Hillary Clinton, From Revolution to Evolution

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: September 18, 2007

Health care reform isn’t only about covering the uninsured. It’s about reorganizing one-seventh of the U.S. economy. It’s the issue that will redefine the role of government in the 21st century. So when I spoke with Hillary Clinton yesterday, I asked what her newly unveiled plan revealed about her political philosophy.

The word she kept coming back to was “partnerships.” She described an array of different social entities — individuals, the federal government, insurance companies, doctors and hospitals — coming together and exercising shared responsibility for creating a better system.

It began to sound like a health care loya jirga — indicative of the political vision that has marked so much of her thinking over the years. When some politicians are asked to describe systems that really work, they think of the competitive marketplace. Others think of political combat — good defeating evil. But Clinton, at her most hopeful moments, is a communitarian. When she’s asked to describe a system that works, she describes diverse people coming together around a big table to reach a consensus.

That’s the sort of national community her plan is supposed to foster and that’s the sort of process she used to create it. Clinton is hard to interview because her answers are often just chunks of her stump speeches, but I thought I detected real warmth when she described the way she and her staff came up with the plan.

“It was an exhilarating process!” she enthused, describing how all sorts of different people came together to talk through issues. “There were countless meetings,” she remembered fondly, “with business leaders who were surprised to find themselves sitting next to me” and a long parade of academics, nurses, experts and friends.

As she spoke, memories of the Clinton years wafted through my head — government by seminar running into the late hours. But as she will tell you (before you even have a chance to ask), she has learned a lot since the early 1990s, and while the conversations may still be endless, they are also more restrained.

And it’s true. The plan she unveiled yesterday is much simpler than the one she came up with 14 years ago. Back then, she and her staff were like technocratic engineers, one of her advisers told me, trying to patch every last gap in their edifice. This time they were content to leave the details of the plan to Congress.

Last time, they threatened people who were satisfied with their health coverage. This time they reassure them that nothing will change. Last time, they were out of touch with the American values of choice and individual freedom. This time they emphasize those values every chance they get, never seriously considering a Canadian-style single-payer system.

This time the change is evolutionary, not revolutionary. The private insurance/employer-based system will still remain the heart and soul of the social contract — it’s just that more people will be given tax credits so they can afford to buy in.

The Clinton plan makes life politically difficult for Mitt Romney. She relies on an individual insurance mandate. So does his plan in Massachusetts. The Clinton plan also takes the brave step of taxing the wealthy for gold-plated health care benefits — a reform that almost every Republican health expert endorses. Meanwhile, the plan seems to have driven John Edwards around the bend. The statement he issued yesterday qualifies as the shrillest statement issued by a major presidential candidate this year.

But the Clinton plan does have the weaknesses of the communitarian approach. She creates a magic circle of companies, providers, government entities, all interlocked in a system to provide health security. But there will still be forces outside the magic circle that will be adapting and innovating in ways that might upset the plan.

First, there will be state governments. One of the virtues of welfare reform is that while the national government set certain goals, it was up to the states to innovate and compete to reach them. Clinton says she’s not averse to creative solutions from the states, but she doubts that they’ll be able to lead the way since they rely on money from Washington. Hers is not a decentralized, federal approach.

Then, there are the insurance companies, the designated bêtes noires of her plan. They are commanded to insure everybody, but they’ll probably be extremely creative in finding ways to not insure high-risk people who will cost them money.

Then there are patients. The Clinton plan aims to lower health care costs through a variety of measures. But if the cost of an M.R.I. comes down, people will just want more of them. Americans spend more on computers as those machines get more efficient.

Finally, there is posterity. Our children face a gigantic tidal wave of debt as a result of our current health care system. If health care reform doesn’t fundamentally adjust benefits while using available tax increases to help the uninsured, then the system will still be unaffordable in the long run.

Hillary Clinton’s health care plan is a huge step forward from 1993. It’s better than the G.O.P. candidates’ plans (which don’t exist). But there are still complexities in the health care system that no loya jirga, no matter how smart, can fully anticipate and control.

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Sad Alan’s Lament

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: September 17, 2007

When President Bush first took office, it seemed unlikely that he would succeed in getting his proposed tax cuts enacted. The questionable nature of his installation in the White House seemed to leave him in a weak political position, while the Senate was evenly balanced between the parties. It was hard to see how a huge, controversial tax cut, which delivered most of its benefits to a wealthy elite, could get through Congress.

Then Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, testified before the Senate Budget Committee.

Until then Mr. Greenspan had presented himself as the voice of fiscal responsibility, warning the Clinton administration not to endanger its hard-won budget surpluses. But now Republicans held the White House, and the Greenspan who appeared before the Budget Committee was a very different man.

Suddenly, his greatest concern — the “emerging key fiscal policy need,” he told Congress — was to avert the threat that the federal government might actually pay off all its debt. To avoid this awful outcome, he advocated tax cuts. And the floodgates were opened.

As it turns out, Mr. Greenspan’s fears that the federal government would quickly pay off its debt were, shall we say, exaggerated. And Mr. Greenspan has just published a book in which he castigates the Bush administration for its fiscal irresponsibility.

Well, I’m sorry, but that criticism comes six years late and a trillion dollars short.

Mr. Greenspan now says that he didn’t mean to give the Bush tax cuts a green light, and that he was surprised at the political reaction to his remarks. There were, indeed, rumors at the time — which Mr. Greenspan now says were true — that the Fed chairman was upset about the response to his initial statement.

But the fact is that if Mr. Greenspan wasn’t intending to lend crucial support to the Bush tax cuts, he had ample opportunity to set the record straight when it could have made a difference.

His first big chance to clarify himself came a few weeks after that initial testimony, when he appeared before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs.

Here’s what I wrote following that appearance: “Mr. Greenspan’s performance yesterday, in his first official testimony since he let the genie out of the bottle, was a profile in cowardice. Again and again he was offered the opportunity to say something that would help rein in runaway tax-cutting; each time he evaded the question, often replying by reading from his own previous testimony. He declared once again that he was speaking only for himself, thus granting himself leeway to pronounce on subjects far afield of his role as Federal Reserve chairman. But when pressed on the crucial question of whether the huge tax cuts that now seem inevitable are too large, he said it was inappropriate for him to comment on particular proposals.

“In short, Mr. Greenspan defined the rules of the game in a way that allows him to intervene as he likes in the political debate, but to retreat behind the veil of his office whenever anyone tries to hold him accountable for the results of those interventions.”

I received an irate phone call from Mr. Greenspan after that article, in which he demanded to know what he had said that was wrong. In his book, he claims that Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary, was stumped by that question. That’s hard to believe, because I certainly wasn’t: Mr. Greenspan’s argument for tax cuts was contorted and in places self-contradictory, not to mention based on budget projections that everyone knew, even then, were wildly overoptimistic.

If anyone had doubts about Mr. Greenspan’s determination not to inconvenience the Bush administration, those doubts were resolved two years later, when the administration proposed another round of tax cuts, even though the budget was now deep in deficit. And guess what? The former high priest of fiscal responsibility did not object.

And in 2004 he expressed support for making the Bush tax cuts permanent — remember, these are the tax cuts he now says he didn’t endorse — and argued that the budget should be balanced with cuts in entitlement spending, including Social Security benefits, instead. Of course, back in 2001 he specifically assured Congress that cutting taxes would not threaten Social Security.

In retrospect, Mr. Greenspan’s moral collapse in 2001 was a portent. It foreshadowed the way many people in the foreign policy community would put their critical faculties on hold and support the invasion of Iraq, despite ample evidence that it was a really bad idea.

And like enthusiastic war supporters who have started describing themselves as war critics now that the Iraq venture has gone wrong, Mr. Greenspan has started portraying himself as a critic of administration fiscal irresponsibility now that President Bush has become deeply unpopular and Democrats control Congress.

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The Nordic Option

By ROGER COHEN

Published: September 17, 2007

Stockholm

Think Sweden and what comes to mind is probably not a youthful finance minister, with his long dark hair in a ponytail and a gold ring through his left ear, explaining that his ambition is to make it “more profitable to work” than to sit around on welfare.

But Anders Borg, 39, poster boy of the “New Moderates” who have put the long-governing Social Democrats out of office, does just that, and when the question of his coiffure comes up, the retort is swift: “This is northern Europe, a modern society. Your public deficit or surplus is more important than your hairstyle.”

Right. Sweden, of course, has a surplus that the deficit-ridden United States can only envy, as well as a knack for staying out of wars that borders on the obscene. It’s that reasonable, semi-socialist, Volvo-driving, super-taxed Nordic place that gave the world Ikea’s cheap furniture and Bergman’s dissection of marriage.

Or is it? The ponytailed finance minister — a world first? — is just one sign that something funky is up in the Swedish woods. A government that includes the country’s first black, avowedly gay and bisexual ministers (that’s three distinct people) has set about a radical reform of the generous welfare state that defined the Swedish condition.

In doing so, it has adopted a few core principles. It should be more profitable to work than not to work. Welfare should mean caring for people who cannot care for themselves. Unemployment insurance should be adjustment insurance rather than an open-ended sinecure. Employers should be encouraged to hire through lower taxes.

Hardly rocket science, you might say, but all of this has proved radical enough to make “systemskifte,” or “system shift,” the buzzword in Sweden. The term might be applied to much of northern Europe, where in recent years the welfare state has been upended even as its essence has been preserved.

Europe, at peace and undivided, has not been foremost on the American mind of late. Old images of “Eurosclerosis” — the vacationing worker (or non-worker) stripped of initiative by an overbearing nanny state — have tended to endure. But in countries including Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark and to some degree Germany, welfare has ceded to what Borg calls “work-fair.”

The transformation has brought streamlined state sectors; more flexible labor markets; a focus on social fairness through improved education and health care rather than through attempts at income redistribution via high taxes; a restored work ethic (“Make Work Pay” is a Swedish government slogan); and a rediscovery of entrepreneurship and choice.

“Our principle is you should show solidarity with people who have problems for a space in their lives, but they should not be supported permanently by the welfare state,” Tobias Billstrom, the migration minister, says.

Billstrom is all of 33 and sports multicolored buttons on his shirt. He’s a backer of the reforms because Sweden doesn’t want the immigrants pouring into the country to think collecting subsidies and working on the black market are the Swedish way.

Sweden has learned that a rigid labor market is a devastating form of exclusion (France, take note). Its aging population, like others in Europe, needs immigrants to find jobs and so pay the taxes that will fund pensions into the future.

By slashing unemployment benefits, making it easier and cheaper to hire, offering tax credits to employers taking on people who have been jobless for a long time, and providing tax incentives to lure domestic jobs out the black market, Sweden has cut unemployment to 4.4 percent, or about half the French rate.

Growth in 2007 of 3.2 percent will be among the highest in Europe and handily top the U.S rate. Surpluses keep accumulating. All nine million Swedes have health insurance, while 47 million Americans, or the equivalent of five Swedens, do not. And the school system delivers high standards.

Of course, Sweden doesn’t have the world to run, and a top personal income tax rate of 56 percent would make Americans pale. Still, Sweden’s new Nordic model merits attention.

“My idea,” Borg says, “is to combine the entrepreneurial spirit of America with the welfare of Sweden. That’s my ideal world: the creative impulse and restructured welfare. The lowest quarter of our population is well educated. The United States could learn from that.”

It could indeed. Northern Europe has looked to America for some of its reforms. America, Iraq-obsessed, has not looked to a changing Europe. A stagnating middle class, losing jobs and health insurance, holds the key to victory for Democratic candidates next year if they can suggest strong programs for better education and universal health care.

A stop in funky Stockholm is in order for Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama.

•

You are invited to comment at my blog: www.iht.com/passages.

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Will Rudy Let Her Rudy-Up?

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: September 16, 2007

WASHINGTON

It’s on.

Or, rather, it’s back on.

Rudy versus Hillary, a New York steel-cage match pitting two eye-gouging, hair-pulling, kick-em-till-they’re-dead brawlers.

For months, Hillary’s comely male rivals for the Democratic nomination have tiptoed around her, letting their wives take shots at the front-runner.

Barack Obama looks wary when he’s on stage with Hillary, but Michelle stepped up: “Some women feel it’s a woman’s turn, you know? They just feel like it’s Hillary’s turn. That, I reject, because democracy isn’t supposed to be about whose turn it is.”

That followed Elizabeth Edwards’s takedown of Hillary: “She’s just not as vocal a women’s advocate as I want to see. John is.”

Obama and Edwards probably figured the criticism would sound less Lazio coming from their wives. But it just made them seem as though they were hiding behind their wives’ skirts.

Enter Rudy. He may wear skirts, but he’s not afraid to take down a skirt.

He put up an ad Friday on his campaign Web site slamming her as a hypocrite for running an antiwar campaign after supporting the president on the authorization for war.

Obama has been trying to make this point for quite a while, but so gingerly that every time he sneaks up on it, Hillary surges ahead.

Rudy doesn’t do ginger.

Hillary has been trying to Rudy-up, corralling ground zero and playing the fear card, saying that if there were a terrorist attack before the election, only she could stop Republicans from keeping the White House. But Rudy aims to de-Rudy her. His ad is an instant cult classic, with a solemn trumpet that is reminiscent of “Taps” and a narrator who sounds like the guy who does trailers for “In a World Gone Wrong” disaster flicks.

Just when Hillary was basking in her reinvention of herself, Rudy sprang out of the Republican primary shadows and shoved her back.

He ignores her attempts to be New Hillary, a senator who loves men in uniform, who is not afraid to use military power, and who is tough enough to deal with bin Laden. He recasts her as Old Hillary, a Code Pink pinko first lady and opportunist from a White House that had a reputation for having a flower-child distaste for the military, a left-wing shrew who made a secret socialist health care plan and let gays into the military and certainly can’t be trusted to fight the jihadists.

“In 2002,” the white words flash on a black screen, “Hillary Clinton voted to authorize military action in Iraq because she believed it was the right thing to do.”

Then it goes to a clip of Hillary speaking on the Senate floor during the war authorization debate that Obama has been too refined to highlight.

“If left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons,” she said, an echo of Condi. “He has also given aid and comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members. So it is with conviction that I support this resolution as being in the best interests of our nation.”

Then the narrator intones, “But now that she’s running for president, Hillary Clinton has changed her position, even joining with the radical group MoveOn .org in attacking American General Petraeus” when she said it would require “a willing suspension of disbelief” to believe him.

“Just when our troops need all our support to finish the job, Hillary Clinton is turning her back on them,” the narrator concludes.

There are harsh images of Hillary, looking brittle in dark glasses, to go with the harsh words.

Rudy has decided that the best way to win his primary is to show he can beat the woman on the way to winning hers.

He can’t campaign on family values or the sanctity of marriage. He can’t whip up any fears on abortion or gays.

He can’t campaign on his plan to get out of Iraq because he doesn’t have one. He can’t campaign as the tough-guy heir to Bush because nobody likes Bush. He can’t campaign on attacking Iran because he’ll sound like crazy Dick Cheney.

He can’t campaign on the economy because he’s W. redux, facing a possible recession because of the mortgage crisis. He can’t campaign on Rudy’s from-the-mountaintop “12 Commitments” because no one knows what they are, and they don’t mention the word “Iraq.”

But he can be the only man in the field tough enough to slap around a woman.

The irony is that if you could loosen up Hillary with a few Jack and gingers, she would probably be closer to her reinvention than to his caricature. She probably secretly supports the surge, knowing that after it sputters, she may reap the whirlwind. And then the Republicans, who have lied, stalled and mismanaged in every way imaginable, will paint her as Ms. Cut and Run, turning her back on the military again.

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The Nightmare Is Here

By BOB HERBERT

Published: September 15, 2007

We’ve heard from General Petraeus, from Ambassador Crocker, and on Thursday night from President Bush. What we haven’t heard this week is anything about the tragic reality on the ground for the ordinary citizens of Iraq, which is in the throes of a catastrophic humanitarian crisis.

President Bush may not be aware of this. In his televised address to the nation he warned that a pullout of U.S. forces from Iraq could cause a “humanitarian nightmare.”

A trusted aide should take the president aside and quietly inform him that this nightmare arrived a good while ago.

When the U.S. launched its “shock and awe” invasion in March 2003, the population of Iraq was about 26 million. The flaming horror unleashed by the invasion has since forced 2.2 million of those Iraqis, nearly a tenth of the population, to flee the country. Many of those who left were professionals marked for death — doctors, lawyers, academics, the very people with the skills necessary to build a viable society.

The Iraq Ministry of Health reported that 102 doctors and 164 nurses were killed from April 2003 to May 2006. It is believed that nearly half of Iraq’s doctors have fled. The exodus of health care professionals in a country hemorrhaging from the worst kinds of violence pretty much qualifies as nightmarish.

While more than two million Iraqis have fled to other countries, another two million have been displaced internally. According to the Global Policy Forum, a group that monitors international developments:

“Most of these internally displaced persons, or I.D.P.’s, have sought refuge with relatives, or in mosques, empty public buildings, or tent camps. ...I.D.P.’s live in very poor conditions. Public buildings are particularly unsanitary, often overcrowded, without access to clean water, proper sanitation and basic services, in conditions especially conducive to infectious diseases.”

Iraqis are enduring most of their suffering out of the sight of the rest of the world. International relief organizations and most of the news media are largely kept at a distance by the insane levels of violence.

Access to safe drinking water is a problem in much of the country. (The World Health Organization was asked to help with a recent outbreak of cholera in parts of Kurdistan that is believed to have been caused by polluted water.) Sanitation facilities are routinely crippled by violence and sabotage. The economy, like the country’s infrastructure, is in shambles.

The worst aspect of the nightmare, of course, is the rain of death that has descended on Iraq since the U.S. invasion. Controversy has surrounded virtually all attempts to estimate the number of civilian casualties, but no one disputes that the toll is staggering.

The U.S. government has behaved as though these dead Iraqis were not even worth counting. In December 2005, President Bush casually mentioned “30,000, more or less” as the number of Iraqis killed in the war. The White House later said there were no official estimates of Iraqi deaths.

We shouldn’t be so cavalier. Based on all available evidence, it seems unreasonable to believe that fewer than 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed thus far. Many very serious scholars believe the total is much higher.

As for the number of wounded and disabled Iraqis — men, women and children who have lost limbs, or been paralyzed or otherwise maimed in air, rocket and bomb attacks — no one has a real grasp of the size of the problem.

“Just considering the number of the dead and the number of displaced, this is probably the biggest humanitarian crisis in the world,” said James Paul, the executive director of Global Policy Forum, which recently compiled an extensive report on the war and occupation. “This is the biggest displacement of people in the Middle East in a very long time.”

The effect on children of the carnage, the dislocations and the deteriorating quality of daily life has been profound. Conditions in Iraq were dire for children even before the war. One in eight died before the age of 5, many from the effects of malnutrition, polluted water and unsanitary conditions.

Now, more than four years after the invasion, huge numbers of Iraqi children are finding themselves orphaned, homeless, malnourished, and worse.

According to Unicef, the U.N.’s children’s agency: “Many children are separated from their families or on the streets, where they are extremely vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Most children have experienced trauma but few receive the care and support they need to help them cope with so much chaos, anxiety and loss.”

These are just a few of the things you won’t hear much about from the American officials in Washington who profess to care so deeply about the people of Iraq.

Gail Collins is off today.

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A Surge, and Then a Stab

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: September 14, 2007

To understand what’s really happening in Iraq, follow the oil money, which already knows that the surge has failed.

Back in January, announcing his plan to send more troops to Iraq, President Bush declared that “America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.”

Near the top of his list was the promise that “to give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country’s economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis.”

There was a reason he placed such importance on oil: oil is pretty much the only thing Iraq has going for it. Two-thirds of Iraq’s G.D.P. and almost all its government revenue come from the oil sector. Without an agreed system for sharing oil revenues, there is no Iraq, just a collection of armed gangs fighting for control of resources.

Well, the legislation Mr. Bush promised never materialized, and on Wednesday attempts to arrive at a compromise oil law collapsed.

What’s particularly revealing is the cause of the breakdown. Last month the provincial government in Kurdistan, defying the central government, passed its own oil law; last week a Kurdish Web site announced that the provincial government had signed a production-sharing deal with the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas, and that seems to have been the last straw.

Now here’s the thing: Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive and president of Hunt Oil, is a close political ally of Mr. Bush. More than that, Mr. Hunt is a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a key oversight body.

Some commentators have expressed surprise at the fact that a businessman with very close ties to the White House is undermining U.S. policy. But that isn’t all that surprising, given this administration’s history. Remember, Halliburton was still signing business deals with Iran years after Mr. Bush declared Iran a member of the “axis of evil.”

No, what’s interesting about this deal is the fact that Mr. Hunt, thanks to his policy position, is presumably as well-informed about the actual state of affairs in Iraq as anyone in the business world can be. By putting his money into a deal with the Kurds, despite Baghdad’s disapproval, he’s essentially betting that the Iraqi government — which hasn’t met a single one of the major benchmarks Mr. Bush laid out in January — won’t get its act together. Indeed, he’s effectively betting against the survival of Iraq as a nation in any meaningful sense of the term.

The smart money, then, knows that the surge has failed, that the war is lost, and that Iraq is going the way of Yugoslavia. And I suspect that most people in the Bush administration — maybe even Mr. Bush himself — know this, too.

After all, if the administration had any real hope of retrieving the situation in Iraq, officials would be making an all-out effort to get the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to start delivering on some of those benchmarks, perhaps using the threat that Congress would cut off funds otherwise. Instead, the Bushies are making excuses, minimizing Iraqi failures, moving goal posts and, in general, giving the Maliki government no incentive to do anything differently.

And for that matter, if the administration had any real intention of turning public opinion around, as opposed to merely shoring up the base enough to keep Republican members of Congress on board, it would have sent Gen. David Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, to as many news media outlets as possible — not granted an exclusive appearance to Fox News on Monday night.

All in all, Mr. Bush’s actions have not been those of a leader seriously trying to win a war. They have, however, been what you’d expect from a man whose plan is to keep up appearances for the next 16 months, never mind the cost in lives and money, then shift the blame for failure onto his successor.

In fact, that’s my interpretation of something that startled many people: Mr. Bush’s decision last month, after spending years denying that the Iraq war had anything in common with Vietnam, to suddenly embrace the parallel.

Here’s how I see it: At this point, Mr. Bush is looking forward to replaying the political aftermath of Vietnam, in which the right wing eventually achieved a rewriting of history that would have made George Orwell proud, convincing millions of Americans that our soldiers had victory in their grasp but were stabbed in the back by the peaceniks back home.

What all this means is that the next president, even as he or she tries to extricate us from Iraq — and prevent the country’s breakup from turning into a regional war — will have to deal with constant sniping from the people who lied us into an unnecessary war, then lost the war they started, but will never, ever, take responsibility for their failures.

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The Waning of I.Q.

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: September 14, 2007

A nice phenomenon of the past few years is the diminishing influence of I.Q.

For a time, I.Q. was the most reliable method we had to capture mental aptitude. People had the impression that we are born with these information-processing engines in our heads and that smart people have more horsepower than dumb people.

And in fact, there’s something to that. There is such a thing as general intelligence; people who are good at one mental skill tend to be good at others. This intelligence is partly hereditary. A meta-analysis by Bernie Devlin of the University of Pittsburgh found that genes account for about 48 percent of the differences in I.Q. scores. There’s even evidence that people with bigger brains tend to have higher intelligence.

But there has always been something opaque about I.Q. In the first place, there’s no consensus about what intelligence is. Some people think intelligence is the ability to adapt to an environment, others that capacity to think abstractly, and so on.

Then there are weird patterns. For example, over the past century, average I.Q. scores have risen at a rate of about 3 to 6 points per decade. This phenomenon, known as the Flynn effect, has been measured in many countries and across all age groups. Nobody seems to understand why this happens or why it seems to be petering out in some places, like Scandinavia.

I.Q. can also be powerfully affected by environment. As Eric Turkheimer of the University of Virginia and others have shown, growing up in poverty can affect your intelligence for the worse. Growing up in an emotionally strangled household also affects I.Q.

One of the classic findings of this was made by H.M. Skeels back in the 1930s. He studied mentally retarded orphans who were put in foster homes. After four years, their I.Q.’s diverged an amazing 50 points from orphans who were not moved. And the remarkable thing is the mothers who adopted the orphans were themselves mentally retarded and living in a different institution. It wasn’t tutoring that produced the I.Q. spike; it was love.

Then, finally, there are the various theories of multiple intelligences. We don’t just have one thing called intelligence. We have a lot of distinct mental capacities. These theories thrive, despite resistance from the statisticians, because they explain everyday experience. I’m decent at processing words, but when it comes to calculating the caroms on a pool table, I have the aptitude of a sea slug.

I.Q., in other words, is a black box. It measures something, but it’s not clear what it is or whether it’s good at predicting how people will do in life. Over the past few years, scientists have opened the black box to investigate the brain itself, not a statistical artifact.

Now you can read books about mental capacities in which the subject of I.Q. and intelligence barely comes up. The authors are concerned instead with, say, the parallel processes that compete for attention in the brain, and how they integrate. They’re discovering that far from being a cold engine for processing information, neural connections are shaped by emotion.

Antonio Damasio of the University of Southern California had a patient rendered emotionless by damage to his frontal lobes. When asked what day he could come back for an appointment, he stood there for nearly half an hour describing the pros and cons of different dates, but was incapable of making a decision. This is not the Spock-like brain engine suggested by the I.Q.

Today, the research that dominates public conversation is not about raw brain power but about the strengths and consequences of specific processes. Daniel Schacter of Harvard writes about the vices that flow from the way memory works. Daniel Gilbert, also of Harvard, describes the mistakes people make in perceiving the future. If people at Harvard are moving beyond general intelligence, you know something big is happening.

The cultural consequence is that judging intelligence is less like measuring horsepower in an engine and more like watching ballet. Speed and strength are part of intelligence, and these things can be measured numerically, but the essence of the activity is found in the rhythm and grace and personality — traits that are the products of an idiosyncratic blend of emotions, experiences, motivations and inheritances.

Recent brain research, rather than reducing everything to electrical impulses and quantifiable pulses, actually enhances our appreciation of human complexity and richness. While psychometrics offered the false allure of objective fact, the new science brings us back into contact with literature, history and the humanities, and, ultimately, to the uniqueness of the individual.

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The Ottoman Swede

By ROGER COHEN

Published: September 13, 2007

STOCKHOLM

As members of Congress mull what to do next in Iraq, they might glance at a League of Nations report of July 16, 1925, on the new Middle Eastern state then being carved by the British from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire.

The report said that despite “the good intentions of the statesmen of Iraq, whose political experience is necessarily small, it is to be feared that serious difficulties may arise out of the differences which in some cases exist in regard to political ideas between the Shiites of the South and the Sunnites of the North, the racial differences between Arabs and Kurds, and the necessity of keeping the turbulent tribes under control.”

And it warned: “These difficulties might be fatal to the very existence of the State if it were left without support and guidance.”

So much for things changing. They don’t, or only slowly, when attempts are made to carve sustainable nation states from multiethnic empires.

This 82-year-old document was handed to me by Carl Bildt, the Swedish foreign minister, a man of dry humor and quick tongue who can claim to be the world’s authority on messes in post-Ottoman areas. “From Bihac to Basra,” he said, referring to towns in western Bosnia and Southern Iraq, “these things take time and benchmarks don’t count for much.”

Bildt recently returned from Baghdad where Sweden has much to discuss given that 20,000 Iraqi refugees are expected to arrive here this year, a number that dwarfs the trickle of fleeing Iraqis into the United States. This imbalance is shameful, but that’s another story. Iraqis have no special desire to trade desert for pine forest, but Sweden has the merit of letting them in.

In the Iraqi capital, Bildt heard divergent political visions from Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the Shiite prime minister, and Tariq al-Hashemi, the Sunni vice president. The notion of give-and-take, of compromise reached rather than domination imposed, is a Middle Eastern novelty.

Give-and-take has not been a big Balkan thing either, and it was in the Balkans, as a special European Union envoy, that Bildt cut his teeth on post-Ottoman mayhem. He sees “massive parallels” between Yugoslavia’s violent dismemberment once dictatorship ended and Iraq’s turbulent deliverance from tyranny.

Both states were invented in the post-World War I years in areas long under complete or partial Ottoman dominion. Both were beautiful inventions, bridges between divergent cultures and religions and ethnic groups, mosaics beneath a national flag. Both had the drawback of tending toward their own self-destruction in the absence of a strongman to resolve contradiction through force.

Freedom is a funny thing. Life without it is misery. But a glance at the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia or now Iraq is a sufficient reminder that distinct peoples forcefully gathered into a dictatorial state will react in the first instance to liberty by trying to get free of each other rather than trying to imagine a liberal democracy.

As Miroslav Hroch, the Czech political theorist, has observed, ethnic or religious nationalism easily become the “substitutes for factors of integration in a disintegrating nation.” That’s where we are in Iraq. In plotting a social revolution, the ushering to power of a subjugated Shiite majority through the overthrow of a minority Sunni dictatorship, the Bush administration did not ponder or plan for these realities.

That’s unfortunate, indeed unforgivable, but it’s done.

Bildt, Balkan-hardened, takes the long view. “If you take the Ottoman areas, they were Muslim but tolerant with an array of different cultures and their replacement with different versions of the 19th-century nation state has proved very difficult, be it in the Balkans, in Cyprus or the Middle East.”

He cannot imagine a quick American exit. “Iraqi leaders will want some sort of exit perspective, but a long-term one,” he says. As long as Iran and Saudi Arabia see Iraq as a Shia-Sunni battlefield, peace will be elusive.

The Balkan analogy is interesting. Yugoslavia’s breakup saw four years of war, then another war in Kosovo four years later. Only regional pressure — the bait of European Union membership — and a large European and American military presence have brought calm. The question of Kosovo’s independence from Serbia remains explosive.

This fragile stability is where the 16-year arc from the eruption of the Balkan wars in 1991 has led. Given that regional realities make an Iraqi breakup unthinkable, the architecture of the Yugoslavia-in-miniature in Bosnia is probably the most helpful guide for Baghdad: a fig-leaf national government presiding over a loose federation.

If the United States meets the responsibilities its invasion engaged and the region can be coaxed to help rather than hinder, we may attain such fragile stability 16 years from Saddam’s fall: that would be 2019, just over a century after the Ottoman collapse.

•

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Sleepwalking in September

By GAIL COLLINS

Published: September 13, 2007

Fred! Fred!

He’s here. He’s tanned. He’s ready.

He looks like he needs a nap.

When it comes to overhyped underperformers, Fred Thompson’s entry into the presidential race was right up there with Britney Spears at the MTV awards.

The Republican Party’s great tall hope announced his intentions on Jay Leno’s show, and timed it to coincide with his avoidance of the candidate debate in New Hampshire. That was supposed to send the message of — what? A fear of crowds? A preference for answering questions only while seated? His performance certainly could not have been more low-key. You do not often hear somebody say “I’m running for president” in the same tone Jay’s guests use to announce that they’ve signed on for the next season of “Dancing With the Stars.”

Then Thompson climbed onto a bus for a trip through Iowa and other states that are going to be first to vote, even if they have to hold the elections tomorrow. It quickly became apparent that whatever our newest top-tier candidate had been up to during those long months of water-testing did not involve practicing a speech. In Iowa, he rambled. The Daily News reported that at one town hall meeting he seemed to be telling the audience that Americans were winning over Iraqis because of Al Qaeda’s no-smoking policy. He appeared to be developing a different position on Osama bin Laden for every state.

(Best guess now is that Thompson wants to see bin Laden “caught and killed,” then granted due process.)

On the subject of gay marriage, he told an interviewer for the Christian Broadcast Network that he had an idea for a constitutional amendment that would “prevent that one state moving from another and someone having to recognize it.”

This was supposed to be the answer to the Republican core’s primal pain. Find us somebody to nominate! Someone slightly less smarmy than Mitt and slightly less strange than Rudy. “My story is an American story ... a small-town kid of modest means and modest goals,” Thompson tells the voters on his Fred08 Web site. Viewers can feel free to recall that Mitt Romney’s dad was a business tycoon and governor. And you can be sure that Fred was not spending his teens founding a high-school opera club like some former New York City mayors we could name.

Thompson, by all accounts, was indeed an underachiever who rose to fame and fortune mainly through powerful friends and good luck. The perfect answer for a country reeling from two terms with an underachiever who rose to fame and fortune mainly through powerful friends and good genes. And so far at least, it’s working in the polls. An affable guy who doesn’t try hard — what could be more refreshing?

There was always speculation that Thompson’s supporters were trying to cast a president rather than nominate one, and that his big selling point was not a résumé or even a personal story, but simply that down-home aura — a drawl in a nice suit. What nobody really expected, though, was that the former senator/lobbyist/actor would emerge on the political stage in a state of apparent exhaustion. He’s 65, but compared to him, 71-year-old John McCain looks like a pup. Either the guy never had an edge, or he lost it somewhere between “Die Hard 2” and “Baby’s Day Out.”

Or maybe he’s a victim of trying to Have It All.

You may have heard that Thompson, who was long divorced, married a woman 25 years his junior in 2002. They now have a 3-year-old daughter and an infant son. Everybody started the campaign off together last week. Little Hayden showed a crowd how she could make like an elephant and Samuel got his diaper changed on the bus during a TV interview.

It’s not unusual for wealthy men to decide they can dive into fatherhood and Social Security at the same time. This presidential field is awash with candidates of late-middle-age whose kids can still qualify for Breakfast with Santa. But none are quite so old or have children quite so young as Thompson’s. And these days it’s hard for an overage dad to get away with absentee fatherhood, especially when mom is intimately involved in the management of his campaign, as Jeri Thompson, seems to be. Yes, his wife goes by Jeri Thompson. Maybe the combination of kids and campaigning has left him too ground down to glad hand. Too pooped to pander.

If so, a lot of women are going to find the story very comforting. Not that we’re resentful of the fact that men’s biological clocks never seem to ring. Or that they’re not the ones who have to decide if they can handle both children and a career.

If it turns out that mixing a race for the most powerful job on the planet with two preschoolers is too much for any one 65-year-old man to do, millions of women will say, welcome to the club, Fred. We know how you feel.

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Iraq Through China’s Lens

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: September 12, 2007

Dalian, China

It’s nice to be in a country where Iraq is never mentioned. It’s just a little unnerving when that country is America’s biggest geopolitical and economic rival these days: China.

I heard China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, address an international conference here in Dalian, and what impressed me most was how boring it was — a straightforward recitation of the staggering economic progress China has made in the last two decades and the towering economic, political and environmental challenges it still faces.

How nice it must be, I thought, to be a great power and be almost entirely focused on addressing your own domestic problems?

No, I have not gone isolationist. America has real enemies that China does not, and therefore we have to balance a global security role in places like the Middle East with domestic demands.

But something is out of balance with America today. Looking at the world from here, it is hard not to feel that China has spent the last six years training for the Olympics while we’ve spent ourselves into debt on iPods and Al Qaeda.

After 9/11, we tried to effect change in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world by trying to build a progressive government in Baghdad. There was, I believed, a strategic and moral logic for that. But the strategy failed, for a million different reasons, and now it is time to recognize that and focus on how we insulate ourselves from the instability of that world — by having a real energy policy, for starters — how we protect our security interests there in more sustainable ways and how we get back to developing our own house.

By now it should be clear that Iraq is going to be what it is going to be. We’ve never had sufficient troops there to shape Iraq in our own image. We simply can’t go on betting so many American soldiers and resources that Iraqis will one day learn to live together on their own — without either having to be bludgeoned by Saddam or baby-sat by us.

So either we get help or get out. That is, if President Bush believes staying in Iraq can still make a difference, then he needs to muster some allies because the American people are not going to sustain alone — nor should they — a long-shot bet that something decent can still be built in Baghdad.

If the president can’t get help, then he has to initiate a phased withdrawal: now. Because the opportunity cost this war is exacting on our country and its ability to focus on anything else is out of all proportion to what might still be achieved in Iraq by our staying, with too few troops and too few friends.

Iraqis can add. The surge has brought more calm to Iraq largely because the mainstream Iraqi Sunnis finally calculated that they have lost and that both the pro-Al Qaeda Iraqi Sunnis and the radical Shiites are more of a threat to them than the Americans they had been shooting at.

The minute we start withdrawing, all Iraqis will carefully calculate their interests. They may decide that they want more blood baths, but there is just as much likelihood that they will eventually find equilibrium.

I have not been to Dalian in three years. It is not just a nice city for China. It is a beautiful city of wide avenues, skyscrapers, green spaces, software parks and universities.

The president of Dalian University of Technology, Jinping Ou, told me his new focus now is on energy research and that he has 100 doctoral students dealing with different energy problems — where five years ago he barely had any — and that the Chinese government has just decided to open its national energy innovation research center here.

Listening to him, my mind drifted back to Iraq, where I was two weeks ago and where I heard a U.S. officer in Baghdad tell this story:

His unit was on a patrol in a Sunni neighborhood when it got hit by an I.E.D. Fortunately, the bomb exploded too soon and no one was hurt. His men jumped out and followed the detonation wire, which led 1,500 feet into the neighborhood. A U.S. Black Hawk helicopter was in the area and alerted the U.S. soldiers that a man was fleeing the scene on a bicycle. The soldiers asked the Black Hawk for help, and it swooped down and used its rotor blades to blow the insurgent off his bicycle, with a giant “whoosh,” and the U.S. soldiers captured him.

That image of a $6 million high-tech U.S. helicopter with a highly trained pilot blowing an insurgent off his bicycle captures the absurdity of our situation in Iraq. The great Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi said it best: “Great powers should never get involved in the politics of small tribes.”

That is where we are in Iraq. We’re wasting our brains. We’re wasting our people. We’re wasting our future. China is not.

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The Road to Partition

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: September 11, 2007

Zealots don’t laugh when elevators break. Shatha al-Musawi did laugh. She smiled at the camera crew that was following her to her Baghdad office, and she sighed, “We’ll have to take the stairs.”

Thoughts of Musawi ran through my head as I watched David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker testify yesterday. Musawi was the subject of a profile by Damien Cave that ran on the front page of The Times a few weeks ago, and a Web cast on The Times’s Web site by Damien Cave and Diana Oliva Cave.

Musawi is a moderate Shiite member of the Iraqi Parliament who earned a university degree after her children grew up. She speaks thoughtfully and gently, but there is a wall in her mind separating Sunnis from Shiites, a wall that was erected during Saddam’s persecution and that has been fortified by the violence since. For her, the conflict with the Sunnis is not over oil; it’s a matter of honor. She wants them to accept historical guilt and grant Shiites moral supremacy.

As she said in the Web cast: “If they come and apologize to victims, if they admitted their faults and asked for forgiveness, maybe we can forget about it. But now with this continuous killing and continuous crimes against us, how could we? How could we?”

This is how many Palestinians and Israelis talk. When conflicts become struggles for moral capitulation, they take forever to end.

Musawi’s words are just one more piece of evidence that Iraq will not be put together the way it was. It’s one more piece of evidence that America’s best course is not to reunify Iraq, but simply to inhibit the violence as Iraqis feel their own way to partition.

What we’re really trying to build, in other words, is a road to partition. We’re trying to build a pathway to separation that involves the sort of low-intensity civil war that Iraq is enduring right now. We’re trying to prevent a pathway that is even worse — a high-intensity genocide.

As I was watching yesterday’s hearings, I was thinking of the sensible yet sectarian Musawi. How many American lives is it worth to save those like her? Is it realistic to think U.S. troops can help Iraqis move on that less barbaric path?

If you look around, you see this is the wrong time to give up hope, for circumstances in Iraq are better than they were in the spring.

First, there’s clearer evidence than ever that U.S. forces can inhibit violence. Despite all the debates over the data, violence over all is on the decline. In neighborhoods where 30 and 40 bodies used to show up a night, now only one or two do. After rising in 2006, violent civilian deaths of all kinds are down 45 percent since December.

Second, the worst of the ethnic cleansing may be over. For years, Shiites and Sunnis have been purging each other from towns and neighborhoods. That ugly process may be nearing its completion, and stabilization may be possible. As Damien Cave and Stephen Farrell wrote in The Times last Sunday, “Iraq’s mixed neighborhoods are sliding toward extinction.”

Third, the tribal revolt against extremism is real and growing. Few anticipated it. Few predicted that it would spread from Anbar to Diyala to Salahaddin and beyond. But it has, and U.S. troops are essential to its success.

Fourth, U.S. commanders finally have a realistic definition of their mission. We’re not trying to determine the future shape of Iraq, Petraeus said yesterday. We’re just trying to ensure that Iraqi sects compete for power in less violent ways.

Fifth, American diplomats are no longer waiting for Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. Yesterday Crocker made some dubious assertions about Iraqi elites discovering the virtues of power-sharing. But the concrete parts of Crocker’s efforts do not require those virtues. They involve bulking up municipal governments and disbursing money from Baghdad.

What we have then, is a confluence of events, a series of processes that weren’t happening four months ago. Obviously, these processes are tenuous. But, given the consequences, it would be foolish to give up now. It would be foolish to weaken U.S. support for the sane sectarians just when they are striving to create a segregated yet inhabitable Iraq.

Shatha al-Musawi is one of those Iraqis unwilling to reconcile. In that way, she’s part of the problem. But she doesn’t want to die in some cataclysmic civil war. There may come a time when the U.S. can do nothing for her. But with all that is happening, that time is not now.

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A U.S. General’s Disquiet

By ROGER COHEN

Published: September 10, 2007

I first met Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli in Baghdad in early 2005. He was about to go home after a year’s assignment as the head of the First Cavalry Division, and he was dreading his return.

The dread related to the loss of 160 men and women from his division. A sign outside his headquarters read: “Complacency kills — don’t become a statistic.” Chiarelli knew he’d carry the cruel statistics back to Fort Hood, Tex., and face the bereaved.

“The hardest thing is going home and facing those parents and wives and loved ones,” he said, looking me in the eye with tears in his. Chiarelli, now the senior military assistant to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, is a thoughtful, decent officer who has absorbed his share of the military’s post-9/11 hurt.

The first two decades of his career were spent training to defeat the Soviet Ninth Combined Arms Army in Europe. This was symmetrical war, tough but clear. It had nothing of the elusive asymmetry of borderless modern warfare, counterinsurgency and counterterrorism.

Like the U.S. armed forces as a whole, Chiarelli has learned and adapted through two Iraq tours. Now he has gathered his thoughts in a forthcoming article for Military Review that makes devastating reading. The picture he paints is of a military and nation still at some remove from reality.

“Much of our government and interagency seem to be in a state of denial about the requirements needed to adapt to modern warfare,” Chiarelli says, adding that even today some believe “that all we have to do to win our modern wars is kill and capture enough of the enemy.”

Nonsense, Chiarelli argues in a piece written with Maj. Stephen Smith. Shadowy modern wars are less about overwhelming force than mastering instantaneous communication to win hearts and minds, adapting rapidly, flattening ponderous military hierarchies, understanding nation-building, and bringing to bear U.S. abilities in fields as diverse as engineering and agronomy.

“If we are unable to do a better job than our enemies of influencing the world’s perception, then even the most brilliant campaign plan will be unlikely to succeed,” he writes. Unreadiness for the real-time reactions of an interconnected globe has often allowed a video-camera-wielding enemy “to run circles around us, especially in the information environment.”

Further damage has been caused by some military leaders and service members who “have not internalized the moral and ethical codes that define who we are as an armed force and nation.”

Failure to meet this moral “imperative” hurts “our credibility as a fighting force, our mission and indeed our standing in the world.” Chiarelli adds that, “Too often, we are reluctant to admit mistakes.”

At a deeper level, beyond the damage of an Abu Ghraib, this general says the United States must address what is needed to conduct long campaigns for its security in places like Afghanistan.

“The U.S. as a nation — and indeed most of the U.S. government — has not gone to war since 9/11,” he observes. While the military is fighting, “the American people and most of the other institutions of national power have largely gone about their business.”

Rarely, if ever, has daily death in combat been accompanied on such a scale by the maxing out of credit cards at the mall. President Bush likes to call himself a “war president.” More accurately he has been the war-and-shop, conflict-and-home-equity-credit president.

Now those two worlds, eerily remote from each other, have come together in simultaneous Iraq and credit crises. While Bush considers lowering troop levels, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke considers lowering interest rates. The overseas and home fronts, the dropping and the shopping, are not unrelated after all.

Chiarelli has long suffered the disconnect. He saw his soldiers killed in flimsy Humvees because American industry was not geared up in World War II fashion to produce replacements. He has seen the military pushed to provide agricultural, governance and legal experts when they might come from the Departments of Agriculture, State and Justice.

“Our current problems raise the legitimate question of whether the U.S., or any democracy, can successfully prosecute an extended war without a true national commitment,” he writes.

Unless you believe the United States can simply withdraw from the world, a popular but naïve view, that essential strategic question needs addressing beyond the Iraq tactics before Congress this week. An answer is the minimum the now overstretched shopping nation owes the long overstretched fighting nation it seldom notices.

Foreclosure is grim. But what the war bereaved want and cannot find is closure.

•

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Where’s My Trickle?

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: September 10, 2007

Four years ago the Bush administration, exploiting the political bounce it got from the illusion of success in Iraq, pushed a cut in capital-gains and dividend taxes through Congress. It was an extremely elitist tax cut even by Bush-era standards: the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center says that more than half of the tax breaks went to Americans with incomes of more than $1 million a year.

Needless to say, administration economists produced various misleading statistics designed to convey the opposite impression, that the tax cut mainly went to ordinary, middle-class Americans. But they also insisted that the benefits of the tax cut would trickle down — that lower tax rates on the rich would do great things for the economy, helping everyone.

Well, Friday’s dismal jobs report showed that the Bush boom, such as it was, has run its course. And working Americans have a right to ask, “Where’s my trickle?”

It’s true, as the Bushies never tire of reminding us, that the U.S. economy has added eight million jobs since that 2003 tax cut. That sounds impressive, unless you happen to know that a good part of that gain was simply a recovery from large job losses earlier in the administration’s tenure — and that the United States added no fewer than 21 million jobs after Bill Clinton raised taxes on the rich, a move that had conservative pundits predicting economic disaster.

What’s really remarkable, however, is that four years of economic growth have produced essentially no gains for ordinary American workers.

Wages, adjusted for inflation, have stagnated: the real hourly earnings of nonsupervisory workers, the most widely used measure of how typical workers are faring, were no higher in July 2007 than they were in July 2003.

Meanwhile, benefits have deteriorated: the percentage of Americans receiving health insurance through employers, which plunged along with employment during the early years of the Bush administration, continued to decline even as the economy finally began creating some jobs.

And one of the few seeming bright spots of the Bush-era economy, rising homeownership, is now revealed as the result of a bubble inflated in part by financial flim-flam, which deceived both borrowers and investors.

Now you know why 66 percent of Americans rate economic conditions in this country as only fair or poor, and why Americans disapprove of President Bush’s handling of the economy almost as strongly as they disapprove of the job he is doing in general.

Yet the overall economy has grown at a reasonable pace over the past four years. Where did the economic growth go? The answer is that it went to the same economic elite that received the lion’s share of those tax cuts. Corporate profits rose 72 percent from the second quarter of 2003 to the second quarter of 2007. The real income of the richest 0.1 percent of Americans surged by 51 percent between 2003 and 2005, and although we don’t yet have the data for 2006, everything we know suggests that the income of the rich took another upward leap.

The absence of any gains for workers in the years since the 2003 tax cut is a pretty convincing refutation of trickle-down theory. So is the fact that the economy had a much more convincing boom after Bill Clinton raised taxes on top brackets. It turns out that when you cut taxes on the rich, the rich pay less taxes; when you raise taxes on the rich, they pay more taxes — end of story.

But it’s not just trickle-down that has been refuted: the whole idea that a rising tide raises all boats, that growth in the economy necessarily translates into gains for the great majority of Americans, is belied by the Bush-era experience.

As far as I can tell, America has never before experienced a disconnect between overall economic performance and the fortunes of workers as complete as that of the last four years.

America was a highly unequal society during the Gilded Age, but workers’ living standards nonetheless improved as the economy grew. Inequality rose rapidly during the Reagan years, but “Morning in America” was nonetheless bright enough to make most people cheerful, at least temporarily. Inequality continued to increase during the Clinton years, but wages rose, as did the availability of health insurance — and the great majority of Americans felt prosperous.

What we’ve had since 2003, however, is an economic expansion that looks good if not great by the usual measures, but which has passed most Americans by.

Guaranteed health insurance, which all of the leading Democratic contenders (but none of the Republicans) are promising, would eliminate one of the reasons for this disconnect. But it should be only the start of a broader range of policies — a new New Deal — designed to turn economic growth into something more than a spectator sport.

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Old School Inanity

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: September 9, 2007

WASHINGTON

Dying for a daddy, the Republicans turn their hungry eyes to Fred.

Fred Thompson acts tough on screen. And like Ronald Reagan, he has a distinctively masculine timbre and an extremely involved wife.

In his announcement video, Mr. Thompson stood in front of a desk in what looked like, duh, a law office, rumbling reassuringly that in this “dangerous time” he would deal with “the safety and security of the American people.”

As Michelle Cottle wrote in The New Republic, far more than puffy-coiffed Mitt and even more than tough guys Rudy and McCain, the burly, 6-foot-5, 65-year-old Mr. Thompson exudes “old-school masculinity.”

“In Thompson’s presence (live or on-screen),” she wrote, “one is viscerally, intimately reassured that he can handle any crisis that arises, be it a renegade Russian sub or a botched rape case.” But she wondered, was he really “enough of a man for this fight,” or just someone who meandered through life, creating the illusion of a masculine mystique?

Newsweek reported that some close to the Tennessean “question whether moving into the White House is truly Thompson’s life ambition — or more the dream of his second wife, Jeri, a former G.O.P. operative who is his unofficial campaign manager and top adviser.”

It took only two days of campaigning to answer the masculine mystique question. Fred gave an interview to CNN’s John King as his bus rolled through Iowa.

“To what degree should the American people hold the president of the United States responsible for the fact that bin Laden is still at large six years later?” Mr. King asked.

“I think bin Laden is more of a symbolism than he is anything else,” Mr. Thompson drawled. “Bin Laden being in the mountains of Afghanistan or — or Pakistan is not as important as the fact that there’s probably Al Qaeda operatives inside the United States of America.”

Usually, you can only get that kind of exquisitely inane logic from the president. Who does Fred think is sending operatives or inspiring them to come?

Fred is not Ronnie; he’s warmed-over W. President Reagan always knew who the foe was.

Fred followed W.’s nutty lead of marginalizing Osama on a day when TV showed another creepy, fruitcake manifesto by the terrorist, who was wearing what seemed to be a fake beard left over from Woody Allen’s “Bananas” and bloviating on everything from the subprime mortgage crisis to the “woes” of global warming to a Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory to the wisdom of Noam Chomsky to the unwisdom of Richard Perle to the heartwarming news that Muslims have lived with Jews and not “incinerated them” to the need to “continue to escalate the killing and fighting” against American kids in Iraq.

Can we please get someone in charge who will stop whining that Osama is hiding in “harsh terrain,” hunt him down and blast him forward to the Stone Age?

Fred must have missed the news of the administration’s intelligence estimate in July deeming Al Qaeda rejuvenated and “a persistent and evolving terrorist threat” to Americans.

Pressed by Mr. King on the fact that the Bush hawks went after Saddam instead of Osama, Fred continued to sputter: “You — you’re — you’re not served up these issues one at a time. They — they come when they come, and you have to — you have to deal with them.”

Democrats pounced. John Edwards issued a statement saying, “That bin Laden is still at large is Bush’s starkest failure.” John McCain and Rudy Giuliani also stressed the need to take out Osama.

Fred quickly caved on the matter of men in caves. At a rally later in the day he manned up. “Apparently Osama bin Laden has crawled out of his cave long enough to send another video and he is getting a lot of attention,” he said, “and ought to be caught and killed.”

He continued to insist that killing bin Laden would not end the terrorist threat, without realizing that this is true now because, by not catching bin Laden, W. allowed him to explode into an inspirational force for jihadists.

Republicans are especially eager for a papa after their disappointing experiences with Junior. After going through so many shattering disasters, W. seems more the inexperienced kid than ever.

In Australia, the president called Australian soldiers in Iraq “Austrian troops,” and got into a weird to-and-fro on TV with the South Korean president.

W. cooperated with Ropert Draper, the author of a new biography of him, yet the portrait was not flattering. Like a frat president sitting around with the brothers trying to figure out whether to party with Tri-Delts or Thetas, W. asked his advisers for a show of hands last year to see if Rummy should stay on. And W. is obsessed with getting the Secret Service to arrange his biking trails.

“What kind of male,” one of his advisers wondered aloud, “obsesses over his bike riding time, other than Lance Armstrong or a 12-year-old boy?”

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Giuliani’s Ground Zero Legacy

By GAIL COLLINS

Published: September 8, 2007

Rudy Giuliani is going to be at ground zero next week, taking part in ceremonies to remember the victims of Sept. 11. That was inevitable — the man has so identified himself with 9/11 that it’s amazing he hasn’t tried to patent it.

It’s also a terrible idea.

After the attacks, Giuliani did his best work in front of a microphone, speaking simply and honestly to the city and the nation. Ground zero, on the other hand, is the site of his worst failure.

That’s saying a great deal when you consider that this is the man whose crack plan for disaster response involved building the city emergency command center in one of the towers of the best-known terrorist targets in the nation.

But think about this: In the final months of his mayoralty, Giuliani went to ground zero 41 times, with whatever visiting statesman, movie star or sports hero who happened to be in town. He would walk them around the edge of the disaster zone and retell the story of 9/11. They could see ironworkers and crane operators dismantling the ruins and emergency workers looking for remains of the victims. Beneath those workers, the still-burning wreckage coughed up benzene and PCB’s and asbestos. The city had received many reports about the danger of that air. Looking down, Giuliani could see that very few people — except the health supervisors — were wearing protective gear. And he did nothing about it.

Now, some of those workers have gotten sick. Since thousands of them have filed lawsuits, it’s not likely that there will be any coming to terms with the numbers soon. The city has not even acknowledged that James Zadroga, a 34-year-old New York City police detective who died in January 2006, was killed by what his family said was more than 400 hours put in at the site. But a New Jersey coroner found that Zadroga died from a disease caused by his exposure to the ground zero dust. A widower, he left behind an orphaned 5-year-old daughter who is being raised by her grandparents.

Construction workers and emergency crews who raced to a stricken New York, eager to offer their services, are now wheezing and, in some cases, sitting immobilized in their living rooms, sucking oxygen from a tank. Their families have already paid a terrible price, and either the city or the federal government is likely to wind up with a financial bill equal to the moral one it already bears.

Workers exposed to toxic air can be protected by respirators. They’re uncomfortable and heavy, and people don’t like to wear them, even when it’s important to their health and safety. So the person in charge of a dangerous site needs to make it clear that only those with proper equipment can come anywhere near it. That’s what happened in Washington at the Pentagon, where there haven’t been health problems. Over in Staten Island, where workers were examining the rubble that the ground zero crews had excavated and loaded onto trucks, people were so well-protected that some of them looked like bit players in a space movie.

At ground zero, the priority was getting the site cleared as quickly as possible to show the world that New York was back to normal. The workers were left on their own. This happened on the watch of a mayor who had been eager to save us from our own imperfect impulses by bringing down the heavy hand of the law on every jaywalker, Chinese New Year firecracker-thrower or ferret owner in the city, not to mention the famous squeegee wielders.

Giuliani also set the worst possible example. While his own expeditions to ground zero were generally confined to the areas where the air was much less dangerous, his failure to ever, ever wear serious protection sent a very strong signal to the workers: Real Men Don’t Wear Respirators.

Sept. 11, 2001, gave Giuliani an extraordinary platform from which to educate the country about terrorism and public safety. Imagine how much help he could have been if he had talked about the mistakes made, the lessons learned. But he has never admitted error.

He has never acknowledged that it might have been better if he had focused less on getting the disaster site cleared away fast, and more on getting all the workers out in one piece. Recently, he had the temerity to claim that he’s a victim, too. “I was at ground zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers ... I was exposed to exactly the same things they were exposed to. So in that sense, I’m one of them,” he said last month during a campaign stop in Cincinnati.

Forty-odd tours of the edge of the site with beauty queens and foreign dignitaries is not exactly the same as months of round-the-clock work on top of a mass of burning plastics. Questioned later, Giuliani copped to the universal politician non-apology — a failure to communicate. Then he added “... but I was there often enough so that every health consequence that people have suffered, I could also be suffering.”

It was, you see, all about him.

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Escape From Las Vegas

By BOB HERBERT

Published: September 8, 2007

Amber is 19 years old and on Sunday she caught a flight out of Las Vegas’s McCarran International Airport and went home to a small town in Minnesota, not far from the Iowa border.

I’m rooting for her. She’s low on funds (“I’ve got my ticket, that’s about all,” she said), and she’s at a crucial turning point in her life.

The question is whether she will go off to college in Florida, and stick with it, which she insists is what she wants to do, or whether she will slip back into her life as a stripper and lap dancer, which is so often the start of the descent into the hell of prostitution.

“I hate the dancing,” she told me. “Sometimes I think I don’t have a strong enough mind for it, because of the way people treat me.”

I met Amber in Las Vegas last week. I was with Melissa Farley, a psychologist and researcher who was asked by the head of the U.S. State Department’s anti-trafficking office to do a study of the sex trade and its consequences in Nevada.

(She published the book-length study this week under the title, “Prostitution and Trafficking in Nevada: Making the Connections.”)

Amber’s story is far more typical than many Americans would like to acknowledge. There are many thousands of Ambers across the country, naïve kids from dysfunctional homes who are thrown willy-nilly into the adult, take-no-prisoners environment of the sex trade with no preparation, no guidance and no support at all.

They are the prey in the predatory world of pimps, johns and perverts that goes by the euphemism: adult entertainment.

Amber’s parents are divorced. Her mother, with whom she lives when she’s in Minnesota, is both physically and emotionally ill.

For awhile, she said, she had a stepfather who physically abused both her and her mother.

“He was on meth,” Amber said. “He’d hit us, scream at my mother. We’d make dinner and he’d go into a rage and throw away the whole dinner. So we’d go without dinner that night.”

Amber was both shy and rebellious and began dancing at a strip club in Minnesota on a dare. That was several months ago.

One afternoon a wrestling coach from her high school came in while she was dancing. “I was topless,” she said, “and I just wanted to crawl into a hole.”

She saved enough money to go to Vegas and tried out for a job there. “The manager told me, ‘You can’t work for me. You’re too big,’ ” she said. “So I didn’t eat for four days. All I had that whole time was one bowl of cereal and some water. It was horrible. I lost 10 pounds and went back. He made me take off all my clothes and dance for him. And then he said I was still too big. You have to be practically anorexic to dance for him.”

I asked why she continued dancing even though she hated it. Her face took on the puzzled look of a kid who had no good answer for not doing her homework.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not very logical, is it?”

She got a job at Sheri’s Cabaret on South Highland Avenue, which trumpets to all and sundry that its dancers are completely nude. The owners of the cabaret also own Sheri’s Ranch, a legal brothel about an hour’s ride outside of Vegas.

“It’s unbelievable the way the customers degrade you,” Amber said. “Their hands are all over you and they’re always trying to have sex with you.”

I asked if she’d ever been tempted to give in. She waited a long moment before answering.

“Sometimes I am,” she said. “Sometimes a guy will offer a lot of money, and I might think that could help with whatever I need for that month. But then I think, I just can’t do that. Nobody should violate my body like that.”

I asked Amber why she was willing to talk candidly and on the record about her experiences. She said, “I want people to know what it’s like for us. They think we’re just a bunch of lowlifes who like to get naked for money. We’re not. We go through a lot.”

When I asked her if she ever wanted to get married and raise a family, she was unequivocal.

“No” she said. “I don’t want any of that. I just feel if I get married the guy will change and show his true colors. I don’t want that to happen to me.”

She swears she’s going to school and will try to find work in the fashion industry.

I asked if she thought she would ever go back to dancing.

“Probably not,” she said.

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The New Social Contract

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: September 7, 2007

In 1942, Franklin Roosevelt imposed wage controls on American companies. Unable to lure workers with higher salaries, many employers began offering health insurance and other benefits. Then, in 1952, officials at the Internal Revenue Service ruled that these benefits wouldn’t count as taxable income.

And so, accidentally, the modern American health and pension system was born.

The system, in which families received social protections through their employers, worked well for decades. But now it’s coming apart at the seams. The proportion of people insured is falling. Rising health care costs burden employers. Workers can’t chase opportunities because they can’t bring their health insurance packages with them.

As Jason Bordoff points out in the current issue of Democracy, the old employer-based social contract is eroding and the central domestic policy debate of our time is over how to replace it.

Some liberals, believing that government should step in as employers withdraw, support a European-style, single-payer health care system. That would be fine if we were Europeans. But Americans, who are more individualistic and pluralistic, will not likely embrace a system that forces them to defer to the central government when it comes to making fundamental health care choices.

And so some distinctly American social contract is going to be required. Beneath all the fluff of the campaign season, that’s what the domestic side of the presidential race is about. In early, halting and half-formed ways, several candidates are offering broad visions of a new social contract and plans married to those visions.

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Few have thought about these matters as long or as well as Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation. Butler grew up in Shrewsbury, England, got a doctorate in American economic history in Scotland and became a U.S. citizen in 1996. As a result, he’s acutely aware of what makes American civilization unique, and which policies fit the national character.

As you read his work, you quickly see what priorities the new social contract should embrace. It should offer basic security, so Americans will feel comfortable enough to move around and seize new opportunities. It should demand reciprocity; if you contribute to society, you’re protected from catastrophes no one can control. It should foster personal responsibility, stimulating private savings and self-insurance among those who can afford it.

Finally, it should foster self-sufficiency; if people do slip and require government support, they should be induced to rebound and take care of themselves. If you are fortunate enough to be upper-middle class, you shouldn’t be rigging the game so you grab benefits that should properly be allocated to the needy.

Butler is no libertarian. He doesn’t believe individuals should just be given Health Savings Accounts and then sent off to shop for health care. Nor does he believe that the primary social relationship is between individuals and government.

He sees America as a thick society, and believes that unions, churches and community groups should be involved in health care and social support. He sees America as a decentralized society. The worst thing we could do is get the smartest people in a room and build one system from Washington. Instead, Washington should set parameters and states should be left free to innovate and compete.

He also sees society as a continuum between the dead, living and unborn. We shouldn’t disrupt the lives of those who are happy with the insurance they have. On the other hand, it’s immoral to shift the costs to our children and grandchildren. Long-term expenses should be calculated into every decision we make.

Butler’s specific health care plan is well-summarized at the Web site of the Hamilton Project. First, he would create tax-exempt “insurance exchanges.” These would be sponsored by trusted agents — unions, churches and other social groups. Organized like the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, they would offer menus of coverage choices and create diverse risk pools.

Second, employers who did not offer their own coverage would oversee payroll deductions and tax withholdings, but they would no longer have to sponsor programs or make choices for employees. Third, Congress would offer a health care tax credit to families making up to 200 percent of the poverty level, and would tighten benefits for the affluent. Fourth, states could come up with their own ways to regulate this system.

This isn’t the laissez-faire social contract of the 19th century. But neither is it the centralized, big bureaucracy contract of the 20th century. It’s a contract that envisions society as a dense but flexible web of social networks, the perfect vision for 21st-century America.

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The Least Bad Choice

By ROGER COHEN

Published: September 6, 2007

The way the United States leaves places matters. Having armed mujahedeen fighters to undo the Soviet empire in Afghanistan, America lost interest in a backwater. Payback came in the form of Afghan-trained holy warriors bent on the destruction of the West. That was careless.

It is important to be less careless in Baghdad. As reports on Iraq reach Congress this month, it’s worth considering that blow-back from an oil-rich country at the heart of the battle for the Middle East could be even more severe than the violent legacy of funding Islam to fight communism in Kabul.

Nothing can undo the American blunders in Iraq that turned the liberated into the lacerated. Hubris is bad, careless hubris worse. The fraying Bush administration still can’t work out who took the decision to disband the Iraqi Army in 2003; that’s grotesque. Nobody in the administration should sleep easy over its ethical responsibility for calamitous mistakes.

But what we did matters less today than how we leave Iraq. It’s far easier to score backward-looking political points against Bush than serve the forward-looking interests of 27 million Iraqis. Still, the latter is more important than the former.

As Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies has written: “It seems likely that the U.S. will ultimately be judged far more by how it leaves Iraq, and what it leaves behind, than how it entered Iraq.” America’s future ability to use its hard and soft power “depends on what the U.S. does now.”

Exit timing and U.S. election maneuvering stand at the center of this month’s Iraq drama, with testimony due next week from Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, and several reports coming in. One, from the Government Accountability Office, has already given the Bush-Petraeus surge a failing grade: a feckless Iraqi government, unshared oil money, untamed militias and undiminished violence.

Not fair, Petraeus and Bush will argue, using the new catchphrase “bottom-up progress” to highlight headway in Sunni-dominated provinces like Anbar through cash-cemented alliances with local sheiks who have been persuaded to turn again to Al Qaeda.

Bush will also make a virtue of necessity on U.S. troop levels. The post-escalation presence of 160,000 can’t be maintained past next spring unless tours of duty are extended beyond 15 months. So some drawdown will start next year, with improved Iraqi conditions claimed to obscure domestic political realities.

Both views of Iraq are right: the situation is awful and, four years on, cleverer U.S. commanders are winning a few. The enduring horror counsels a swift exit. The positive shifts bolster a catchphrase Cordesman found doing the rounds in Baghdad: “strategic patience.”

I side with the latter, provided the patience is indeed strategic and not just a means to kick the mess into the post-Bush world. That strategy should involve the following elements.

First, continue bolstering Sunni power and allegiance through aggressive use of aid and local security deals. A rough balance of power between the main Iraqi communities — Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish — is in the interests of Iraqi stability.

Second, while accepting that Iraq’s central government will at best be a respectable fig leaf and that strong provincial authorities are essential, pressure the weak Shia-dominated coalition to share oil money, power and space. Stronger American-backed Sunnis and fewer U.S. troops may help focus Shia minds.

Third, establish, with United Nations help, a regional framework for talks between the neighboring powers. Use this to reach out to Iran. Tehran wants America to fail in Iraq but not to the extent that Shia gains are reversed. That provides some leverage.

Fourth, recognize that all Middle Eastern problems — Israel-Palestine, Lebanon, Iran and Iraq — are tied and that the U.S. needs a coherent diplomatic strategy for containing jihadist fanaticism through ideological persuasion. An uncritical embrace of Israel does not help. And whatever happened to Karen Hughes, our invisible public diplomacy czar?

Fifth, protect the countless Iraqis who have helped America and are vulnerable. The U.S. urged Iraqis to rise up in 1991 only to abandon them to slaughter. Never again should be our policy.

The above may just avert the worst: a regional war in which a disintegrating country’s neighbors are drawn into carnage that makes current bloodshed pale.

Some see Iraq as the ultimate demonstration of the demise of American power. Fast withdrawal is in that view’s logic. But if you believe, as I do, that global stability still hinges on the credibility of that power, “strategic patience” is the least bad of the terrible options Bush’s now amnesia-clouded incompetence has bequeathed.

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You are invited to comment at my blog: www.iht.com/passages.

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