“So good luck to Barack Obama. If he is chosen, then France will be delighted. And if it’s somebody else, then France will be the friend of the United States of America.”

If that’s not an Obama endorsement from the Élysée Palace, I don’t know what is. Fair enough: the world has shrunk.

Obama, all silky brilliance, merited the endorsement. He dissected the caricatures that have undermined U.S.-European relations (Europe’s militaristic America, and America’s won’t-get-their-hands-dirty Europeans). He noted Sarkozy’s merit in shattering “many of these stereotypes.”

He offered a succinct summary of how to wield American might: “An effective U.S. foreign policy will be based on our ability not only to project power, but also to listen and to build consensus.”

On specifics, he aced every item, identifying a nascent peace quest between Israel and Syria as a potential “game changer” that has received insufficient U.S. attention; calling for a “steady and prudent” troop withdrawal from Iraq in the light of improved security; pairing two additional U.S. brigades in Afghanistan with a call for greater commitment there from NATO allies “not restrained in terms of their rules of engagement;” and warning Iran not to wait for the next president to stop its “illicit nuclear program” because pressure “is only going to build.”

This was a winning performance. By two-to-one, Americans still believe McCain would be a better commander in chief than Obama. That’s the central hurdle the Democratic candidate has to overcome to turn a lead into victory in November. His tough charm in Paris helped.

There are still two Obamas: the slouching, hands-in-pockets boulevardier ambling out of his meeting with Hamid Karzai in Kabul looking anything but presidential, and the assured leader-born beside fellow innovator Sarkozy. Only bridging this gap lies between him and the White House.

Nearly 80 percent of Americans think the country’s headed in the wrong direction. Like Europeans, they are looking for some wonderment. Obama’s semiotics must balance reassurance and renewal. The commander-in-chief test will not be passed by conventionalism alone. That’s McCain’s terrain.

On the road from the Berlin mouther of received ideas to the Paris messenger of generational shift lies Obama’s key to “the last and greatest of all human dreams.”

Here's Mr. Krugman:

So the big housing bill has passed Congress. That’s good news: Fannie and Freddie had to be rescued, and the bill’s other main provision — a special loan program to head off foreclosures — will help some hard-pressed families. It’s much better to have this bill than not.

But I hope nobody thinks that Congress has done all, or even a large fraction, of what needs to be done.

This bill is the latest in a series of temporary fixes to the financial system — attempts to hold the thing together with bungee cords and masking tape — that have, at least so far, succeeded in staving off complete collapse. But those fixes have done nothing to resolve the system’s underlying flaws. In fact, they set the stage for even bigger future disasters — unless they’re followed up with fundamental reforms.

Before I get to that, let’s be clear about one thing: Even if this bill succeeds in its aims, heading off a severe credit contraction and helping some homeowners avoid foreclosure, it won’t change the fact that this decade’s double bubble, in housing prices and loose lending, has been a disaster for millions of Americans.

After all, the new bill will, at best, make a modest dent in the rate of foreclosures. And it does nothing at all for those who aren’t in danger of losing their houses but are seeing much if not all of their net worth wiped out — a particularly bitter blow to Americans who are nearing retirement, or thought they were until they discovered that they couldn’t afford to stop working.

It’s too late to avoid that pain. But we can try to ensure that we don’t face more and bigger crises in the future.

The back story to the current crisis is the way traditional banks — banks with federally insured deposits, which are limited in the risks they’re allowed to take and the amount of leverage they can take on — have been pushed aside by unregulated financial players. We were assured by the likes of Alan Greenspan that this was no problem: the market would enforce disciplined risk-taking, and anyway, taxpayer funds weren’t on the line.

And then reality struck.

Far from being disciplined in their risk-taking, lenders went wild. Concerns about the ability of borrowers to repay were waved aside; so were questions about whether soaring house prices made sense.

Lenders ignored the warning signs because they were part of a system built around the principle of heads I win, tails someone else loses. Mortgage originators didn’t worry about the solvency of borrowers, because they quickly sold off the loans they made, generally to investors who had no idea what they were buying. Throughout the financial industry, executives received huge bonuses when they seemed to be earning big profits, but didn’t have to give the money back when those profits turned into even bigger losses.

And as for that business about taxpayers’ money not being at risk? Never mind. Over the past year the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury have put hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on the line, propping up financial institutions deemed too big or too strategic to fail. (I’m not blaming them — I don’t think they had any alternative.)

Meanwhile, those traditional, regulated banks played a minor role in the lending frenzy, except to the extent that they had unregulated, “off balance sheet” subsidiaries. The case of IndyMac — which failed because it specialized in risky Alt-A loans while regulators looked the other way — is the exception that proves the rule.

The moral of this story seems clear — and it’s what Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, has been saying for some time: financial regulation needs to be extended to cover a much wider range of institutions. Basically, the financial framework created in the 1930s, which brought generations of relative stability, needs to be updated to 21st-century conditions.

The desperate rescue efforts of the past year make expanded regulation even more urgent. If the government is going to stand behind financial institutions, those institutions had better be carefully regulated — because otherwise the game of heads I win, tails you lose will be played more furiously than ever, at taxpayers’ expense.

Of course, proponents of expanded regulation, no matter how compelling their arguments, will have to contend with very well-financed opposition from the financial industry. And as Upton Sinclair pointed out, it’s hard to get a man to understand something when his salary — or, we might add, his campaign war chest — depends on his not understanding it.

But let’s hope that the sheer scale of this financial crisis has concentrated enough minds to make reform possible. Otherwise, the next crisis will be even bigger.

On CNBC, supposedly, at 2 — from the Princeton studio (a basement classroom with blue paper taped over the window.) I’m in TV costume: dress shirt, jacket, tie, shorts, and sandals

The late Tony Snow — how odd it is to write “late” before Tony’s name, and how sad — was an editorial writer and columnist, the host of “Fox News Sunday” for seven years and of a radio talk show for three, and a speechwriter in the White House of the first president Bush and press secretary for the second. We were twice colleagues (at the first Bush White House and at Fox), and throughout our two decades together in Washington compatriots and friends.

I could easily dilate on Tony’s impressive achievements in journalism and government, and on the remarkable abilities and manifold talents that made his professional accomplishments possible.

But I’ll remember Tony Snow more for his character than his career. I’ll especially remember the calm courage and cheerful optimism he displayed in his last three years, in the face of his fatal illness.

For quite a while now, optimism has had a bad reputation in intellectual circles. The fashionable books of my youth — and they are good books — were darkly foreboding ones like Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and George Orwell’s “1984.” Young conservatives of the era were much taken by Whittaker Chambers’s gloomy memoir, “Witness.” We who read Albert Camus — and if you had any pretensions to being a non-Marxist intellectual, you read Camus — loved the melancholy close of his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus”: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

The basic attitude one derived from these works was that pessimism is deeper than optimism, and existential angst more profound than cheerful confidence. This attitude remains powerful, perhaps dominant, among many thoughtful people today — perhaps especially among conservatives, reacting against a facile liberal belief in progress.

Tony Snow was a conservative. But he didn’t have a prejudice in favor of melancholy. His deep Christian faith combined with his natural exuberance to give him an upbeat world view. Watching him, and so admiring his remarkable strength of character in the last phase of his life, I came to wonder: Could it be that a stance of faith-grounded optimism is in fact superior to one of worldly pessimism or sophisticated fatalism?

Tony was one of the nicest guys you’d ever meet — kind, helpful and cheerful. But underlying these seemingly natural qualities was a kind of choice: the choice of gratitude. Tony thought we should be grateful for what life has given us, not bitter or anxious about what it hasn’t.

So he once wrote that “If you think Independence Day is America’s defining holiday, think again. Thanksgiving deserves that title, hands-down.” He believed that gratitude, not self-assertion, was the fundamental human truth, and that a recognition of this was one of the things that made America great.

After Tony’s cancer diagnosis and surgery in 2005, his faith deepened. So, amazingly, did his sense of gratitude. That doesn’t mean he accepted his illness, or the prospect of dying. He fought both. Above all, he didn’t want to leave his wife, Jill, and his three children.

Still, he understood the limits of human control. And, perhaps because of his faith, he found dying in a way life-enriching. As he wrote last year, “The mere thought of death somehow makes every blessing vivid, every happiness more luminous and intense.”

Tony once spoke at a dinner for journalists held in conjunction with the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. Cal Thomas reported on Tony’s remarks: “After his first cancer surgery, Snow said, he had to stay in bed and he began reading the Bible more, ‘learning to pray’ and to ask God to ‘draw me closer, please, [which] develops a hunger that is also a form of joy.’ ” As this last sentence hints, Tony was an avid reader of C. S. Lewis.

In July 2001, Tony wrote a beautiful tribute to a friend and former Washington Times colleague, Ken Smith, who had died of cancer at age 44. Seven years later, the piece reads uncannily as if the subject were Tony himself.

Tony described his friend’s extraordinary grace as he suffered from a cruel and debilitating form of cancer. Ken “hated fussing over himself, and didn’t want to burden anybody” with his problems. He “accepted calmly the news that his cancer was incurable.” What’s more, “Ken never became bitter or morose. He didn’t milk his plight to elicit pity. He remained himself.” And “when it mattered, his virtues always dominated his vices.” Above all, “He used the light of his faith to dispel shadows of death.”

Tony concluded: “I find myself in the odd position of mourning less than I ought to because I feel so grateful that I got to know him at all. The world doesn’t produce as many nice guys as it should. Ditto for people who possess exemplary courage, strength, decency and faith. Ken got 44 years to show the rest of us how to brighten a life and a world.”

Tony got 53 years to show the rest of us how to brighten a life and a world. We should be grateful. But I can’t help being indignant that he didn’t have longer.

Somehow I think we'll manage to soldier on, and that the Republic will survive without him.  Here's Mr. Cohen, writing from Oslo:

Scandinavia does reasonableness well, even when faced with unreason. The Oslo Accords of 1993 were as close as Israelis and Palestinians have come to looking each other in the eye, admitting neither side is going away, and jettisoning a bitter past for a better future.

The mediation habit stayed with Norway, despite Oslo’s collapse. Jonas Gahr Store, the Norwegian foreign minister, is a battle-hardened Mr. Dialogue. He took a personal terrorism course earlier this year while on a diplomatic mission to Afghanistan.

Store was in Kabul’s Serena Hotel on Jan. 14 when explosions and machine-gun fire erupted in the lobby, a flight of stairs above where he sat. Carsten Thomassen, a prominent Norwegian diplomatic correspondent covering his visit, was killed by terrorists linked to the Taliban. At least five other people died; one of Store’s media officials was gravely wounded.

The foreign minister was left with what he calls “anger and sadness.” But in the course of a conversation with Store, on the margins of the Oslo Forum, a meeting on conflict resolution that Norway hosts with the Geneva-based Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, it was less anger I felt from him than relentless reason.

Perhaps Store’s world view — that of a very critical NATO ally — is a good introduction to this post-unipolar moment, when the United States has bumped down to earth from its with-us-or-against-us apotheosis.

Store disapproves of the way the Bush Administration has conducted the war on terror. “This paradigm of the war on terror, connecting all kinds of armed resistance around the globe in one huge ideological framework, as a new ideology at a stage in history when most of the major ideologies are gone, does not reflect the facts on the ground,” he told me.

Norway’s message to the United States is blunt: the next administration, whether headed by Barack Obama or John McCain, should pronounce the war on terror over. Because it has tended to isolate the United States, polarize the world, inflate the enemy, conflate diverse movements and limit scope for dialogue, its time has passed.

“The way this has been framed, as an indefinite war that will last for decades, has impoverished our ability to understand the point of departure of the conflict and how we should deal with it,” Store said. “Engaging is not weakness, and by not talking the West has tended to give the upper hand to extremists on the other side.”

He continued: “Moderates lose ground if they cannot show tangible results. You don’t engage at any price, but the price can come down and we can achieve more.”

Norway has kept channels open to Hamas and to Syria. It has spoken with the Hamas leadership. It is convinced the West missed an opportunity by not talking in March 2007 to the elected Palestinian national unity government composed of Fatah and Hamas members. It argues that Taliban elements can be drawn out of terror into politics through talks.

In all of this, Norway has used the greater diplomatic latitude it enjoys as a non-member of the European Union. The E.U., like the United States, lists Hamas as a terrorist organization.

“We have enormous reason to be upset with Hamas because it spent every day after Oslo trying to destroy Oslo,” Store said. “But there is a strong realist tradition in Hamas oriented toward a political landscape. In general, it should be in our interest to get organizations out of military activity and into politics. The political working method has not been sufficiently tested.”

Engaging, he insisted, does not mean lowering of requirements. It can be a means to set yardsticks, hold interlocutors accountable, and probe their thinking while surrendering nothing.

“If Hamas wants to be part of the real world, it has to end up accepting Israel’s right to exist,” Store said. “The rest of the world will never yield on that.” It must also recognize the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas of the mainstream Fatah movement, as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people in negotiations.

For Norway, the Mecca accord of February 2007 came close enough to recognizing past Palestinian commitments to Israel for the West to begin rigorous engagement with Hamas. It chose another course and mayhem ensued.

Store believes a “revisiting has started in U.S. foreign policy in the direction of engagement” and this will “accelerate” under the next administration. “Part of this ideology of the war on terror has been the United States doing things by themselves,” he said. “Now we in Europe and Norway must expect to be more actively engaged by Washington.” That will bring demands as well as opportunities.

Engagement begins with allies. It can be extended to enemies. It cannot be deterred by bloodshed or personal loss. An Oslo stop is in order for America’s next president.

Here's Mr. Krugman:

And now we’ve reached the next stage of our seemingly never-ending financial crisis. This time Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are in the headlines, with dire warnings of imminent collapse. How worried should we be?

Well, I’m going to take a contrarian position: the storm over these particular lenders is overblown. Fannie and Freddie probably will need a government rescue. But since it’s already clear that that rescue will take place, their problems won’t take down the economy.

Furthermore, while Fannie and Freddie are problematic institutions, they aren’t responsible for the mess we’re in.

Here’s the background: Fannie Mae — the Federal National Mortgage Association — was created in the 1930s to facilitate homeownership by buying mortgages from banks, freeing up cash that could be used to make new loans. Fannie and Freddie Mac, which does pretty much the same thing, now finance most of the home loans being made in America.

The case against Fannie and Freddie begins with their peculiar status: although they’re private companies with stockholders and profits, they’re “government-sponsored enterprises” established by federal law, which means that they receive special privileges.

The most important of these privileges is implicit: it’s the belief of investors that if Fannie and Freddie are threatened with failure, the federal government will come to their rescue.

This implicit guarantee means that profits are privatized but losses are socialized. If Fannie and Freddie do well, their stockholders reap the benefits, but if things go badly, Washington picks up the tab. Heads they win, tails we lose.

Such one-way bets can encourage the taking of bad risks, because the downside is someone else’s problem. The classic example of how this can happen is the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s: S.& L. owners offered high interest rates to attract lots of federally insured deposits, then essentially gambled with the money. When many of their bets went bad, the feds ended up holding the bag. The eventual cleanup cost taxpayers more than $100 billion.

But here’s the thing: Fannie and Freddie had nothing to do with the explosion of high-risk lending a few years ago, an explosion that dwarfed the S.& L. fiasco. In fact, Fannie and Freddie, after growing rapidly in the 1990s, largely faded from the scene during the height of the housing bubble.

Partly that’s because regulators, responding to accounting scandals at the companies, placed temporary restraints on both Fannie and Freddie that curtailed their lending just as housing prices were really taking off. Also, they didn’t do any subprime lending, because they can’t: the definition of a subprime loan is precisely a loan that doesn’t meet the requirement, imposed by law, that Fannie and Freddie buy only mortgages issued to borrowers who made substantial down payments and carefully documented their income.

So whatever bad incentives the implicit federal guarantee creates have been offset by the fact that Fannie and Freddie were and are tightly regulated with regard to the risks they can take. You could say that the Fannie-Freddie experience shows that regulation works.

In that case, however, how did they end up in trouble?

Part of the answer is the sheer scale of the housing