Washington Madness, Madness

As the capitol shows signs of awakening from the debt-ceiling fever dream with face-saving aspirin for both sides, onlookers try to understand the pathology of it all.

Like the final scene of “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” after crazed loyalties and pride have created carnage, a dazed survivor is left to wander through the wreckage, mumbling, “Madness, madness.”

As the Chairman of the Fed describes failure to raise the debt limit as a “catastrophic...calamitous...self-inflicted wound” to the economy, the President in his Weekly Address is virtually pleading for sanity:

“After all, we’ve worked together like that before. Ronald Reagan worked with Tip O’Neill and Democrats to cut spending, raise revenues, and reform Social Security. Bill Clinton worked with Newt Gingrich and Republicans to balance the budget and create surpluses. Nobody ever got everything they wanted. But they worked together. And they moved this country forward.

”That kind of cooperation should be the least you expect from us--not the most you expect from us.”

In a piece titled “Getting to Crazy,” Paul Krugman notes: “If a Republican president had managed to extract the kind of concessions on Medicare and Social Security that Mr. Obama is offering, it would have been considered a conservative triumph. But when those concessions come attached to minor increases in revenue, and more important, when they come from a Democratic president, the proposals become unacceptable plans to tax the life out of the U.S. economy.”

Washington insanity seems to be contagious as Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee finds racism in the madness.

"What is different about this president that should put him in a position that he should not receive the same kind of respectful treatment of when it is necessary to raise the debt limit in order to pay our bills, something required by both statute and the 14th amendment?

"I hope someone will say that what it appears to be is not in fact accurate. But historically it seems to be nothing more."

It’s long past time to start testing what’s in the D.C. drinking water.

President Generic

A Republican has opened up a 47 to 39 percent lead over Barack Obama for 2012 in the latest Gallup Poll, but voters don’t know who he or she is.

At this point in their reelection bids, both Bushes were leading generic opponents, even though George H. W. eventually lost to Bill Clinton while George W. defeated John Kerry.

But now, in what the President agrees is a “stressed-out” nation, Americans are venting their anger at the man in the White House.

Understandably so, but when the 2012 GOP challenger has a name and a face and, most important, a record and positions on issues, how will that translate into what they do at the ballot box?

The dilemma of the Republican field of has-beens and never-will-bes is reflected in the first campaign ad of Ron Paul, trying to portray the extreme libertarian as another Ronald Reagan. Lots of luck with that one.

Frontrunner (barely) Mitt Romney is still straddling every position in sight, but opponents are reviving the ads Ted Kennedy used to trounce him in 1994, showing that his vaunted business acumen consisted mostly of merging companies and eliminating jobs.

Michele Bachmann is still explaining away her weirdness, while Herman Cain is gagging on his gaffe about no Muslims in his cabinet and Tim Pawlenty is trying to find traction on anything.

In 1976, Jimmy Carter came out of nowhere to defeat Gerald Ford in an electorate that was disgusted by the aftermath of Watergate, but the prospects for a GOP President Generic next year are looking dimmer with each passing day.

Can you beat somebody with nobody?

Obama-Cantor Clash: An Old Story

For those who have been watching closely, Barack Obama has had it up to here with Eric Cantor for a long time, starting at least a year and a half before the President’s disgusted walkout this week.

As far back as the White House Health Care Summit on February 25, 2010, the Leader of the Free World was lecturing the partisan pipsqueak on the difference between legislating and grandstanding. As Cantor parroted talking points behind a foot-high pile of papers, the President tartly dismissed “props like these” and told him, “These are the political things we do that prevent us from having a conversation.”

Cantor had been squeezing maximum personal exposure out of the Summit for weeks, at first refusing to go, then signing a drop-dead letter with Boehner before the meeting and finally showing up that day on “Good Morning America” to bloviate on why it would fail.

Labeled “Dr. No” back then, Cantor has followed the same game plan in the debt ceiling debate, stalking out of the Biden negotiations to make headlines and hectoring the President at meetings ever since.

The New York Times’ Caucus blog offers a Democratic version of the Presidential walkout the other day:

“Let’s stop the catering to our bases. Let’s start compromising and solving this problem for the American people, because the clock is ticking, Mr. Obama told those assembled around the table.

“Mr. Cantor interrupted--rudely, according to the Democratic aides.

“We should pursue short-term debt ceiling increases, Mr. Cantor said.

“Mr. Obama rejected the idea.

“It’s not an acceptable outcome to have an extension of the debt ceiling that doesn’t get into 2013, the president said.

“Mr. Cantor tried two more times, interrupting the president to advocate for a stop-gap measure.

“’Enough is enough,’” the president said...

“Aides described Mr. Obama as animated and passionate.

“We have to get this solved for the American people, the president said. We have to be willing to compromise. It shouldn’t be about positioning and politics.”

The President then left the meeting, clearly annoyed at the one-note ideologue and self-promoter who has been dogging his steps for years now.

Misadventures of Michele and Murdoch

To keep our heads from exploding over the debt-ceiling debacle, it’s time to turn back to figures who keep public life from being boring. After a summer of Charlie Sheen, Donald Trump, Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Anthony Weiner, Americans badly need a fresh dose of the peculiar and piquant to divert their attention.

Michele Bachmann fills the bill so well that Jon Stewart devotes a long segment to having Jerry Seinfeld try to cure him of taking cheap shots at the “gay cures” of her therapist husband, even as the Iowa GOP frontrunner is backing off her screed denouncing homosexuality as slavery and now has to defend herself from charges of membership in a church that calls the Pope the Antichrist.

Unless Republicans lose their senses entirely and nominate her, however, Bachmann will be only a passing diversion compared to the emergence of Rupert Murdoch in all his slimy glory, not only in the British scandal that shut down his News of the World and blocked his BSkyB takeover but in a rising bipartisan clamor here over charges that his “journalists” hacked into voicemail accounts of 9/11 victims.

Republican Rep. Peter King is asking the FBI to investigate, as Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez writes to the Attorney General:

“It is horrifying to consider the possibility that the victims of the 9/11 tragedy would be victimized again by an international newspaper seeking information about their personal suffering.”

Murdoch isn’t running for president, but his standing in the media world is not looking too secure as politicians and real journalists start to sense that the Fox News emperor has no clothes.

Now, back to Boehner and Eric Cantor...

Heading for Economic 9/11 on 8/2

Tea Party terrorists elected last fall promised to change Washington, and they have—-turning it from a flawed vehicle that moves the nation’s business along, however bumpily, to a cockpit of fighting over a fabricated issue that is steering a shaky economy toward a smashup.

The sorry spectacle has roused the largest American corporations to sound alarms and rating agencies to issue warnings about plummeting credit ratings for U.S. debt

But GOP leaders, sitting up front, refuse to look ahead or even buckle their seat belts. John Boehner tells Fox News that “no one really knows what would happen” after August 2nd if no deal is reached but admits that a failure to do so could “spook the market, and you could have a real catastrophe.”

Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell is staring at the emergency exits and talking in tongues about a plan to let the President retake the controls for a time, while Republicans stand over him with box cutters.

In India, terrorists have set off real bombs in the financial district of Mumbai. Over here, you can blow up Wall Street by remote control from the Capitol building in Washington.

Update: The President reaches the end of his patience by walking out after Eric Cantor, the delusionary Tea Party champion, tells him, “We are very far apart right now. I don’t know if we can get there.”

Somebody should take away Cantor’s rubber gun and mask.

Or maybe not. “Eric Cantor Is the Democrats’ New Boogeyman,” reports the Caucus, potentially a very valuable symbol for the 2012 election cycle.

Eric Cantor's Nixon Act

When John Boehner pulled back from his Grand Bargain with the President last weekend, the cynical suspected that he and Eric Cantor were playing good cop-bad cop. But it’s clear now that Boehner was being undermined by his own sidekick.

Cantor is looking more and more like a young Richard Nixon. In 1952, when Nixon was on the GOP ticket with Ike before the Checkers speech, a Democratic volunteer asked, “What do we say when they ask exactly what’s wrong with him?”

Someone suggested, “The only answer to that is, if you don’t know, I’m sorry for you.”

From then until Watergate, Americans found answers to what the intuitive could see then in a recklessly ambitious young pol who would do anything to get ahead.

Now, as Cantor now embarrasses his boss John Boehner in the debt ceiling debate, that blind ambition is obvious again in another charisma-free climber with limited intelligence and no scruples.

There are always potential Nixons and Cantors around, but it takes a political crisis for them to emerge on the national stage. Nixon had the McCarthy era Communist scare to fuel his rise. Cantor has Tea Party anger and hatred of government.

After stalking out of the Biden talks to call attention to himself, the House Majority Leader, says one Washington observer, “has slipped into true madness” by now insisting that the GOP’s concession in negotiations is “the fact that we are even discussing voting for a debt ceiling increase.”

“Crazy like a fox” is closer to the truth, as Cantor positions himself to be the Tea Party hero no matter what compromise is finally reached, leaving Boehner to take the heat.

In 2008, Cantor’s staff spread false rumors that he was being vetted as a possible V.P., which the McCain people called “a complete and total joke.”

Nixon would have found that shrewd rather than funny.

Update: Cantor's gamble could easily backfire, as Matt Bai notes: "To the extent that Mr. Obama gets his message across more effectively, he hands Republicans the unenviable choice or either joining him in a comprehensive solution or looking self-interested for backing away and imperiling the economy.

"Does that mean voters won’t blame Mr. Obama for a crisis over the debt ceiling? It doesn’t. But they’ll probably blame Congress even more."

Grand Bargain Basement

Last week’s brief attempt at actual governing by both the White House and the GOP Congressional leadership in trying to “go big” on budget deficit and debt ceiling solutions dramatizes how dysfunctional Washington has become in six months of Tea Party madness.

After two years of Democratic control and wall-to-wall Republican naysaying, the American economy was teetering toward recovery but now has to be kept from going off a cliff, as the leadership of both parties acknowledge.

Why? John Boehner’s willingness to negotiate a Grand Bargain has been undermined by idiot ideologues in his own party, led by his own deputy Eric Cantor who makes Karl Rove look like a statesman.

The nation is careening toward a disastrous default because a moronic minority of newly elected anti-politicians has made a religious mission out of preserving the Bush tax cuts for billionaires while tearing down Medicare, Social Security and other safety nets for the most vulnerable Americans.

“No tax hikes” has become the mindless mantra for those who were elected to curb the excesses of government but have translated that into a mandate to destroy it.

“If not now, when?” the President asks Republican leaders but, for an answer, gets a Cantor monologue on going back to the patchwork compromises his minions had negotiated with the Vice President.

But Joe Biden has been working for the goals of Barack Obama, while Cantor has been undermining his own boss Boehner. If the government is to get past these distractions and start dealing with substantive issues again, the GOP has to clean out its bargain basement and get the House in working order again.

Update: The President turns up the heat on opponents about “massive, job-killing” tax hikes by emphasizing that any tax increases would only go into effect after 2013.

“No one is talking about raising taxes right now,” he says at a press conference. “I have bent over backwards to work with the Republicans that comes up with a formulation that doesn’t require them to vote sometime in the next month to increase taxes.”

For presidential hopefuls Like Michele Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty, he has no patience: “For them to say we shouldn’t be raising the debt ceiling is irresponsible. They know better.”

Boehner Falls Off His Horse

It’s enough to make a cowboy cry, seeing the Speaker drop the reins and let himself be pulled off his debt-deal mount by the Tea Party drunks in D.C.

“Despite good-faith efforts to find common ground,” John Boehner sobs, climbing down from a Grand Bargain, “the White House will not pursue a bigger debt reduction agreement without tax hikes. I believe the best approach may be to focus on producing a smaller measure...”

In this new definition of horse’s-ass leadership, the GOP chief is tethered to the “tax hike” post by his own deputy, Eric Cantor, and the rowdies behind him.

A White House spokesman responds regretfully, “Both parties have made real progress thus far, and to back off now will not only fail to solve our fiscal challenge, it will confirm the cynicism people have about politics in Washington. The president believes that now is the moment to rise above that cynicism and show the American people that we can still do big things.”

But you can’t do that riding backward.

Update: Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on “Face the Nation” restates the reality:

“I have to write 80 million checks a month to Americans, including 55 million Americans who depend on their Social Security check. We have to make principal payments or roll over $500 billion of debt in the month of August, about $87 billion in that first week in August.

“If they don’t act, then we face catastrophic damage to the American economy and the leadership, to their credit, and I mean Republicans and Democrats, fully understand that.”

If they do, why are they still horsing around?

Boehner on a Bucking Bronco

As the “Grand Bargain” unfolds, both the President and the Speaker are taking heat from their true believers, but there is both irony and justice in John Boehner’s plight.

A year and a half ago, he chose to wild-ride the Tea Party bronco all the way to November 2012 without getting the creature under control. Now, after stirring up all that dust about the debt limit, Boehner has to corral enough votes to avoid going over a cliff.

"While some think that we can go past August 2nd,” he says, with no embarrassment over having caused the crisis in the first place, “I frankly think it puts us in an awful lot of jeopardy and puts our economy in jeopardy risking even more jobs."

But Boehner is riding at the head of a 21st century Gang That Can’t Shoot Straight.

Michele Bachmann, playing Calamity Jane to his Wild Bill Hickcock, is riding off in the other direction, vowing in TV ads to vote “no” on any deal.

His shifty sidekick Eric Cantor, perhaps hoping eventually to unhorse his chief, is also veering off the path by having a spokesperson tell reporters that “the big deal as described by the president included $1.4 to $1.7 trillion in tax hikes and he doesn't support that and the House wouldn't support that.”

With friends like those, the old saying goes, you don’t need enemies.

Meanwhile, the President is getting static from his supporters as well. But being Democrats, there are no ultimatums and threats, just a letter urging him to stand firm on cutting entitlement benefits.

If and when Obama and Boehner finally get the debt ceiling bull into the barn, they will still be pursued by Tea Party vigilantes trying to burn it down.

Update: Boehner shouldn't "bet his majority on Mr. Obama's promises," says the Wall Street Journal, warning that "the only way he can avoid being taken for a ride by Democrats is if all parts of any deal are negotiated, voted on and then implemented immediately. Two men, one deal, once. Promises of future action aren't credible."

That kind of talk won't help the beleaguered Speaker.

The Betty Ford I Knew

She came to the White House unexpectedly and never stopped being herself, unlike those before her who could have passed for inflatable life-sized dolls permanently positioned to stare adoringly at their husbands.

Betty Ford spoke openly about everything, from equal rights for women to abortion to what she would do if her 18-year-old daughter were sexually active. Even more, by example, she went beyond politics and set new standards for openness about her own life.

After a mastectomy for breast cancer, she spoke about it in public and wrote an article for me in McCalls to encourage women to go for early screening.

Then, in July 1978, I published a piece, “Betty Ford: Her Long Struggle with a Lonely Marriage.” Mrs. Ford had just been hospitalized for addiction to alcohol and tranquilizers after years of suffering with a pinched nerve in her neck.

Knowing that pinched nerves often result from emotional stress, I asked Myra MacPherson, who knew Mrs. Ford well, to interview her friends, family and physicians about that possible explanation.

They told of her distress that, after looking forward to retirement togetherness after his Presidency, her husband was still away from home politicking 200 nights a year.

Our conclusion: “Like other wives of ambitious men, she had to raise her children with little emotional support from her husband. After 30 years, the price she has paid for a life of loneliness and stress is painfully clear to everyone—with the possible exception of the one person she needs most.”

The aftermath has stayed in my mind ever since.

Several years later, although anxious that Mrs. Ford might have been upset by our piece, I asked Myra MacPherson to interview her again.

“The reason I’m seeing you,” Mrs. Ford told her, “is that 1978 article. I sent copies of it to every politician’s wife I know.”

Betty Ford, who died today at 93, was one of the most honest and caring people ever to live in the White House

Murdoch's Pickpocket Journalism

He is unmasked not only as an opinionated mogul (pace Fox News) but mastermind to a den of thieves, a 21st century Fagin to the Artful Dodgers of his London gang of reporters stealing news not only from politicians and celebrities but the victims of tragedies while paying off Scotland Yard for protection.

This kind of electronic pickpocketing has led to criminal investigations and the closing of his tabloid News of the World, the only newspaper, as one observer puts it, to die of shame.

For those who see Murdoch’s holdings as boils on the backside of American journalism, his British embarrassment only underscores what he has insidiously been doing here.

At the risk of sounding starchy (critics, flail away!), Murdoch’s Fox gang is yet another expression of a rapacious mentality that is not satisfied to slant the news but bend it into total submission to his purposes. (Those with strong stomachs can Wiki that history for themselves.)

"I hunger for quality news,” Jay Rockefeller told a Senate Committee recently. “There's a little bug inside of me which wants to get the FCC to say to FOX and to MSNBC: 'Out. Off. End. Goodbye.' It would be a big favor to political discourse; our ability to do our work here in Congress, and to the American people."

But no legal disasters are going to slow up Murdoch here, as they are doing in Britain now.

Eternal banality, as well as vigilance, may be the true price of liberty, but it’s worth the effort to keep Rupert Murdoch from stealing our minds.

Trash Journalism Update: Star Magazine, founded by Murdoch to compete with the National Enquirer but later sold off, is reporting that Casey Anthony and her family have been offered $1 million to appear on the Jerry Springer Show.

If News of the World hadn’t gone under, it would have saved all that money by just tapping their phones.

Deficit Dance Begins

As Barack Obama beats the default drums louder, the White House and Congress are finally taking steps toward moving in concert instead of sitting on the sidelines vocalizing and tweeting at each other.

Now the usual reliable sources whisper that the President “wants to move well beyond the $2 trillion in savings sought in earlier negotiations and seek perhaps twice as much over the next decade.”

In the light of two and a half years of dysfunctional hoofing, can Obama and Boehner suddenly turn into Astaire and Rogers without tripping all over the feet of their party members?

As they prepare for serious steps, there is nervousness among Democrats that the President may go too far on Social Security while Republicans are worrying that their Speaker could stop moving to the right on tax increases.

Obama, the Washington Post reports, “is proposing significant reductions in Medicare spending and for the first time is offering to tackle the rising cost of Social Security...

“The move marks a major shift for the White House and could present a direct challenge to Democratic lawmakers who have vowed to protect health and retirement benefits from the assault on government spending.”

GOP stalwarts, while insisting they will remain firm on the Bush tax cuts, concede that “Boehner may be amenable to a solution that simplifies and lowers individual and corporate tax rates, while ending preferences, loopholes, and expenditures—including...subsidies for big oil companies--and perhaps other reforms to be named later.” In short, raising taxes while denying that you are.

As clumsy as these moves may seem, they are an advance over sitting on the sidelines with arms folded. Start the music, but don’t expect the choreography to be classic.

Washington Tweet Meet

The deficit impasse takes an ecclesiastical turn as GOP talking heads unveil yet another phrase to defend tax increases for what the President considers, although not nearly as pithily, to be the filthy rich.

The owners of private jets are “job creators,” according to Texas Sen. John Cornyn, a new sound bite to pair off with designation of Democratic efforts to raise taxes on billionaires as “job killers.” Sounds like a hell of a matchup!

As the President holds his first Twitter town meeting, he will be hard-pressed to match the Republican machine (pioneered by Frank Luntz) to churn out lies that can be sold as verities.

With the Obama penchant for serious, long-winded answers, the White House will be disadvantaged in the competition for reductive language that conceals rather than reveals.

Twitters away!

Update: Good news for brevity addicts--Joe Biden has a new Twitter account. Less good: His first two tweets are in the third person.

Murder, 21st Century Soap Opera

What, asks an old riddle, do you call a hundred lawyers under the ocean? A good start. Now, what do you call a thousand lawyers under glass? Cable TV news.

In 17 years since the O.J. trial, media fascination with murder has morphed from classic elements as fame, race and sexual rage to pathetic obsession with the death of a little girl and the guilt of her possibly disturbed young mother.

Now the Casey Anthony verdict brings into focus the extent to which reality TV has infected the daylight hours, supplementing inexpensive adventure and talent shows with even cheaper studio sets and courtroom coverage.

For weeks, CNN’s outpost HLN outranked Fox and other cable channels with its trial coverage and, after announcement of the verdict yesterday, CNN’s web site had a million live-video users, 30 times as high as its usual average.

Crime has become this century’s substitute for soap opera, dispensing with the need for writers, actors and other artifices, going right to the gut of the lonely, alienated homebound and bored office workers.

A Florida newspaper reports, “Thousands of people wrote letters to Anthony. Women mailed her magazines and books, asked her for dating advice. Men asked for her hand in marriage, told her she was beautiful, sent her money.” (Renee Zellweger in "Chicago," anyone?)

Now, there will be furious debate over the unexpected not-guilty verdicts and, on a more refined plane, about the exploitative role of the media in distorting the justice system, with Anthony’s chief electronic prosecutor Nancy Grace garnering even more attention with her outrage.

With social media involved, it will all seem very 21st century. But at bottom, will there be much difference from Nathanael West’s classic 1939 black comedy, “Day of the Locust,” originally titled “The Cheated,” in which an enraged crowd enacts its bottled-up feelings by rioting at a Hollywood premiere?

That, too, was a time of Depression and worldwide social upheaval.

Update: The Orlando soap opera moves to a new chapter with a four-year sentence and $4000 fine, a tap on the wrist when time served is included.

Even the closest viewers are confused as the New York Times at first reports the wrong parent-grandparent combination that concealed the child’s death in a family in which defense lawyers claimed their client “had been sexually abused by her father and had been taught to lie her entire life.”

The Partridge family, it wasn’t.

Giving Brains a Bad Name

Were the fireworks louder this year or what?

Newt Gingrich may be on to something by making Alzheimer’s a campaign issue, although he could be going too far in trying to make voters forget about his crackpot Contract with America, Tiffany tabs and his latest wife’s terror campaign that led an entire staff to quit.

Mitt Romney, as always, is testing the waters with a little senior moment of his own, forgetting he had to apologize for saying that Obama made the economy worse, and at a neighborhood holiday celebration, repeating the gaffe. Those who have been following him closely are not surprised, since he has had trouble remembering the names of other Republicans in the race.

Michele Bachmann seems to have an invisible edge in the mental health meltdown, with a clinical therapist and her husband of 32 years always at her side, often with arms wrapped around her.

All this, plus the intellectually challenged remainder of the field, leads David Brooks to conclude that the GOP is in the grip of “the mother of all no-brainers.”

The Republican Party, he decides, “may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.

“The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch in order to cut government by a foot, they will say no. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch to cut government by a yard, they will still say no.”

A Washington Post columnist suggests they could use “a mental health professional, preferably a specialist in the power of fixations, obsessions and the like. The GOP needs an intervention. It has become a cult.”

Such armchair analysis may be helpful but, if this Alice in Wonderland Tea Party continues through next year, it will be voters who need to have their heads examined.

JFK used to say "You can't beat brains," but he was living in a time before 24/7 idiocy had turn the mind of the body politic to mush.

Update: The diagnosis gets worse. Paul Ryan tells an interviewer about his proposed Medicare changes, “When the plan is described accurately, it actually polls very well.”

Add to GOP psychiatric symptoms “in total denial,” a condition that makes it near-impossible to treat delusions.

The President invites Republicans to discuss a “balanced approach” to the stalemate, but how do you do that with politicians who have become unhinged from reality.

Declaration Disclaimer: How Fast to Change?

The document Americans celebrate today starts with a cautionary note:

“Prudence, indeed,” warns the Declaration of Independence, “will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

This serves well as a preamble to a ringing statement of our nation’s right to free itself from British oppression, but a slight turn of the kaleidoscope can reveal that warning’s meaning for our national life today, both domestically and abroad.

After voting for Change less than three years ago, under pressure of economic and terrorist anxiety, Americans are now experiencing transformation at a rapid rate of “the forms to which they are accustomed” in both governing themselves and intervening in the affairs of other nations.

In Washington, the Tea Party shadow government has Congress and the White House locked in paralysis over its agenda with more to come, a minority as militant as George III’s redcoats and as oppressive.

In the Middle East, we are hip-deep in “abolishing the forms” of other governments, directly or not, with no clear statements of our national interests and timelines.

As we light barbecue grills and fireworks in congratulation of hard-won freedoms, it might be worth a moment’s pause to think about how fast we are burning them up today and why.

They are as easily lost not just with bangs but whimpers.

Historic Blink Time

At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, just before the Soviets caved in, someone in the Oval Office exclaimed, “We’re eyeball to eyeball, and the other guy just blinked!”

Now, as a deadline nears in the debt-ceiling staredown, Bill Clinton evokes that JFK era image and warns “the White House could blink. I hope that won't happen. I don't think they should blink."

The former President, who survived a Newt Gingrich government shutdown and won reelection, is advising Barack Obama not to back down to Boehner and McConnell, even though the price of standing firm could be high.

"You have to assume,” Clinton says, “that our credit rating will be downgraded and our interest rates will go up which will make the deficit problem worse and make it much more difficult to recover because it will be harder for people to get credit, even harder than it is now."

In his Weekly Address, the President is not wavering, noting that “It would be nice if we could keep every tax break, but we can’t afford them.”

Almost half a century ago, when Kennedy stood fast in their nuclear confrontation, the Soviets eventually stood down. Boehner and McConnell may want to note that Nikita Khrushchev had his own version of Tea Party hardheads in the Kremlin back then but decided that those who, in JFK’s words, “want to blow up the world,” should not have the final word.

Clinton and Obama would do well to remember that, too.

Update: Was there a GOP eyelid moving on the Sunday talk shows? Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl reiterates the party talking points but mentions “revenue raisers” as a euphemism for tax hikes and observes that “we’ll take the savings we can get now, and we will relitigate this as we get closer to the election.”

Blink?

Kennedy Freedom, Low-Rent Royal Wedding

Celebrity independence is making Fourth of July weekend news as famous names couple and uncouple.

In California, JFK’s niece takes steps to terminate the Terminator as her husband while 6000 miles away Princess Grace’s son enters wedlock in a low-budget version of the extravaganza that starred his mother, nee Grace Kelly, 55 years ago.

Saving all this from utter cheesiness is the new British royal family, geographically and temporally between these extremes on what would have been Princess Diana’s 50th birthday yesterday.

Only weeks after their own wedding, her son and his bride are in Canada playing out the sequel to their fairy-tale wedding, obscuring the tawdry tales of two 20th century princesses whose weddings captured the world’s imagination but did not live happily ever after, only until car crashes ended their sad stories violently.

What meaning can we find in the lives of those selected by birth or matrimony to give the rest of us vicarious dreams of glamor and grandeur at the eventual price of their own inner happiness?

In the last century, relatively unsophisticated media offered the full candy-box treatment, playing down the reality that movie star Grace Kelly was marrying a man she hardly knew and that virginal Diana Spencer was doing the same 26 years later.

Diana’s son seems to have escaped his mother’s fate by joining his life to a woman he has known well for years rather than a virtual stranger, but the show-biz glitz dominating the wedding of Grace’s son is not promising for the princely couple of an area the size of Central Park, whose domain is a tourist trap with a gambling casino.

Back here, Maria Shriver is in court, despite her Catholic faith, to shed the body-builder who became a movie star and then a political prince but remained a horny frog when the cameras were off.

Those in the media who amplify such spectacles, like Fourth of July fireworks, and those who consume them like the products of holiday barbecues, will shake their heads knowingly at these sad denouements and move on, feeling sated and superior to such superficiality.

But they are part of those pathetic stories, perhaps the most important part of them all.

Body Language on the Potomac

Presidential courage can be a tricky question.

The fuss over a TV anatomical reference to Barack Obama recalls the original Dick in American politics, Nixon, and how another President, LBJ, viewed his successor’s genital endowments--wrongly, as it turned out, based on his own Vietnam mistakes arising from confusion in that area.

Depressed and unhappy in retirement, Johnson was still trying to understand what went wrong, when I saw and heard him analyze his successor Richard Nixon.

"Not much here," LBJ said, pointing to his head and then his heart, "even less here," before lowering a hand below the belt and saying grudgingly, "But enough down there."

Johnson’s judgment was made in the aftermath of the quagmire he created by his stubborn refusal to become "the first American president to lose a war." He spent those final years confused by his own downfall from what he considered a gutsy stand.

Barack Obama’s problems today, however, come not from too much self-assertion, but too little and a more apt role model would be, not LBJ with his hubris, but Harry Truman with his feistiness in trying to blast through Congressional road blocks to saving the economy.

For five years after Johnson’s departure, Dick Nixon kept us bleeding blood and money in Vietnam by refusing to wimp out there. In today’s confrontation, Obama does not have that much time, no matter what pundits say about his guy behavior.

Hormonal metaphors won’t hurt.

Talk About Bad Taste

CNN interrupts graphic wall-to-wall coverage of the Casey Anthony child-murder trial to lecture Newsweek editor Tina Brown on a “revolting” computer-generated cover showing Kate Middleton side by side with her late mother-in-law to mark what would have been Princess Diana’s 50th birthday this week.

In the world of journalistic grave-robbing, this might seem a minor misstep at most, but it raises questions about taste in an era when we have all just had electronic and digital views of Anthony Weiner’s penis ad nauseum.

From a dead-tree editor of the past century who did his share of exploiting Prince William’s mum, this comes with no sanctimony about what anybody is doing now, but it’s hard to see what’s vulgar in Newsweek’s respectful what-if about how the Princess would look and what her life might be like if she had survived that 1997 car crash.

If anything, it makes fascinating reading and viewing, and brings back a memory of what an aide of Diana’s told me at the height of her fame in the 1980s. Driving through the countryside past a huge billboard with a magazine cover, the Princess buried her face in her hands, saying, “It’s gotten so that I don’t know where I end and she begins.”

Neither did we all but, in this era of 24/7 shamelessness, it’s good to be reminded there were real people who lived and suffered back then from our prurient interest.

In those days, some journalists still cared about taste, as Joseph Epstein, then editor of American Scholar, attempted to define vulgarity in an essay and came up with his best invented example—-Barbara Walters interviewing the Pope and asking, “Tell me, Holy Father, have you never regretted not having children of your own?”

That was smarmy before the word became popular, but Barbara is still with us and, compared to those who have followed, is now a doyenne of good taste.

Vulgarity Update : The legal case in Manhattan crumbles against France’s towel-wrapped statesman, creating moral confusion an ocean away.

As forensic tests find evidence of a sexual encounter between Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the woman in his hotel room, prosecutors “now do not believe much of what the accuser has told them about the circumstances or about herself.”

None of this has the glamor of Princess Diana redux, but it’s a fair sample of the state of bad taste now.

Grownup Time Again in Washington?

Barack Obama’s press conference ends up being an effort to put aside childish games and restore government to an adult level on national issues.

“Call me naïve,” he tells reporters. “But my expectation is that leaders are going to lead.”

At one point, he contrasts Congress’ dealing with the debt limit to the way his daughters do their homework a day early, not waiting until the last minute and “pulling all-nighters” to get it done on time.

Members of Congress “need to do their job. They need to go ahead and make the tough choices...

“This is not a situation where Congress is going to say we won’t buy this car or we won’t take the vacation. They took the vacation. They bought the car. And now they are saying maybe we don’t have to pay. If the United States government, for the first time, cannot pay its bills, if it defaults, then the consequences for the U.S. economy will be significant and unpredictable. And that is not a good thing.”

Meanwhile, with as much apparent patience and good humor as he can muster, the President chides the GOP’s line in the sand against raising taxes for the richest Americans:

“If you are a wealthy C.E.O. or hedge fund manager in America right now, your taxes are lower than they have ever been. They are lower than they have been since the 1950s. And they can afford it. You can still ride on your corporate jet. You’re just going to have to pay a little more.”

With his temperament, this is about far as Barack Obama will go with his impersonation of Harry Truman running for reelection against a “do-nothing, good-for-nothing” Congress in 1948 and, against all odds, winning reelection.

At least it’s a start.

Update: The President’s tone in yesterday’s news conference now becomes a political issue itself as pundits point out, “Showing a rarely seen passion, the president called out his rivals for their comments about him, saying they are ‘just not on the level’ and essentially accusing them of being crybabies who walk away from the discussions when the debate gets tough.”

There won’t be a total Obama abandonment of his congenital approach--reasonable, conciliatory, even professorial--but his inner Harry Truman is beginning to surface, just in time for not only this year’s battles with “a do-nothing, good-for-nothing Congress,” but next year’s political campaign.

Says the New York Times Caucus blog: “Mr. Obama’s more aggressive, confrontational tone will probably be welcomed by many in the president’s party who have been eager for him to fight for the causes they believe in.”

Amen to that.

Update Update: The President hangs tough with Senate Republicans and turns down their invitation to meet and hear them reiterate their tantrum position on the debt ceiling. The first step in dealing with schoolyard bullies is to turn your back on them.

Clown of the Month Club

A new month brings another GOP candidate as Rep. Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan arrives. He plays a star-spangled guitar, wants to repeal health care reform and is backing a $3500 annual tax deduction for pet owners.

The Republican race is looking like one of those old mail-order book clubs that thrive on negative option. Once you sign up and send a buck for the first three or four choices, they automatically start shipping you each month’s new selection, unless you tell them to stop.

Last month, ready or not, we got Michele Bachmann for a coffee table already piled high with Romney, Pawlenty, Cain et al, a summer reading list of anti-Obama screeds with little or no sexy conflict in their own stories.

The Gingriches at least provided a “Breakfast at Tiffany” subplot for a while, as Trump teased us with “DaVinci Code” revelations about Hawaiian archives that never materialized and Palin still keeps hinting at a “Going Rogue” sequel with a promotional tour but fails to deliver a product.

The old saying “You can’t beat somebody with nobody” recurs as Republicans keep “Searching for Mr. Goodbar” (or Ms.) to excite a fractured audience of Tea Party true believers, skeptical Independents and disaffected Democrats to take over the top spot on their best-seller list.

For beach reading, voters could do worse than pull Barack Obama’s old tomes from the shelves and try to remind themselves (and him) of what excited them so much back then.

Palin-Bachmann Iowa Pas de Deux

Ballet comes to mind for what GOP divas as doing in the Hawkeye State, a new variation on the graceful duet in which dancers make their moves in harmony but in this case as if the other were invisible.

La Palin comes into the state on tiptoe for the premiere of an adoring movie about her, cloaked in classic subtlety that sets off equal and opposite images in the eyes of two leading political blogs:

“Sarah Palin team reaching out to Iowa activists for meetings headlines Politico as Real Clear Politics reports, “Palin Not Reaching Out to Key Iowans Ahead of Visit.”

No such ambiguity is seen as the new ballerina bursts on the presidential stage, swathed in patriotic clichés and gaffes, sometimes in the same metaphor as she proclaims her love for “John Wayne’s America” in Waterloo, Iowa, hometown not of the cowboy hero but John Wayne Gacy, the celebrated serial killer. Oops!

For political dance critics, Bachmann’s exuberance may be both her strength and...er...Achilles heel. Her surprisingly positive performance in the South Carolina debate was surely at least in part due to the hiring of veteran Ed Rollins as an adviser.

But moving his new client centerward has a Tea Party price, as Rollins soon learned after being bashed for jibing at the iconic non-candidate.

Now an official entrant, Bachmann will have to go beyond patriotic postures and start tangling with Mitt Romney and even Tim Pawlenty, if he shows signs of life, in Iowa.

Palin may keep striking poses, but her doppelganger will have to accept the reality that running for president, unlike ballet, is a contact sport.

Update: On the fact-checking meter, Bachmann has climbed (or fallen, depending on your perspective) halfway to a rating of two Pinocchios: “Significant omissions and/or exaggerations. Some factual error may be involved but not necessarily.”

That sounds like progress.

Deficit Debate: Air-Cooling the Desert

As the President prepares to confront Mitch McConnell and John Boehner on the deficit, an irresistible image arrives for the absurdity of those deliberations.

Among the endless laundry list of government expenditures to be evaluated is $20.2 billion, an item larger than the entire N.A.S.A. budget, scheduled to go for air-conditioning in Afghanistan and Iraq next year.

What would be the tradeoffs between scrapping the space program or letting our troops fry in Middle East heat? Or could that much more just be sliced from the American old and poor by a new stroke of the Paul Ryan cleaver?

McConnell drops a Sunday talk show gauntlet: “Throwing more tax revenue into the mix is simply not going to produce a desirable result, and it won’t pass. I mean, putting aside the fact that Republicans don’t like to raise taxes, Democrats don’t like to either.” (He makes it sound like eating spinach or going to the dentist.)

So Republicans frame the struggle to avoid national bankruptcy as a we win-you lose effort for the White House: You can cut out apples, oranges, grapes or even figs but add nothing to the other side of the scale.

If that seems like a weird process, taxpayers can look forward to Tea Party help as the parsimonious patriots form a commission to find ingenious new ways to cut government expenses and reduce the deficit.

In the movie, “The American President,” a politician claims that, without leadership, a parched public would head for an imaginary oasis and try to drink the sand. But apparently not without air-cooling it first.

Take Two Aspirin and Call Me Next Month

As the GOP keeps trying to repeal health care reform, the White House is hiring comparison shoppers to call doctors’ offices and find out how hard it is to get appointments.

While they are snooping, some of the pseudo-patients will claim to have private insurance while others say they are covered by government programs to see if it makes a difference.

This newest wrinkle in the sacred doctor-patient relationship comes as a result of such evidence as that of a Massachusetts study finding that more than half of primary care physicians are not accepting new patients and, for those who do, the waiting time for an appointment averages 36 to 48 days.

Whatever happened to “Take two aspirin and call me in the morning”? Before long, it will be easier to get medical advice by phoning your Congressman’s office.

Is College for Everyone? A Very Old Story

From the current debate over whether a college education is worth the price in money and time for every American child, a memory seven decades old arises as testimony to the life-changing difference those four years used to make for generations born to immigrant parents.

The teacher's name, improbably, was Mr. Crabb. His grim face rose from a stiff rounded collar anchored by a pinched tie. His suits, buttoned over a body of stone, were always black.

He had been teaching math at Junior High School 44 since before any of us were born--a ramrod of a man displaced from some heartland town and set down among the striving little savages of the Bronx. He held us at cufflinked arm's length with disapproving eyes.

Over the years he had planted himself in the doorway to a free college education, and he was an austere gatekeeper, Godlike, judging our fitness to escape a future life of sweat in shops and factories, much as the civil servants on Ellis Island had earlier eyed our parents to decide whether they were worthy of passing from steerage into the Promised Land.

Since none of our families had money for tuition, our only hope was City College, and the only sure way of getting in was through Townsend Harris High School. The competition for places there was so fierce that admission was determined by competitive examinations. Somehow, no one remembered exactly how, Mr. Crabb had taken charge of preparing candidates from JHS 44 for those tests.

Every morning before eight, our small huddled mass waited for him on the cold stone steps of the school (no one who was late would be let in). On the dot of the hour, he marched up to unlock the front door. Once inside, he handed his bowler hat to one of us, briefcase to another, umbrella to a third, and we followed him down the hall for an hour of drill.

After a few weeks it became clear in my 13-year-old mind that those mornings of mental drudgery, boring and repetitive, had a different, darker purpose than preparing us for testing: the sheer assertion of power by a bitter old man over children he detested, exacting humiliation as the price for a chance at a better life than he thought we deserved.

After one brutal session of rote, laced with sarcasm, I went up to his desk and said, "I'm not coming any more."

"Then you won't be taking the tests," he answered without looking up.

I didn’t take the tests but somehow managed to keep my high-school grades just high enough to scrape through and get the college education that would lead to the life described in the biography on this page.

Now, David Leonhardt writes in the New York Times that the argument against college for all “encourages children, parents and schools to aim low. For those families on the fence--often deciding whether a student will be the first to attend--the skepticism becomes one more reason to stop at high school. Only about 33 percent of young adults get a four-year degree today, while another 10 percent receive a two-year degree.”

Here is one emphatic vote the other way, and damn the Mr. Crabbs of the world!

Gay Divorce

Amid all the celebrating at the Stonewall Inn and elsewhere, the advent of same-sex marriage in New York stirs in the spouse and co-author of a book by a divorce lawyer memories of how archaic and brutal that state’s divorce laws have always been.

It was only a year ago that New York, which now recognizes the inhumanity of denying legitimacy to those who want to share their lives lovingly and legally, was still forcing heterosexual couples in failed marriages into dishonest warfare that encouraged them to lie and cheat, enrich divorce attorneys and, worst of all, damage their children in protracted court fights.

Last July 1st, the state became the last in the union to legalize no-fault grounds for dissolving a marriage in a relatively humane way. Now, it joins Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and the District of Columbia as the only places in the U.S. where same-sex couples can get legally married.

Moral and religious arguments over the issue will go on, but in the presumably most sophisticated area of the country, both developments will go a long way toward preventing judges and lawyers from torturing Americans in their bedrooms and keep them in the courts and legislatures where they increasingly have their hands full doing just that.

Meanwhile, if some of New York’s newly sanctioned unions don’t work out, here is a place to get help and save time, money and heartache in dissolving them. Two small steps for mankind...

The Hostage President

Barack Obama started the week playing golf with John Boehner a few days before going on TV to proclaim a foreseeable victory in the Middle East, hoping no one would notice he was wearing handcuffs all the time.

Now, with Republicans walking out on debt ceiling talks and the Afghan victory lap clearly a mirage, the President’s chains are inescapably visible. Eric Cantor and Jon Kyl have him as tied up in Washington as Hamid Karzai does in Kabul.

The White House may still be living in some dimly remembered Age of Reason, but intransigence is clearly the prevailing political climate. A New York Times editorial decries the GOP “temper tantrum,” pointing out that they “had no intention of actually negotiating. Negotiations require listening to those on the other side and giving them something they want in exchange for some of your goals.”

Meanwhile, post-bin Laden discoveries are showing how closely our Pakistani allies and clients have been working with Al Qaeda while taking billions of U.S. aid money

In all this, we are still debating our future at home and abroad based on a fantasy world that bears little relation to what pre-9/11 Americans would recognize as reality.

Ten years ago, this nation had a budget surplus, unemployment of 4.4 percent and no wars. The foreign news headlines were about Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic being handed over to U.N. officials to be tried for war crimes against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

Much has happened to take us downhill since then, some of it inescapable, most not, but a long, hard look at what we have been doing to ourselves would involve asking how we turned into a Third World country fueled by political blackmail and spite.

Barack Obama won’t be in the White House forever, and whatever his shortcomings, do we really want to live in a country where there is no room for reasonable debate or compromise on anything?

Handcuffs won’t look good on the Presidential seal.

Palin: Genocide and Jury Duty

Her Magical Mystery Tour is on hold, Sarah Palin tells us, because “civic duty calls (like most everyone else, even former governors get called up for jury duty) and I look forward to doing my part just like every other Alaskan."

The civic-minded governor is cancelling a trip to war-torn Sudan with Franklin Graham to stop what evangelical Christians are calling “genocide” there.

“She would be a very good person to help draw attention to the plight of the Christians in South Sudan,” says the Rev. Graham. “We’ve got George Clooney, we’ve got some Hollywood-type people...But we need everybody we can find...

“Churches were burned. Pastors were nailed to trees. We have been able to identify 1,000 churches destroyed.”

But the former Governor will be tied up with the rigors of jury duty during what she has described as her family’s “favorite season” in Alaska when they usually travel north for a salmon fishing trip.

As it happens, Greta Van Susteren of Fox News, who had planned to make the trip with Palin, has also had to cancel because of urgent journalistic duties.

Choices, choices. It’s hard being a celebrity in today’s world.

Small Change for a Worn-Out War

The President’s remodeling in our Cash for Clunkers struggle reaches the salesroom with all the dings and dents of a ten-year-old lemon that has exhausted the patience of buyers who have spent almost half a trillion dollars keeping it on the road.

“The goal that we seek is achievable,” he says, “and can be expressed simply: no safe-haven from which al Qaeda or its affiliates can launch attacks against our homeland, or our allies. We will not try to make Afghanistan a perfect place. We will not police its streets or patrol its mountains indefinitely.

“That is the responsibility of the Afghan government, which must step up its ability to protect its people; and move from an economy shaped by war to one that can sustain a lasting peace. What we can do, and will do, is build a partnership with the Afghan people that endures--one that ensures that we will be able to continue targeting terrorists and supporting a sovereign Afghan government.”

Does anyone really believe that is going to happen in 2012, 2014 or ever?

The vaunted Obama rationality once again fails him on a major issue, leading to a split-the-difference formula as self-defeating as his decision two years ago to ram through a misshapen version of health care reform when he might have backed off and concentrated on bolstering the economy instead.

Barack Obama, for all his idealism, has shown a tin ear for managing big Change. Just as the monstrous abortion of health care reform in 2009 is now a Pyrrhic victory that endangers his reelection, so is the new Afghanistan drawdown a bad compromise that few close observers understand and hardly any want. Both Democrats and Republicans are criticizing it.

The timeline of his ups and downs over America’s longest and most frustrating war in history suggests a President making intellectual decisions about an enterprise that he knows in his bones has been flawed from the start and that no amount of tinkering can fix.

How else to explain the stop-and-go Surge that is now coming and going without any basic change in propping up a corrupt partner in an unwinnable war, that will keep costing American lives and money with little hope of anything tangible to show for it?

One goal of the President’s almost everyone will support--that we concentrate on “nation-building here at home.” Why do we have to wait so long to start?

Huntsman, Great White-Haired Hope?

Reaction to the newest GOP 2012 entry is a symptom of how far the politics of paralysis has gone. Virtually unknown, Jon Huntsman Jr. causes a media ripple by bringing something new to the race—-a note of sanity and civility.

That he is on speaking terms with the President and has even served in his Administration makes him either (1) a hopeless outsider in Republican primaries or (2) an alternative to the Obama-bashers who make up the field.

Substance-starved journalists are swooning over his announcement statement that “it concerns me that civility, humanity and respect are sometimes lost in our interactions as Americans...I don’t think you need to run down somebody’s rep in order to run for the office of president.”

More to the point, he closed the day by raising $1.2 million and is off on “a week-long fundraising sprint” from traditional Republican high-rollers who have been waiting for a White-Haired Hope to save them from the current clownfest.

On the blank slate of his public image, Huntsman will be drawing a picture of himself as “someone who knows that serious times demand serious leaders and won’t play the gotcha game of modern politics” rather than “a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a man who spent the last two years of his life not just serving President Obama publicly but also praising him privately as a ‘remarkable leader.’”

His position on gay marriage, among other issues, will set him apart from other aspirants, but essentially he seems to be only a different flavor in the GOP smorgasbord of tax cuts and Ryan cutbacks of social programs.

Yet, even small differences could shake up the Republican wall-to-wall strategy of Obama-bashing in an atmosphere that calls for what Thomas Friedman describes as “a full-time government” rather than “a Congress that is a full-time fund-raising enterprise that occasionally legislates and a White House that, save for 100 days, has to be in perpetual campaign mode.”

If Huntsman runs well as “Obama-lite,” at least traditional Republicans and independents will give us some clue about how they feel now about Hope and Change.

D-Day, Afghanistan

No matter what the President announces tomorrow on Drawdown Day, nobody will be happy with his decision, especially if, in Obama tradition, it is a measured move. That will neither satisfy the growing bipartisan desire to get out completely or the McCainiacs who see every Middle East conflict as an outpost for defending American liberty.

Yet...

How do we keep fighting in a country where an ambassador, as ours did last week, has to tell the president, “When Americans, who are serving in your country at great cost--in terms of life and treasure--hear themselves compared with occupiers, told that they are only here to advance their own interest, and likened to the brutal enemies of the Afghan people, they are filled with confusion and grow weary of our effort here?”

How do we keep fighting when the U.S. Conference of Mayors urges Congress to quickly end the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq and spend the money--$112 billion this year in Afghanistan--on jobs at home?

How do we keep fighting a war, about which Gen. Petraeus told Bob Woodward, “I don't think you win this war. I think you keep fighting...This is the kind of fight we're in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids' lives?"

A year and a half ago, in sending more troops, the President said, "If I did not think that the security of the United States and the safety of the American people were at stake in Afghanistan, I would gladly order every single one of our troops home tomorrow."

When he tells us what he is going to do now, will he be guided by that same thought?

Update: As the President prepares to announce his decision, a new kind of GOP opponent enters the race, Jon M. Huntsman, a former governor of Utah, who served as his ambassador to China.

“He and I have a difference of opinion on how to help the country we both love,” Mr. Huntsman says. “But the question each of us wants the voters to answer is who will be the better President, not who’s the better American.”

Whatever happens in Afghanistan, that kind of discourse would be a welcome relief on the campaign trail.

The President as Pinata

The tone of the 2012 presidential campaign is reflected in that Volkswagen commercial showing an auto-shaped piñata being whacked at a kid’s birthday party.

How this image sells the idea of an indestructible car is not clear, but judging from last week’s GOP debate and subsequent stumping, such flailing at everything Obama is the Republican strategy for selling themselves into the White House next year.

The biggest stick for beating up on the President is the economy. A party communiqué says flatly about the White House and Congressional Democrats: “They own it.”

Yet the New York Times' John Harwood reports: “Mr. Obama’s policies, for better or worse, have something to do with current employment levels and growth rates. But economic advisers to Republican politicians concede that most of the distress Americans feel now stems from the recession and financial crisis he inherited.

“Glenn Hubbard...who led the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, criticized Mr. Obama’s spending, tax and regulatory strategies for ‘actively’ retarding the recovery. Yet he added, ‘There could have been policies that made a difference--but not a sea change.’

"Mark Zandi...who advised Mr. Obama’s 2008 opponent, Senator John McCain, went further. Had he been elected president, Mr. McCain’s near-term policy choices would have largely overlapped with Mr. Obama’s, he said--and the differences would have had only marginal effects by now.”

That’s the reality, but in the battle of sound bites and slogans, will that make a difference to worried voters? For some time now, Democrats have been running on “It could have been worse,” not the catchiest phrase for buttons and banners.

As the Obama campaign gears up, one of its main aims will be to stop Republicans from piling on the President without offering viable economic solutions of their own.

“There seemed to be a unanimity of antipathy toward the president,” says David Axelrod, who recently left the White House to work on the re-election campaign, summing up the GOP debate: “I didn’t hear a lot of ideas,” only “a lot of pat partisan platitudes.”

The Democratic challenge will be to remind voters that their opponents are not bring any candy of their own to the party, only hoping to break some out of the Presidential piñata.

Mitt's Multiple Choice Heritage

In 1994, someone who looked and sounded like Mitt Romney declared, “I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country. I have since the time that my mom took that position when she ran in 1970 as a U.S. Senate candidate.”

Today, apparently the same person writes: “I am pro-life and believe that abortion should be limited to only instances of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother.

“I support the reversal of Roe v. Wade, because it is bad law and bad medicine. Roe was a misguided ruling that was a result of a small group of activist federal judges legislating from the bench.

“I support the Hyde Amendment, which broadly bars the use of federal funds for abortions. And as president, I will support efforts to prohibit federal funding for any organization like Planned Parenthood, which primarily performs abortions or offers abortion-related services.”

Back then, his opponent for the Senate, Ted Kennedy, accused Romney of being “multiple choice,” but he insisted “since Roe v. Wade has been the law for 20 years, that we should sustain and support it, and I sustain and support that law, and the right of a woman to make that choice, and my personal beliefs, like the personal beliefs of other people, should not be brought into a political campaign.”

In 1968, when his father was running for President, I spent some time with his parents. Lenore Romney was an intelligent, articulate and humane woman, and I can’t help wondering what flip-flop gene she passed on to her son from the male side of the family.

Romney Sr. went from front-runner to also-ran after switching positions on Vietnam with the claim that he had been “brainwashed” by generals and diplomats on his trip there into supporting the war.

Now on Father’s Day, his son has “evolved” 180 degrees on abortion to satisfy the Social Conservatives in his party, a chip off the old block whose campaigning a Republican colleague described as "like watching a duck trying to [expletive deleted] a football."

Back then, I thought that Romney’s mother would have been a better presidential candidate than her husband. I still do. The male Romneys are so easily brainwashed.

Update: Romney’s abortion flip is apparently not far enough because he won’t sign the Susan B. Anthony Pledge that he says might “end all federal funding for thousands of hospitals across America."

Says Michele Bachmann: “Gov. Romney should reconsider his decision not to sign the pledge just as he reconsidered his position on the life issue during the last campaign.” Wait, he is still “evolving.”

Failings of a National Father

In his Weekly Address, the President talks personally, but his musings about fatherhood have deep political resonance.

“I grew up without my father around,” he says. “He left when I was two years old, and even though my sister and I were lucky enough to have a wonderful mother and caring grandparents to raise us, I felt his absence. And I wonder what my life would have been like had he been a greater presence...

“That’s why I’ve tried so hard to be a good dad for my own children. I haven’t always succeeded, of course--in the past, my job has kept me away from home more often than I liked.”

What children need most, he concludes, are time, structure and unconditional love. True enough but not the whole story.

As President, Barack Obama has done his best at national fathering, but his own experience deprives him of an essential truth about the role: Children have to know in their bones that, when they are in trouble, their fathers will come and take them home.

One of the best parents I ever knew was a quiet, diffident man who never showed emotion, but when his teen-age son was off in India on drugs, got on the first flight and brought him back safely.

Behind all the clichés about fatherhood is the need for children to feel, no matter how bad things get, they will never be abandoned, that when they fall into a hole, someone will be there for them.

Barack Obama never had that experience and, with the best of intentions, seems unable to communicate to anxious Americans that government is not an enemy under the same national roof but a source of help and support in the hardest times.

He tells fathers to “encourage our children to turn off the video games and pick up a book...pack a healthy lunch for our son, or go outside and play ball with our daughter...teach our children the difference between right and wrong, and show them through our own example the value in treating one another as we wish to be treated.”

All well and good but, as he faces a year of pounding by Republicans, the President will have to learn an essential truth about fathers is that, when you are in trouble, they are the ones you depend on to be there to help save you.

Like it or not, American presidents from “The father of his country” on have assumed a paternal role in the society, and now as Tea Party patriots seem intent on patricide, Barack Obama will have to step up to reassure the rest of us that he understands the symbolism.

Try imagining Romney, Pawlenty, Bachmann and Gingrich doing that.

Sleaze Olympics

On the first day of the rest of his life, Anthony Weiner may take some comfort from the latest news about his role model in sexual misadventure. John Edwards has now been caught soliciting get-out-of-jail money from the 100-year-old heiress who bankrolled his original walk on the wild side. (Is that why he was smiling in his mug shot?)

As Republicans open a wide lead in the Shameless Olympics in the halls of Congress, Democrats have clinched the gold on the domestic front.

On trial for misusing election contributions from “Bunny” Mellon, Edwards is apparently redefining chutzpah with a flying visit on her private jet to see if she would compound the felony by giving him millions more to defend himself.

Whatever “package” Weiner was bragging about to his online correspondents, it seems puny in contrast to what Edwards is showing to one and all.