Kentucky Politics, Served With a Helping of Ribs at an Annual Barbecue

Gov. Ernie Fletcher criticized his rival’s stance on gambling
during the Fancy Farm, Ky., picnic on Saturday,
saying, “I don’t subscribe to Steve Beshear’s math and science program
that teaches children only to count to 21.” Photo by Josh Anderson for The New York Times

By IAN URBINA

Published: August 6, 2007

FANCY FARM, Ky., Aug. 4 — They came for the barbecue pork and the roasting of rivals.

The crowd of more than 5,000 gathered under a sweltering Western Kentucky sun for the 127th annual Fancy Farm picnic on Saturday as Democrats and Republicans took turns on stage taunting each other with mocking skits and sarcastic speeches.

Republicans sent a man dressed as Moses into the audience looking for the Ten Commandments, which they said Democrats took out of the schools and courthouses. Democrats started a chain gang marching alongside the stage to poke fun at a hiring scandal and a series of indictments that clouded much of the Republican governor’s first term.

In part a fund-raiser for the local Catholic parish, the raucous event marks the unofficial kickoff of a campaign season here that promises to be one of the feistiest in years.

Cloaked in the smoky smell of 19,000 pounds of pork and mutton being barbecued, the event was held on the grounds of St. Jerome Catholic Church in Fancy Farm, a Western Kentucky town of 2,100 residents that got its name for its many elegant farms.

The afternoon’s highlight was a rousing performance from a rejuvenated Gov. Ernie Fletcher, who just over a year and a half ago was under indictment, had approval ratings in the 20s and had lost the backing of most of his party and Mitch McConnell, the state’s senior United States senator.

Staging a striking comeback, Mr. Fletcher (pictured right), the first Republican governor in the state in more than three decades, saw the corruption charges against him dropped last August and won more than 50 percent of the votes in the May primary. On Saturday, he smiled contentedly as Mr. McConnell took the stage to speak on his behalf as he seeks a second term as governor.

“Ernie Fletcher does stand for Kentucky and that’s why he’s going to have another four years as our governor,” said Mr. McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, who had helped Mr. Fletcher win his first term but quickly had distanced himself when the governor was indicted.

A Franklin County grand jury investigation into the governor’s administration had returned 29 indictments, concluding that Mr. Fletcher had approved a “widespread and coordinated plan” to skirt state hiring laws so political supporters could be rewarded with jobs. The governor had been charged with criminal conspiracy, official misconduct and political discrimination, but the charges were later dropped in an agreement with prosecutors. Mr. Fletcher then issued pardons for everyone else who had been charged or could be charged.

Mr. Fletcher focused his speech on Saturday on Steve Beshear, his Democratic opponent in the Nov. 6 general election. Mr. Beshear, a former lieutenant governor and former attorney general, hopes to pay for his proposed education and health care initiatives by amending the Kentucky Constitution to allow limited casino gambling, and for the past six weeks Mr. Fletcher has made the issue the focus of debate.

As Republicans tossed casino chips written with “Don’t gamble on Steve Beshear” into the crowd, Mr. Fletcher warned that increased crime, divorce rates and bankruptcies would come with expanded gambling in the state.

“I don’t subscribe to Steve Beshear’s math and science program that teaches children only to count to 21,” Mr. Fletcher said.

Mr. Beshear (pictured right) countered with a few shots of his own.

“Senator McConnell, it’s only taken you a year but I’m glad you finally remembered Ernie’s name,” Mr. Beshear said.

As the state attorney general, Mr. Beshear wrote in 1981 that Kentucky schools must remove the Ten Commandments from classrooms in keeping with a United States Supreme Court decision.

“I obeyed the law,” Mr. Beshear said. “As governor, I’ll obey the law, and wouldn’t that be a great change, too.”

He added what he said his father, a Baptist preacher, had always told him about the Ten Commandments: “It’s not so important where they hang but it sure is important that you try to live by them.”

“And if this administration had been living by them,” Mr. Beshear added, “they wouldn’t be in the mess they’re in today.”

In recent weeks, Mr. Fletcher has fueled his political rebound with advertisements referencing the indictments and depicting himself as the bookish young boy taunted by schoolyard bullies.

“Day after day he took it,” says a narrator in one of the advertisements. “Didn’t flinch because fighting is not his way. But he got where he was going. He held his head high.”

Jumping to an image of Mr. Fletcher in the governor’s office, the narrator then says that he stayed focused on the job and got things done for Kentucky.

But Mr. Fletcher has not put his troubles behind him entirely.

Last week, the state’s Fraternal Order of Police endorsed Mr. Beshear, and the organization cited the pardons made by the governor as part of the reason.

Registered Democrats still outnumber Republicans by roughly three to two in the state, and while one in three Democrats crossed party lines and voted for Mr. Fletcher in 2003, many had been partly motivated by a corruption scandal involving the previous governor that Mr. Fletcher had promised to clean up.

Stacy Neitzel contributed reporting.

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Hard to Figure: The Drab Legacy of Jottin’ Joe

Aki Jones, a security guard, with the DiMaggio
“diaries” at Gallagher’s Steak House Monday.

By CLYDE HABERMAN

Published: July 17, 2007
=================

Whitey Ford, who really should be introduced as the incomparable Whitey Ford, wore a somewhat quizzical look yesterday as the books were spread across a table where he sat in a Midtown restaurant.

On second thought, calling them books endows them with an ill-deserved loftiness. They were binders, 29 of them, filled with more than 2,400 pages of jottings by one of the most magnificent players ever to fill a baseball uniform, Joe DiMaggio of the New York Yankees. Steiner Sports, a Westchester company that trades in sports memorabilia, has bought these jottings and now plans to sell them.

Call them diaries or journals, if you wish. But those words, too, might be lofty.

Page after page, they are DiMaggio’s summaries of his daily activities from 1982 to 1993. Judging from the samples that Steiner Sports made available, there seems little likelihood of anyone’s stumbling upon Proustian insights. These notes lean heavily toward the humdrum: “Monday, December 12, 1983. Up at 7 a.m. Had breakfast in coffee shop at 8 a.m.” At the bottom of many pages, he itemized his expenses for the day — $87 that Dec. 12, most of it for taxis.

DiMaggio began tracking his spending for tax purposes but came over time to use the summaries to “convey his feelings and emotions,” Steiner Sports said. Typically, he wrote on stationery cadged from hotels or airlines. He was notoriously — how to put it kindly? — frugal. The man tossed quarters around as if they were manhole covers.

We’re willing to bet that on Dec. 12, 1983, millions of people woke up at 7 in the morning and had breakfast at 8. But millions of people were not Joe DiMaggio, who died in 1999 at 84. Steiner Sports is betting that enough potential buyers are out there to bring in at least $1.5 million at auction, and maybe $3 million or more.

In this era of celebrity worship — can you imagine what Paris Hilton’s prison uniform might fetch? — anything goes. “People want artifacts,” said Brandon Steiner, the company’s chief executive.

To announce its plans, the company held a news conference yesterday at Gallagher’s Steak House, a DiMaggio haunt. The choice of July 16 was presumably no accident. On July 16, 1941, DiMaggio hit safely in his 56th consecutive game. That streak, which ended the next day, remains baseball’s gold standard for batting consistency.

Whitey Ford, the great Yankee pitcher and no stranger himself to making a buck on his glory years, was asked to join the show. He and DiMaggio were teammates for a short time in 1950, he at the dawn of his major league career, DiMaggio at the twilight of his.

Mr. Ford, looking fit at 78, sat at a table while the stacks of binders were laid out in front of him. He seemed taken aback. “This is all new to me,” he said. “I didn’t know this stuff existed until a couple of days ago.”

And what would DiMaggio have thought about his personal musings being put up for auction?

“He was a very, very private man,” Mr. Ford replied. “I don’t know if Joe would be too tickled about this.”

DiMaggio’s desire to preserve his privacy was legendary. “He did everything right,” Mr. Ford said, “except he just couldn’t open up.”

THAT thought raises an inevitable question about the propriety of turning a profit on the personal writings of a man who, though always interested in cash, kept to himself. Nor is this is an isolated situation. You may remember Sotheby’s 1999 auction of letters written by the hermitic J. D. Salinger.

Steiner Sports bought the DiMaggio papers from Morris Engelberg, who was DiMaggio’s lawyer and did just fine for himself with that association. The purchase price was not disclosed. But on the correctness of the deal, the company’s executives pronounced themselves to be on the side of the angels.

“I think at some point, he knew that these would get out,” Jared Weiss, the company’s president, said of DiMaggio. Mr. Steiner said that Mr. Engelberg took “a lot of direction” from DiMaggio. “At the end of the day,” he said, “if Joe really didn’t want these to come out, Morris would have known it.”

That may be. But few of us standing on the outside looking in are ever likely to know for sure. Whitey Ford, for one, sounded uncertain.

Once more, someone asked him what he thought DiMaggio might have felt about his papers going on the block. “I don’t know,” Mr. Ford said. “He was a tough man to understand.”

E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com

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In a Corner of the Woods, Teenagers Escape From the Trials of Military Life

At a session for children of service members held at Camp Deer Run
in upstate New York, discussions of stress and fear were balanced
by activities like a ropes challenge course,
intended to build self-esteem and teach teamwork.

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: July 8, 2007
==================

PINE BUSH, N.Y.

“I don’t want this to sound rude,” said Alicia Jade Geurin, who is 13. Rude was the last word that came to mind. “But civilian kids just don’t understand. You say your dad’s away, and they say, ‘Oh, that’s O.K.’ They think it’s like being away for a week on a business trip. That’s what’s so cool about this camp. You don’t have to say a word, and everyone still understands how you feel.”

At Camp Deer Run in the foothills of the Shawangunk Mountains last week, the 59 teenage campers, all with parents in the military, could take on the Eagle’s Nest ropes challenge course, scale the rock climbing wall, wander down by Plattekill Creek.

They could also listen to a soldier just back from Iraq describe what it was like there and hear his family talk about the impact of the deployment on them. Along with other fare (excellent paella with kosher chicken the other day), they could sample military M.R.E.’s. They could literally share war stories or, their common ground established from the day they arrived, use the time to get away from it all.

The camp sessions, known as Operation Purple, last one or two weeks and are organized by the National Military Family Association. This was one of the camps held at 34 locations in 26 states, serving close to 4,000 children for free across all the military branches. But the really striking number is a different one: 155,000. That’s about how many children have a parent serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, according to the association. That’s an awful lot of kids under an awful lot of stress.

“One of the favorite comments I heard was from a 15-year-old boy who said, ‘People don’t realize that we serve too,’ ” said Kuuipo Ordway, a behavioral health care consultant for the camps. Which is not to suggest a cadre of mopey kids pining for distant parents. Instead, a visitor gets two contradictory impressions: how unnaturally mature and self-sufficient some of them are, and how much of a quiet burden others seem to carry.

In the first category, you could put Alicia, who lives at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey and whose dad recently returned from a tour with the military police in Afghanistan. With the élan of a gung-ho cadet, she seems on a different planet from many of her pampered peers in the MySpace/iPod/Abercrombie generation.

“Two parents have responsibilities, and if one isn’t there, whatever they can’t do, you have to do,” she said matter-of-factly. “But if you know you don’t have Mommy around to hug every night, or Daddy, you learn to be self-sufficient. I know I can go anywhere, introduce myself, I’m not going to be someone sitting in the corner. I love the military life. I love it.” She wants to be a marine.

But for others the anxiety, even in the green repose of the woods, is almost palpable. You can hear it in the questions they ask of visiting service personnel from Iraq, some sort of playful (How big are the spiders? How often do you get to wash your socks?), some as playful as a hand grenade (Have you ever killed anyone? What is it like when a bomb goes off? Are you really sorry when you miss your son’s soccer game?).

For those with a parent in Iraq, like Elizabeth and James Darney of Virginia and Chris Seger of Kingston, the stress is particularly acute. So ask Elizabeth about a military career, and she says no, thanks. Too hard on the family. Chris has it all figured out: Study accounting at Pace University and open a pizzeria.

A lot of the challenges addressed by Operation Purple seem like the problems of modern life, but amplified: divorces and blended families on top of deployments abroad. But Ms. Ordway, the psychologist, says this moment is particularly tough on military kids. Deployments are longer and less certain, and there is a nonstop din of gruesome war coverage. There are more older soldiers, with older kids at more complicated times in their lives, and many parents are returning with grievous injuries or, increasingly, with post-traumatic stress disorder.

It’s not likely that a week or two in the woods will solve all that, but if it shows kids there are others in the same boat, if they get to ask questions they can’t ask anyplace else, maybe that’s a start.

Up on the ropes course, snug in a harness, was Samantha Santiago, Alicia’s pal. Over the past two years or so, her grandmother died of cancer, her mother served in Germany for more than a year as a nurse, and her parents divorced after her mother’s return. Samantha, who wants to join the Navy, clambered along ropes ending at a platform 35 feet above the ground. From there, the goal was to end the exercise with “the leap of faith,” jumping from the platform toward a bell hanging from the cable.

With the other kids hollering encouragement from below, she hesitated. Then she jumped, and for a fleeting moment, Samantha Santiago flew.

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

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Reviving the Hamilton Agenda

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: June 8, 2007

These days there seem to be four schools of political economic thought. First, there are the limited government conservatives, who think taxes should be low and the state should be as small as possible. Second, there are the Hamiltonians, who believe in free market capitalism but think government should help people get the tools they need to compete in it.

Third, there are the mainstream liberals, who think government should intervene in small ways throughout the economy to soften the effects of creative destruction. Fourth, there are the populists, who believe the benefits of the global economy are going to the rich and we need to fundamentally rewrite the rules.

If you are reading this column, you’re keeping company with somebody in group No. 2. We Hamiltonians disagree with the limited government conservatives because, on its own, the market is failing to supply enough human capital. Despite all the incentives, 30 percent of kids drop out of high school and the college graduation rate has been flat for a generation.

Just when it needs a more skilled work force, the U.S. is getting a less skilled one. This is already taking a bite out of productivity growth, and the problem will get worse.

We Hamiltonians disagree with the third group, the mainstream liberals, because their programs haven’t worked out. Retraining programs for displaced workers have flopped. Tax code changes to reduce outsourcing are symbolic. Federal jobs programs aren’t effective. Moreover, the high taxes you need to pay for these programs sap the economy. There’s now a pile of evidence showing that higher taxes mean reduced working hours. In the face of Chinese and Indian competition, we don’t need Americans working less.

We Hamiltonians disagree with the populists because we don’t find their storyline persuasive. The populists argue that global trade is creating a race to the bottom that is leading to stagnant wages and vast inequality. But when you look at the details, you find that most inequality is caused by a rising education premium, by changes in household and family structure, by the fact that the rich now work longer hours than the less rich and by new salary structures that are more tied to individual performance. None of this can be addressed by changing global trade rules.

The global economy radically decreased poverty and increased living standards. It’s crazy to upend this complex system to return to some nostalgic vision of a 1950s industrial wonderland.

When it comes to what Hamiltonians are actually for, two big themes stand out. First, the overall economy has to remain dynamic. The biggest threat is the looming wall of entitlement debt. We Hamiltonians would break the current campaign silence on the issue by raising the retirement age and tackling medical inflation to make Medicare affordable.

The second big theme is a human capital agenda. No one policy can increase the quality of human capital, but a lifelong portfolio of policies can make a difference.

Children do better when raised in stable two-parent families. Bigger child tax credits and increasing the earned income tax credit can reduce the economic strain on young families (and shift the tax burden to older, affluent ones). Extending government income support to young men in exchange for work would make them more marriageable.

Nurse practitioners who make home visits can stabilize disorganized, single-parent families. Quality preschool can help young children from those disorganized homes develop the self-motivation skills they’ll need to succeed.

The most important thing in a school is quality teachers. That means there should be merit pay for the best, and a change in the certification rules (we should allow more people into the profession and weed out the mediocre ones, regardless of their certification).

Senior citizen groups could mentor students to keep them emotionally engaged during college years. National service should be a rite of passage, forcing city kids to work with rural kids, and vice versa.

Middle-aged workers need portable pensions and health insurance so they can move and take risks. The immigration system should reward skills, like the college admissions system. The government should increase funding for basic research, especially in math, engineering and physics.

The list could go on. My goal here is merely to describe the different economic policy schools that are out there, and to emphasize my favorite, the one least represented by the current presidential candidates.

Government is really bad at rigging or softening competition. It can do some good when it helps people compete.

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The Vulcan Utopia

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: May 29, 2007

If you’re going to read Al Gore’s book, you’re going to have to steel yourself for a parade of sentences like the following:

“The remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the re-establishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way — a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response.”

But, hey, nobody ever died from contact with pomposity, and Al Gore’s “The Assault on Reason” is well worth reading. It reminds us that whatever the effects of our homogenizing mass culture, it is still possible for exceedingly strange individuals to rise to the top.

Gore is, for example, a radical technological determinist. While most politicians react to people, Gore reacts to machines, and in this book he lays out a theory of history entirely driven by them.

He writes that “the idea of self-government became feasible after the printing press.” With this machine, people suddenly had the ability to use the printed word to debate ideas and proceed logically to democratic conclusions. As Gore writes in his best graduate school manner, “The eighteenth century witnessed more and more ordinary citizens able to use knowledge as a source of power to mediate between wealth and privilege.”

This Age of Reason produced the American Revolution. But in the 20th-century, television threatened it all. In Gore’s view, TV immobilizes the reasoning centers in the brain and stimulates the primitive, instinctive parts. TV creates a “visceral vividness” that is not “modulated by logic, reason and reflective thought.”

TV allows political demagogues to exaggerate dangers and stoke up fear. Furthermore, “conglomerates can dominate the expressions of opinion that flood the mind of the citizenry” and “the result is a de facto coup d’état overthrowing the rule of reason.”

Fortunately, another technology is here to save us. “The Internet is perhaps the greatest source of hope for re-establishing an open communications environment in which the conversation of democracy can flourish,” he writes. The Internet will restore reason, logic and the pursuit of truth.

The first response to this argument is, Has Al Gore ever actually looked at the Internet? He spends much of this book praising cold, dispassionate logic, but is that really what he finds on most political blogs or in his e-mail folder?

But Gore’s imperviousness to reality is not the most striking feature of the book. It’s the chilliness and sterility of his worldview. Gore is laying out a comprehensive theory of social development, but it allows almost no role for family, friendship, neighborhood or just face-to-face contact. He sees society the way you might see it from a speaking podium — as a public mass exercise with little allowance for intimacy or private life. He envisions a sort of Vulcan Utopia, in which dispassionate individuals exchange facts and arrive at logical conclusions.

This in turn grows out of a bizarre view of human nature. Gore seems to have come up with a theory that the upper, logical mind sits on top of, and should master, the primitive and more emotional mind below. He thinks this can be done through a technical process that minimizes information flow to the lower brain and maximizes information flow to the higher brain.

The reality, of course, is there is no neat distinction between the “higher” and “lower” parts of the brain. There are no neat distinctions between the “rational” mind and the “visceral” body. The mind is a much more complex network of feedback loops than accounted for in Gore’s simplistic pseudoscience.

Without emotions like fear, the “logical” mind can’t reach conclusions. On the other hand, many of the most vicious, genocidal acts are committed by people who are emotionally numb, not passionately out of control.

Some great philosopher should write a book about people — and there are many of them — who flee from discussions of substance and try to turn them into discussions of process. Utterly at a loss when asked to talk about virtue and justice, they try to shift attention to technology and methods of communication. They imagine that by altering machines they can alter the fundamentals of behavior, or at least avoid the dark thickets of human nature.

If a philosopher did write such a book, it would help us understand Al Gore, and it would, as he would say, in fact, evoke a meaningful response.

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Pirates and Sanctions

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: May 24, 2007

DONGGUAN, China

This is a city you’ve probably never heard of, yet it has a population of 10 million people who fill your dressers and closets. By one count, 40 percent of the sports shoes sold in the U.S. come from Dongguan.

Just one neighborhood within Dongguan, Dalang, has become the Sweater Capital of the World. Dalang makes more than 300 million sweaters a year, of which 200 million are exported to the U.S.

Keep towns like this in mind when American protectionists demand sanctions, after the latest round of talks ending yesterday made little progress. Some irresponsible Democrats in Congress would have you believe that China’s economic success is simply the result of currency manipulation, unfair regulations and pirating American movies.

It’s true that China’s currency is seriously undervalued. But places like Dongguan have thrived largely because of values we like to think of as American: ingenuity, diligence, entrepreneurship and respect for markets.

The people in Dalang, the Sweater Capital, used to be farmers, until a Hong Kong investor opened a sweater factory at the dawn of the 1980’s. After a few years, the workers began to quit and open their own factories, and both the bosses and the staff work dizzyingly hard. One factory worker here in Guangdong Province told me that she works 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, 365 days a year, not even taking time off for Chinese New Year. She chooses to work these hours to gain a better life for her son. If protectionists want somebody to criticize for China’s trade success, blame that woman and millions like her.

Remember that China isn’t like 1980s Japan, which had a sustained huge surplus with nearly everybody. China’s global surplus has surged in the last five years, but traditionally its global trade position has been close to a balance, and it still has a trade deficit with many countries.

China imports components, does the low-wage assembly, and then exports the finished products to the U.S. — so the whole value appears in the Chinese trade surplus with the U.S., even though on average 65 percent of the value was imported into China. When a Chinese-made Barbie doll sells in the U.S. for $9.99, only 35 cents goes to China.

Sure, China pirates movies and software — but the U.S. was even worse at this stage of development (when we used to infuriate England by stealing its literary properties without paying royalties). Pirated DVDs are sold openly on the streets of Manhattan, while sellers in China can be far more creative. A couple of days ago, I dropped into a small DVD shop in Beijing to check its wares. Everything seemed legal.

Then the two saleswomen asked if I wanted to see American movies — and tugged at a bookshelf, which rolled forward on wheels. Behind was a door; one of the saleswomen whisked me into a secret room full of pirated DVDs. That’s piracy — but also capitalism at its harshest and hungriest. There are plenty of reasons to put pressure on China, including its imprisonment of journalists and its disgraceful role in supplying the weaponry used to commit genocide in Darfur. But whining about the efficiency of Chinese capitalism is beneath us.

All that said, the Chinese development model is running out of steam.

Labor shortages are growing and pushing up wage costs. Factories are having to spend more money to improve worker safety and curb pollution. The environment is such a disaster that 16 of the world’s most polluted cities are now in China.

China will also be forced to appreciate its undervalued currency, further pushing up costs. The “China price” will no longer be the world’s lowest, and millions of jobs making T-shirts and stuffed toys will move to lower-wage countries like Vietnam and Bangladesh.

So if China is going to continue its historic rise, it will have to move up the technology ladder and shift to domestic consumption as its economic engine. Yet the share of consumption in China’s economy has fallen significantly since 2000.

So as one who has been profoundly optimistic about China for the last 25 years, I think it’s time to sober up. President Hu Jintao is China’s least visionary leader since Hua Guofeng 30 years ago, and China has the burden of unusually weak leadership as it navigates a transition to a new economic model as well as a political transition to a more open society.

I’m betting China will pull it off, but I don’t think the world appreciates the risks and challenges ahead.

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Rethinking Old Age

By ATUL GAWANDE

Published: May 24, 2007

At some point in life, you can’t live on your own anymore. We don’t like thinking about it, but after retirement age, about half of us eventually move into a nursing home, usually around age 80. It remains your most likely final address outside of a hospital.

To the extent that there is much public discussion about this phase of life, it’s about getting more control over our deaths (with living wills and the like). But we don’t much talk about getting more control over our lives in such places. It’s as if we’ve given up on the idea. And that’s a problem.

This week, I visited a woman who just moved into a nursing home. She is 89 years old with congestive heart failure, disabling arthritis, and after a series of falls, little choice but to leave her condominium. Usually, it’s the children who push for a change, but in this case, she was the one who did. “I fell twice in one week, and I told my daughter I don’t belong at home anymore,” she said.

She moved in a month ago. She picked the facility herself. It has excellent ratings, friendly staff, and her daughter lives nearby. She’s glad to be in a safe place — if there’s anything a decent nursing home is built for, it is safety. But she is struggling.

The trouble is — and it’s a possibility we’ve mostly ignored for the very old — she expects more from life than safety. “I know I can’t do what I used to,” she said, “but this feels like a hospital, not a home.” And that is in fact the near-universal reality.

Nursing home priorities are matters like avoiding bedsores and maintaining weight — important goals, but they are means, not ends. She left an airy apartment she furnished herself for a small beige hospital-like room with a stranger for a roommate. Her belongings were stripped down to what she could fit into the one cupboard and shelf they gave her. Basic matters, like when she goes to bed, wakes up, dresses, and eats were put under the rigid schedule of institutional life. Her main activities have become bingo, movies, and other forms of group entertainment. Is it any wonder most people dread nursing homes?

The things she misses most, she told me, are her friendships, her privacy, and the purpose in her days. She’s not alone. Surveys of nursing home residents reveal chronic boredom, loneliness, and lack of meaning — results not fundamentally different from prisoners, actually.

Certainly, nursing homes have come a long way from the fire-trap warehouses they used to be. But it seems we’ve settled on a belief that a life of worth and engagement is not possible once you lose independence.

There has been, however, a small band of renegades who disagree. They’ve created alternatives with names like the Green House Project, the Pioneer Network, and the Eden Alternative — all aiming to replace institutions for the disabled elderly with genuine homes. Bill Thomas, for example, is a geriatrician who calls himself a “nursing home abolitionist” and built the first Green Houses in Tupelo, Miss. These are houses for no more than 10 residents, equipped with a kitchen and living room at its center, not a nurse’s station, and personal furnishings. The bedrooms are private. Residents help one another with cooking and other work as they are able. Staff members provide not just nursing care but also mentoring for engaging in daily life, even for Alzheimer’s patients. And the homes meet all federal safety guidelines and work within state-reimbursement levels.

They have been a great success. Dr. Thomas is now building Green Houses in every state in the country with funds from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Such experiments, however, represent only a tiny fraction of the 18,000 nursing homes nationwide.

“The No. 1 problem I see,” Dr. Thomas told me, “is that people believe what we have in old age is as good as we can expect.” As a result, families don’t press nursing homes with hard questions like, “How do you plan to change in the next year?” But we should, if we want to hope for something more than safety in our old age.

“This is my last hurrah,” the woman I met said. “This room is where I’ll die. But it won’t be anytime soon.” And indeed, physically she’s done well. All she needs now is a life worth living for.

Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a New Yorker staff writer, is the author of the new book “Better.” He is a guest columnist this month.

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Hooked on Violence

By BOB HERBERT

Published: April 26, 2007

Two days after the massacre at Virginia Tech, a mentally disturbed man with a .40-caliber semiautomatic handgun opened fire in a house in Queens, killing his mother, his mother’s disabled companion and the disabled man’s health care aide. The gunman then killed himself.

Sixteen months ago, in the basement of a private home in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, four aspiring rappers, aged 19 to 22, were summarily executed in a barrage of semiautomatic gunfire. Two teenagers were arrested five months later, and one was charged as the gunman.

I had coffee the other day with Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, and she mentioned that since the murders of Robert Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, well over a million Americans have been killed by firearms in the United States. That’s more than the combined U.S. combat deaths in all the wars in all of American history.

“We’re losing eight children and teenagers a day to gun violence,” she said. “As far as young people are concerned, we lose the equivalent of the massacre at Virginia Tech about every four days.”

The first step in overcoming an addiction is to acknowledge it. Americans are addicted to violence, specifically gun violence. We profess to be appalled at every gruesome outbreak of mass murder (it’s no big deal when just two, three or four people are killed at a time), but there’s no evidence that we have the will to pull the guns out of circulation, or even to register the weapons and properly screen and train their owners.

On the day after Christmas in 2000, an employee of Edgewater Technology, a private company in Wakefield, Mass., showed up at work with an assault rifle and a .12-gauge shotgun. Around 11 a.m. he began methodically killing co-workers. He didn’t stop until seven were dead.

An employee who had not been at work that day spoke movingly to a reporter from The Boston Globe about the men and women who lost their lives. “They were some of the sweetest, smartest people I’ve ever had the chance to work with,” he said. “The cream of the crop.”

The continuing carnage has roused at least one group of public officials to action: mayors. “We see the violence that is happening in America today,” said Mayor Thomas Menino of Boston. “Illegal guns are rampant. Go into almost any classroom in Boston — sixth and seventh grade, eighth grade, high school — and 50 percent of those kids know somebody who had a gun.”

The mayor noted that since the beginning of the year, more than 100 people have already been killed in Philadelphia, and nearly 80 in Baltimore. Most of the victims were shot to death.

Last year Mayor Menino and Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York, at a meeting they hosted at Gracie Mansion, organized a group of mayors committed to fighting against illegal firearms in the U.S. “It is time for national leadership in the war on gun violence,” Mr. Bloomberg said at the time. “And if that leadership won’t come from Congress or come from the White House, then it has to come from us.”

The campaign has grown. There were 15 mayors at that first gathering. Now more than 200 mayors from cities in 46 states have signed on.

When asked why Mayor Bloomberg had become so militant about the gun issue, John Feinblatt, the city’s criminal justice coordinator, mentioned the “human element.” He said: “I think it’s because he’s watched eight police officers be shot. And because, like all mayors, he’s the one who gets awakened, along with the police commissioner, at 3 in the morning and 4 in the morning, and has to rush to the hospital and break the news that can break somebody’s heart.”

Those who are interested in the safety and well-being of children should keep in mind that only motor vehicle accidents and cancer kill more children in the U.S. than firearms. A study released a few years ago by the Harvard School of Public Health compared firearm mortality rates among youngsters 5 to 14 years old in the five states with the highest rates of gun ownership with those in the five states with the lowest rates.

The results were chilling. Children in the states with the highest rates of gun ownership were 16 times as likely to die from an accidental gunshot wound, nearly seven times as likely to commit suicide with a gun, and more than three times as likely to be murdered with a firearm.

Only a lunatic could seriously believe that more guns in more homes is good for America’s children.

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Elizabeth Edwards for President

By FRANK RICH

Published: April 1, 2007

ELIZABETH EDWARDS’S choice to stay in the political arena despite a Stage 4 cancer diagnosis didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know about Elizabeth Edwards. People admired her before she was ill for the same reasons they admire her now. She comes across as honest, smart and unpretentious — as well as both devoted to and independent of her husband. But we have learned a great deal about the political arena from the hubbub that greeted her decision. For all the lip service Washington pays to valuing political players who are authentic and truthful, it turns out that real, honest-to-God straight talk about matters of life, death and, yes, political ambition, drives “some people” (to use Katie Couric’s locution) nuts.

If you caught Elizabeth and John Edwards in the Couric interview on “60 Minutes” or at their joint news conference in Chapel Hill, you saw a couple speaking as couples chasing the presidency rarely do. When Ms. Couric gratuitously reminded Mrs. Edwards that she was “staring at possible death,” Mrs. Edwards countered: “Aren’t we all, though?” It’s been a steady refrain of her public comments that “we’re all going to die” and that she has the right to make her own choice to fight for her husband’s candidacy even as she fights for her life. There are no euphemisms or equivocations in her language. There’s no apologizing by either Edwards for the raw political calculus of their campaign plans. There’s no sentimental public hand-wringing about the possible effect her choice might have on her children. The unpatronizing Mrs. Edwards sounds like an adult speaking to adults.

Americans understood. A CBS News poll found that by more than two to one, both women and men support the decision to move forward. So do prominent cancer survivors in the media establishment, regardless of where they fall on the ideological spectrum: Tony Snow (before his own rehospitalization), Laura Ingraham, Cokie Roberts and Barbara Ehrenreich all cheered on Mrs. Edwards. But others who muse on politics for a living responded with bafflement and implicit moral condemnation — and I don’t mean just Rush Limbaugh, who ridiculed the Edwardses for dedicating themselves to their campaign instead of, as he would have it, “to God.”

No less ludicrous were those pundits who presumed to bestow their own wisdom upon the Edwards household as it confronted terminal illness. A Washington correspondent for Time (a man) fretted that “Edwards’s supporters, and surely many average Americans” will be wondering when his “duties as a husband and a father” will “trump his duty to his country and the cause of winning the White House.” (Oh those benighted “average” Americans!) A former Los Angeles Times reporter (a woman) who covered the 2004 Edwards campaign suggested to USA Today that “this is a time when they would want to be home together savoring every moment that they’ve got.” A Washington Post columnist, identifying herself as a fellow mother, faulted Mrs. Edwards for not being sufficiently protective of her children.

As Mrs. Edwards moves forward both to manage her cancer and to campaign for her husband, she’ll roil more of the Beltway crowd. In a political culture where nearly every act by every candidate and spouse is packaged to a fare-thee-well for the voters’ consumption, the Edwardses’ story by definition will play out unpredictably in real time, with a spontaneity that is beyond any consultant’s or media guru’s control. Here is one continuing familial crisis that cannot be scored with soothing music to serve as a Hallmark homily in an inspirational infomercial at the next election-year convention. The Edwardses’ unscripted human drama will be a novelty by the standards of our excessively stage-managed political theater and baffling to many in its permanent repertory company.

That’s one reason it will be good for the country if Mr. Edwards can stay in this race for the duration, whether you believe he merits being president or not. (For me, the jury on that question is out.) The more Elizabeth Edwards is in the spotlight, the more everyone else in the arena will have to be judged against her. Next to her stark humanity, the slick playacting that passes for being “human” and “folksy” in a campaign is tinny. Though much has been said about how she is a model to others battling cancer, she is also a model (or should be) of personal transparency to everyone else in the presidential race.

This is especially true in a campaign where the presumptive (or at least once-presumptive) front-runners in both parties have made candor their calling card: John McCain is once again riding his Straight Talk Express and Hillary Clinton is staking her image on the rubric “Let the Conversation Begin!” They want us to believe that they are speaking in a direct, unfiltered manner, but so far their straight talking, even without Elizabeth Edwards as a yardstick, seems no more natural than Cheez Whiz.

Senator McCain’s bus has skidded once more into a ditch since the Edwards news conference. He’s so desperate to find the light at the end of the tunnel in Iraq that last week he told the radio jock Bill Bennett that “there are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk.” Yes, if they’ve signed a suicide pact. Even as the senator spoke, daily attacks were increasing in the safest of Baghdad neighborhoods, the fortified Green Zone, one of them killing two Americans. No one can safely “walk the streets of Baghdad, nor Mosul, nor Kirkuk, nor Basra, nor Tikrit, nor Najaf, nor Ramadi, without heavily armed protection,” according to the retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who delivered an Iraq briefing (pdf) to the White House last week.

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign “conversations” with the public have not stooped to the level of Mr. McCain’s fictions. But they have been laced with the cautious constructions that make her stabs at spontaneity seem as contrived as her rigidly controlled Web “chats.” This explains why a 74-second parody ad placed on YouTube by a Barack Obama supporter had enough resonance to earn (so far) nearly three million views. Reworking a famous Apple Macintosh commercial from 1984, the spot recasts Mrs. Clinton as an Orwellian Big Brother by making her seemingly innocuous campaign catchphrases (“I intend to keep telling you exactly where I stand on all the issues” and “We all need to be part of the discussion”) sound like the hollow pronouncements of the Wizard of Oz rather than the invitations to honest interchange the words imply.

Since the Edwards storm broke, there have been unintended consequences for other campaigns, too. In an accident of timing, Judith Nathan picked the same day as the Edwards news conference to explain that she was only now, after six years in public life, correcting the inaccurate published record of the number of her pre-Giuliani marriages (two, not one). Juxtaposed with the Edwards headlines, the dishonesty unmasked by this confession looked even worse than it might have otherwise. In a less vulgar vein, the first major Democratic campaign event after the Edwards announcement, a forum on health care, prompted more than the usual sniping about Mr. Obama’s substance when his policy prescription lacked the specifics in Mr. Edwards’s plan.

The power of Elizabeth Edwards’s persona is such that the husband at her side will be challenged to measure up to her, too, perhaps even more so than his opponents. No one may be labeling him “the Breck girl” anymore (the subject of another popular Web video parodying his coiffure maintenance), but should his campaign prove blow-dried when he moves beyond health care, he’ll pay his own hefty political price for the inauthenticity.

Whatever Mr. Edwards’s flaws as a candidate turn out to be, he is not guilty of the most persistent charge leveled since his wife’s diagnosis. As Ms. Couric phrased it, “Even those who may be very empathetic to what you all are facing might question your ability to run the country at the same time you’re dealing with a major health crisis in your family.”

Would it be better if he instead ran the country at the same time he was clearing brush on a ranch? Polio informed rather than crippled the leadership of F.D.R.; Lincoln endured the sickness and death of a beloved 11-year-old son during the Civil War. In the wake of our congenitally insulated incumbent, who has given our troops neither proper armor nor medical care and tried to hide their coffins off camera, surely it can only be a blessing to have a president, whether Mr. Edwards or someone else, who knows intimately what it means to cope daily with the threat of mortality. It’s hard to imagine such a president smiting stem-cell research or skipping the funerals of the fallen.

Indeed, of all the reasons to applaud Elizabeth Edwards’s decision to stay in politics, the most important may be her insistence, by her very action, that we not compartmentalize the harsh reality of death and the imperatives of public policy, both at home and at war. Let the real conversation begin.

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Defense Secretary Arrives in Baghdad

By DAVID S. CLOUD
Published: December 20, 2006
The New York Times

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 20—Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates arrived in Baghdad today and said he expected to “learn a lot” in his first talks with American commanders and Iraqi officials since taking office.

“The whole purpose is to go to talk to commanders, talk to the Iraqis and see what I can learn,” Mr. Gates told reporters traveling on his airplane.

His visit to Iraq only two days after taking over from former Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld reflected the intense focus on Iraq strategy by the Bush administration, which is weighing an American troop surge and other options for restoring security in Baghdad and other areas of the country.

Mr. Gates was scheduled to have several meetings with Gen. John P. Abizaid and Gen. George W. Casey, Jr., and other top American commanders, during his first day in Baghdad. He is expected to see Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki later in his visit.

His trip, like those of all senior American officials since 2003, was not announced beforehand for security reasons.

Also today, the military announced that General Abizaid plans to go ahead with his overdue retirement next spring. Since General Casey is also likely to step down around then, Mr. Gates will have the opportunity to reshape the top ranks of commanders overseeing Iraq at the same time that a new strategy is adopted.

Capt. Gary E. Arasin Jr., a spokesman for Central Command in Tampa, Fla, said today that Mr. Rumsfeld asked General Abizaid last spring to stay on until March 2007, beyond the usual term in that position. “He does not intend to extend beyond that period,” Captain Arasin said.

As Mr. Gates left Washington for Baghdad, there were already other indications that the replacement of Mr. Rumsfeld is affecting Bush administration policy.

President Bush told the Washington Post in an interview Tuesday that he favors increasing the size of the United States military, a move that Mr. Rumsfeld had long opposed. Mr. Bush said he had told Mr. Gates to develop a plan for boosting troop levels, which follows public complaints by top generals that Iraq and other deployments have stretched American forces too thin.

Mr. Gates has given few indications about his views on the strategy options under consideration, except to say that an American failure in Iraq could lead to a wider regional conflict in the Middle East.

"Failure in Iraq at this juncture would be a calamity that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility, and endanger Americans for decades to come," said Mr. Gates, said at the ceremony.

Mr. Bush has put off a speech on his strategy decisions until next month, in part he said to give Mr. Gates time to formulate his views.

Joining him on his trip to Iraq was Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and senior aides from the Pentagon, the White House staff, the State Department and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Mr. Gates traveled to Baghdad earlier this year as a member of the Iraq Study Group, the bipartisan panel created by Congress to recommend a new Iraq strategy. But he resigned from the panel after his nomination and before it issued its recommendations last month.

Its recommendations include phasing out most American combat troops by early 2008, increasing training for Iraqis and talks with Iran and Syria in hopes of curtailing the violence.

At his swearing-in ceremony earlier this week, Mr. Gates promised to rely on advice from military commanders in comments that were widely seen as a signal to uniformed services that his style would differ from that of Mr. Rumsfeld. He was often criticized for overriding the views of senior military commanders.

General Casey is formulating a plan to dramatically boost the number of American advisers attached to Iraqi units, a move aimed at improving the Iraqis’ performance over the next year, officials have said.

Additional trainers are already being drawn from American combat units in Iraq. Still under discussion is how large to make the training teams, which now have between 4,000 and 6,000 personnel, officials said.

Senior commanders and members of the Joint Chiefs have not publicly endorsed increasing American force levels in Iraq by 20,000 or more in a short-term surge aimed at restoring security. Gen. James Conway, commandant of the Marine Corps, said recently that the chiefs would back a troop increase if it was accompanied with a plan for using the forces effectively.

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Attacks in Iraq at Record High, Pentagon Says

By DAVID S. CLOUD and MICHAEL R. GORDON
Published: December 19, 2006

WASHINGTON, Dec. 18 — A Pentagon assessment of security conditions in Iraq concluded Monday that attacks against American and Iraqi targets had surged this summer and autumn to their highest level, and called violence by Shiite militants the most significant threat in Baghdad.

The report, which covers the period from early August to early November, found an average of almost 960 attacks against Americans and Iraqis every week, the highest level recorded since the Pentagon began issuing the quarterly reports in 2005, with the biggest surge in attacks against American-led forces. That was an increase of 22 percent from the level for early May to early August, the report said.

While most attacks were directed at American forces, most deaths and injuries were suffered by the Iraqi military and civilians.

The report is the most comprehensive public assessment of the American-led operation to secure Baghdad, which began in early August. About 17,000 American combat troops are currently involved in the beefed-up security operation.

According to the Pentagon assessment, the operation initially had some success in reducing killings as militants concentrated on eluding capture and hiding their weapons. But sectarian death squads soon adapted, resuming their killings in regions of the capital that were not initially targets of the overstretched American and Iraqi troops.

Shiite militias, the Pentagon report said, also received help from allies among the Iraqi police. “Shia death squads leveraged support from some elements of the Iraqi Police Service and the National Police who facilitated freedom of movement and provided advance warning of upcoming operations,” the report said.

“This is a major reason for the increased levels of murders and executions.”

The findings were issued on the day Robert M. Gates was sworn in as defense secretary, replacing Donald H. Rumsfeld.

At an afternoon ceremony at the Pentagon attended by President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, Mr. Gates said he planned to travel to Iraq shortly to consult with military commanders as part of a broad administration review of Iraq strategy.

“All of us want to find a way to bring America’s sons and daughters home again,” Mr. Gates said. “But as the president has made clear, we simply cannot afford to fail in the Middle East. Failure in Iraq would be a calamity that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility and endanger Americans for decades to come.”

Over all, the report portrayed a precarious security situation and criticized Shiite militias for the worsening violence more explicitly than previous versions had.

It said the Mahdi Army, a powerful Shiite militia that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal Al-Maliki has not confronted despite American pressure to do so, had had the greatest negative impact on security. It is likely that Shiite militants are now responsible for more civilian deaths and injuries than terrorist groups are, the report said.

But the report also held out hope that decisive leadership by the Iraqi government might halt the slide toward civil war.

While noting that efforts by Mr. Maliki to encourage political reconciliation among ethnic groups had shown little progress, it said that Iraqi institutions were holding and that members of the current government “have not openly abandoned the political process.”

The Pentagon assessment, titled “Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq,” is mandated by Congress and issued quarterly.

The new report, completed last month, noted two parallel trends.

On the one hand, the Iraqi security forces are larger than ever, with 322,600 Iraqi soldiers, police officers and other troops, an increase of 45,000 since August. Iraqi forces also have increasingly taken the lead responsibility in many areas.

The growth in Iraqi capabilities, however, has been matched by increasing violence. That raises the question of whether the American strategy to rely on the Iraqi forces to tamp down violence is failing, at least in the short term.

The Bush administration has decided to step up substantially the effort to train and equip the Iraqi forces. A major question being pondered by Mr. Bush is whether that is sufficient, or whether more American troops are needed in Baghdad to control the violence and stabilize the city.

According to the Pentagon, the weekly average of 959 attacks was a jump of 175 from the previous three months. As a consequence, civilian deaths and injuries reached a record 93 a day.

Deaths and injuries suffered by Iraq’s security forces also climbed to a new high, 33 a day, while American and other allied deaths and injuries hovered at 25 a day, just short of the record in 2004, when the United States was involved in battles in Falluja and elsewhere.
The increase in violence coincided with the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, when there had previously been a temporary spike in attacks, but also reflected the deeper sectarian passions that have flared since an attack in February 2006 on a Shiite shrine in Samarra.

According to Pentagon data used in formulating the report, there were 1,028 sectarian “executions” in October. That was a slight dip from July, when there were 1,169 executions, but a major increase since January, when there were 180. During this period, “ethno-sectarian incidents” have steadily risen, the report noted.

Security difficulties varied in different parts of the country. While sectarian strife was the biggest problem in Baghdad, in Anbar Province it was attacks by Sunni militants. North of Baghdad, in Diyala and Bilad, terrorists linked to Al Qaeda have been battling the Mahdi Army, it says.

While Shiite militias are active, the group known as Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is still a major threat, despite the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, its leader. “The emergence of Abu Ayub al-Masri as leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq demonstrated its flexibility and depth, as well as its reliance on non-Iraqis,” the report noted.

Indications of progress were few. The report credited the Iraqi government with taking “incremental” steps at assuming more responsibility and said its security forces “have assumed more leadership in counterinsurgency and law enforcement operations.” But it remained “urgent” for the Iraqi government “to demonstrate a resolve to contain and terminate sectarian attacks.”

In a briefing for reporters, Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, a senior aide to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the Baghdad operation had been constrained because the Iraqi government had not allowed American and Iraqi troops to “go in and neutralize Sadr City,” the base for the Mahdi Army.

Crude oil output was 2.3 million barrels a day, 7.5 percent higher than in August but still below the government’s goal of 2.5 million barrels.

Proponents of sending more troops to Iraq cited the report to argue that only Americans could ensure security in the short term and that more were needed. Critics said it showed that the initial effort by the American military to reinforce Baghdad had failed to stop the killing.

Gen. James T. Conway, who took over this fall as commandant of the Marine Corps, told reporters in Missouri on Saturday that among other options, President Bush was considering sending five or more combat brigades to Iraq, or about 20,000 troops.

General Conway said he believed that the Joint Chiefs would support such an increase as long as “there is a solid military reason for doing so.” He said sending more troops just to be “thickening the mix” in Baghdad would be a mistake.

Representative Ike Skelton, Democrat of Missouri, the new chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said he was opposed to more troops. “Everything I’ve heard and everything I know to be true lead me to believe that this increase at best

won’t change a thing,” he said, “and at worst could exacerbate the situation even further.”

Carl Hulse contributed reporting.

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