BARACK'S "ASK NOT"

BARACK'S "ASK NOT"

At various moments in history, our leaders define our moment. 

And they do so in words that become unique to that moment.

In 1776,  Jefferson embraced the Enlightenment ideal that "all men are created equal."  What he meant, really, was that all educated, white men were created equal.  Slaves and women and the non-propertied class were not included.  But it was still a great advance.  The Enlightenment's equality of the mind unhinged us from the monarchs, aristocrats, clerics and court jesters who for centuries had held a monopoly on thoughts that mattered, and thus made science and widespread progress possible.

In the 1860s, Lincoln made a nation of what had until then been a collection.  He extended the Jeffersonian ideal to the victims of the nation's greatest crime -- slavery -- and set in motion the hundred plus years of cautious progress that ultimately made those victims full citizens.  That was the goal of his "government of the people, by the people and for the people."

It too, however, was insufficient.

For Lincoln's vision did not include America's wives or mothers or daughters.  Nor did it include -- and couldn't, really, because an assassin's gun deprived us of knowing what the great man would have thought of the corporate capture of his party of emancipation -- the bottom and middle rungs of an economic ladder that industrialism would turn into a Gilded Age of class based exclusion and poverty, and that social Darwinism would turn into the cyclical spectre of economic depression.

And so, in the first and fourth decades of the 20th century, two cousins named Roosevelt would condemn the "malefactors of  great wealth" and lay down the foundation for the "four freedoms" -- of speech and worship, and from want and fear.  To make real those freedoms from want and fear, FDR would protect labor unions and give us Social Security and President Johnson-- thirty years later -- would create Medicare and the War on Poverty. 

But these too failed to create a  "more perfect union."  

In truth, a "more" perfect union should not be possible.   The concept is an oxymoron.  Perfection, by definition, cannot itself be "more" perfectible.  Nonetheless, here, on a patch of land in the North American temperate zone, circles are squared as we Americans try to temper the arrogance of asserted perfection with the humble admission of need for improvement.

We invent our own logic, however inverted that logic may be.

Which is how we got Reagan.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan warned against Roosevelt's  and Johnson's -- and, so he thought, the entire Democratic Party's -- ostensibly unvarnished collectivism.  He called government "the problem."  He attacked and weakened labor.  He made a hero of Calvin Coolidge, the last President to preside over a nation of splendiferous wealth, and promoted a culture that spawned Buffett and Gates (but also Milken and Madoff) and thousands like them over the next thirty years. He won the White House, and the Senate, and then unleashed a second Gilded Age.  Wealth was less regulated, less taxed, and way more concentrated, than at any time since the 1920s.  In truth, he created the one per cent.

And made us all think we could get there. 

This was the Age of Reagan.  

It ended in the fall of 2008 with George W. Bush's lesser Depression. "W" made no bones about being Reagan's heir.  He sought to deregulate and privatize at home while claiming to export freedom at the end of an American gun abroad.  By November 2008, it had all come crashing down.  The nation, it turned out, could become a . . .

Less perfect union as well.

Along the way, a skinny guy with a scary middle name wowed us with a keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.  He was smart, eloquent . . . and black.  Four years later, we entered the Age of Obama.  He is only the second person in the history of the United States to become President on the strength of his oratory; the first was Abraham Lincoln.  And so, like Lincoln, what matters most are often . . .

His words.

President Barack Obama was sworn in for his second term yesterday and re-took the oath as part of the public Inauguration today. 

He then gave his Second Inaugural Address.

The speech was exceptional.  Only he could have given it and, arguably, only it was appropriate to the moment we now face, one where the enormity of our challenges is met by the polarizing partisanship of our politics.  It is unlikely to be equaled any time soon.  It was, therefore, a veritable tour de force.

The speech summoned a citizenry to action. In fact, its unifying theme was that republican (small "r") responsibility creates the obligation of citizen action.  At both the beginning and the end of this unique Inaugural Address, Barack Obama made that framework clear.

Like every President before him, Obama embraced Jefferson's "self evident" truths --  that "all men are created equal " and are "endowed" with those heralded  "inalienable rights" to  "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."  But he then became the first President to tell us that "while these truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executing."  In the same breath, he warned that "while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by his people here on earth."  And at the end, this call to citizen action was re-stated.  All of us, he said, have an obligation -- "as citizens" -- "to shape the debates of our times -- not only with the votes we cast, but with the voices we lift in defense of our most ancient values and enduring ideals."

Back in the summer, in Charlotte during his speech accepting the Democratic nomination, Obama had told us that the coming campaign would not be about him.  Pundits scoffed at his supposed false humility.  But it wasn't false at all.  The campaign, the government he envisioned, was not about him.  He can't give us the government we want. 

But we can.

And today, in his Second Inaugural,  he told us how. 

Vote?  Certainly, and he might well have added: "not just in Presidential years."  But most importantly, his call to citizen action was a call to  . . .

Raise your voice.

If you want to make schools safe and eliminate as possibilities the horrors of Newtown,  you must raise your voice and stand up to the NRA.  If you want to secure those freedoms from want and fear, you must raise your voice and reject a rhetoric that turns Medicare and Social Security into entitlements for takers rather than security for hard workers.  If you want to begin to confront the challenge of climate change before it is too late, you have to raise your voice against deniers of science.   If you believe all are created equal, you must raise your voice in support of marriage equality for gays and pay equality for women.  And if you want to sustain a middle class, you must raise your voice and stand with those who would regulate Wall Street and stimulate the demand to employ Main Street.

Gridlock, of course, is still a problem.  And Obama cannot solve that problem by himself either.  He can't turn partisanship into progress, or extremism into reason, or racism into tolerance.  But if, in raising our voices, we do not "mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name calling as reasoned debate,"  we can.

In his only Inaugural Address, President Kennedy issued his famous challenge: "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."  In his Second Inaugural, Barack Obama told anyone who accepted Kennedy's challenge exactly what they could "do."

Be a citizen.  

Raise your voice. 

Every day.

Not just on Election Day.

BONFIRE OF INSANITY

BONFIRE OF INSANITY

About a generation ago,  Gerald R. Ford arguably lost the the 1976 Presidential election by refusing to let the federal government lend New York City any money to finance its ballooning debt.  In the face of a near bankruptcy that would have sent the nation's then largest metropolis -- along with its seven million inhabitants and the lucrative national franchise known as Wall Street-- into a death spiral, Ford chose to troll for votes everywhere else.

This prompted one of the city's two remaining tabloids, the Daily News,  to run a headline that became iconic -- "Ford to City: Drop Dead."

It seems that some political parties never learn.

John Boehner -- Ohio Republican, Speaker of the House, ostensible deficit hawk but really one of the myriad defenders of a new Gilded Age where a 39.6% marginal tax rate is just too much for your average billionaire -- refused yesterday to allow the House of Representatives to vote on the $60 billion dollar aid package for Hurricane Sandy's victims.  The Senate had already passed the bill.  And the House stayed in session until near midnight to make sure the rest of the country, including all those red staters, were not forced to suffer a New Year's day tax increase.  

But Boehner wouldn't let them vote on the Sandy aid package.

I guess they were too tired.

This has created what amounts to a political meltdown among New York, New Jersey and Connecticut Republicans -- yes, Virginia, they do exist.  

The Jersey Shore, New York City's Rockaways, the South Shore of Long Island and large parts of Connecticut's Sound Shore can double these days as accurate movie sets for remakes of  Saving Private Ryan's opening scenes from World War II's Normandy beaches.  Thousands of homes lay in ruins in the wake of Sandy.  Thousands more are partially or wholly uninhabitable.  My wife's cousin in Monmouth Beach, NJ lost her whole first floor -- furniture and all -- to the Atlantic Ocean, and has been living for the last two months in a friend's condo.  Another cousin in Belle Harbor, a section of NYC's Rockaways, needs $100k to make his house once again a suitable home.  Still other relatives across Jamaica Bay in  Canarsie lost three cars parked in the street when flood waters turned that Brooklyn neighborhood into a lake.

And these were the lucky people.

Breezy Point, on the far western end of the Rockaways, literally went up in smoke as flooded but live electrical connections ignited a bonfire that quickly consumed more than eighty sardine-packed homes on what locals affectionately call the Irish Riviera.  Even if sufficient numbers of first responders could have crossed the Gil Hodges Bridge that connects Breezy to Brooklyn -- and they couldn't given the high winds -- New York's bravest still would have been stopped by flooding that made it impossible for the trucks to get to the flames.  

So, in one fell swoop, the dreams of hundreds of very middle income families were destroyed by Sandy.  None of these denizens of an outer-borough, as they are known in Manhattan, showed up in Bonfire of the  Vanities,  Tom Wolfe's 1987 punch at this Gilded Age's traders and financiers who always seem to have first call on the nation's resources.  And none of them park their assets on Wall Street or manage their portfolios from their beach houses.  

Their little spit of summer sunshine on the Irish Riviera was their principal asset. 

For many, it was their only asset.

NJ Gov. Chris Christie is mad.  So are Rep. Peter King, Rep. Michael Grimm and Staten Island's Borough President James Molinaro.  They are all Republicans, and right about now they are in the mood to assert their own Second Amendment rights and storm what is left of the dysfunctional GOP caucus in Washington, DC.  During the height of the Sandy crisis, President Obama was calling Christie at midnight to offer federal help; Boehner wouldn't even take Christie's first four phone calls as the Governor tried to get the Speaker to schedule a vote in the House.

Memo to Chris -- when the other guy calls at midnight and your own guy won't even pick up the phone, maybe it's time to choose a new side.

Rep. King had perhaps the best take on this latest GOP meltdown.  "These people have no problem finding New York when it comes to raising money. They only have a problem when it comes to allocating," said King.  He then added that anyone from the tri-state area who donates campaign money to Republicans “should have his head examined.”  Molinaro was a bit more succinct -- “They’re a bunch of idiots.” 

The "idiots," as is their wont, blamed everyone but themselves. Rep. Darrell Issa said the Senate bill was pork, laden with "non-essential" funding.  If it was, there couldn't have been much.  The bill allocated $60 billion to the three states, a mere drop in the bucket for anyone  worried about the deficit (which won't be helped much if the Jersey Shore is closed for business this summer) and small potatoes given the scope of the disaster.

In a move that was all profile and no courage, Boehner's office responded to the onslaught of criticism by announcing there will be a vote on Friday, apparently after the new Congress, which is to be sworn in Thursday, assembles.  Peter King, however,  is not convinced. As he noted,  most of the Republicans do not support the Sandy Relief Bill.  Boehner, who already had problems with his caucus before yesterday,  arguably did not improve his position by  voting in favor of not falling off the fiscal cliff, which a majority of GOP members also opposed, and can't be eager to make them walk another plank.

Nonetheless, the 112th Congress is now gone.  It  will vote no more. 

Maybe the new one will do better.  

It clearly cannot do any worse.

THE GUNS THAT STOLE CHRISTMAS

THE GUNS THAT STOLE CHRISTMAS

One of the guns was a Bushmaster .223 rifle.  The second was a Sig Sauer pistol.  The third a Glock pistol. 

All were semi-automatic. This means that, once a bullet was fired, the guns automatically re-loaded and were set to be fired again.  There was no need to re-cock or manually re-load the guns.

Yesterday in Newtown, Connecticut, Adam Lanza used one or more of them to kill twenty children and six adults in an elementary school.  He then killed himself.  One newspaper reported that he had fired more than 100 rounds.  His victims were shot multiple -- some as many as three to eleven -- times.  He apparently had previously killed his mother, with whom he lived in that town. He also reportedly suffered from a personality disorder or some other mental illness. 

The dead children were first graders.

The Sig Sauer is advertised as a "weapon of choice for elite units around the world."  Its P220 model pistol, which was created in 1985, "led the semi-automatic revolution" in gun manufacturing.  There are at least twenty three models of Sig Sauer pistols.  Like the elite car companies, they even sell "certified pre-owned" guns.

Glock tells potential customers that "Armed forces all over the world count on Glock. Why shouldn't you?"  According to the company,  "When you carry a Glock, you carry confidence."  It also targets woman.  Glock's web site says "We believe in empowering women.  That's why we've packed full-size performance into even our smallest pistols."  For its part, Bushmaster claims that "With a Bushmaster for security and home defense, you can sleep tight knowing that your loved ones are protected." Its "lightweight carbon models" are supposedly "perfect for women." "Any gun will make an intruder think," it says, but "a Bushmaster will make them think twice."

The guns carried or used in Newtown were legal.  They were registered to Lanza's now dead mother, Nancy, who apparently did not consider the possibility that a personalty-disordered (or otherwise mentally ill) young man and guns might make for a lethal combination.  In any case, she almost certainly was not asked about the condition of her son when she purchased the guns, and the web site manuals and safety materials provided by Bushmaster, Sig Sauer and Glock are themselves silent on mental illness.  According to Sig Sauer's site, it is not "frequently asked" about the issue either.

President Obama was near tears yesterday when he went to the podium to offer condolences.  So were many of the television journalists reporting the story. 

I too am very sad.  

I remember when my son and daughter were first graders.  I remember them as first graders in this Santa Claus is coming to town week, when their combination of joy and innocence could melt the hardest hearts.

But mostly I am very angry.

We live in a country where there are more than 300 million "non-military firearms."  Of the guns in the United States, at least 40% were purchased without a background check.  Though the guns used in Newtown were legal, those used in many homicides are not.  And calling the Newtown firearms "legal" doesn't change the fact that their presence in that home was simply stupid in view of who lived there.  Nor does it change the fact that no one -- not Bushmaster or Sig Sauer or Glock or the retailer or any government -- asked about the household or warned about the dangerous mix it presented once firearms were introduced.

We will now go through our customary period of mourning.  The NRA will be silent for a week or so.  Then it will point out that Connecticut has some of the strictest gun control laws and claim that, since those laws did not stop these killings, gun control is ineffective.  Others will say -- in fact, some already did yesterday -- that if the kids had firearms, fewer would have been killed.  The same thing was said after the shootings in Aurora earlier this year.  

Apparently, however, the guns-uber-alles crowd now thinks first graders should pack heat too!

This is nuts. 

No other country has this problem.  

We can do sufficient background checks to keep guns out of the hands of the most dangerous.  We can criminalize multi-clip ammunition magazines. We can permanently ban possession of assault weapons; the Bushmaster used in Newtown either is such a weapon or, slightly modified, easily becomes one.  We can ban possession of firearms by the mentally ill and make homeowners responsible to insure the ban is enforced in their homes.  Short of new laws, we can stop glorifying a gun culture that tells would be purchasers, in some sort of phallic overload, that when they purchase a gun, they buy "confidence."

But we do none of this.

In trying to capture words adequate to the occasion, Connecticut's Gov. Dan Malloy stood in Newtown yesterday and said that "Evil visited this community today."  He was wrong.  Evil was stored in Nancy Manza's Newtown home.  All that showed up yesterday was . . . 

Evil's accomplice.

HOLIDAY FEVER

HOLIDAY FEVER

We are in one of those "in-between" periods.

Some of them are annoying.  

Once February ends, I am generally in no mood for the "in like a lion, out like a lamb" daily dreariness of early March.  I can understand why my co-religionists turned St. Patrick's Day on March 17 into an annual debauch.  It was more an expression of frustration at the pace of seasonal change than a window into the soul of the Irish.

There is a different  problem with a languid August.  By then, the heat of the summer just creates lassitude as everyone waits for the fall.  The French take the entire month off.  We can't, of course, lest our vacationing -- along with the last vestiges of our social safety net and the not yet fully implemented vision that is Obamacare -- be vilified as "European style socialism."  But they have it right.

Not much gets done in August.

Unlike that period between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Where we are right now. And which is somewhat . . . 

Dizzying.

To begin, and this is where America often begins when it thinks about these things, the period is that one time of the year when commerce --  in particular, "retail" -- is one steroids.  This year, the stampede that is Black Friday began on Thanksgiving itself.  This more or less represents the repeal of the latter, which was initially created by George Washington in 1789 when he proclaimed November 26 as "a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God."  

Among those "signal favors," according to Washington's proclamation, was  "the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted".  In other words, Thanksgiving was created -- inter alia, as we lawyers say -- to thank God for . . .

The federal government.

Who would have thunk that!

In any case, our first President's intentions to the side, the day has now pretty much become a national prelude to . . . shopping.  And shop we did this year.  According to the reports, Black Friday (which began shortly after dinner on Thursday), followed by "Shop Small" Saturday and "Cyber" Monday, produced over $62 billion in sales.  $59.1 billion of that spending occurred over the four day weekend, 41% of which was on-line. "Shop Small" Saturday accounted for $5.5 billion in sales and "Cyber" Monday had $1.5 billion, both records.  All sales figures were substantially above last year's figures, and in total, 247 million shoppers either visited stores or shopped on-line.

A little less than three weeks before this shopping spree, Americans went to the the polls to elect their President.  At that time, 127,683,108 of them actually voted.  Three weeks later, 247 million of them went shopping.  In other words, there were about 120 million more "shoppers" than there were voters.  Now, the  "shopper" figure may be plagued by some double counting.  Some people no doubt made more than one purchase over the weekend-plus-Monday's orgy of commerce, and that 247 million number would therefore have to come down to reflect actual individuals.  But still in all, a lot more people shopped after (or on) Thanksgiving than voted on Election Day.

So take that George Washington.

In any case, there are now twenty-six days 'til Christmas.  We used to distinguish between "days to Christmas" and "shopping days to Christmas."  But now, every day is a shopping day.  So the math is less complicated.  During this period, there will be office Christmas parties, relatives who undergo their annual holiday meltdowns, millions of visits to thousands of Santas, talk radio's now annual  claims that liberals are taking "Christ" out of Christmas, and . . . 

Incessant talk about the so-called "fiscal cliff."  

Which is to economics what those old plastic trees were to Christmas.

Entirely artificial.

The fiscal cliff was created by politicians who held raising the debt ceiling hostage to their anti-tax, anti-spending crusade.  They did so in the midst of an anemic recovery that followed a near depression, the only solution to which was a Keynesian stimulus, which they generally oppose.  To raise the ceiling, Congress passed and the President signed a sort of mutual suicide pact -- if some agreement on taxes and spending is not reached by December 31, the tax rates on January 1 will return to the Clinton era rates (39% at the high end, as opposed to today's 35%) and there will be big cuts in both domestic and defense spending.  The combined effect is predicted to be a drop in annual economic growth of about 1-2% over the next two years and, potentially, a new recession.

The "fiscal cliff" is artificial for two reasons -- one metaphorical, the other real.  As a metaphor, the notion is just false.  It suggests that the fall off in growth (the "cliff," as it were) will somehow be the fault as much of those who refuse to reduce the deficit (the liberals) as it will of those who refuse to increase taxes on the wealthy (the conservatives).  But it won't be.  The loss in growth -- and this is where the artificiality becomes real --  will be a function entirely of the austerity the suicide pact enforces.  If taxes on middle incomers (but not the super-wealthy) go up and spending goes down, that is austerity and that is what kills growth and creates a new recession.  If taxes on middle incomers do not rise and the spending cuts are targeted, you do not decrease growth; at the same time, you nominally lower the deficit by improving the government's balance sheet on the revenue side. 

There are some signs the cliff will never be reached.  Having lost the last two Presidential elections (and five of the last six if you count 2000 correctly), the GOP is now being hoist on a demographic and ideological petard that it quickly needs to unshackle itself from if it is to win nationally in the future.  This means appealing to more than the 1% (or their wannabes) and religious fundamentalists, ending its alienation of Hispanic voters, and becoming pro-growth.  Obama is proposing a pro-growth and relatively painless give-up on their part -- the rich pay more but everyone else stays where they are and draconian spending cuts are significantly softened; he is doing this in a post-election world where the polls say voters will hold the GOP accountable, as they should, for the anti-growth austerity the "cliff" tries to mask. 

This is, as Bill Kristol told them shortly after the election, hardly a bad deal for the GOP.  It allows them to retain their no tax bona fides with most of the country and doesn't undermine long term deficit reduction.

They will probably accept it, or some version fairly close.

If not . . . 

There are twenty six shopping days 'til Christmas.

RELIEVED

RELIEVED

Others will and already are picking apart the election result and explaining why it happened.  

The featured causes include significant increases in the number of Hispanic voters, the GOP's seriously declining share of that vote, the ubiquitous gender gap, extremism on the right, and -- perhaps owing to that extremism -- the inability of Romney, though he tried,   to credibly embrace the center once the general election was upon him.  

All are valid.  

But the thing that most struck me about the election was not why it happened but rather the dominant emotion the result elicited.  Other than in the immediate aftermath, it wasn't elation or exuberance.  It certainly wasn't chest thumping or braggadocio. It wasn't even all that much score settling (though statistics and real evidence guru Nate Silver -- who called the Presidential result in all fifty states -- is clearly entitled to take a lot of names).  Rather, on the extreme right, it was denial.  And everywhere else it was . . . 

Relief.

The Europeans were relieved.  The Chinese were relieved.  The Middle East was relieved to the extent possible in that part of the world.  Seniors and  women were relieved, and so were all those people living on the coasts who just got hammered by Hurricane Sandy and don't believe "the jury is still out" on climate change and global warming.  Even Floridians, where the vote is still being counted, were relieved, no doubt grateful that Ohio and Colorado put someone over the top and spared the rest of us a re-run of 2000. 

So why was this the case?

The simple answer, I think, is this.  Had Romney been elected, and certainly had he been elected along with a Republican Senate and House, the country was going to march to the beat of a radically different drummer.  From an immediate fixation on drastic spending cuts to a resurgence of neo-conservative militarism, the future was not going to look remotely similar to the recent past.   The country's foreign and domestic policies undoubtedly would change.

But, much more importantly, so would its priorities. 

In a demand starved environment where austerity has failed wherever it has been tried, the new normal would have been, at the very least, a second recession or depression.   The British demonstrate this reality in spades.  In 2010, having jettisoned a government embracing reasonable Keynesian stimulus for one that denied its necessity, the UK cut spending and watched itself slide into another downturn from which it has yet to emerge.  Nor have the austerians fared any better on the continent.  Unemployment is at historically tragic levels in southern Europe, civil unrest is becoming a serious problem in Greece,  and the absence of real growth is even now starting to hurt the inflation-obsessed Germans.  

America, in contrast, has been a relative success story since Obama became President.  

And this was not by accident.  

The auto industry bail out saved Michigan and a large part of the mid-west.  The early term Recovery Act pumped billions into an economy that was then on life support.  It is true, of course, that the patient has only recently  been released from intensive care.   And she is hardly able to walk out of the hospital.

But she is no longer dying either.

The likelihood is that all this would have ended or been reversed if Romney had been elected President.  However much he tried to convince us of late that a moderate heart beat in 2012's version of an otherwise extreme political body, Romney never wavered in his opposition to the stimulus.  He falsely claimed it had failed but truly believed it should not have been adopted.  Ditto on Obamacare, which he would have repealed.  To bend the medical cost curve, which Obama bends with his state-based exchanges and best-practices panel, Romney's answer was privatized Medicare, which in the end could only bend it by denying care to those without the means to supplement their vouchers.

Romney was about ending the New Deal at home . . .

And resurrecting the Neo-Con Deal abroad.  

How else to explain the unasked for increases in military spending.   Or the fact that any Republican cabinet would have included their Secretary of State in waiting, John Bolton, one of the architects of Bush II's armada uber alles approach to foreign policy.  Or the false claims that Obama's approach was to undertake "an apology tour."  Or the GOP's xenophobic approach to immigration, where the first question asked any Hispanic (let's not kid ourselves here) would have been "where's your green card," in the hope that "self-deportation" eliminated the need for the nastiness now au courant in Arizona.

And then there was the Supreme Court.  Which is likely to have three or more vacancies in the next four years.  Romney wanted more Scalias.  

Most of us do not.

So, at the end of the day, in a reprise of that old Alka-Seltzer commercial, the country woke up on Wednesday morning having been asked how it spelled relief.  The answer was . . .

O-b-a-m-a.

MOTHER NATURE AND MITT

MOTHER NATURE AND MITT

It was supposed to be the week we all focused on those eight swing states -- New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Iowa, Ohio, Virginia, Florida, Colorado and Nevada.

And then reality intervened.

The latest "storm of the century" hammered the tri-state New York region earlier this week and we are not remotely far along in digging out from under.  I lost power but was among the lucky who had it restored within two days.  Hundreds of thousands remain in the dark.  No electricity, and for all but those whose technology is circa 1950, no heat, no hot water, and  (absent working refrigerators) no fresh food either.  Gas lines reminiscent of the Arab oil embargoes of the '70s dot the suburban landscape.   Jobs became an escape, until everyone had to actually begin the commute to them.  Then they just morphed into part of the continuing nightmare. New York City south of 34th Street is still dark.  Many of the  subways are idle in that part of town, and some of the tunnels remain flooded.

The city that never sleeps is officially exhausted.

Natural disasters bring out the worst in Mother Nature but often the best in us.  New Jersey's in-your-face Governor, Chris Christie, had a moment, actually more like a long weekend, of consummate class this week, continually praising the President he had been routinely lampooning, honestly grateful for the on the job competence Obama exhibited on Sandy, in contrast to the federal government's insouciance on Katrina in 2005.  The same, however, could not be said of Mitt Romney.  The man who only months ago told us he wanted to shutter the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and out source disaster relief to the states and localities affected, was eerily silent when journalists asked if he was still of that view.

What's he waiting for?

Memo to Mitt -- next Wednesday is too late.

Further memo to Mitt -- closing FEMA is truly a bad idea.

In case Governor "I-saved-the-Olympics-am-a-businessman-and-trust-me-will-create-jobs-even-though-I -can't-tell-you-how-because-what-I'm-for-actually-doesn't-do-it" hasn't noticed, natural disasters tend to cripple or seriously hamper the areas affected.  Last time anyone checked, Louisiana did not have the resources to dig out from Katrina on its own in 2005, nor do New York City or New Jersey or Connecticut in the wake of Sandy today.  As of now, FEMA can call in the Army Corps of Engineers, which actually has a unit committed to nothing but "unwatering" a flooded levee (or tunnel).  And today, those "unwater-ers" are busy drying out lower Manhattan.

So Mayor Bloomberg doesn't have to.

Disaster relief has been part of the federal government's mandate for more than a hundred years.  The only reason it was not part of that mandate beforehand is that the feds did not then have the capacity to move resources and manpower to the scenes of natural disasters on a moment's notice.  Today they do.  Right now, there are hundreds of FEMA employees from across the nation, marching through the Rockaways in New York City and through towns up and down the Jersey Shore, making sure those without access to phones or the Internet can immediately apply for the assistance they need.  Last night, the National Guard in their army convoys was ferrying families in flooded Hoboken to safety.  In the months ahead, the federal government will be writing checks to tens of thousands of victims who will re-build their homes and businesses.

The states and localities could not do that on their own either.

Throughout this Presidential campaign, I have been searching for the best word to describe the GOP's challenge to Obama this year.   And I now think Mother Nature has come up with that word.  Romney's vision, if it can be called that, is artificial.  There is a disconnect between the problems we face and the so-called solutions he trumpets.  You can't jump start an economy starved for demand by crippling the ability to use fiscal policy to create that demand.  You can't empower women while controlling and denying their access to  health care.  You can't beat terrorism by ignoring the world's terrorist in chief, the now dead bin Laden.  You can't lament the frequency of now annual storms of the century while denying climate change or global warming.  And you can't be for disaster relief if you demand that it come only from those governments least able to provide it.

That's not relief.  

It's neglect.  

And it is Romney's platform.  

He may have been a  can-do businessman.  But he's now proposing to be . . . 

A won't do President.

ROMNEY AGONISTES

ROMNEY AGONISTES

I am from New York. 

But last week went to Virginia.  

And was finally in a state where there actually is a Presidential campaign.

Here is New York, safely blue, we are besieged with information from the under-ticket.  No Presidential candidate need apply.  I know, for example, that one of my Congressional candidates,  Sean Patrick Maloney (he always uses the Patrick, though I doubt anyone questions his ethnicity), will preserve Medicare and the right of women to make their own health care choices, and that his opponent will not.  I then find out, however, that his opponent, Rep. Nan Hayworth, a so-called Tea Partier elected in  2010, will do the same, or so she says.  I know she was for the Ryan budget, and so have more than some doubts about this.  But all her fellow-travelers in the GOP are singing from the same hymnal, doing their best to convince us that they are . . .

What they clearly are not.

Mitt Romney, of course, has written the book on this.  

And added yet another chapter to it in his debate this week with President Obama.  

The topic this time was foreign policy, but the same feigning Mitt showed up.  In Denver, the candidate for the $5 trillion tax cut, $2 trillion defense increase, and junking of Obamacare, became the candidate without the cut or the increase and with a ban on exclusions for pre-existing conditions and an extension of parental coverage for kids.  In Boca Raton, the policies changed but the approach did not.  This time,   pace his recent and not so recent past, there was no red-line on Iran's nukes and certainly no war, no disagreement on the 2014 deadline for pulling out of Afghanistan, and no disagreement on Pakistan.

In his previous life, Romney had so berated Obama for weakness on Iran that, given the actual strength of the sanctions regime (it is literally putting the Persians on rations), his policy alternative had  to be viewed as favoring a military strike.  He had also joined John McCain in committing to not violate Pakistan' sovereignty without their permission (which would have made the bin Laden raid either impossible or ineffective).  In Boca Raton, however,  the candidate (and party) that ignored Osama bin Laden for ten years was forced to praise the President who didn't,  and sanctions-shaped diplomacy replaced neo-con sabre rattling as the policy of choice on Iran.

Even when he went off topic, Romney stayed in character.   

When the debate strayed into auto company bailout territory, laser-focused as both candiates were on the bailout's positive impact in Ohio, mutating Mitt claimed he was actually for federal assistance to the auto companies in 2009.  This was a lie, or as they say these days, a post-truth.    In fact,  at the time the bailout was proposed, Romney said the auto companies should be forced to re-organize in a bankruptcy court.  Unfortunately for Mitt, this is neither a place debtors go in search of federal assistance nor one where that assistance is given out.

In truth, the only real contrast the entire night was the one that blew up in Romney's face.  

Earnestly -- but inaccurately -- asserting that his proposed defense increase was merely opposition to the sequestration that may occur later this year (the latter of which, by the way, neither he nor Obama can stop without Congressional action, which the GOP is now holding hostage so as to preserve Bush II's tax cuts for the wealthy ), Romney claimed our Navy was woefully under-equipped, noting that it had fewer ships today than in 1916.  Obama's rejoinder was that the force structure had been set, in consultation with the Joint Chiefs and all three branches of the military, based on strategic concerns and that, in the line that broke records on Twitter, "We also have fewer horses and bayonets."

At which point, Romney just went back to agreeing with Obama, looking "Presidential", and trying to make sure he didn't turn off the the last two undecided voters in Ohio . . .  or Colorado . . .  or New Hampshire.  

Which was his only purpose from the outset.

Now, to be frank, there is a Shakespearean "doth protest too much" quality to all of us who lambast Mitt Romney for tacking to the center in a general election.  They all do it and Romney is not the first, nor will he be the last,  to raise political posturing to an art form.  In fact, if that were all his 11th hour, 59th minute metamorphosis amounted to, it might very well say much that was negative about his character (as in "I'll do or say anything to get elected"), while at the same time saying a lot that was positive about his brain (as in "OK, I am really not that crazy and won't drive us off the cliff by actually implementing all that right wing stuff").

Here,  however, is the problem.

If elected, Romney  won't be able  to govern from the center, even if he has undergone a sort of road to Damascus conversion to common sense.  

He won't be able to do this because no President governs alone and Romney's party has no one in it who can implement a set of centrist policies.  On the one hand, as Grover Norquist -- he of the "no tax" pledge in exchange for beaucoup de campaign contributions -- has made clear, the only job a Republican President has is "to sign [the] stuff" the right wing sends him.  On the other, if you look for potential Republican cabinet secretaries who could implement a non-right wing agenda on either domestic or foreign policy, there are none.

To a man (and woman), the current crop of GOP governors has preached at the altar of tax and spending cuts, eliminating public sector unions, opposing cap and trade to bring down carbon emissions, and favoring oil and natural gas over renewables.  Put simply,  a set of Republican centrists to run HUD . . . or the Departments of Energy . . .  or Health and Human Services . . . or Labor . . . or the EPA is  unavailable.  And on foreign policy the situation is even worse.  Romney's Secretary of State in waiting is John Bolton, and he is not against either going to war on Iran or out-sourcing the job to Israel.  

So what Romney believes, or more importantly whether he believes anything, may not even matter.  

If he is, as he pretended to be for virtually all of this and the last Presidential campaign, a once moderate governor now become a garden variety Republican right winger, the voters will reject him.  But if he is the vague but discernible moderate whose mantle he donned in all three presidential debates, a guy who answers "Never left ya" to Bill Clinton's "Where ya been these last few years, I missed ya", the elites in his own party will reject them.  

The reality is that Romney sought and obtained the nomination of the most conservative and extreme Republican Party in the modern era.  It is layered with true believers running through Congress, the well-funded right-wing think tanks and corporate lobbyists, and the right-wing media of Ailes's Fox and Murdock's NY Post.  Its policies would take us back to the economics of the 19th century and the foreign policies of the first decade of this one.  Romney could not have won the nomination without them.  That was his problem.  Ours is that he has no one to govern with . . .

Other than them.