Columnist.
WASHINGTON -- As I was talking recently with the founder of a large American corporation, the conversation turned (inevitably) to health care reform. His employees in their 20s, on average, cost the company about $1,500 a year in health bills. Those in their 50s cost at least 10 times more. The effect of proposed health care reform -- which limits the ability of insurers to charge higher premiums for older adults -- would be, he said, a large shift of America's health care burden to the younger generation. This is not an unintended consequence of reform; it is the whole purpose. It is not a side effect; it is the main funding mechanism.
WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama's Nobel Prize for climate change -- the Nobel committee credited him with "creating a new climate" -- was useful in at least one way. It exposed the truest of the true believers -- those who believe that the tonic of Obama's presence deserves the Nobel Prize for medicine, that his magnetism merits the Nobel Prize for physics, that his charisma demands the Nobel Prize for personal chemistry. Even Obama could not claim that he personally deserved the award. "I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments," he said -- which was simple realism, not false humility.
WASHINGTON -- Creigh Deeds, the Democrat running for governor of Virginia, may not be much of a candidate, but he has a future as a political commentator. During a recent interview, Deeds explained his trouble gaining political traction: "Frankly, a lot of what's going on in Washington has made it very tough. We had a very tough August because people were just uncomfortable with the spending; they were uncomfortable with a lot of what was going on, a lot of the noise that was coming out of Washington, D.C."
WASHINGTON -- Mel Martinez's recent resignation from the United States Senate was for personal and family reasons. But the departure of the Republican Party's most visible Hispanic leader crackles with political symbolism. Martinez does not consider himself disillusioned, but he is "frustrated."
WASHINGTON -- On June 7, 1981, Israeli F-15s and F-16s took off for the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq, after the pilots were emotionally briefed that "The alternative is our destruction." In fact, Prime Minister Menachem Begin had no idea if the raid would stop the Iraqi nuclear program or merely slow it. But slowing it was reason enough. Since the George W. Bush administration, the American military has assessed that an attack against Iran's nuclear facilities would only delay the development of its program. "The reality is," Defense Secretary Robert Gates said recently, "there is no military option that does anything more than buy time. The estimates are one to three years or so."
WASHINGTON -- As President Obama approaches a decision on the way forward in Afghanistan -- the most historically consequential choice of his presidency so far -- military leaders seem impressed with his decision-making process. During the next few weeks, Obama has scheduled considerable time to be personally involved in discussions. In the White House economy, presidential attention is the most valued commodity -- coveted, hoarded and stolen. Obama's engaged, deliberate style has fans in the military. But there are also risks when arguments about military strategy are too public for too long. An enemy can try to influence the outcome of a debate with attacks and propaganda. Al-Qaeda's most recent video warns Europeans that they are about to be abandoned: "It won't be long until the dust of war clears in Afghanistan, at which point you won't find a trace of any American, because they will have gone away far beyond the Atlantic."
"It is my deeply held belief," Barack Obama told the United Nations General Assembly, that "in the year 2009 -- more than at any point in human history -- the interests of nations and peoples are shared." That is, of course, the year Obama became president, and he wasn't shy about referring in his second paragraph to "the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world," though he assured us they "are not about me."
WASHINGTON -- The transformation of Germany in the 1920s and '30s from the nation of Goethe to the nation of Goebbels is a specter that haunts, or should haunt, every nation. The triumph of Nazi propaganda in this period is the subject of a remarkable exhibit at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (where I serve on the governing board). Germany in the 1920s was a land of broad literacy and diverse politics, boasting 146 daily newspapers in Berlin alone. Yet in the course of a few years, a fringe party was able to define a national community by scapegoating internal enemies, elevate a single, Messianic leader, and keep the public docile with hatred while the state committed unprecedented crimes. The adaptive use of new technology was central to this achievement. The Nazis pioneered voice amplification at rallies, the distribution of recorded speeches, and the sophisticated targeting of poster art toward groups and regions.
WASHINGTON -- Two Octobers ago, the Dalai Lama received the Congressional Gold Medal, one of America's highest civilian honors, in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. Speaker Nancy Pelosi talked of a "special relationship between His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the United States." Said Sen. Mitch McConnell: "We have reached out in solidarity to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan people, and the Chinese government needs to know that we will continue to do so." President George W. Bush urged Chinese leaders "to welcome the Dalai Lama to China. They will find this good man to be a man of peace and reconciliation." This October, on a scheduled visit to the United States, the Dalai Lama will not be welcomed at the White House. Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett was recently dispatched to Dharamsala -- the Dalai Lama's place of exile in northern India -- to gently deliver the message. The Tibetans took the news, as usual, nonviolently. "A lot of nations are adopting a policy of appeasement (toward China)," observed Samdhong Rinpoche, prime minister of Tibet's government-in-exile. "I understand why Obama is not meeting with the Dalai Lama before his Chinese trip. It is common sense. Obama should not irritate the Chinese leadership."
CHICAGO -- The streets of West Garfield Park provide a distant vista of the Sears Tower and closer views of corner drug dealers, abandoned buildings still defended by barbed wire and trash pickers pushing shopping carts on their slow rounds. It is a place, in T.S. Eliot's image, of "rats' feet over broken glass." It is also one of the two or three Chicago neighborhoods receiving the most ex-offenders back from prison. Their welcome is uncertain, but their success is essential. America's incarceration rate -- massively higher than other democracies and the highest in our history -- has been arguably effective in reducing crime. It also means that about 650,000 men and women return from state and federal prisons to communities each year, a number larger than the active-duty U.S. Army.
WASHINGTON -- There is a segment of society for whom traditional family values are increasingly irrelevant, and for whom spring-break sexual liberationism is increasingly costly: men and women in their 20s. This is the period of life in which society's most important social commitments take shape -- commitments that produce stability, happiness and children. But the facts of life for twentysomethings are challenging. Puberty -- mainly because of improved health -- comes steadily sooner. Sexual activity kicks off earlier. But the average age at which people marry has grown later; it is now about 26 for females, 28 for males.
WASHINGTON -- In 1950, Lionel Trilling could write, "In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition." In 1980, as the Reagan revolution was starting, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan concluded, "Of a sudden, the GOP has become the party of ideas." Where now is the intellectual center of gravity -- the thrill of innovation, the ideological momentum -- in American politics? Not in the party of Obama.
WASHINGTON -- President Jimmy Carter once sent a note to an adviser extolling the importance of crisis to leadership. "When a president has authority to act unilaterally (as in a crisis), his leadership can be exerted. Otherwise, compromise, delay and confusion are more likely. It's our system. I like it." Politicians, like the rest of us, are often victims of their wishes. Carter was eventually smacked by the waves of crisis he sought to ride. But encouraging a sense of crisis is a traditional tool of executive leadership. And using a joint session of Congress to address a single domestic issue is the most dramatic expression of this approach.
WASHINGTON -- We are seeing the stirrings of a cross-ideological revolt against American military involvement in Afghanistan. On the right, some who accepted the Cold War as a great moral cause view the war on terror as a bother -- even as a dangerous excuse for global social engineering. Such tinkering, the argument goes, is particularly doomed in Afghanistan, brimming with warlords both primitive and invincible. And because Afghanistan is now Barack Obama's war, no partisan motive remains to support it.
WASHINGTON -- The incompetence of President Obama's health care reform effort is undeniable, and unexpected. A supremely competent candidate and campaign usually indicate a talent for governing and communications. But on central issues such as the public option and financing methods, the Obama team has been wavering and contradictory. The president's summer recess legislative deadline was hasty and unserious. (As Mississippi Republican Gov. Haley Barbour points out, Obama spent more time picking out the White House dog than he permitted for comprehensive health reform.) Obama allowed the House to lead with a bill that is ruinously expensive, financed by a massive accounting trick and dismissed by a number of Democrats in the Senate. And talk of imposing "go-it-alone," partisan legislation now seems desperate.
