Dumb Coups

Yesterday’s Boehner-Bachmann rally outside the Capitol was largely a rehash of the teabagger bacchanal back on September 12th. A large, angry, incomprehensibly white crowd toting signs portraying the president as witch-doctor, nazi, communist, and African Muslim marched around the building where, for some three months now, the Congress has been engaged in a bitter battle over whether and how to do something about the healthcare problem in this country. For added flavor, this time around there could be seen in the crowd such images as a machine gun pointed at the president’s head and a photograph of burnt Jewish corpses piled high at the Dachau extermination camp, clearly intimating that “Obamacare” would produce similar results.

Starting with the colorful town hall meetings at the end of the summer and carrying through to the rally yesterday, what began as a serious debate on the nuts and bolts of health care reform – and perhaps also the necessity of health care reform – has turned into an ugly slugfest between the radical right wing of the Republican party and…(you complete the sentence). The point is, in the past months it has become difficult for even the most attentive minds to nail down exactly who or what the teabagging movement is polemicizing against; President Obama, the Democrats, the working poor, the uninsured, illegal immigrants, Congress, government? Surely these few would have to be included on the list of entities that teabaggers identify as their targets, but to isolate one above the others seems a task for the foolhardy.

It is an understatement to say that the opposition to healthcare reform has failed to find a focal point in the matrix of public reason. Instead, perhaps for reasons both intentional and unconscious, vocal rightists have used the few vaguely progressive policy proposals of the Obama administration as a springboard to launch a furious national outcry over latent right-wing fears about social justice, property redistribution, race relations, and the role of government; in short, the very issues that will shape the discourse of any functional 21st century democracy. However, what began in late summer as a quasi-populist movement of dissenters has now taken into its ranks prominent members of the government, and the civic and historical ramifications of that are truly frightening. With usual hubris, Michele Bachmann announced to the crowd of demonstrators, some of whom had traveled all through the night to be there, that she had called this “press conference” and doggonit they had shown up! Behind her stood but a few congressional compadres who seemed ready at a moment’s notice to jettison their suits and ties and jump into the crowd.

Never mind the ensuing spectacle, which included John Boehner attributing a passage from the Declaration of Independence to the Preamble to the Constitution, or Bachmann’s insinuation that the Democrats’ bill was bad because it was too long to read, or the fiendish chanting of “Kill this Bill,” or Eric Cantor’s Bobby Jindal impression. By now we know that the cardinal values of the Republican leadership include prideful ignorance, stupidity and charmlessness. What we were still uncertain of, but got an answer to yesterday I believe, was the question of whether members of the U.S. Congress would condone an overtly racist people’s campaign that has refused to make a substantive contribution to the public debate and regards government itself as a pest.

Like another Republican woman with inviting looks and an irritating north country drawl, Ms. Bachmann has become a poster girl for a movement urgently trying to strip down government, and by extension, the body she works for. There is something shallow and promiscuous about this, not just from Bachmann’s point of view but from the broader point of view of the movement she represents.

Given the troubles this country now faces – severe economic insecurity, two seemingly endless wars in the Middle East, massive debt – it is perfectly reasonable to have a debate about health care; about whether a public option is the best formula, about how to finance it, about whether to tackle the problem now, about whether we should have done it twenty years ago. But the Republican party has given into its radical wing’s appetite for the quick, the carnal and the primitive and in doing so it has arrogantly brushed aside the chance to take part in this important discussion. That is behavior unbecoming of a political party in this country.

There is another point worth noting. Contrary to the tea party doctrine, a real difference exists between limited government and lack of government. The former is rooted in the still evolving philosophies of libertarianism, political conservatism and European liberalism, all of which are legitimate, if perhaps problematic, theories of governance. But there is the point – they are theories of governance, not justifications for non-government. The suggestion that government is the problem, which emanates from Reagan neoconservatism, may be in part just rhetoric aimed at promoting a kind of radical libertarianism. That is fine. But the suggestion that government is unnecessary, or that government ought not do anything, which has been gaining support among the tea party crowd, moves categorically past even the most ambitious neoliberal prescriptions to an implicit denial of the necessity of the political union that is the United States.

I would be the first person to tell you about the importance of dissent and public demonstration in a democracy. I have myself engaged in it, and like most reasonable people, I am not offended by people with whom I disagree engaging in it. It is part of the necessary and inevitable back and forth – the modus vivendi, as Rawls called it – of democratic life. But, when dissent summarily dismisses content-based issues in favor of railing against government, and invokes racist, classist, and historically inappropriate imagery towards that end, then it fails to be dissent. Of course, there is something terribly awry in all of this: an engaged, dissenting Republican party would likely be a boon to the overall health care debate. Instead all we have is Boehner-Bachmann, and thank God it’s pronounced “BAY-ner” or else some Freudian analysis might really be in order.

Election Wrap-up

The stir in GOP ranks began some time late last week in Virginia, New Jersey and Washington when polls first emerged decisively showing McDonnell, Christie and Doug Hoffman with strong numbers in their respective races. Last night, in the hours leading up to poll closings, Republican talking heads seemed barely able to contain themselves. Speaking on Fox News well before the New Jersey polls closed, the ever-prognosticating Karl Rove fantasized that the Republican momentum swing of this election cycle would be the final straw to break the back of national health care reform.

The reasoning was simple. Obama carried Virginia by six points a year ago, yet now that state had chosen a Reagan conservative governor by a margin of almost 60 to 40. In New Jersey – a deep blue state – the scruffy ex-Goldman governor was likely to be unseated by a working-class conservative from Newark. In upstate New York, ironically most notable of all, a special election which had seen its share of drama in the final run-up, including Dede Scozzafava’s surprise drop-out and celebrity campaign visits from GOP “rising stars” Sarah Palin and Tim Pawlenty (and fading star Fred Thompson), was being talked about as a referendum on Barack Obama’s agenda (and of course the Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman was expected to win there as well). In the words of many-a-pundit on the right, the election results would reveal a clear consensus on the president’s agenda, and that consensus was, by all accounts, expected to be quite negative.

Real life is always messier than we want it to be, though, even if we’re Karl Rove. As it happened, McDonnell won big in Virginia as expected, Christie won by a comfortable margin in New Jersey, and Hoffman got bounced in the New York 23rd by Bill Owens. John Garamendi, the Democrat on the ticket in the California 10th, won by an even bigger margin than Owens. So for the time being, Republican jubilation has had to restrict itself to the gubernatorial gains in Virginia and New Jersey, while trying to look past the fact that the House Democratic caucus probably picked up two votes for a public option health bill.

Make no mistake, Virginia and New Jersey were significant contests and their results are not meaningless. In New Jersey, voters turned away from an unpopular Democrat with a troubled history in big finance to a born-and-bred Jerseyan with conventional conservative views on taxes and social issues. In Virginia, Bob McDonnell helped himself by focusing his campaign on matters of interest to the key suburban voting block in the northeastern part of the state – taxes, transportation, public safety and the like.

It is manifestly true that economic concerns worked to the advantage of both men elected last night. Economic catastrophe is no time to be a reelection-seeking incumbent or a member of the ruling party; just ask John McCain. Last night Jon Corzine learned that enduring truth the hard way. In Virginia, there was no incumbent in the race since sitting Governor and DNC Chairman Tim Kaine did not seek reelection. But McDonnell, to his credit, ran an ingenious campaign based on the simple principle that rural Republican voters will vote for the conservative they see and suburban moderates will vote for the pragmatist they hear. In Arlington and Alexandria, moderates and conservative Democrats heard a fiscal pragmatist as concerned with their pocketbooks and bank accounts as they were. The strategy was one built for success, and success was made that much easier by the stunning ineptitude of the Creigh Deeds operation.

In essence, the two GOP gubernatorial victories should rightly be attributed to solid campaigning and ability to capitalize on the salient issue of the day. This was not a triumph for cardinal conservative values, or a conservative rebellion, or a Republican Renaissance (as party leaders Eric Cantor, John Boehner and Michael Steele, respectively, have crooned), as much as an instance of organized and focused political play by a party reeling for life. If Republicans want to sing their paeans and wave high their portents, they ought to first determine how to explain away the loss taken by Hoffman in his hard-line conservative upstate New York district notwithstanding the star-studded cast of 2012 GOP hopefuls brought in to boost him across the finish line.

On that note, Republicans also need to explain how, with respect to the health care fight, two gubernatorial victories substantively outweigh the addition of two progressive Democrats to the House of Representatives. Before the states ever get their hands on it, the House is going to play a central role in sculpting the health legislation that gets presented to the president, and the Democrats’ numbers in the House were improved, if slightly, last night. Besides, even though it is a settled fact that party-line voting is generally more erratic in local and state elections than in national elections, Virginia and New Jersey polls show that neither Barack Obama nor health care reform figured prominently into most voters’ thinking. That, compounded by the appallingly poor turnout of young people, should at least give party leaders a moment of pause in their rush to celebration.

Local politics is altogether a tricky game, and Virginia is a prime example. In 2001, just nine months after President Bush took office, Democrat Mark Warner was elected to the Senate in Virginia. If the election of Christie and McDonnell is a rebuke of President Obama’s policies, as many on the right suppose, then was Warner’s election a rebuke of President Bush just two months after 9/11? I suppose not.

The more plausible analysis for last night’s results than the one offered by the Republicans is that local elections are idiosyncratic. Money and personality play big roles (ask Bloomberg), economic fears play even bigger roles, and beyond that it becomes very hard to glean real, clear messages from the outcomes. In any case, affluent Jerseyans and Virginians can now look forward to tax breaks and state spending cuts, and we will all have a chance to gauge the effectiveness of that highly-touted and long-awaited conservative gameplan for an ailing economy.

For more commentary on the elections, click here.

The Trouble with Medicare

If you lived during the 1960s, or the Reagan 80s, or the Republican insurrection of the 1990s, then you know how bizarre it is that the people who are now lying down on the tracks for Medicare are the Republicans. Ronald Reagan, who is openly revered by current party leaders as the ideological godfather, made a thirty-year career out of fighting Medicare and brought notable characters along with him. In 1961, while serving as spokesman for General Electric and before his real entrance into politics, Reagan cut a spoken-word track entitled, “Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine.” In that gentle masculine voice that rocked a generation, he warned that if we didn’t kill Medicare, we would “spend our sunset years telling our children and grandchildren what it once was like in America when men were free.”

George H.W. Bush and Barry Goldwater chimed in with similar comments in 1964, the year before Lyndon Johnson signed the 1965 Social Security Act – and thereby Medicare – into law. Bush called it “socialized medicine” and Goldwater “rationing.” Sound familiar? Nearly twenty-five years later, at the end of Reagan’s presidency, Republicans were still lambasting Medicare. The fervor continued well into the 1990s when presidential contender Bob Dole proudly declared during the 1996 campaign that he had been one of the 12 congressmen to vote against Medicare in 1965.

It is fair to say that prior to President Obama’s taking office, the Republican resentment of Medicare ran long and deep. It lasted nearly 50 years, from the very inception of a plan for government-run, single-payer health coverage in the early 1960s to the Obama administration’s call for broad reform earlier this year. And criticisms against it were marked by every rhetorical method ranging from Reagan’s suave dishonesty to Bush and Goldwater’s shallow Soviet allusions, Gingrich’s hubris and Dole’s resume-thumping.

Now, however, Medicare is the Alamo for congressional Republicans. As evidenced by the disastrous hearings in the Senate Finance Committee last week, in which two public option amendments proposed by Democratic Senators Chuck Schumer and Jay Rockefeller were struck down, Republicans and even conservative Democrats are feeling the pinch to vote against anything that might conceivably pose a threat to Medicare beneficiaries. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), when pressed by Schumer over the fact that Medicare is government-run and yet virtually all Republicans support it, responded that Medicare is wonderful but “the government is a predator.” This stance, which is shared by the majority of Grassley’s party colleagues, probably has Reagan rolling in his grave.

How did this change happen, and why? For one thing, Medicare has been a boon to senior citizens in America. Despite its financial woes, which ought to be addressed, and its need for closer auditing of claims to root out fraud, Medicare has provided older people with very good medical coverage and advantages at a relatively low cost when compared to so-called “market insurance” options. This is a fact that Republicans would like us to quickly look past. While they openly acknowledge the singular value of Medicare, they know it hurts their position for opponents to be pointing out that it is run by the government. In this tightrope act, the incoherence of the Republican position becomes plain as day; they want to preserve free-market health insurance and Medicare – a government-run, single-payer health care system that is more public than the “public option” – at the expense of any reform that would expand coverage.

It doesn’t make any sense to want to protect a government coverage system from another government coverage system. It makes even less sense for the party of Reagan to be in this predicament at all. But there are three important factors that help to explain why, contrary to all reason, the Republicans have sided with Medicare in this debate.

The first is the geriatric lobby – old people on Medicare and loving it. This sounds like a joke but it is not. Old people in this country tend to have an above-average amount of free time in which to take advantage of their Medicare benefits, organize to discuss among themselves the importance of their medical care, and drown their congressmen and senators in phone calls and petitions. Putting politics aside, Medicare has – and has always had – a pretty favorable rating among the people who are on it. Obama’s plan to reform health care by cutting costs from Medicare (something, ahem, Reagan would do), has seniors scared that cut costs will translate into cut services, which is a definite possibility. There would, of course, not be any death panels or secret euthanasia program, as some have suggested, but there might be a little less care for Medicare beneficiaries. What is ironic, is that the sincere apprehension about this possibility is an instructive metric of just how much people who are on Medicare like it. Imagine that.

The second factor is the insurance lobby, which stands to see a lot of its profits lost if the government institutes a viable public option to supplement its current programs. The media has been rather complacent about reporting on the fact that many members of Congress who have played active roles in the health care debate thus far receive – or have received – generous campaign contributions from insurance companies. While it is true that members of both parties have received these contributions, the Republican recipients have seemed generally more swayed by them. Thus, it is not hard to see how these recipients would use their influence on Capitol Hill to fight for the interests that keep their campaigns financially afloat. The fight is hardly a fair one; some reports say there are six insurance lobbyists in Washington for every member of Congress. Insofar as the insurance industry has converted certain members of Congress into their legislative mouthpieces, the Republican talk of the importance of Medicare may really just be a way of hiding from the American people what’s really going on: a massive offensive by the health insurance companies to quash any government reform package that will force them to reduce their rates.

The third factor, and probably the most crucial, is that the Republicans don’t want to see Obama succeed. LBJ signed Medicare into law and gained immortality (we’re still talking about him, aren’t we?). A second major wave of successful health care reform by a democratic president would be more of a loss for the Republicans than a victory for the Democrats. That is because it would raise serious questions about the Republican Party’s commitment to the public good, which is already in some doubt. This is a high-stakes game for the Republicans, though, because, in their characteristic approach, they have not come to the table with any proposal of their own. All they have offered is hyperbole and groundless rejection. If Obama and the Democrats are able to overcome this obstacle and pass a successful public option anyway, it will make the Republicans look old, stubborn, ineffectual, and lazy.

Whatever the case, conservatives ought to have a long, hard think about this issue before resorting to the Cold War catchphrases. Times have changed, the Reagan paradigm is obsolete, and the value of Medicare has been widely acknowledged. Libertarians who fear too much government intrusion should recall the founding words of their faith – “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” – each of which bears a direct link to notions of choice and well-being. Health may be a matter of chance, but health care is a right, and that is the unequivocal consensus in the western, industrialized, democratic world. When this country finally acknowledges that via the passage of strong legislation, our children may look back on 2009 or 2010 the way our parents look back on 1965.

Bipartisanshit

It was not so long ago that the Republicans were the party of “Yes We Can!” Under President Bush, Republicans enacted tax cuts for the rich, waged two wars in the Middle East, set up a vast domestic wiretapping scheme, broadly transformed the legal underpinnings of the criminal justice system, made torture a part of national policy, and began a yet-unresolved detention program at Guantanamo Bay. Of course, liberals remember the Bush administration more for what it didn’t do: health care, climate legislation, hurricane relief, diplomacy, following the law, and so on. Still, the Republican approach to governance under Bush turned mainly on principles of substantive action, and the party base reflects on those eight years as the halcyon days of conservative policymaking.

President Obama, who draws from a much deeper well of intelligence, charisma and good intentions than Mr. Bush, has so far enjoyed few, if any, of the happy fruits of the “Yes We Can!” attitude during his nine months in office, and this in itself seems like an injustice. The liberal apology stemming from this observation characterizes Obama in the following way: he is like the man who comes home from work on a Friday looking forward to having a wine mixer with his friends, and when he walks in his house he discovers it has been vandalized and wrecked. Why, one friend asks upon arriving, haven’t you gotten anything done in here for the party? I’m just lucky to be where I am, Obama replies.

This analogy has elements of truth. What is even more discouraging than what it plainly suggests is that the collective cost of funneling resources away from the country to the rich and the corporate for eight years cannot and will not be fully accounted for during Obama’s presidency. But the analogy is an apology nonetheless, and fails to indicate the ways in which Obama should change his approach to governance immediately. There is a fair amount, unfortunately, that is over his head – the $4.6 trillion cost of the Bush tax cuts to the American people between now and 2013, the massive contraction of the job market, and pervasive corporate greed, to name a few. But there is also quite a lot he can do, and there are a couple important things he could get done by Christmas.

A successful final quarter of the year will depend in great part on Mr. Obama fully reworking his stance on bipartisanship. During the campaign, we heard an unprecedented theory from the man yet untainted by the Washington cesspool that the problems in government could mostly be traced back to partisan bickering. We tended to react positively to his proposal to usher in a new era of bipartisan collaboration, even if it made us raise an eyebrow. In practice, this theory has shown itself to be overly academic and idealistic and not at all conducive to progress. Obama the scholar sometimes gets in the way of Obama the leader, and this is not so hard to understand. He is smart, well-educated, and at home in the halls of ivy-league institutions where a great deal more importance is placed on the philosophy of government than on the government of government.

Bipartisanship is one of those ideas that emanated from the primordial stew of the American experiment when our forefathers were brainstorming what government ought to be. It is still part of an interesting argument. But no one really advocates bipartisanship in real life. Sure, it looks good on senatorial resumes and sounds good in stump speeches, but at the end of the day, liberals, conservatives and moderates alike don’t want bipartisanship, they want policy. Bush supporters didn’t want that administration to cozy up with congressional democrats, they wanted Bush policy, and they got it. Now it’s Obama and the democrats’ turn.

A deeper case for the abandonment of bipartisanship can be found in the fact that several of the mini-institutions in our Congress have starkly anti-democratic structures. Take, for example, the Senate Finance Committee, which is stocked by conservative Republicans, conservative Democrats, and Chuck Schumer and Jay Rockefeller. This committee of twenty-three senators voted down two very reasonable amendments to the health care bill written by the latter two men this week. The debate now moves to the full Senate, leaving us all to wonder whether a health proposal supported by 65% of the country will not again be defeated by some spurious sub-majority of Republicans from states like Idaho, Wyoming and North Dakota.

The point is this: if Obama is hoping to achieve bipartisanship with intransigent, rural Republican members of Congress who craftily group themselves together onto key committees, he is doing a service neither to the significant majority of Americans who support his proposed legislation nor to the philosophical idea of democracy. This is not to say that the president should forthwith cease all negotiations with his opponents, but it may very well be time to dispose with those who refuse to do anything but cross their arms and stamp their feet.

In power, the Republicans have shown themselves to be organized and effective actors. Out of power, they have shown themselves to be organized and effective roadblocks. Their utter unwillingness since Obama took office to come to the table with any sort of proposal – whether on health care, global warming, the economy, or anything else – is practically undemocratic. But this too is an excuse for the Obama administration. The task now for the president is to get a little angry, stop worrying about the Republicans, and push through on public-option health care (at the very least) before we open our post-recession stocking knickknacks on December 25th.

Hands Off My Freedoms

One of my great sources of inspiration and education on current events, Matthew Yglesias, had this to say about the tea parties (and the larger conservative unrest) today:

Jonah Goldberg, it seems to me, was the real pioneer in this brand of hypocrisy-driven hysteria—holding captives in secret where they’re hung by shackles from the ceiling and occasionally beaten to death is fine by him, but efforts to curb smoking are “liberal fascism.” And now this line of thinking seems to have completely taken over the right.

The real question, in my mind, centers around the process by which an individual constructs a political belief system for himself. If one thinks of himself as a hardline conservative, for instance, then in the American political scheme there are certain values and value judgments that comprise that system of thought. Though such values might be anathema to me or someone else, the argument that some individual came to embrace those values without conducting some rational thought process has no merit. It is reasonable to expect, that is, that two equally rational people can arrive at a totally different set of personal-civic values by way of the same – or similar – process of thought and question.

But a rationally constructed set of beliefs demands, to some extent, the greatest possible elimination of fallacies and hypocrisies within that set. In fact, one might even say that the continual act of removing fallacious and hypocritical ideas constitutes an essential part of the formation of one’s belief system. Further, the impulse to recognize and discard problematic beliefs is one of the capacities that makes a person rational. Is it not?

Now, it is hard not to see the hypocrisy in approving eight years of lawbreaking and invasion under Bush and calling healthcare reform “socialism.” We must, I think, accept that all people who fail to recognize this hypocrisy are not really being rational in any normal sense of the term.

At once, I find the failure to identify this hypocrisy very hard to believe and very obvious. One the one hand, I think it requires impressive mental gymnastics to resent government when it undertakes to improve society and to support government when it imprisons innocents, wire-taps, tortures, wages war and so on. On the other hand, a growing contingent within the Republican party has shown itself in recent months to be less interested in the principles of social justice and rational thought than in exclamatory half-arguments that all lead back to the same admission: the only purposes of government of which it approves are illegal or, at least, unethical.

That is, the sole purpose for which such conservatives would like the government to exist is to not take freedoms x, y and z away from states and themselves. If that were a workable state of affairs, then we would not have a government, since we never require the presence of an institution if we have already excused it from performing its stated function; we don’t need a chauffeur to not drive us anywhere.

In any democratic conception, government exists because there are functions we require of it. A political belief system that accepts only the illegitimate functions that government can perform, and categorically denies the value of those our society has traditionally required of it, is, in strict terms, not a proponent of the continued existence of government whatsoever. Such a view, in my mind, does not have any place in the American political discourse.

(My) Review of (500) Days of Summer

Most of you are going to laugh at this, and rightly so perhaps, but the first time I saw Joseph Gordon-Levitt (the star of 500 Days of Summer) and realized his acting talent, was in the 1994 film, Angels in the Outfield. The film won few critical accolades, to put it mildly, but at the age of eight or nine, I thought it was great and watched it at least a dozen times. In it, Gordon-Levitt plays a young boy in foster care who prays that the California Angels will win the pennant after his father, a jaded, leather-clad biker and family-evader played by Dermot Mulroney, tells him that the only way he’ll have a family is if the hapless hometown baseball team accomplishes that feat. Mulroney’s promise is intended non-literally, of course (as in, “it’s never gonna happen, kid”), but his wide-eyed, baseball-loving son interprets it at face value, as children often do, nonetheless. Thereby, the plot commences – Christopher Lloyd, the head angel, shows up at the ballpark in his characteristically creepy manner, and before you know it, with the help of a team of angels that only young Gordon-Levitt can see, the Angels win the pennant.

Even at such a young age, without much experience of love or loss, I was affected by the look of forlorn heartbreak that Gordon-Levitt was able to summon each time his father wheeled away or some other painful thing was done to him by adults or fate. His performance was all the more gripping because the odds seemed so stacked against him, because so much seemed utterly out of his control, and because, despite all that, his character never lost faith in the possibility that things could turn out alright. Thanks to Danny Glover, and in part Mr. Lloyd, things did turn out alright in that film, but in 500 Days of Summer, a kind of Angels in the Outfield for twenty-somethings, the conclusion is more complicated.

Mr. Gordon-Levitt (I now refer to him with title to differentiate him from his younger self) has certainly grown up – his face is more chiseled, his hair a bit flatter, his voice deeper, his body leaner and longer – but he still commands that look. He has even taken his expressiveness to new heights in this film, in part, we can guess, because while Mulroney must have been painful to a father-deprived child, Zooey Deschanel is pure agony for a love-deprived young man. The filmmakers, without any hesitation, went to great lengths in this film to demonstrate Ms. Deschanel’s unearthly cuteness. Slow-motion closeups, a sample of her singing voice, reportage of her height and weight, and disclosure of her (questionably fictitious) history of torturing members of the opposite sex, are just a few of the tactics they employ in pursuit of this goal. Summer Finn is definitely something of a she-devil. For most of the film, she entices and brutally strings along Mr. Gordon-Levitt’s character, Tom Hansen, providing him many opportunities to give that look that makes your knees wobble.

The filmmakers deserve commendations for what could be called excellent “personality profiling” in preparation for the casting of this film. What they were looking for (the narrator announces this in the opening montage) was a faithful, innocent, tragic young man who could wear his heart on his sleeve and a beguiling temptress who would take that heart and grind it into a fine paste. That is precisely what they got with the two actors they chose, and Ms. Deschanel, like Mr. Gordon-Levitt, was to my mind a perfect fit for her role; instantly alluring and yet perpetually mystifying, reserved and guarded – in short, a love-seeking man’s deepest, darkest fear. She pulls this role off with great aplomb, and to be quite blunt, I continue to have doubts about just how much “acting” she was doing, which makes the pain she induces over the course of the film that much more visceral and real.

What may now come as a surprise is that this film is a comedy – or, at least, a romantic comedy. It is a refreshing one, too, because it bucks nearly all the annoying conventions on which the genre has come to rely in recent years: allegedly mature women plucking through designer wardrobes, ignoble and inscrutable men seeking nothing but sex, women (Katherine Heigl and Jennifer Aniston come to mind) just wanting love and marriage, comeuppance for the morally wayward, and so on. Even the Judd Apatow movement, which was supposed to refresh the genre by exposing real guys in their real element, appears to be stalling, judging by its latest entry. In any case, Summer succeeds where the others have failed by making a firm commitment to truthfulness and the ups, downs and complexities of real human relationships. In so doing, it reminds us that a romantic comedy can be fun and fresh and focus more on people than what they wear.

In one particularly humorous scene, just after the two main characters have done it for the first time, Tom trots down the street on his way to work with a grin ear to ear and his head cocked slightly upward, shaking strangers’ hands, receiving congratulations and eventually leading a celebratory dance number with a marching band to a well-matched Hall & Oates tune. All of this is to illustrate the sublime happiness he feels – a sentiment which all men can relate to and which nearly all would describe as incomparable. We can contrast this with the first scene of the film, in which Tom, having just broken up with Summer, is standing in the kitchen of his apartment like a zombie, taking plate after plate out of the cupboard and smashing it on the counter, until his conspicuously wise and girl-savvy younger sister comes in to calm him down.

The truth is that the film’s allegiance to honesty – to the good and the bad – is so earnest that it gets away with things other romantic comedies wouldn’t. Towards the end, for instance, in a fit of frustration and heartache, Tom stands up at an office meeting and starts ranting about how love is an illusion and there’s too much fakery in the world before storming out of the room. One of his sexless co-worker-pals then starts clapping awkwardly amidst the shock and disbelief. This would be a laughable gimmick in almost any other film but it works here because we have ridden the roller-coaster with Tom and we know how he feels.

Make no mistake, the film is a romantic comedy and it does dabble in some murky waters – the metaphysics of time and the role of fate in human relationships, for example. These two themes join together in a somewhat schmaltzy way as the plot progresses, and given the humility of the rest of the film, we could probably do without it. But the funniness and creativity (it is plainly obvious that some genuinely original minds were behind this work) that prevails throughout prove more than enough to compensate for those minor flaws.

Upon walking out of the theater, the first and only thought in your head, regardless of your sex, may well be how adorable Ms. Deschanel is (even my girlfriend, who is often harsh on attractive female leads, admitted to me on the way out how convinced she had become of this one metaphysical truth). But after a couple of days of reflection, of which I have availed myself, you may find yourself thinking more about Mr. Gordon-Levitt, also regardless of your sex. Once again the odds are as insurmountable as the passion is high for his character, and, once again, by some mixture of heartbreak, anger, frustration and catharsis, he manages to lose and regain his faith in love and himself. It’s sad, funny and romantic all at once. Most of all, it’s first-rate comedy.

A Teachable Moment

The two-week feud between Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates and Cambridge Police Officer James Crowley (and President Obama) concluded on a merry if quiet note last night beneath a magnolia tree outside the White House. The three men – actually four because Scranton Joe showed up, probably at the last minute – sat at a little round table just out of earshot of a mass of microphone-wielding reporters and shared a cold brew, the perfect poison for a warm summer’s night.

Far be it from me to argue that there is anything that can’t be solved by beer, and surely, it would seem, the president would agree. Two weeks ago, amid a casual news conference that took place just after the sparking incident at Professor Gates’ home, the president, probably a little distracted by his health care push and other lofty issues, made an uncharacteristic verbal gaffe when he said that the police had “acted stupidly” in arresting the professor.

The comment, much more than the event itself, in my opinion, precipitated a furious national debate over racial profiling, the relationship between black men and law enforcement in America, what constitutes disorderly conduct, and what constitutes acceptable behavior in one’s home. There were those, including myself, who were surprised by the president’s careless remark, not so much because he was wrong, but because the decision to wade into a local, racially-charged incident seemed like poor judgment. Obama has taken more heat for the mistake than anyone else, though. Over the past two weeks, his health care campaign, which was looking strong at the start, has played second fiddle to Gates-gate in the media and he has had to make numerous public apologies and clarifications to try to clear the air. About a week ago, he said that he thought the event might serve as a “teachable moment” for America, adding just a trace of pedagogical haughtiness to a situation already saturated with it. As it turns out, it is the president who has learned the hardest lesson in all of this, and last night, after a long, tough stretch, it was probably nice to sit down and have a beer.

Now, we all hope, the issue has been put to rest, and the president can get back to his agenda. Insofar as the teachability of the moment extends to either of the parties involved in the initial altercation, or to the groups in society which they supposedly represent, I think the lesson to be learned was summed up nicely by Colin Powell on Larry King the other night. Yes, racial profiling is an ongoing problem in America (twenty-three states have passed legislation pertaining to it), and yes, there are many many cases of white police officers treating minority men (particularly blacks) unfairly. Officer Crowley should have at some point recognized that Gates was carrying luggage and that it was in fact his home, and he should have left; the professor should have taken a deep breath and refrained from insulting the officer. And as so often is the case, neither of them started it, neither was right, and neither was wrong.

Both men, particularly Crowley, seemed to be in much better spirits in the post-beer press conference last night and said that they have planned further meetings (we don’t know what for – perhaps a joint book tour). They both learned their lesson and now we have an important opportunity to learn one ourselves. If you find yourself unable to see the disagreement from the other person’s point-of-view (if you, for instance, naturally side with Crowley and think Gates is just a raving lunatic), then try earnestly to find someone who can explain the other side to you. Learning to walk in another person’s shoes is the only real hindrance to racism that I can think of. Here is a perfect chance to reflect on a dispute between a white cop and a black man – a notoriously troubled relationship in our country’s history – and try to see both sides of the coin.

I don’t know if that’s what Obama meant when he called it a “teachable moment” but that’s where I think the educational meat lies.

In Poor Health

Nancy Pelosi had sharp words for the health insurance industry today after the Blue Dog Democrat coalition successfully delayed a full House vote on the bill under consideration until after the upcoming congressional recess. “They are the villains in this…They have been part of the problem in a major way,” the House Speaker said, not of the fiscal conservatives in her party, but of the insurance companies.

Pelosi’s recrimination seems less like a focused political attack than a sign of frustration. Over the years, as most members of her party would agree, insurance companies have posed the greatest hindrances to substantive health care reform, but today it was House Democrats that were putting up all the obstacles.

During the press conference she held at the end of the day’s legislative session, Pelosi used the terms “carpet bombing” and “shock and awe” in discussing the health insurance industry’s campaign against reform. However, the real shock for Pelosi must be that with a sizeable majority for her party in the House, solid numbers in the Senate, a champion of the cause in the White House and time being of the essence, all that has been accomplished so far is several rounds of heated, partisan in-fighting.

In a mildly informative conversation in the Times today, Gail Collins and David Brooks toss around the idea of instituting a single-payer system on the federal level to replace the ailing, market-based private scheme currently in effect. It is worth noting that since the 1960s, the aged and the impoverished have had access to government-funded single-payer health care: Medicare and Medicaid, respectively. In addition, the Veterans Administration, which provides care principally to men and women who have been discharged from the armed forces, is a single-payer system owned, operated and financed by the government. Several health economists and other experts agree that the V.A. is both a form of socialized medicine and that it provides excellent quality care.

Single-payer systems that provide universal health care have been implemented by every high-income industrialized democracy in the world except for the U.S. A cursory comparison between the U.S. and those countries of such statistics as life expectancy, infant mortality rate and administration efficiency places that fact in an alarming context. By all accounts, our cumulative health care ranking should be near Canada, Australia, Great Britain and Belgium; instead, it’s wedged between Costa Rica and Slovenia.

All of which is to say that forty-six million Americans now lack health insurance, tens of thousands more may lose theirs before the recession ends, and time is of the essence more than ever. If, amidst his perpetual need to be well-liked, Obama fails to impress upon the congressional democrats the gravity of the situation and get a significant reform package pushed through, he will find himself in an epiphanic moment less Napoleonic than Hamletian.

In any case, it is not hard to understand the source of Pelosi’s frustration. Perhaps we can take it as a tiny victory, however, that she had the good sense to redirect her fury toward the insurance lobby - the fallback villain – and away from the newcoming obstruction that is her own party.

Moral Hazard and Sarah Palin

Moral hazard is the idea that in cases where one is protected from the consequences of a certain risk, there is a lack of incentive to avoid that risk. It’s easy to see why this concept has been applied in recent times to the financial crisis; agents within our financial system took excessive risks because they knew that in the worst case scenario they would simply be bailed out of trouble. That assumption, which proved correct, underscores the fact that moral hazard runs rampant in our economy because when corporate risk-taking turns out badly, it is more of a problem for the public than for wealthy executives. The authority to determine which risks to take, in other words, rests with the powerful and insulated and not with those who have to clean up the mess.

Think of it this way: an average person knows not to drive 120mph swerving through traffic because getting into an accident is too costly. A person who has an insurance plan that offers full coverage and recompense for every accident, however, might be a bit bolder on the road.

Our political system differs from our economy, at least in theory, in that it has institutions that are supposed to control and eliminate moral hazard. Politicians cannot just say and do whatever they want and then expect taxpayers to pick them up off the floor, although that sometimes happens. In fact, it is a well-understood truth about politics in this country that politicians have to be measured in their words and actions so as to not endanger their own futures. The election process guarantees that elected officials have to please their constituents or else be voted out of office, and in that way, the fortunes of our elected officials are tied to their public approval ratings, which are ideally reflections of how well they’re doing their job. For a politician, the political system imposes a trivial but very demanding circle of anti-hazard: do and say the right things to keep your approval ratings up, keep your job, and continue doing and saying the right things (notice how doing good work doesn’t figure so neatly into this circle).

We seldom speak of moral hazard in connection with our politics because of this system of accountability, which to a sufficient degree, we believe in. Elected officials surely enjoy some immunities afforded to them by their office, but Jeff Sessions, for instance, can’t say that he doesn’t like Latinos and Barack Obama can’t campaign against racial profiling. There are limits on what one can say and do in public office, that is.

Most politicians blithely accept these limits as the price of holding a powerful position in government. To make my point at long last, I think these limits are anathema to Sarah Palin. The notion of being accountable to one’s constituents, to the media and even to such lofty ideas as ethical conduct and the rule of law is too challenging and uncomfortable for her. She is not alone – Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly and others have kept out of politics so as to not be confined by the filters of politics. I think that is the direction in which she is headed. She already has a lucrative book deal which will surely turn into a national tour, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she used that as a springboard to launch herself into a career as a radio or TV personality. She would be good at it, too. She has a diehard following that finds her both physically attractive and ideologically enthralling and she will wield her high popularity with this group to catalyze some kind of movement centered around the reactionary principles that she holds dear.

What she is not good at is playing the politics game. She’s not intelligent or educated, she’s not keen on being held accountable for her actions by ethics committees, and she’s fed up with the media prying into her life and telling her she’ll never make it to the big time. She wants to say and do what she feels like and not have to worry about it, and that’s what she’s going to go do. Unfortunately, I think she may turn out to be very good at it.

So Long to the Peter Pan of Pop

Whatever one might say of his personal life or plastic surgery mishaps, no one can deny that Michael Jackson was one of the most gifted performers we’ve ever seen. Like only a select few before and since, he revolutionized the sound, the culture and the image of commercial pop music. Writes Brooks Barnes for the Times,

As with Elvis Presley or the Beatles, it is impossible to calculate the full effect Mr. Jackson had on the world of music. At the height of his career, he was indisputably the biggest star in the world; he has sold more than 750 million albums. Radio stations across the country reacted to his death with marathon sessions of his songs…

As a solo performer, Mr. Jackson ushered in the age of pop as a global product – not to mention an age of spectacle and pop culture celebrity.

He will be missed, perhaps not for his charming face, but most certainly for his screeching, crackling voice in Billie Jean and Thriller, for the way he could move across a stage, and for the youth, energy and edge he infused in modern pop.