The heavy hand of shoddy regulation in epic crises.

Tomorrow, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission releases its 576-page tome on what caused the U.S.-originated financial crisis that triggered the Great Recession. Not surprisingly, it largely faults inept and complaisant regulators. Among the cast of incompetents and worse: Regulatory officials Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson Jr., Tim Geithner, Bill Clinton, Phil Gramm and top dogs at the SEC, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Office of Thrift Supervision, the U.S. Fed and the New York Fed. That is not a complete list.

  
 

The biggest mistake - again, no surprise for students of history - is that it was wrong to trust that the private sector, in this case the financial-services industry - would exercise sufficient prudence without adequate regulatory supervision. And the pols and regulators were well paid to turn away from dodgy practices they should have outlawed. As the NYT reports, "the financial industry spent $2.7 billion on lobbying from 1999 to 2008, while individuals affiliated with it made [an additional] $1 billion in campaign contributions."

In a more perfect world, say, the early FDR years, that president excoriated the "rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods, [who] have failed through their own stubbornness and incompetence, have admitted to their failure, and have abdicated." FDR was backed up by the sordid findings of the Pecora inquiry, still the only thorough examination of Wall Street's widely destructive self-interest when left to its own devices. Obama, while expressing annoyance at execessive pay for "fat-cat" bankers, has forsaken an entirely appropriate populist castigation of the dread spawn of Crash of '29, and been pilloried as a "class warrior" every time he dares raise the subject. A shame, because this was one of Obama's "teachable moments" if ever there was one.

Imagine a zoo with the bars removed, and that's the private sector without able and honest regulators.

Lax or non-regulation was the principal cause of the loss of a great American city, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. FEMA's own internal watchdog, the inspector general of Homeland Security, said the post-Katrina criticism of FEMA was largely deserved.

Just days before the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster of last year, in which 29 miners were killed in the worst U.S. coal-mining tragedy in 40 years, the U.S. Department of Labor issued a report titled "Journeymen Inspectors Do Not Receive Required Periodic Training." Davitt McAteer, former head of the Mine Safety and Health Administration, couldn't believe in the aftermath of the 2006 Sago mine disaster - another case of excess methane levels triggering a fatal explosion - lessons had not been learned and applied to the 56 mines operated by Massey Energy, a chronic violator of safety regulations. "We know how to remove methane and control dust problems and the fact that we had [another] explosion with methane or dust suggests we are not doing enough to protect miners."

A few weeks later last year, BP's offshire exploration rig in the Gulf of Mexico, the Deepwater Horizon, capsized and sunk, triggering one of the biggest environmental disasters in U.S. history. Turns out the Interior Department - Obama's Interior Department, headed by the industry friendly pol Ken Salazar - had issued an exemption for the Deepwater Horizon project from a detailed environmental impact analysis. Which would have found that BP had taken no special precautions in drilling the deepest well ever in Gulf history, that no tests had been done worldwide to show that a blow-out preventer would work at that unprecedented depth (it didn't), or the shoreline impact given that the project was located extraordinarily close to the Gulf Coast.

But then, BP had spent millions in extensive lobbying to get waivers from those regulatory requirements. And an industry friendly Minerals Management Service (MMS) branch of Salazar's Interior Department was all to easily swayed by BP's assurance that it knew what it was doing.

Obama, the story goes, dispatched Salazar to the MMS's offshore-drilling headquarters to "sweep the stables" clean of the well-known corrupting influences of industry there. Salazar gave the place the once-over, delivered a pep talk, and wasn't heard from again. It disappoints me now end that Obama didn't sack Salazar last summer, and that indeed he is still in cabinet.

The bottom line is epic disasters - like an unsupervised greed on Wall Street that cost 8 million Americans and 400,000 Canadians their jobs - usually have inadequate or corrputed regulation as a root cause.

I wish we had no need of regulators. As a taxpayer, I would love to save that expense. But then I'd have to hope I could count on good behavior from the private sector. And whether its violations of employment laws at Wal-Mart or a deadly listeria outbreak that kills consumers at Maple Leaf Foods or faulty tires on Ford Explorers in deadly accidents or unregulated mortgage brokers peddling toxic subprimes to unsuspecting, starry-eyed prospective homebuyers, red tape is not what ails our economy. What ails our society is (a) private-sector willingness to slip into immoral behavior and (b) insufficient vigor by "public stewards" (of our financial system, as the FCIC report will say tomorrow) in curbing the anti-social conduct of business.

"Gresham's Law," dating from the mercantilism era, has it that bad money drives out good. It is the same with modern business behavior. Chuck Prince, the hapless, since fired, CEO of Citigroup, which remains on U.S. government life support, famously said at the height of the recklessness that if all your peers are dancing to the devil's tune, you are obliged to as well.

Yes, we are talking about lemmings, bearing the imprimatur of degrees in finance from Wharton, and in the case of the epic failure of Long-Term Capital Management LP, not one but two Nobel laureates in economics sitting on the board of directors.

Lack of robust regulation. Let's resolve either to get rid of the cost of the regulatory apparatus, including the undeniable red tape, and take our chances on the law of the jungle. Or get serious about guarding the public's interest - which, by the way, is in the best interest of business itself - and settle for nothing less than adequately staffed and trained and incorruptible public-servant regulators.

Looking back on these four miserable episodes is to recall Edna St. Vincent Millay's adage: "Life is not one damned thing after another. It's the same damned thing, over and over."

Or as my dad said, "People always have to learn the hard way."

 

 

Chips ahoy.

Canada and many European nations have been switiching debit-card technology from magnetic stripes to embedded chips - so-called chip-and-PIN cards. The latter pose more of a challenge to "skimmers," bandits who use a variety of means, including hidden cameras at ATMs and fake ATM facades, to steal as much as $1 billion a year from U.S. banks.

Apparently that's not too high a price to pay for U.S. banks, who resist converting to the new chip technology because banks would have to issue new cards (I just got mine in the mail from RBC, many thanks), the 400,000 U.S. ATMs would have to be upgraded, and so would millions of point-of-sale debit-card readers. (Hey, wouldn't that make for a timely job-stimulus program?)

Such sluggardness is what you get from a U.S. system of more than 7,000 independent banks, who'd each rather wait for a rival to prove the efficacy of a new technology. Canada's Big Five just made a collective decision years ago to enjoy the 21st century without having to reimburse debit-card holders for funds plundered from their accounts by skimmers.

Who, not surprisingly, are focusing more than ever on the U.S. "Fraud always migrates to the softest target," Michael Lee, executive director of the ATM Industry Association, tells Time. The more countries you have converting to chip-and-PIN, the greater the risks for the U.S."

Meanwhile, a look at the ATM landscape:

 
The buddy system can be helpful in guarding against "skimmers." 

A buddy can help shield your PIN from unscrupulous onlookers.

 
Or you can get in line behind a superhero.

 
 
Preferably one who's not been banged up in a bar fight.

 
Some "skimmers" are more sophisticated than others.

 
Some just like to play with your head.

 
 
They make a game of banking, as too many bankers do.

 
Alas, the instructions on how to shield your PIN are sometimes out of reach. 

 

 

"The American people are socialists."

From Michael Tomasky's review of Richard Wolffe's book, Revival: The Struggle for Survival Inside the Obama White House in the New York Review of Books:

House Republicans say they want to cut $100 billion from domestic spending this year. Even by federal budget standards, that's a lot: it would mean cuts in education, environmental protection, scientific research, transportation, and other areas amounting to 20% of total expenditures. This will not happen, as House GOP aides began to concede to reporters on background even before the congressional session began. Their fellow Republicans in the Senate won't go along with that, let alone the Senate's Democratic majority. The same goes for many Republican governors and mayors, who are counting on every federal dollar they can get at a time when many states face deep financial crises.

The American public won't go along with it either. A poll released on January 2 by '60 Minutes' and Vanity Fair asked respondents how they would balance the budget. Answers: increase taxes on the wealthy, 61%; cut defense spending, 20%, cut Medicare, 4%, cut Social Security, 3%. Evidently the American people are socialists.

Evidently, Americans want to, dare we say it, soak-the-rich to solve their current epic woes. I guess a few bank and auto bailouts will do that to you, especially when the Big Business screw-ups who triggered the loss of eight million jobs and $2 trillion-plus in Main Street retirement savings were all rewarded for their failure with severance packages large enough to buy an archipelago of South Sea islands.

But not to worry, at least not until the mass outbreak of food-bank rioting. The political and media establishment understands - it just knows - that "class warfare" or anything that can so easily be construed as such is off the table. Not even spoken of. Why, that dog hasn't hunted since the confiscatory tax regimes of FDR. Which, oh dear, was the last time America had to resort to extraordinary deficit financing to, er, save truth, justice and the American way. And capitalism, of course, although we're still waiting on the tycoons for a simple "Thank you" on that.

 

 

 

Must be true.

News item: Eric Schmidt steps down after a long, successful tenure as CEO of Google Inc., world's most valuable company.

Top 10 reasons Eric Schmidt is stepping down, by Nitrozac and Snaggy:

He got tired of all the "Still holding a baby bottle for Sergey and Larry?" jokes.

His self-driving car asked him to join forces with it and fight crime.

He's changed his named to avoid Google searches. Also, he was recorded on Streetview, and now has to move.

He had a suck-fit last night after watching David Pogue's new science show, and demanded that PBS give him his own. He's now off to record the pilot for "Making Stuff Creepy."

Now that Google is self-aware, his work is done. He can return to the future, to live quietly among the Cyberdyne Systems Model 101s and T-1000s.

He got sick and tired of hearing that damn Evilmeter constantly going off!

Hated the thought of battling an Apple without Steve Jobs on the day-to-day frontlines. But mostly, Tim Cook scares him.

Organizing the world's information proved too overwhelming. Eric's going to focus on organizing his garage.

He just can't stand to live in a lie anymore. Abdicating is only way he can be seen in public with his beloved iPhone.

He's starting work at Facebook on Monday, holding Mark Zuckerberg's baby bottle.

 

Related

Five plausible reasons Eric Schmidt resigned. (PC World) 

H/T: All Things Digital

 

 

Here and now.

The U.S. middle-class has been exiled from the American Dream. There are 15 million unemployed, 2.9 million U.S. home foreclosures, a record, were filed last year; the U.S. just topped the $14 trillion mark in national debt. Oh, and America, with a literacy rate that ranks 17th, according to the OECD, is being out-educated even by developing world nations, and not just China. The myth of "American exceptionalism" has imploded. (Richard Wolff, Guardian)

 
A tent city for homeless people in Sacramento, Calif. (AP) 

As with Dubya's pose as a rancher, turns out Palin's no hunter. (Says USA Today reviewer of her Alaska show); not a few real hunters., UK Independent reviewer; and Andrew Sullivan on her complete phoniness in this and other matters.

 
The former Miss Wasilla, still cashing in. (TLC handout)

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), supposed new nemesis of Obama, has such a checkered past even the MSM might see his committee's planned probes of the administration through that lens. (Ryan Lizza, New Yorker)

Remembering Sargent Shriver, first head of the Peace Corps. (Garry Wills, Atlantic)

Books of the times

Before Churchill ("History will remember me well, because I will write it") there was TR. New Republic's Franklin Foer reviews Theodore Roosevelt's History of the United States.

 

Here's a photo gallery of the Rat Pack, with cameos of JFK and Marilyn, from a new coffee table book on same. The shots are interesting.

There were so many Frank Sinatras, no wonder no one really knew him. That would include his latest biographer, says reviewer Geoffrey O'Brien in the New York Review of Books.

Oy vey.

Why Palin's "blood libel" self-defense was a slur on Jews, whether that's what Palin intended or not, says Garry Wills in the Atlantic. Wills makes a convincing case that it was intended, since Palin's operatives would have nixed the reference otherwise, and because...

...the entire Tea Party movement might well have a "Jewish problem." No fewer than eight of the 10 "villains" Glenn Beck routinely goes after are "of the Jewish persuasion," as Nixon liked to say. (Jeffrey Goldberg, Atlantic)

The sad decline of photojournalism. (Jed Perl, New Republic)

Should Michelle Obama have shared a stage with Wal-Mart, no matter how virtuous the cause, when Wal-Mart persists in tying up woemn plaintiffs in the courts seeking justice for the stores' shoddy treatment of them? The Atlantic's Andrew Cohen, erstwhile legal counsel, says no.

How Caroline Kennedy and Maria Shriver helped squelch History Channel's airing of a JFK series, shot largely in Toronto, with an acknowledge focus on JFK's extra-marital activities. Series will still air in Canada, March 6. (Hollywood Reporter)

How Red State favorites dominate TV's primetime schedule, and why. (Hollywood Reporter)

"Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior" stirs controversy over strict parenting. (ParentCentral.ca)

Top Toronto baby names now include Fatima, Gurleen, Tenzin and Muhammad-Mohamed. Fortunately, Jake and variations finally have ebbed (great name, but almost all my parent friends have a Jake). And silly names Jayde, Kyle, Crystal (Krystal), Tucker et al have apparently been asked to take a seat at the back. (ParentCentral.ca)

 

  

The riot act has been read...

 

Thank you, commenters. The Dinsdale boys (Python fans know who I mean) just dropped by with a thermal nuclear missile, said I hadn't responded to reader comments, and would I pay the fine? Which is three-quarters of a million pounds. I said, yes, I had bought one of their fruit machines, and wasn't that enough? But of course it isn't and I'll catch up your commentary ASAP.

 

 

 

 

Voltaire's progeny.

Sarah Palin's operatives have taken down from her website the notorious map with the Dem-held congressional districts "targeted" for GOP gains. Palin has conceded finally that they were cross-hair marks, and not surveyor's marks as her spokespeaople had insisted since the Jan. 8 tragedy in Tucson.

This billboard ad for Rush Limbaugh's radio show, just down the road from the Tucson tragedy, wasn't taken down by the radio station that commissioned it until two days after the massacre, and after images of it went viral. 

Limbaugh told his radio audience of his initial reaction to the Tucson billboard that it was meant to look like "angry Democrats in Tucson were firing along bullets at the thing."

Uh, that's not what angry Dems do, as we all know. which makes me wonder if the birthers shouldn't be looking into Rush's place of origin, a satellite of Uranus, possibly. No, Dems would Tweet about the billboard, raise it at the weekly book club, maybe lean a pathetically small placard against one of the legs of the billboard, or, if they were philosophically minded, talk among themselves as to whether, existentially speaking, the billboard even existed. (How many people drive along that stretch of highway, exactly?) What they wouldn't do is roll down the driver's window of their F-150 and unload a Glock magazine into the thing. That would be your crowd, Rush. 

The brilliant Wanda Sykes had the keynote duties at Obama's first White House Correspondents Dinner, the #1 event on D.C.'s social calendar. She missed the memo post-Stephen Colbert's WHCD appearance that the WHCD takes everything that embarrasses you about the dull-wittedness of the MSM to a higher (lower?) level. The Establishment media cannot take a joke, especially about itself.

Referring to Rush's intemperate but usefully honest assertion re Obama that "I want to see him fail," Sykes said that sounded traitorous to her. And that, "I want to see Rush's kidneys fail." Which was received in that Hall of Mirrors with a predictable round of groans compounded later by criticism of Sykes in, of course, the MSM.

   
   
Top row: Wanda Sykes, Bill Maher, Lewis Black.
Bottom row: Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, David Cross.
(Agency handouts)
 
But Sykes' words were well chosen. We live in this crazy world in which a poorly trained and undersupervised Cambridge, Mass. beat cop arrests one of America's most distinguished academics for the "crime" of being in his own home, and somehow the story is that Obama lost his cool over it. Obama didn't help by then holding the kumbaya "beer summit." No, Obama got it right the first time - the arrest and detention of Henry Louis Gates was an outrage, like so many everyday outrages from "death panels" (end-of-life discussions among loved ones that Obamacare proposed to pick up the tab for instead of the hospital billing for them, the mother of all distortions) to relabeling Obamacare as the "Job-Killing Act" for the purposes of voting to repeal it in the newly GOP-controlled house.

With words we control events, if Goebbels taught us anything, and later Joe McCarthy, and still later Lee Atwater with the Willie Horton episode. The Dems need a Truth Squad in permanent war-room mode to knock down every one of these specious affronts to civility. The sheer volume of the corrections to the record would block out of GOP's message, which I wouldn't argue for in a democracy save that the modern GOP's "message" does not extend beyond whipping up fear of bogeymen with lies and distortions.   

Some things need to be said. Thank you, Ms. Sykes. And thanks to all the political stand-ups, who have displaced the H.L. Menckens and Walter Lippmanns of the past. They alone are essential satirists of our times. It started with Mort Sahl in the JFK era. George Carlin took it mainstream (if HBO Specials count as mainstream). And it continues, with gathering strength, in the work of Jon Stewart, Colbert, Lewis Black, David Cross and the take-no-prisoners Bill Maher.

We'll build a Pantheon to these folks someday. They're doing more than anyone to protect the Republic and defend its Constitution. But don't tell them that. Self-effacing humor is what enables them to do their work. If they stopped being fools in the Shakespearean sense - the Bard tended to put his most telling observations in the mouths of ostensible fools - and became all serious on us, they'd become something else, politicians perhaps. Then they'd have to win a nail-biter for the U.S. Senate from Minnesota. Which is great as long as it doesn't thin the ranks of satirists with no voting constituents to worry about offending.

 

 

 

 

The mystery of Obama's Immelt pick.

 
Obama and the newly appointed head of his outside panel of economic experts, failed GE CEO Jeff Immelt.

Yes, if I was exhorting U.S. business to start creating jobs again, after laying off millions of Americans in knee-jerk fashion at the outset of the Great Recession (an American capitalism specialty; European and Asian employers treat layoffs as a last resort), and wanted someone who really understands the Bejing mentality...

...just to be counter-intuitive, I might pick as a job-creation strategist and enhancer of U.S. trade with China one Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric Co. since 2001. Which Obama did last week.

During Immelt's tenure, GE shares have lost half their value. And GE's workforce has shrunk 2% even as revenues jumped. Then there's Immelt's intemperate criticisms of both Beijing, which he last year insisted wants foreigner interlopers to fail, and of Obama himself, during that ridiculous meme last year about how America's corporate leadership was ired by the president. Ridiculous, because, to the chagrin of progressives, Obama is a pro-business, ever-so-mildly left-of-centre leader whose efforts to jump-start the economy account for the record profits Corporate America has reaped during this third U.S. "jobless recovery" in a row.

I'll stand corrected, but Harry Hopkins, FDR's masterful economic and social-conditions fixer, had no business background. George Marshall and Doug MacArthur, with a purely military background, laid the groundwork for the postwar European and Japanese economic miracles.

So from whence springs this presidential tradition of tapping corporate chieftains in the expectation some great good will come of it? It's one thing to tap Hank Paulson, then successful head of Goldman Sachs, to fail as Bush II treasury secretary in making nice with Beijing, where Paulson at least had nurtured a lot of high-level contacts. But presidents, this one included, have a weakness for failed or flailing CEOs. Donald Rumsfeld, for example, mediocre Big Pharma CEO; and Dick Cheney, who almost drove Halliburton into the ground during his five-year haitus from government.

Obama sensibly picked one of America's most successful education administrators as his secretary of education, and put one of the nation's top healthcare system reformers in charge of Medicare and Medicaid. To clear out the shameful backlog of veterans' health claims, he tapped Gen. Eric Shinseki (Ret.) as his secretary of veterans' affairs.

But such logic too often goes to the winds on key economic appointments.Immelt will head Obama's outside panel of economic advisors, replacing Paul Volcker, the most successful central banker in U.S. history. Makes you wonder, were none of the morons who went down with the ships in the Wall Street crash available?

You want a panel of outside economic advisors? Get some farmers, urban economic development officers charged with turning around cities like Detroit, Phoenix and Las Vegas (who meet with Big Business and small business daily), experts on income inequality (Robert Reich, Barbara Ehrenreich), and, yes, a smattering of CEOs who are extraordinarily competent, civic-minded and at least a bit as contemptuous as the rest of us of Big Business' lack of a spirit of sacrifice - the kind we saw among everyday people in Tucson.

American business is sitting on more than $2 trillion in cash reserves but won't resume expanding and rehiring until it has absolute certainty the worst economic times are over. The rest of the country doesn't have that luxury of waiting. And using the surplus funds in economically wasteful ways, as the Fortune 500 has been doing in buying back company shares, boosting dividends and maintaining bonus regimes calculated to evaporate public respect in business as a social institution.

 

 

I wish I could be there.

A caravan formed to cheer Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, severely wounded in the Tuscon shooting, from her fabulous surgeons at the University Medical Center in that great city to a rehab phase of her recovery at at Texas Medical Center and later at TIRR Memorial Hermann, both in Houston.

Congresswoman Giffords has kept us busy. We prayed daily for her recovery from head wounds the oddsmakers say are usually lethal. Now we pray for a complete restoration of her faculties. And already we've been rewarded, as Gabby is now able to speak.

 
A caravan of Arizona well-wishers prepares to follow Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords' 930-mile-plus route to rehab treatment in Houston. (AP)

Our highest hopes are with this transplanted Yellow Rose of Texas for the duration of her stay in the Lone Stare State, with the felled congresswoman's family, friends and larger community waiting anxiously back home in Arizona. 

 

 

Obama's popularity surge - what gives?

 
First, an apology. In Spectrum, we noted Obama's public-approval rating is 50%, compared with 35% for Ronald Reagan at the two year mark in his administration. Wrong. From mid-December to today, Obama's popularity has shot up 8 points to 53%. That's according to the latest amalgam of all polls by the definitive RealClearPolitics.com, and it's equal to Obama's 53% showing on Nov. 4, 2008 - the third-best performance by any successful Dem presidential candidate of the past century.

 

Obama in Tuscon.(C-SPAN)

It was fun to hear panelist's on NPR's flagship "On Point" yesterday morning entirely dismissive of this huge leap in the president's popularity. Actually, they just couldn't account for it, and in talking-headom you quickly brush away things you can't explain.

The explanation is simple.

(a) As per Newton's three laws of motion, a counter-reaction to the "schellacking" (so described by Obama) of his party in the midterms.

(b) The astonishingly productive lame-duck Congress, still controled by Dems, which scrapped DADT after an odious 17 years, among many other measures for the long-term good of the Republic.

(c) The "healing speech," as Obama's address in Tuscon on the shooting spree will be known to historians. Stunning, really, how the finger-pointing over intemperate political discourse, a deficient mental-health care system and inadequate gun control laws practically vanished after Obama simply detailed the lives of the victims - and who knew there were so many everyday heroes at that gathering outside the Safeway, that the shooter could have done so much more damage - and called on Americans to care better for each other, putting off the divisive debates for a period of silent mourning and celebration of these lives just lost. It was a plain-spoken speech, just what a nation rubbed raw after two years of fierce debate needed.

      

Among the presidential wannabes: Bachmann, Gingrich, Palin. (AP, Reuters)

(d) Boehner and the Republicans now controlling the House overplayed their hand, following through on their promise to vote on repealing Obamacare. This gave Dems, organized for once, the opportunity in debate to follow each G.O.P. speaker with detailed Obamacare benefits to the, say, 9,583 people in the previous G.O.P. speaker's cloud-of-dust of a speech. If you're looking for the talking points in Pelosi's "take back 25" campaign, already in progress, to reclaim seats lost in November, you head plenty of them last week, and very appealing they were.

All this and Obama hasn't even delivered his SOTU yet (that's this Tuesday), usually good for a further modest bump in public-approval.

Even better news longer-term is the likely brawl for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination. It will briefly feature Mitt Romney, who once  took a motor trip to Canada with his kids strapped to the roof (something like that; his story kept changing) and was father of Obamacare in Massachusetts when he was governor of the Bay State - good luck explaining that to the GOP-Tea Party base). There's Palin, of course, like Lady Macbeth, trying to wash from her hands the blood from her Tucson cross-hairs map. There's serial philaderer Newt Gingrich, who has told friends recently he's contemplating a 2012 presidential bid and would not be electorally viable in Canada on morals grounds alone. (Newt, once described by Bob Dole as a filing cabinet full of ideas, maybe one of them good, spawned the currrent meme that the 46 states with budget crises should simply declare bankruptcy, and in that way shed their penion obligations to civil servants, thus breaking the power of public-sector unions once and for all). And Michelle Bachmann, who this week called for Obama's replacement as the only goal worthy of GOP preoccupation, and is soon to visit first-in-the-nation-caucus state Iowa. Ryan has been chosen for this Tuesday's SOTU response. But Bachmann, breaking precedent, insists on giving an "alternate," Tea Party-endorsed response of her own. And the MSM obsesses about internal Dem divisions. Sheesh.

Romney, the walking Brylcreem ad, won't sell any better in 2012 than in the last go round. His high card is that he's the adult in the group, but that will be trumped by his inauthenticity. Gingrich, at 67, exhibits all the dynamism that McCain did in the previous contest, and his personal ife contrasts poorly with the incumbent's - not a factor in France, but most definitely in Topeka. The others are, well, variously rightwing-nuts. Some of few remaining sane heads in the GOP heirarchy have hopes for Paul Ryan. But this supposedly sensible accountant wants to replace Social Security with a voucher system, an idea that was DOA under Dubya even before the catastrophic collapse of the stock market wiped out a huge portion of retirement savings, a stark contrast to the sure thing that is defined-benefit Social Security.

Obama's soft underbelly remains unenthuiastic progressives in his own party. (Then again, even Blue Dog Dems stood with the president in the House last week on Obamacare. And eight GOP senators crossed the aisle to help put DADT out of the nation's misery!)The worst-case scenario for him now is a feckless but attention getting bid by a Bill Bradley against Al Gore, circa 2000, which put Gore, the prohibitive favourite, on his heels and weakened him for the general election. As did Reagan's failed but damaging bid for the GOP nomination in 1975-76, which deep-sixed incumbent Gerry Ford's election prospects ahead of the Carter presidency.

Ahead of the 2012 contest, Obama's operatives must steal a page from the Clinton playbook and squelch any serious competition for the nomination, giving Obama the clear field against the powers of reaction that a comfortably re-elected Clinton had in 1996.

Paul Krugman, for one, has sounded a warning that Obama might need to be replaced, having compromised too much. But for progressives who grasp that politics is the art of the possible, most will recognize in Obama an uncanny agility in moving their agenda forward. Obama seemed to have given up on Obamacare, then on DADT, but then suddenly was signing into law huge leaps toward a healthier and more just America. Like FDR, Obama waits for the planets to align, then succeeds, rather than take reckless chances as Clinton did, failing with both healthcare and an end to discrimination against gays in the military in his first two years, signalling weakness that defined the rest of his administration. Obama's just not interested in noble, losing causes. Read his damn pre-2008 speeches and media interviews.

You needn't even consider the alternatives to appreciate that Obama is the progressives' best hope for reinforcing and adding to gains of the past two years that, frankly, already are so great in number and variety that historians will wonder how any progressive isn't tying his or her shoelaces right now to begin working to get this president an even bigger mandate than the near-landside he won in 2008.

If the public-sector unions, indeed a bulwark of Dem front-line support, don't get what's at stake for them in 2012, Newt Gingrich is happy to explain. He wants you powerless to the Boss. If seniors don't (the all-important Florida and Southwest vote), Mr. Ryan will oblige. He wants you to fend for yourself. ("You mean I won't be getting a federal check each month anymore?" "That's right, ma'am, we're counting on you to understand how the stock market works in somehow setting up a non-volatile source of retirement income with the help of the nice folks on Wall Street. Yes, that's right, the ones who took an unfair rap for triggering the deepest recession since the Great Depresion, whom we bailed out with your money.")

If a newbie GOP's congressional constituents don't grasp what's at stake for them in going back to having 50 million Americans without health-insurance coverage, and all the bells and whistles already in place (keeping your 25-year-old kid on your policy), the DNC will put the Statistical Abstract of America to work on behalf of each Dem challenger and I almost pity the GOP incumbent campaigning to leave America's young adults naked to the medical-industrial complex. But that's how they voted, unimously, last week - a gift one prays the kumbaya Dems don't squander.