Like the smart kid beset by schoolyard bullies, Barack Obama is turning to wonkish jocks for protection. Leaks from The Speech reveal he will be relying on his Commission on Deficit Reduction and perhaps Congress’ Gang of Six for bipartisan cover but also raise a question: If the President is taking a centrist stance against Republican extremism, who speaks for those who take a (dirty word alert) Liberal position? Where are the champions of what used to be a major view in American politics? As...

The familiar pattern emerges: Aides spin a preview, he delivers an admirable speech, nothing changes. How did Barack Obama morph from an inspiring orator to a professorial President without the power to lead? Yes, yes: a crashing economy, wall-to-wall GOP resistance, Tea Party insanity… Granted, but there must be more. “I’d rather be a really good one-term president,” he said a year ago, “than a mediocre two-term president.” As of now, there is doubt that he will...

How can you satirize someone who does it himself every day? Today’s Trumpery is a letter to the New York Times attacking columnist Gail Collins, which malicious pencil pushers there have left unedited: “Her storytelling ability and word usage (coming from me, who has written many bestsellers), is not at a very high level.” Collins responds evenly, noting, “I once got an aggrieved message from him in which he misspelled the word ‘too.’” Literacy aside, the...

When he makes his long-term budget proposal this week, the President must include choices about all the money that has been draining into the Middle East Money Pit for the past decade. In Baghdad last week, Robert Gates was reassuring troops they would be paid, even as he told them they may be staying longer than scheduled. “If folks here are going to want us to have a presence,” the Defense Secretary says, “we’re going to need to get on with it pretty quickly in terms of...

In a windup worthy of the WWF, Washington budget wrestlers bounce off the canvas to take bows and hug one another for the cheering crowds. In the Senate, Harry Reid is so carried away that, hours after calling the GOP “shameful,” he praises every Republican in sight including John Boehner’s chief of staff and, most of all, Mitch McConnell, who gushes back that Congress has made history, instead of repeating the history of the Newt Gingrich-Bill Clinton government shutdown. For skeptics...

Half a century after LBJ, America is on the brink of another “War on Poverty,” this one not to ease the misery of millions but make them pay for tax cuts for the rich and comfortable. Behind all the budget gabble is a reversal of Johnson’s “Great Society” that provided a safety net for the poorest Americans with Medicare, Medicaid, Federal aid to education and, not incidentally, civil rights, all of which led to prosperity until a decade ago when unregulated greed began...

As Washington continues to make April the most confusing and “cruelest month” in memory, half of the 2012 Republican ticket is becoming clear. For clowns contesting for the top spot, Paul Ryan has positioned himself as a young, wonkish, issue-oriented counterweight–next year’s knowledgeable not-Palin for Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Michele Bachmann, Haley Barbour et al, even Palin herself, freeing them to blather Tea Party and Social Conservative banalities while hiding behind...

Washington is acting out that old story of the farmer with a reluctant mule and the neighbor who offers to reason with the animal, then bashes its head with a plank. “I thought you were going to reason with him.” “I am, but first I have to get his attention.” Farmer Obama and Neighbor Boehner are standing over a dazed government with no sign that they can get it moving by week’s end and deliver crops of services to those who depend on them. But, to switch clichés, Republicans...

Barack Obama brings to mind a world-class athlete I once saw, slogging through deep sand to strengthen his legs for competition. In Libya and Washington, the President is doing just that, certainly not by choice, but it could help get him into condition for the 2012 marathon. With only days left to avoid a government shutdown, he is pushing through Republican resistance even as they unload an even bigger pile of muck for the year ahead. “We want to get spending and debt under control,” says...

In 1950, an underrated team won both the NCAA and NIT basketball tournaments, a feat never accomplished before or since. They played for tuition-free City College of New York, which had no scholarships or country-club campus to attract the best high-school talent. For those city kids, basketball was like life–threading through tight spaces under pressure, seeing openings and seizing them, making moves while keeping track of where others are, using every second and every inch to score in a game...

The whatever-it-is in Libya gets more convoluted daily as Defense Secretary Gates tells Congress there will be no U.S. boots on the ground “as long as I’m in this job,” while non-uniformed C.I.A agents soft-shoe their way in to find out who the rebels are and what they need. In the Senate, John McCain proclaims that “Hope is not a strategy” as Joint Chiefs Chairman Mullen reports the no-fly mission has been hampered by bad weather. So much for the military situation....

Is anyone surprised that the C.I.A. is on the ground in Libya, along with who-knows-what Special Forces, presumably to find out who the rebels are and how to help them? How could it be otherwise? The President’s disingenuous speech evoked “images of slaughter and mass graves,” then insisted that “broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake”–but to prevent the first, the second is inevitable. Little wonder that such mission creep...

A candidate will emerge from the 2012 Republican primaries only after running a gauntlet of embarrassment this year. As polls show low public faith in Obama leadership, his potential successor will have to survive a field of self-promoting clowns unprecedented in presidential history. Take Newt Gingrich (please), claiming his adultery (in two marriages) more excusable than Bill Clinton’s because he was aroused by patriotic fervor and isn’t a lawyer while urging voters to elect him to...

For those who welcomed a thoughtful, analytical, measured President after the pietistic, never-in-doubt George W. Bush, Barack Obama’s latest Big Speech is a reminder that words can cloud as well as clarify. The President now tells us that “when our interests and values are at stake, we have a responsibility to act. That’s what happened in Libya over the course of these last six weeks.” But that assertion is not supported by hard facts any more than was Bush’s warnings about...

Patriots who revere the Founding Fathers may now be overshooting their mark by almost a century–back to the Salem Witch Trials of the 1690s: If anything went wrong then, the answer was to find the servants of Satan responsible and get rid of them. In Congress and statehouses across the country, newly minted Tea Party officeholders are hounding public employees and their unions as a response to frustration over economic woes–a solution that makes as much sense now as it did in Salem–and...

Not since the days of Iraq’s mushroom clouds and smoking guns has the American air been filled with more obfuscation than now in Libya. The “inchoate coalition” there, we are told, “remains divided over the ultimate goal–and exit strategy” of what now looks like a “military campaign that could last for weeks.” The days of “gunboat diplomacy” are back, when great powers used shows of military strength to impose their will around the world....

Elizabeth Taylor has died at 79 without publishing her memoirs, but that would have been redundant. Everything about her, from the age of ten, is on film and in old magazines. We never met but, in 1958, she saved my best friend’s life. I had sent Bob Levin to interview her and her then-husband Mike Todd for Redbook. He was to see her on a Saturday morning, but the day before she was in bed with bronchitis and Todd suggested that Bob come with him on a flight from L.A. to New York on his private...

As the new law turns one, the occasion recalls a greeting purportedly sent to a company president after surgery, “The Board of Directors wishes you a speedy recovery by a vote of six to five.” A year later, the public is still confused, Republicans swear to kill the law and the White House is sending out explainers to sing its praises. It’s like combining a wake with a birthday party. A new poll shows “Americans don’t think they like the Affordable Care Act, but they don’t...

As usual, the air is filled with sounds but nobody is saying much. In this era of certainty about everything, Libya has exposed the soft underbelly of politics and punditry by reducing expertise to belaboring the obvious. A New York Times editorial, after describing Qaddafi as “a thug and a murderer who has never paid for his many crimes, including the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103,” hems and haws about the action against him, reviews what’s happened and takes no position beyond...

George W. Bush, who gave up binge drinking for piety and power, knew more about mornings-after than his successor now reeling from the aftermath of his first foreign-policy bender. Everywhere he looks, Barack Obama is surrounded by weird little men with hammers pounding away at his skull. John Boehner, yes. John McCain, of course. Liberal Democrats, why not? Michael Moore and Andrew Sullivan, a not-too-surprising left-right duo. But there are specters from the political dead as well: Ralph Nader? And...

Those who have spent a lifetime (75 years in my case) with the New York Times, from days of smudged fingers on, are moved to realize that “All the News That’s Fit to Print” is passing another milestone. As the Times imposes subscription fees for more-than-casual readers, it’s like the change in a long affair–with time out for 15 years of open digital co-habitation–after decades together under old rules. In those days, it was like waking up every morning with a...

As our planes and missiles bomb Libya, we are back 200 years to the first foreign military action in American history, commemorated in the Marines’ Hymn, intervention in a dispute over the throne between Arab brothers. What we are doing in Tripoli now is, of course, sanctified by the U.N. and in concert with other powers, but it is a clear return to U.S. policy as “policeman of the world” advocated by Dick Cheney and Bush’s Neo-Cons who led us into the Iraq disaster. This...

The Colin Powell warning about Iraq (“You break it, you own it”) is now evolving into a reverse version for Libya. But if we fix that, don’t we own it, too? Hillary Clinton, announcing fatigue and retirement before Obama’s second term, is leading a gung-ho charge against the Libyan strongman. “Qaddafi must go,” she says, calling him “a ruthless dictator who has no conscience and will destroy anyone or anything in his way.” That’s true (as it was about Saddam...

An image arrives, the cover of a new book in French showing American icon Marilyn Monroe 56 years ago in a legendary Irish saloon, a convergence of cultures for St. Patrick’s Day. In that place, where my generation learned about life, Tim Costello was our teacher. One of us, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a budding sociologist and later U.S. Senator, would famously say when JFK was killed, “To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.” Now, as the world batters...

He keeps reminding us how lucky we were that he lost in 2008. Now John McCain gets into a more-warlike-than-thou exchange with the Afghan War’s current proprietor, David Petraeus. Testifying before the Senate, the General cites “fragile and reversible” gains, guardedly talking about possible drawdowns but raising a likelihood of joint military bases with local forces well after our troops are scheduled to leave in 2014. But that’s not enough for McCain, who during the campaign...