P.M. Carpenter

The power of gullibility

Maureen Dowd's column this morning, which as I write is being praised on CNN's "State of the Union" by none other than that right-wing demagogue of smugness, Bill Bennett, makes a profound but also profoundly inadvertent and profoundly sad point: President Obama is too smart for the American electorate. 

He and "His inner circle believed too much in the power of the Aura and in protecting the Brand," writes Dowd. "They didn’t think they needed to sell anything or fight back when the crazies started sliming them.... Obama ... missed the moment in August of 2009 when Sarah Palin and the Tea Party got oxygen with their loopy rants on death panels. It never occurred to the Icon that such wildness and gullibility would trump lofty rationality."

I, and I'm sure Obama as well, couldn't agree more. But in his defense I can say what he can't: He (and I know I did) misinterpreted the 2008 election as a broad re-endorsement of, and thus a return to, rationality. He had deeply invested in a new, soft post-partisanship whose chief objective was pragmatic problem-solving; he indeed believed that "lofty rationality," given the titanic problems we all faced, would trump "gullibility."

He trusted that the American electorate had grown up, that it had matured, that it would no longer opt for the shinest baubles tendered by those tarnished demagogues of the right. His confidence was misplaced. Within weeks of his inauguration the GOP began resolidifying its rabid base through amplified alarms about Obama's "socialist" agenda. Hence center-right independents began harboring doubts.

Meanwhile, insatiable movement progressives also began doing their petty, benighted and immature best to cripple Obama early on. "This is 'Change we can believe in'? Pshaw. Just more of the same." Although an impressive 75 percent of rank-and-file liberals have held their ground in support of Obama, movement progressives' pummeling message in the service of the far right began taking its toll on center-left independents. Hey, they're right, thought these perhaps lower-information voters -- Where, after a mere 18 months or so, is the organic Change we voted for?

In short, Obama has been squeezed from both ideological extremes, paradoxically leaving himself and his Congressional allies most vulnerable in the essentially non-ideological middle, where national elections are won or lost.

Being a supremely rational man in search of a new kind of rational politics -- which, again, Obama thought had been confirmed in November, 2008 -- it likely never occurred to the president that his in-office political strategy would soar so far above the street-fight mentality of both far left and far right that the latter's fog of war would obscure it, in the vast middle.

Obama believed in the power of rationality. He thought we had bought into it, too. He was wrong. The power of gullibility is as mighty as ever.

Blind dates

Perhaps it's their unshakable sense of moral superiority, or maybe it's some lamentable need to prove themselves indefatigably subversive and thus ideologically purest, but whatever the cause, the "professional left" is a self-destructive, stumblebumbling gang of Dudley Do-Right clowns who simply don't understand coalition or pluralistic politics, which is to say, American politics.  

"[W]hile White House officials Thursday described Obama’s appearance on the [Daily Show] an air-clearing 'success,' " writes Politico, "it was also stark proof that Obama can’t expect the same got-your-back support from the progressive media as George W. Bush enjoyed from conservative TV and radio hosts."

The "progressive media" are, you see, the noblest of the noble and brimming with self-righteous integrity, which means they're willing to assist, through their unremitting assaults on center-left pols who must operate in our real electoral universe of 40 percent conservatives and 35 percent moderates, in the return of another Bush presidency or Gingrich Congress. 

"The president himself gets a little cranky at the idea he's disappointed the left," wrote Keith Olbermann to Politico. " 'I have suggested to the White House that some maintenance of progressives on their turf would at least counteract this GOP/mainstream media theme that' the White House has stopped caring about the party’s progressive wing." Say what? The theme of unrequited love and cold embraces spews forth from the "GOP/mainstream media"? Is Olbermann joking? kidding us? kidding himself?

Let's cue the "fighting" Adam Green, founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, to make my point:

"President Obama could have fought for and passed the public option [and] a more effective stimulus," Green told Politico, "and ... he refused to step on Republican toes, pre-emptively caved to senators with no mandate to oppose him and refuses to acknowledge his mistakes as Democratic candidates across the country face an uninspired electorate as a result."

Magical thinking -- "could have fought for and passed...." That's all Mr. Green and others of his strategically amateurish ilk have to offer, in addition to magical conclusions:

“Democrats need to learn the right lesson from this year's election, which is, voters will show up if you fight harder for a popular progressive agenda."

My dear Mr. Green, it evidently requires a "progressive conservative," as he has called himself, to explain the facts of political life to you. From today's NY Times, I give you the serendipitous David Brooks:

"[T]he fact is that Obama will win 99.9 percent of the liberal vote in 2012, and in a presidential year, liberal turnout will surely be high. On the other hand, he cannot survive the defection of the independents. In 2008, independent voters preferred Democrats by 8 percentage points. Now they prefer Republicans by 20 points, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll."

As for what all that spells, see "Music Man" and pool tables.

Memo to movement progressives: We live in a complex nation, overrepresented in traditional conservative thought and moderate temperament. Progress is, and always has been, incremental. Obama comprehends that. You don't.

Of what possible benefit is Kendrick Meek's tenacity? Put another way, to whose definite benefit is Kendrick Meek's tenacity?

Meek, reports Politico, "has failed to broaden his appeal around the state and is mired in third place in most public polls, with a survey today showing him with just 15 percent of the vote. His withdrawal, polls suggest, would throw core Democratic voters to the moderate governor, rocking a complicated three-way contest and likely throwing the election to Crist."

So, "Bill Clinton sought to persuade Rep. Kendrick Meek to drop out of the race for Senate during a trip to Florida last week."

As I wrote on Oct. 7: "It now seems a) irreversible that Democratic senatorial candidate Kendrick Meek will finish last and thus b) advisable that he should quit the race assuming c) Independent candidate Charlie Crist promises to caucus with Democrats, all of which d) would stop GOP candidate Marco Rubio in his tea partying tracks....

"The transcendent goal here ... is to stop one of the tea party’s golden boys."

Mr. Meek, your determination, while admirable, is also destructive. Move aside. Now.

Lunatic alert

From my inbox, the latest incoherence, hysteria, and, just in case, excuse-making, from Tea Party/TeaParty.org:

Arizona and Colorado are reporting massive voter fraud perpetrated by the Marxist groups Mi Familia Vota and One Vote Arizona. Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce writes: "I also understand that these 2 groups have signed up 20,000 states wide and they have requested that 45,000 be put on the permanent early ballot. If 65% of these last minute registration forms in Yuma are invalid, which may be more as they are still checking the rest, then what is the percentages of invalid in Maricopa, Pima and other counties?"

Aided by Socialist Democrat Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) and a George Soros funded group, WND [WorldNetDaily] advises that poll watchers are being threatened with, amongst other things, Obama's DOJ: "Houston Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who was seen inside the polling location electioneering and threatening to turn a poll-watcher's name to the Department of Justice for voter intimidation." Note: It appears that Michele Obama is not the only Marxist Democrat who is now allowed to illegally electioneer....

Voting machines in Nevada are being reported for automatically checking Harry Reid's name. The Washington Examiner reports: "Voter Joyce Ferrara said when they went to vote for Republican Sharron Angle, her Democratic opponent, Sen. Harry Reid's name was already checked. Ferrara said she wasn't alone in her voting experience. She said her husband and several others voting at the same time all had the same thing happen.

'Something's not right,' Ferrara said. 'One person that's a fluke. Two, that's strange. But several within a five minute period of time - that's wrong'." Note: Oh and by the way, guess who is the official technical organization for the voting machines. Why, it's Obama's bought and paid for SEIU....

Again folks - and I cannot stress this enough - We-the-People MUST vote in unprecedented numbers in order to counter the all-out attack now being waged against us by Dictator-in-Chief Obama's government. Our would-be slave masters are proving the point - beyond any and all doubt or question - that they WILL do anything and stop at nothing to stay in power in order to bleed every last drop of resources, blood, freedoms and liberty from us. It's now or never.

An Appauling vision

Have you ever wondered what a tea party-ish plan -- if I may use that noun in relation to a brutal ideology of nihilistic anarchy -- for W.'s Depression would have looked like? In an interviewwith Hayekian serf Ron Paul, The Atlantic's Joshua Green satisfies our wonder:

"You would not increase spending, you would not increase taxes, you would not bail out anybody," said the Texas congressman. "You would have bankruptcy, liquidation of debt, and [you’d] wipe the books clean so everybody can go back to work."

Simple as that.

And therein lies the appeal to a growing number of dazed American voters, as well as an elongated branch of the tea party's genealogy. As Barry Goldwater preached in his 1964 presidential run, which previewed the libertarian message from the coming New Right: "The big trouble with the so-called liberal today is that he doesn't understand simplicity"; that is, liberalism won't accept that there are indeed simple answers to complex problems. (When Goldwater first uttered this on the campaign trail, the NY Times' Tom Wicker opined that he spoke as a "child" would.)

Green -- gently dancing around Paul's hands-off voodoo -- does his level-headed best to point out the most recent, sadly complex Keynesian record: "Most experts" -- did you hear the soft throat-clearing? -- "think the government’s intervention [of 'deficit-funded fiscal stimulus, bailouts, and a broad easing of credit'] was, technically speaking, successful (although probably too small). A recent study by the economists Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi concluded that it likely prevented a depression and saved 8.5 million jobs. A Congressional Budget Office study reached a similar conclusion. In other words, the intervention validated Keynes."

That of course is the real world. "But lingering high unemployment and economic weakness," notes Green, "along with the relentless Republican effort to undermine Obama, have led most people to conclude the opposite, that Keynesian intervention failed.... Tea Party outrage appears to have ended the Keynesian consensus that had obtained since the Great Depression."

Yet there's another, far deeper consensus that "tea party outrage" seems to have ended: our once general agreement that facts matter.

This national pathology of denial has been long in the making, though; tea partyers and their ideological spokesmen such as Ron Paul have but yet again capitalized on it. In rebuffing OMB Director David Stockman's warning that he couldn't cut taxes, increase defense spending and balance the budget, Reagan had absorbed Goldwater's exhortations to shun complexity. Well, let's just see how it goes, Reagan, almost word for word, instructed Stockman. The nation cheered. Reagan then ignored the factual outcome -- those predicted, massive deficits -- of wishful, ideological economics. From there we ultimately traveled to Dick Cheney's defensive rumination that "Deficits don't matter." The nation cheered again.

In a way, deficits didn't matter -- not, that is, during his boss' reign. W., Dick & Co. simply dumped them on the succeeding administration. And now the dumpers at large are lecturing the dumpees in office on the apocalyptic evils of those deficits that didn't matter then, but could actually benefit us now.

For decades we've been entombed in the Goldwater-Reagan-Bush-Paul-Tea Party's upside-down bubble of blind ideology, in which complexity is foe and facts are nuisance. Just "wipe the books clean so everybody can go back to work," urges Paul. Simple as that.    

President Obama's greatest challenge over the next two years? To somehow simply reintroduce the American electorate to the complexities we face. And God knows he should have plenty of time to do just that. Except for taking a moment now and then to veto some monumentally inane piece of legislation passed by the incoming Keystone Cops of Congress, he'll have the bully pulpit from which to educate -- and it seems he now appreciates just how badly that pulpit is needed.

Exhausting, isn't it?

Barack Obama "has been one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times."

That, as the Post's Ruth Marcus notes this morning, was the "deranged" or "dangerous" California Congressman Darrell Issa speaking to Rush Limbaugh about a week ago. Marcus suspects danger more than derangement: "When Bloomberg's Al Hunt called Issa on his hyperbole, the congressman hemmed, hawed and brought forth a mouse: in-sourcing. Seriously. In-sourcing, the practice of shifting work from private contractors to government."

Issa, who will assume the chairmanship of the House oversight committee that traffics in phantom scandals, has also concluded that "the administration's dangling of a job offer to Rep. Joe Sestak to drop out of the Pennsylvania Senate primary is 'a crime' and an 'impeachable' offense, with an ensuing White House 'coverup' reminiscent of Watergate." Again, seriously.

But now for something -- seemingly -- completely different. Yesterday the Times' Bob Herbert rightly bemoaned: "What has always struck me ... is that there is a desperate need to improve the nation’s infrastructure and a desperate need for the jobs and enhanced economic activity that would come from sustained, long-term infrastructure investment. But somehow the leadership and the will to move forward on the scale that is needed are missing."

So what's the implied relationship (see above, "seemingly") between Maurcus' piece on dangerous Issa and Herbert's on intelligent spending? Exhaustion, I'd say. Exhaustion on both the writers' and readers' part. Wholesale intellectual and emotional exhaustion.

Sometimes, as I'm either reading a moderate-to-liberal commentary or writing one, it blasts me but good: My God, I've been reading, writing, this exact item for years -- the GOP is verifiably dangerous, provably deranged and empirically irresponsible; the nation needs to get in gear, to get moving, to reject fear, to embrace Reason. And the resulting sensation is, to repeat in a word, exhaustion.

When children learn their ABCs, they "get it." They get it and move on. But we adults seem to have a great deal of trouble in learning our governmental ABCs. We endlessly read or write identical columns on what's gobsmackingly stupid or sublimely sensible; then we promptly march en masse to the polls and ratify the former.

I don't mean to sound petulant, or worse, naive. It's just that all this recurrent buffoonery is so goddamn exhausting.

Just ran across this limerick in James Joyce's Ulysses, which I found hilariously relevant. (Note: Joyce's "Joe Miller," according to Harper's New Monthly Magazine, June of 1876 -- yeah, this intrigue required a bit of online research -- "was more or less, in some sense or other, the origin of the jest-book named after him," hence the limerick's "the" Joe Miller.)

There's a ponderous pundit MacHugh
Who wears goggles of ebony hue.
As he mostly sees double
To wear them why trouble?
I can't see the Joe Miller. Can you?

Hope you enjoyed that as much as I did, although when I start posting items like that, you know this campaign season is growing far too long.

Bring 'em on

We don't, but procurer John Boehner will deserve every excruciating moment of the hydra-headed clusterfuck he's about to suffer. The upside for us, however, is that consequent voter backlash should arrive in a 2012 torrent that'll make this year's seem like a drizzle. 

Politico previews the wicked fun: Rep. Steve "King and allies such as [Michele] Bachmann will push their leadership into what could be an uncomfortable confrontation with the White House, specifically on health care, threatening government shutdown if they don’t get their way."

And then there are the now-inevitable newcomers: "Many of these candidates are people who are new to public life," said Republican Congressman Peter Roskam. "So they will have an expectation of 'I said this in the campaign, and I’m going to do this in Congress.' "

Boehner, Cantor & Co. has had a high old time of it egging on tea-party challengers and whipping up mass ill will toward all things Obamian. But today's cranky public sentiment will morph into stupendous outrage once the GOP's promised realities set in: the House's (attempted) re-unleashing of health-insurance companies to summarily deny coverage or cancel policies; the House's cruel interruption of extended unemployment benefits; the House's idiotic contraction of government spending in a depressed, demandless economy; a ghastly government shutdown in which Treasury can't cut Social Security checks and Medicare can't process Medicare claims (hello, all you older, angry white voters); and so bloody on.

Boehner already foresees that his choices will be those of Hobson's. Even his passably moderate House members who appreciate the immense stupidity of tea-party ideology will also espy a troubled 2012 primary, should they make any attempts at rational governance -- at moving the country forward. The House GOP will, therefore, collapse under the obesity of its own counterproductive fraudulence. 

That Boehner has made a Faustian bargain is perhaps the stuff of conspicuity and doubtlessly harmful to sound governance, but it sure will be fun to watch him and his party over the next two years go up in flames.

The Dems' mess

David Brooks nails one out of three reasons he offers for Congressional Democrats' brief reign. I quote (almost) in extenso:

Democrats and their media enablers have paid lavish attention to Christine O’Donnell and Carl Paladino, even though these two Republican candidates have almost no chance of winning. That’s because it feels so delicious to feel superior to opponents you consider to be feeble-minded wackos.... Similarly, the Democrats and their enablers have paid lavish attention to the Tea Party this year. It’s nice to feel more sophisticated than those hordes of Middle Americans, who say silly things like "Get government off my Medicare." On the other hand, Democrats have paid little attention to the crucial group in this election -- the independent moderates who supported President Obama in 2008 but flocked away during the health care summer of 2009 and now support the GOP by landslide proportions.

Naturally I say Brooks nails it because on this point I agree wholeheartedly. But try disputing it.

True, Democrats' "media enablers" have also devoted considerable time to, say, "feeble-minded whacko" Sharron Angle, who has more than just a chance at winning. But mousy evolution-deniers and businessman mobsters and wannabe Nazi officers and violent Texas revolutionaries who, in the grander scheme of this election, are utterly insignificant, have carried the entertainment-over-information day. On the other hand Marco Rubio, who couldn't be more wrong on virtually every issue, is polished and articulate in his stunning wrongheadedness, thus not as laughable, thus not as ratings-attractive, thus largely ignored by left-leaning media, and thus leading both the Independent and Democrat by wide and embarrassing margins.  

From there, Brooks starts hammering only his thumbs. He sarcastically assaults the verifiable proposition that "Democrats are lagging this year because the country appears incapable of appreciating the grandeur of their accomplishments," and with far too-clever Machiavellian mischief he toys with and belittles "the menace of secret money." (Go ahead and laugh, Mr. Brooks, but now that we have office-supply sports stadiums, next we'll have Chevron and Bank of America voting stations.)

To make his points, Brooks judiciously neglects mentioning the extraordinary role of malicious Republican obstructionism (except in one minor instance of sarcasm, again) in bringing effective economic cures to an unpardonable halt; nor does he even peek into the democratic abyss of Republican demagoguery-cum-policy.

Bu that's OK, really, since conservative Brooks' larger, initial point holds, I think: Democrats and their media enablers have done a prosecutable job of message malpractice for nearly two years, and now they're paying for it.

There's no dang fence

"No matter what the outcome is, this" -- the unholy deluge of big, bullying, outside money in the midterms -- "is a wake-up call,” said a Democratic official to Politico.

I'm certainly no knee-jerk advocate of Constitutional amendments, but in the matter of campaign finance I see no other alternative. Pass a limiting law and greedy or desperate pols find a way to circumvent it; pass a stricter law and some delusional handful of robed cowboys finds a way to explode it. The difficulty of fine-tuning legislation with respect to campaign finance is akin to the censorious nightmare we would have experienced in the way of free speech had the First Amendment not been so absolutist.

Public financing. Period. No exceptions. No escape clauses. Otherwise, no equal players.

Crazy gets a vote, too

Remember the "Gay '90s"? The gay 1890s, that is? Of course you don't. But neither would those Americans who lived through that decade, were they still living today, because the '90s were anything but joyous and carefree. It was a decade of unprecedented economic depression, corporate hegemony, labor unrest, plunging commodity prices and two-party dominance, all of which ignited what is generically known today as the "populist movement" -- the late 19th-century's Tea Party.

Although Populism was hijacked by the bizarre economic theory of inflation-on-demand through the "free" and unlimited coinage of silver, many of its political goals -- e.g., railroad regulation, an income tax, direct election of U.S. senators -- were not only sensible, they were adopted and enacted by the next century's Progressives. At the time, though, the populist impulse was feared by many as the undoing of America. Its often eloquent leaders were loud, aggressive and rabble-rousing; yet with economic recovery, they and their "grassroots" movement vanished as suddenly as they had appeared. 

Such is the promise of historical perspective with respect to the shockingly vulgar Tea Party, offered this morning in the Times' "Room for Debate" by political historians Alan Brinkley and Robert Dallek. Writes the former: "[B]ad economic times always leads to unusual politics: popular movements, angry at whatever centers of power people blame for their problems, turn to scapegoats (immigrants, radicals and other unpopular groups)." Writes Dallek: "While Tea Party candidates seem poised to win some national, state and local elections, they are unlikely, if history is any guide, to be more than a passing phenomenon.... [O]ne can well imagine that as the economy improves, the protests will subside and the Tea Party will be remembered not as an enduring part of American political culture but as a summer storm that left a small mark on the country’s political history."

There is one immense, modern divergence, however, as noted by Brinkley: "What’s different today, I think, is the way in which once marginal ideas and movements have become enormously well known through modern communications. People angry and disaffected used to have nowhere to go. Now they can join with millions of others to create something very much like a movement through the Internet and other new forms of communication."

I endorse Brinkley's worry, which is undeniably legitimate: today we've the scum of wild Internet rumors, Fox News' 24/7 malicious propaganda, the scurrilous venom of radio's Limbaughs and Becks, as well as the "news"-consuming public's devaluation of old-school print journalism; all of them paradoxically compounded, in my view, by MSNBC's and progressive Web sites' relentless fearmongering of the radical right as the coming and permanent majority.

On the other hand, prior to all our modern communications outlets, Populism's message of authentically loony economic remedies also swept through, especially, the American South and the Plains states. Lunacy always seems to find a way.

In general, the Brinkley-Dallek thesis of cautious historical perspective holds. The watchwords are "Don't panic"; tea parties in times of economic distress have always been with us. Their presence and influence are painful -- about that, there's no doubt -- but in a representative democracy, crazy gets a vote, too.

Poppycock & Gibberish

On “This Week” this morning, George Will once again monotonously defended the obscene levels of special-interest money in politics by noting that Procter & Gamble spends more on advertising its assorted consumer products than Americans invest in electing their constitutional representatives.

Fair enough. Yet Will never compares the relative kick of each dollar spent; that is, P&G refrains -- because of government regulation -- from advertising that Olay will cure skin cancer, that Head and Shoulders will restore your thinning hair,  or that eating Pringles and only Pringles five times a day promotes weight loss. 

There is, as we unfortunately know all too well, no such constraint in political advertising. This year any anonymous guttersnipe with a spare million can tell tens of thousands of voters that his or her representative is, say, a pedophiliac socialist hellbent on death-paneling grandma, and it’s all perfectly legal.

Dear Mr. Will: Is one man always one vote, and is one dollar always just a dollar?

They're back, of course

This morning when I saw the Times' front-page tease for Nate Silver's latest political cryptology -- "Don't Call It a Comeback?" -- I assumed that Silver was referencing the GOP's rather excellent chances, at least in the House, of achieving the status quo ante; that is, that what seems like 2010's roaring Republican comeback is actually just the rubble's resettling, to pre-2006 days.

Instead, Silver's point (although I've no doubt he agrees with the above) was that at this late stage of any campaign season, "rumors of a candidate’s demise -- or comeback -- may be greatly exaggerated, given how little time there remains to make up even fairly small polling deficits."

Point taken. The other, anticipated point, however, awaited only my next click: Politico's main and serendipitous headline, "The new political map: Welcome to 2004." There, in somewhat more formal language, Jonathan Martin and Alex Isenstadt improved on my rubble:

Based on the state of the political map two weeks out from the election, the famed red vs. blue model that followed the 2004 presidential race appears to be returning to shape.... Even if Democrats are able to prevent a total wipeout, it’s likely that this year’s election will mark a return to the familiar political universe that characterized the decade before 2006 when the GOP controlled swaths of politically conservative and moderate parts of the country.

In other words, Democrats' exploratory outposts of 2006 and 2008 simply could not hold, and what they're now experiencing isn't so much an invasion as a revanchist maneuver. As long as Democrats had George W. Bush in office to singularly demonstrate the horrors of contemporary GOP management, they were safe in unsafe districts at almost any speed. But to voters in center-right districts, the Bush era and its attendent atrocities against sound governance are as good as ancient history.

This is well known. What is commonly forgotten or haughtily dismissed by Democrats' rather narrow progressivist base, however, is that progressive Congressional Democrats are hardly ever caught in the electoral crossfire; they represent relatively safe progressive districts -- which, naturally, is why they got themselves elected in the first place -- where Republican candidates possess little chance of success. When the party, then, as the governing majority, moves to the left, it is incumbent Democratic moderates from swing districts who pay for any backlash.

What has always astounded me, though, is that movement progressives always celebrate incumbent progressive victories in purifying, weeding-out elections as proof that the progressive message holds the key to overall victory. This, it scarcely needs to be added, is a precise and destructive misreading of virtually every ideological signal that swing-district voters are emitting.

Now, some progressive readers are bound to conclude from this that mine is an argument against progressive goals, which would be but another misreading. It is, rather, merely a notation of uncomfortable political truths and realities -- the very ones our progressive president, in the formulation of policymaking, has had to contend with -- which movement progressives have an insufferable habit of ignoring.

Joe Miller, regulation hound

Come on, Joe, where's that famous Wild West spirit of yours?

Alaska Republican Joe Miller slapped the cash-flush Super PAC supporting Sen. Lisa Murkowski with a Federal Election Commission complaint Wednesday.... Miller is charging that the group's relationship with Murkowski is inappropriate, saying the senator is "bought and paid for" by the Alaska Native corporations that make up Alaskans Standing Together.

Is 'up' the only direction left?

Seven hundred dollars later -- all of it expended the incurably optimistic American way: on credit -- I discovered that my prolonged computer problems could have been fixed by a mere $21 hardware upgrade. And so it goes.

At any rate (and I trust the pricey yet wholly unnecessary ones are behind me for a while, although I was proud indeed to add to the economy's recovery through free-market waste, fraud and abuse), I wanted to highlight a recent, brain-curdling passage from NY Times Magazine that assesses with fairness, I think, the truly wretched state of our union:

White House aides wonder aloud whether it is even possible for a modern president to succeed, no matter how many bills he signs. Everything seems to conspire against the idea: an implacable opposition with little if any real interest in collaboration, a news media saturated with triviality and conflict, a culture that demands solutions yesterday, a societal cynicism that holds leadership in low regard.

Do I hear any objections? That's what I thought. The Nays have it.

I resist, however, capitulating to the voices of irreversible doom.

True, I'm as skeptical as any White House aide that Obama will manage to unseat the above quadrumvirate of mindless partisanship, triviality, unthoughtfulness and cynicism. But look at it this way: He'll have six more years to try, since even this disreputable electorate, according to virtually every poll, isn't so imbecile as to trust any of the current crop of GOP dunces or demagogues with chief executive power. There are, it seems, limits to our descent.

It's also true that Republican reactionaryism is outsizedly popular at the moment, yet economic recovery (yesterday's solutions tomorrow) will work to circumscribe that abnormality. And remember, as for the longer term, the contemporary GOP in all of its inglorious manifestations is the subject of a death-watch: every day the inexorable march of America's diversifying demographics puts it deeper in an electoral hole.

As for "societal cynicism" about leadership? That may not be entirely regrettable. Carlyle-esque "Great Man" theories and interpretations of history have always circulated excessively in America's political culture; perhaps it's time for at least a minor correction.

Finally there's the news media's obsession with "triviality and conflict." I could, I suppose, here devote thousands of words to limitless examples and some scholarly analysis of their whys and wherefores. But, in the end, we'd still be left with that one, ineradicable conclusion: Conflict sells, and as long as news -- especially cable news -- is hustled as an entertainment commodity, there'll be no end to the media's groveling. Short, that is, of more mature consumers. And to that we can only say: Good luck.

Thus a wretched state we're in indeed; yet, in the overall picture, there lie sound reasons for hope.