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...

Ballet comes to mind for what GOP divas as doing in the Hawkeye State, a new variation on the graceful duet in which dancers usually 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...

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...

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...

Barack Obama started last 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...

Amid all the celebrating at the Stonewall Inn and elsewhere, the advent of same-sex marriage in New York stirs in the spouse of 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

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. MORE.

Now that the political air has been purified by Anthony Weiner’s departure, Washington can concentrate on its other endless fount of hypocrisy–money. Many Tea Party purists, who came to Congress to force government to live within its means, we learn, have not been doing well on that score personally. Among 87 new GOP members, the Washington Post reports, at least 30 had liabilities totaling $50,000 or more in 2010–credit card debt, unpaid student loans, mortgages on investment properties. The...

Three years ago, Barack Obama was campaigning against dumb wars while John McCain was musing about staying in Iraq a hundred years. Now Republican hopefuls pound the President about military moves in the Middle East even as John Boehner warns him to get Congressional approval for his action in Libya by this weekend or face being in violation of the War Powers Act. Behind this scramble of traditional hawks and doves is the emerging theme for 2012: Everything Obama does is wrong, including going to...

Introducing him to flog a new book, Stephen Colbert admiringly cites the days when Henry Kissinger chased women in his “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac” days, an arresting contrast to the fate of Anthony Weiner for pursuing similar urges in our time. In fact, by all accounts, Kissinger actually netted some of his quarry (“When I’m boring, they think it’s their fault”) while Weiner came up empty. Have Americans become more prudish in the intervening years? One difference is that the...

In the wake of Weiner and on the tide of Palin e-mails and Facebook posts, we swim in a world where fame is so uncoupled from achievement that a Republican presidential debate could well be titled “Sarah and the Seven Dwarves,” with a non-candidate’s image hovering over the politicians vying for attention. Seventy years ago, Americans were riveted by a book ironically titled “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” showing in words and pictures the desperate poverty of invisible victims of the...

Life is too short to read Sarah Palin’s 24,000 e-mails or even all the media blather about them, and sanity too precious to delve into Anthony Weiner’s last refuge from getting out of Congress and our faces Weiner, says his spokesperson, “departed this morning to seek professional treatment to focus on becoming a better husband and healthier person.” Good idea, says Nancy Pelosi, urging him “to seek that help without the pressures of being a Member of Congress.” A sane response to all...

The death this week of a multimillionaire lapdog puts a furry period to the end of a greed-is-good tale that now seems ancient history. In the rare world of canine obituaries, the small Maltese named Trouble rates attention, not only for her wealth but as a reminder of the heartless rapacity that led to the depressed economy we now inhabit. Trouble was bequeathed $12 million in 2007 by owner Leona Helmsley who, after a gaudy career of appearing in TV commercials as the demanding Queen of Manhattan’s...

A very un-Weiner problem arises as Newt’s campaign staff quits “in protest of what they felt was a takeover by Callista Gingrich, the candidate’s wife since 2000.” The partisan contrast is striking. The Gingrich rebellion recalls Fred Thompson’s 2008 implosion when interference by his young spouse (“the Jeri factor”) brought down his listless campaign, and even Rudy Giuliani, now poised for 2012, back then interrupted stump speeches to take cell calls from the third wife he had met...

When a top-secret Defense Department analysis of the Vietnam War, which caused a legal uproar 40 years ago, was recently made public, the government said it was keeping 11 words secret, then changed its mind and published the 7000 pages in full. Now a guessing game is vexing the even the leaker, Daniel Ellsberg, and the lead author of the report, Leslie Gelb, who can’t find them in the mountain of words. It may be like the re-mastering of those ancient jazz records, which uncover sounds not caught...

Anthony Weiner’s penis has dominated the news longer now than the death of Osama bin Laden in a media world more transfixed by texting antics of a horny Congressman than the demise of a mass murderer who changed the world. When I was teaching journalism, that would have been unthinkable. In those benighted days, sex scandals lasted a few days and headline writers went back from sniggering to serious issues. Unsophisticated as we were, subjects like the national debt, Medicare and wars would have...

The President is hinting at a declare-victory-and-leave strategy, once proposed for Vietnam and more recently for Iraq, to end our decade-long war in Afghanistan. In a TV interview, he says, “By killing Osama bin Laden, getting al Qaeda back on its heels, stabilizing much of the country in Afghanistan so that the Taliban can’t take it over…it’s now time for us to recognize that we’ve accomplished a big chunk of our mission and that it’s time for Afghans to take more...

Turns out the Congressman is not just a Weiner but, in the parlance of our people (his, mine and Jon Stewart’s), a “schmuck,” the difference between the male member as metaphor for “stupid, foolish, or detestable” or simply clueless, as the euphemism for a smaller organ his surname suggests. Then again, he may now have earned the highest rank in the Yiddish lexicon of penile designations for the unwise–a total “putz.” In calling Anthony Weiner “half-smart” before he finally...

Stupidity is so rampant now that the problem is to distinguish between the trivial and the significant. Lost in the flood of sewage news about Anthony Weiner’s underwear and Sarah Palin’s Paul Revere gaffe are much more important examples of the dumbing down of American politics, where knowledge and insight keep giving way to slogans and invincible ignorance. “Last October,” writes an MIT professor, “I won the Nobel Prize in economics for my work on unemployment and the labor market. But...