Before a new blizzard brought Washington to a standstill, Barack Obama made another effort to dig out of the Republican snow job and verbal high winds that have disabled his efforts to govern. After a two-hour meeting to clear the path for legislation, the President told White House reporters, “I won’t hesitate to embrace a good idea from my friends in the minority party, but I also won’t hesitate to condemn what I consider to be obstinacy that’s rooted not in substantive...

In a pre-Super Bowl interview, President Obama told Katie Couric about a televised bipartisan health-care meeting on February 25th to go through “all the best ideas…and move it forward.” If he hadn’t been absorbed in the game, watching Bill Moyers Journal would have given him a more productive idea than meeting with members of Congress who have been bargaining and bastardizing reform into a monstrosity that few Americans understand and the majority disapproves. Moyers interviewed...

The image of a pet rabbit in a boiling pot arises after a night of passion in Nashville, with Sarah Palin auditioning for the Glenn Close role in a remake of “Fatal Attraction.” If the GOP establishment was hoping for a one-night stand with the Tea Party, Palin evoked some serious stalking ahead by promising to campaign for challengers to traditional Republicans: “Contested primaries aren’t civil war. They’re democracy at work, and that’s beautiful.” The...

Political satire started in prime time as Sarah Palin preempted SNL with a parody of herself at the Tea Party convention. “How’s that hopey-changey stuff working out for you?” she twinkled during a $100,000 standup (to be donated to “the cause,” destination unclear) for hundreds who paid $349 to hear her pummel Obama with one-liners about everything from bailouts to the Christmas bomber (in the war on terror, “we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law...

With the approach of Super Bowl Sunday, talking heads are out on TV to handicap and cash in politically on the biggest game of all–a terror attack on American soil. The latest skirmish pits Sen. Kit Bond, ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee, against White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, who took exception to Bond’s flogging the notion that release of information that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is cooperating with questioners “has no doubt been helpful” to his “terrorist...

Ronald Reagan’s Fed Chairman Paul Volcker is back to bash bankers–and not a moment too soon–as he tells a Senate hearing that the solution for bailouts is “to arrange an orderly liquidation or merger–in other words, euthanasia, not a rescue.” This drastic solution unnerves outgoing Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd into warning that the Obama White House is “getting precariously close” to excessive ambition for regulatory legislation: “I don’t want to be...

Older Americans may find solace in David Brooks’ report today on longitudinal studies “producing a rosier portrait of life after retirement. These studies don’t portray old age as surrender or even serenity. They portray it as a period of development…” So much for Charles DeGaulle’s famous aphorism, “Old age is a shipwreck,” and Freud’s assertion, “Old people are no longer educable.” It’s comforting to learn that we are getting “more...

As the New York Times‘ Public Editor puzzles over the paper’s coverage of a best-seller “filled with racy anecdotes about dysfunctional marriages and political back-stabbing,” we get our first look at Washington’s new Mr. Clean, a Senator arrested for shoplifting at 12 who posed naked for a magazine at 22. In his first Sunday interview, Ted Kennedy’s replacement tells Barbara Walters that “I’m a Scott Brown Republican. What does that mean? That means...

Within 24 hours this weekend, the President tackled two national shortfalls–dollars and cents in the government’s income vs. expenditures, civility and sense in the partisan debate over remedies for an economy ravaged by recession. In his weekly address yesterday, Mr. Obama zeroed in on seven Republicans who had sponsored a bipartisan commission for deficit reduction but then voted against it in the Senate. “Now, it’s one thing,” he said, “to have an honest difference...

Two writers in their nineties died this week. J.D. Salinger, a recluse in New Hampshire, produced four books in his lifetime. Louis Auchincloss lived in old-money Manhattan, practiced Wall Street law and wrote more than sixty novels, biographies and works of criticism. Apart from being published in the New Yorker, they had little in common, Auchincloss the “chronicler of New York’s upper crust,” as the Times headlined his obituary, while Salinger chose a “half-century of solitude...

Until his peroration “to start anew, to carry the dream forward, and to strengthen our union once more,” the President spent more than an hour last night calling out everyone in the chamber, including himself, for “a difficult year.” Congressional Republicans, Democrats, even the Supreme Court came in for their share of scolding. The unusual tone of this State of the Union came from both directions. Below each outburst of applause, there was an unprecedented hum of disapproval...

This week brings intimations of mortality from Osama bin Laden and Carlos the Jackal, two aging terrorists who achieved reknown by cutting short the lives of countless unknown others in pursuit of their ideology. The mastermind of 9/11 is reduced to making an audiotape to hitchhike on the “accomplishment” of the 23-year-old loser who couldn’t find his way to the lavatory to blow up an airliner, claiming that the work of “the heroic warrior Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was a confirmation...

Headlines from the President’s State of the Union speech have been leaking all week–a three-year spending freeze on domestic programs today following yesterday’s package of tax credits for child care, caps on student loan payments and automatic retirement savings for employees. After whatever revelation the White House is saving for tomorrow morning, by the time Barack Obama faces both houses of Congress in the evening, the only remaining suspense will be about his demeanor and...

A Gallup poll confirms that rank-and-file GOP members have followed their leaders in saying “no” to Barack Obama with the widest gap in approval ratings by party for any first-year president in history, 23 percent against 65 for Democrats. Obama, who started as a wannabe conciliator, faces his first State of the Union with a one-word reality: fractured. Now, the White House is signaling a new fighting tone both in the words of the President and those around him. David Plouffe, his campaign...

The Republicans’ new Great White Hope could turn out to be a disappointment for the Right wing of the GOP–and an opportunity for Democrats. “I know what I want to do: Go down there and be a good person, a good and competent senator,” Scott Brown tells Peggy Noonan. “I have huge shoes to fill, the legacy is just overwhelming. I’m a consensus builder…I can disagree in the daytime and have a coffee or beer later on. Everyone’s welcome to their opinion.” This...

Presidents can’t afford the luxury of getting depressed, so here we have Mr. Audacity of Hope right after the Scott Brown newsshock being handed a football helmet in a sports equipment factory and telling crowds that he can handle the pummeling. “So long as I have some breath in me,” he vows in an upbeat Ohio talk using “fight” as a mantra, “so long as I have the privilege of serving as your president, I will not stop fighting for you. I will take my lumps. But I...

Once, under local anesthesia on an operating table, I overheard doctors in heated disagreement on what to do next. It was not reassuring, but compared to Washington squabbling over health care reform after the Massachusetts debacle, restful. The Surgeon-in-Chief wants to “move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on. We know that…health insurance companies are taking advantage.” He cites the need for “essentially a patient’s bill...

If his widow had run for Ted Kennedy’s seat, would she have won yesterday’s election? Although Victoria Reggie Kennedy had spent a lifetime in politics and, on the weekend of the wake, showed unusual poise and grace, the Senator’s widow rebuffed all suggestions that she run for his seat in a special election to be his proxy in passing legislation for what he called “the cause of my life.” In what would truly have been the last hurrah for the Kennedy dynasty, Tea Party...

As he completes a year in office, Barack Obama deserves a gift from Americans–a moratorium on savaging him for everything that has gone wrong in their lives since last January 20th. The man almost 70 million voted into the White House with hope and enthusiasm has been put through a wringer unlike any president in memory to come out shrunken in the polls, battered by a monolithic opposition offering nothing but toxic rage, beleaguered right and left for providing too much government and not...

As America’s bankers take a day of rest to honor the precepts of Martin Luther King comes the suggestion of an anomaly in their policy of equal-opportunity bloodsucking. A New York Times editorial finally catches up with the reality that “Retirees Saved the Banks,” a situation described here some time ago under the heading, “The Fed’s Financial Death Panels.” The Times explains how the bailout has victimized older Americans: “By lowering the short-term interest...

If he had survived to turn 81 today, what would Martin Luther King have made of an America in which the racial barrier to the White House has been overcome only to be followed a year later by hatreds and division throughout the nation? In his dream for America, there was not only justice and equality but universal respect and love. “In the process of gaining our rightful place,” Dr. King said at the Lincoln Memorial, “we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds….we must rise to the...

“If we ignore history, we are bound to bail it out again.” That was the opening note of the bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission struck yesterday by its chairman, Phil Angelides, the former state treasurer of California. In an atmosphere that Madame Defarge would have loved, America’s bankers are now in the dock of public opinion, which has been boiling over more than a year after Bush and Obama handouts to save them followed by bad behavior that makes the aristocrats of the...

The 100-year-old woman who died this week takes something with her that is being lost in this century of hatreds on the rise everywhere–a human compassion that could persist at the risk of her own survival. Miep Gies, who sheltered Anne Frank and her family, was known for giving the world a gifted young girl’s diary of a life never to be fulfilled, but her own longevity is a testament to the decency of unremarkable people who refuse to trade the lives of others for their own safety and...

“Like every Democratic president since John F. Kennedy,” the New York Times declares, “President Obama is battling the perception that he’s a wimp on national security,” That “perception” has haunted Democrats in the White House even before JFK, when Harry Truman ordered government employees to sign loathsome loyalty oaths in order to counter McCarthy era charges that he was “soft on communism.” Even as the Times lists such Obama moves as sending...

If there really is a “war,” why are all the images of it defensive and reactive, from the White House’s talking heads this week to yesterday’s arraignment of a young man in a T-shirt looking in the artists’ sketches like a teenager caught swiping fruit? As two generations of Cheneys fault Barack Obama for not being Jack Bauer of 24, real questions persist about how to fight an aggressive war on terror but avoid one “that sacrifices the open society and liberties...