Campaigning in Kinston, North Carolina, Hillary Clinton drew the line:

"All I hear about is gas prices. Gas and diesel, everywhere," she said. "I want the Congress to stand up and vote. Are they for the oil companies, or are they for you?"

And, lest one think that was just another moment of ‘misspeaking', she repeated her point in Jeffersonville, Indiana:

"I believe it is important to get every member of Congress on the record. Do they stand with hard pressed Americans who are trying to pay their gas bills at the gas station or do they once again stand with the big oil companies? That's a vote I'm going to try to get, because I want to know where they stand and I want them to tell us--are they with us or against us?"

Asked by George Stephanopoulos to name one "credible economist" that agreed with her plan for a gas-tax holiday, she said, ""I'm not going to put my lot in with economists."

Rarely has there been such unanimity among economists across the political spectrum that the gas-tax holiday is a bad idea. Even Paul Krugman, who has basically been backing Clinton, called this proposal "pointless and disappointing." But he then adds, "Just to be clear: I don't regard this as a major issue. It's a one-time thing, not a matter of principle, especially because everyone knows the gas-tax holiday isn't actually going to happen." I agree that the gas-tax holiday is not itself a major issue, but the way Clinton is handling it ought to be. It is one thing if Clinton does not want to throw in her lot with economists--voters can then decide whether they want to throw their lot in with someone willing to make a policy decision in the face of all we know about economics. But her reaction to criticism is to turn this into a loyalty issue for lawmakers. According to Hillary, either you are "with us"--and the only way to show it is to jump on board this preposterous bandwagon--or you are "for the oil companies." One might think there ought to be a little wiggle room here--namely, for those who think their judgment ought to be influenced by the accumulated learning of economics. But, on Hillary's accounting you are thereby taking a stand for "big oil." Not only that, she has called for a public drama in which each member of Congress has to take a stand on the gas-tax holiday as the litmus test of whether they are "with us or against us." 

It is difficult to know what Hillary is up to here, so it is worth traveling down every interpretive route. Let's suppose she's serious. She really thinks the gas-tax holiday is a good idea and thinks those who don't support it really are supporting "big oil." She thinks this is an issue of such importance that one must require each member of Congress to take a stand. On this serious view, Hillary is someone who will not listen to the overwhelming mass of evidence when it points against her own judgment. Indeed, she seems to form her judgment independent of anything the rest of the world would consider evidence. And rather than cutting others some slack because they are trying to weigh the evidence, she sincerely categorizes them as "against us," "against you," "for big oil."  There is no room in this division for a person of integrity and good judgment who disagrees with her--and, on this hypothesis, she sincerely believes that. It is hard to see how anyone could think that a person who makes up her mind this way has the judgment to be a good president. So, let's go down the opposite road and assume she's not serious. Then we have someone who is cynically willing to play to her audience's fears, and to exploit the innate human tendency to divide the world into us and them. And she is willing to entangle her colleagues in Congress in a loyalty parade, all the while knowing that the issue is fake. She has made up the rules of who is in and out: an exhaustive partition of good guys and bad guys, drawn along the fault lines of the publicly shared anxiety of the moment. Remind you of anyone? 

One might think that serious versus not-serious cover all the bases, but in fact there is another interpretive option: she is operating in a realm in which the question of seriousness does not arise. This is like the realm of dramatic entertainment and make-believe, where we simply suspend the question of whether anyone is being serious about their claims. As the child psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott pointed out, parents intuitively know not to ask their children the question, "Are you really calling for a gas-tax holiday, or just pretending?" Even in child's play, it is hard to keep pretending when the question of whether one is pretending is explicitly raised. This interpretive option does have some advantages. It allows us to think ‘she can't really be serious' without having to flip over to the other side and see her as utterly cynical. If Election Campaign is the name of the game--the game of getting elected--then Hillary is just making moves within it. And it would explain her irritation about being called out by economists about the plan. From inside the game, it seems unfair for the ‘adults' to call her out on the reality of her proposal. No wonder she called them "elites" who are "out of touch" with the American people. Let us alone! Let us continue to play! This interpretation also gives insight into the name that Clinton's own advisors have dubbed the inner sanctum: Hillaryland. It is as though they acknowledge there is some degree of fantasy at work here.

But if we consider Hillary's either/or in terms of the structure of a fantasy, it is not a pretty sight. This is a world in which all ways of weighing available evidence in order to form a mature judgment have been suspended. Instead, there is a massive group, "the American people," and a leader (Hillary) who has the power to say who is "for us" and who is "against us," "for big oil." It is the leader who can draw up the litmus test that every other purported leader must pass or fail. Of course, one can find this kind of fantasy-structure on playgrounds across the country and around the world. It is a familiar structure of us-versus-them play. But when the playground is the battle for the Democratic nomination, it is hard to see this as anything other than exploitation of the very real fears and anxieties of voters about their economic and social futures. Hillary Clinton is, I think, correct when she says she is listening to the American people; but her response is problematic when it comes to exercising a leadership role. This, as opposed to the gas-tax holiday itself, ought to be a major issue.

--Jonathan Lear

Reasonable people are making reasonable arguments for and against Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain. But in a recent column attacking Barack Obama, Paul Krugman has lost his bearings.

Krugman objects to Obama's suggestion, on Fox News, that he accepts the Republican claim that regulation should take the form of tradable emissions permits rather "top-down command and control." Krugman says that Obama is "giving Republicans credit for good ideas they never had."

Here is what Obama actually said:

"I think that back in the '60s and '70s a lot of the way we regulated industry was top-down command and control, we're going to tell businesses exactly how to do things. And you know, I think that the Republican Party and people who thought about the markets came up with the notion that, 'You know what? If you simply set some guidelines, some rules and incentives, for businesses--let them figure out how they're going to, for example, reduce pollution,' and a cap and trade system, for example is a smarter way of doing it, controlling pollution, than dictating every single rule that a company has to abide by, which creates a lot of bureaucracy and red tape and oftentimes is less efficient."

Krugman objects, "Mr. Obama's answer was puzzling because he gave credit where it isn't due."

Actually Obama had it right. As Harvard's Robert Stavins, a long-time participant in the relevant debates and perhaps the world's leading expert on what actually happened, wrote me, "I think I know the history and provenance of U.S. of cap-and-trade and emission-reduction-credit systems relatively well, and Krugman's column is exceptionally misleading."

The major emissions trading program in federal law, enacted in 1990 and focused on acid deposition, was developed under Bush 41, in the White House no less (under the leadership of C. Boyden Gray, an influential Republican and a pioneering figure, in political circles, with respect to emissions trading). The law was pushed through an initially skeptical Democratic-controlled Congress. The pivotal role of the Bush White House has been carefully documented in books and articles. (See, for example, A. Denny Ellerman et al., Markets for Clean Air.)

The several early emissions trading systems, adopted in the 1970s, were established in Republican administrations (Nixon/Ford), with significant opposition from Democrats (and environmental organizations). The trading program for lead in gasoline was also adopted under a Republican president (Reagan).

Krugman is quite right to say that the Reagan administration resisted a regulatory response to acid deposition (a point that is irrelevant to Obama's claims). He is also right to say that economists of all stripes supported tradable permit systems by 1990. But in the political domain (which was clearly the topic), Obama was correct to say that such systems have come from Republicans. As Robert Stavins writes, "the history is what it is, and unfortuately Krugman has misled his readers in order to score some political points."

There is a more general point here. Krugman wants Democrats to attack Republicans and to call them "the party of denial," rather than to give them credit for good ideas. But where credit is due, it is not exactly terrible to give credit.

--Cass Sunstein

I haven’t learned my Iraq lesson yet. I want the U.S. to pluck Robert Mugabe out of his criminal fastness in Zimbabwe and drop him, parachuteless, from 40,000 feet, during which he’ll have enough seconds to reflect upon the horrors he has inflicted on the country of which he was once a benefactor.

“Do unto others...”

If Ian Smith had allowed the jailed Mugabe to attend the funeral of his three-year-old son, who knows how many people, decades later, might have been spared Mugabe-inflicted viciousness. In jail for ten years, schoolteacher Mugabe earned three degrees from the University of London Extension Division. Soon after he came to power, Zimbabwe’s educational system was Africa’s best. Child mortality dropped, national prosperity seemed possible. Land owned by six thousand white citizens was expropriated and distributed to blacks, too many of them Mugabe stooges. Do unto others... When Cecil Rhodes--who’d given his name to the land that became Zimbabwe--expropriated the land that those settlers eventually owned, was questioned about its propriety, his graceful response was, “I prefer land to niggers.”

When drought hit the country, the long-stored hatred in Mugabe burst into what wrecked his country: life expectancy the worst in Africa, inflation at 1000 per cent, political opponents jailed and tortured, starvation and chaos in the streets.

Corruptio optimi pessimi. Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

The bespectacled octogenarian with the gleaming wicked head is trying to squirm out of last month’s electoral defeat. Soldiers and police are bribed to obey him, the seething populace is waiting for African and world leaders to ratify their choice and expel the monster, but they are molasses-slow to act; the United Nations secretariat mutters; the
American administration condemns, but as of today, Mugabe reigns.

Roll out that plane.

--Richard Stern

Nothing like a few days in hospital to refresh--at least revise--one’s usual view of the world. The hospital world of repair, renewal, rescue, of injury, illness, the breaking and broken, the sinking and the sunk is unto itself, connected here and there but essentially cut off from the world of busses, bakeries, borrowing, and earning. It’s thousand technicians, doctors, interns, nurses, cleaners and transportationers inhabit the bright, immaculate corridors and labs, concentrating on their complex occupations, almost in the center of which--the “almost” can become a problem--is oneself. In the tiny den of one’s self-manipulable hospital bed--television, lights, and sometimes nurses at one’s finger--one is visited day and night by technicians who take and retake one’s “vital signs,” by interns, residents, and doctors who tap one’s chest, feel one’s glands, listen to one’s lungs and heart, ask and re-ask questions about one’s susceptibilities and habits (“Are you diabetic?” “Do you take any street drugs?”) and discuss one’s condition and its possible causes and remedies.

No private rooms available, I was curtained away from two successive roommates, men decades younger than I but so assailed by difficulty that I felt a prince of health. They were diabetics, blind, they beshat themselves and were in diapers, but each was far more alert than the doctors who raised their voices addressing them. They were ironic, funny, skeptical, contemptuous of the attempt to treat them as children or morons.

The first of my two nights, I couldn’t sleep. There was every sort of noise, loud-speakered summonses to nurses, television chatter, the intrusions of the pursuers of vital signs. The second night, my doctor prescribed a sleep-inducing drug and I awoke hours later amazed that nighttime had been annihilated. Finally, but two days in, the joy of having the doctors of my two teams (one was the hematologists debating the cause of my anemia) concur in discharging me. I was “transported” in a wheelchair by one of the good-spirited transportationers to the be-winged entrance where my wife waited with the car. And then the oddly unfamiliar but oh-so-welcome world of streets, houses, trees, CTA buses, and cars where I’ve spent most of the last half century.

It was the Monday before the Pennsylvania primary where my brilliant neighbor, Barack Obama, was trashed and trounced by the almost madly driven wife of the great political performer who, but weeks before, had my allegiance, admiration, and affection. In my own bed, fed the food I loved, I broke off the endlessly repetitive commentary of MSNBC and watched my beloved Cubs play the kind of baseball that sees them in their division’s first place. I then read a few more pages of War and Peace, which I was reading in the hospital, more astonished than ever by its fascinating human strands beautifully, magically interwoven. (Daniel Mendelssohn, otherwise writing well about Herodotus in the New Yorker, foolishly compares his wildly, uncontrollably restless pages on the rise and fall of Persia to Tolstoy’s powerfully, subtly assembled masterpiece.)

Home.

The luck of being home with anything material I could want. Now and then, though, one’s heart half-broke watching and hearing stories of thousands being foreclosed and thrown out of theirs or, worse, of hundreds of millions over the planet with nothing to eat, their gorgeous huge-eyed babies wordlessly begging that they might live a few more less tormented days. Malthus, Darwin, the gurus of demography, their predictions inscribed on the tragic human faces and swollen bodies. Senators Clinton, McCain, and Obama, one of whom would soon have the sort of power which might extend, alter, and even brighten at least some of these existences, subtly and not so subtly trashed each other and demeaned their otherwise superior selves. “What,” the thought came to me, “if Tolstoy himself were president? How much would that alter the world? Or would he succumb, one way or another, to the world’s assembled greed and hatred?”

Still, the Cubs and Tolstoy’s book eased my easily easable spirit, and I slept without benefit of medication.

--Richard Stern 

In response to the massive criticism of the ABC Presidential Debate, George Stephanopoulos has said, "Overall, the questions were tough, fair, relevant, and appropriate." This is not true. For the issue is not just about the bias towards gossip and gotcha-questions--(over which people may differ as to whether they are fair, relevant and appropriate). At one point, Stephanopoulos asked Obama: "do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?" And after Obama's answer, he keeps it up, "But do you believe he's as patriotic as you are."

This is not asking about a particular incident or about any particular belief or commitment of the candidate. It is asking one person to speculate on another person's love for their country. How could Obama possibly know the answer to such a question? Was he supposed--Bush-like--to have gazed into Reverend Wright's soul? 

And, of course, there is no way to answer the question without losing. If the answer is ‘yes', then the question becomes, well, then, how patriotic are you, really? If the answer is ‘no', then the question is, why are you hanging around with a priest you know to be unpatriotic?

There is no politician in living memory who has more directly and honestly faced a political problem than Obama in his speech on Reverend Wright and the lingering problems of race in this country. Instead of dealing with the issues that the Wright controversy does genuinely raise--which would be "tough, fair, relevant and appropriate"--Stephanopoulos actively tried to bring the issues down to the level of unfounded speculation and gossip.

The real issue then is not that Stephanopoulos brought up the Wright issue yet again; it is the manner in which he did it. It was, obviously, an attempted mugging.

--Jonathan Lear

Of the many ludicrous political discussions of the last six months, the most ludicrous may well be the discussion of the alleged association between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers, former member of the Weather Underground.

Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, have lived in the Hyde Park area in Chicago. So has Barack Obama. (So have I.) If you lived in Hyde Park for (say) a decade, there was a good chance that you'd run across Ayers, and maybe even be at a social occasion with him. And if you were a social person, or someone who was running for political office, you would meet a lot of people, and it's pretty likely that you would run across Ayers, or be at some social occasion with him.

Ayers is one of numerous people, in the Chicago area, whom Barack Obama has run across. Obama has much closer relationships with numerous conservatives on the University of Chicago faculty, many of whom have given money to Obama's campaign, and many of whom have talked to him at length and been at social occasions with him.

I know for a fact that Obama has actually played basketball with Richard Epstein, a libertarian on the law school faculty who has written some pretty controversial things on property rights and government regulation. I also know that Obama has had a number of conversations with former law school dean Daniel Fischel, a Reagan Republican who has written some pretty controversial things on corporations and government regulation.

True, Ayers apparently had a small party for Obama back in 1995; true, Ayers gave some small sum of money to one of Obama's campaigns; and true, Ayers and Obama simultaneously served, for a time, on a board of a local organization, the Woods Fund, which helps disadvantaged children.  But there was nothing even vaguely like a close relationship between them; and it would be easy to identify countless people, since 1995, with whom Obama has had much closer associations.

Of course many legitimate questions can be raised about any candidate for public office. But it is a gross understatement to say that the alleged Ayers-Obama association is not one of them.

--Cass Sunstein

Real heroes seldom look like their predecessors or textbook models. Ben Shalom Bernanke reminds me of Lewis Carroll’s Dormouse. Small, bald, pepper-and-salt bearded, his voice repressed toward monotone, this ex-student of the Talmud, son of a Dillon, SC pharmacist and a school teacher, taught himself calculus, got the highest SAT scores in his state, worked as a waiter to help put himself through his Harvard summa cum laude BA and, according to a friend of mine who knows him, endured and clearly overcame serious personal phobic crises. Out of this human swirl emerged a Roland, a Galahad, a non-Heston El Cid, who under enormous pressure led to the making of a decision that may well have saved the world economy from plunging into a black hole. Through light and dark hours, estimating the consequences of not acting or acting poorly, gathering with other dedicated guardians of the economy, he helped work out the decision to keep Bear Stearns from the collapse whose blasted filaments would almost surely have brought on economic catastrophe. To hear him on April 2 and 3 responding to the well-informed, often belligerent, often self-serving “inquiries” of congressmen, one saw the epitome of thoughtful, forceful, knowledgeable reason. None of the egocentric self-flaunting, mean-spirited boastfulness of some of his questioners (my least favorite, the ex-great pitcher, Jim Bunning of Kentucky). Here we had the true civil servant at his best, a model, as far as I’m concerned, for the person who under pressure makes crucial decisions.

As I listen with familiar but renewed joy to a fine pianist (Cecile Licad) play Chopin’s G Minor Ballade (Opus 23), some of the human strength which has been drained these last weeks from my old body, flowed in, and I felt the luck of being left with the genial inventions and creations of human genius. In his way, little Ben Bernanke was helping create the conditions out of which such creations and inventions come.

I’d been having trouble finding something truly engaging to read, but three days ago, dropped the poorly written new book that hadn’t drawn me in and took up two old favorites, the prose of George Orwell and the stories of W.S. Maugham. I read Orwell on Mark Twain as a “licensed jester,” his portion of Voltairean disgust and outrage muted by his enchantment with success and by the prudential decorum of his wife, his brilliance surviving largely in his portraits of an age otherwise irrecoverable. A harsher judgment than my own but as always in Orwell, the sense that a high, independent intelligence has made one that had to be considered. Then Maugham: two stories of the far east, “A Vessal of Wrath” and “Flotsam and Jetsam.” The exactitude and surprise of observation, the unexpected, piquant detail and the powerful underplayed feeling for the happy, Dutch hedonist who runs the Malaysian colony or against the hate-charged, failing rubber plantation whose hating couple welcomes the malaria-struck white man who’s carried into their home took me thousands of miles and hours away from the markets Bernanke and company had saved and I could hardly wait to see what would happen to the puritanical evangelist who brings the dissolute Ginger Ted to the malaria-struck island although terrified that he will rape her or what had driven the couple in the other house to remain together despite the hatred that colored every inch of the air around them.

But lesser Maugham stories tired me, so I took up Anna Karenina and rose into narrative sublimity, just reading here and there about Dolly and her children, Levin working with the peasants, Anna’s amazing stream of consciousness as she heads for the railroad station and her suicide. I wish I knew Russian so that I could relish, say, what the brilliant D.S. Mirsky  says about Tolstoy’s style (its combination of idiomatic Russian nobleman speech and complex French syntax) but there is enough here for a thousand enchanted readings.

Finally, a film, the amazing There Will Be Blood, with a central portrait unmatched by anything I’ve seen in film including Citizen Kane, Daniel Day-Lewis’ Daniel Plainview. I haven’t read the book on which Paul Andersen’s script is based, Upton Sinclair’s Oil, but I suspect it is an attack on capitalism and religion. The film could be reduced to such “meaning,” but that would be like reducing Ben Bernanke into a standard bureaucrat and Tolstoy into another merely excellent writer.

--Richard Stern

The three weeks since my last blog have been more significant for the blogger than his readers. He slipped into the counter-world of illness, curled into chills and fever, sleeping and dozing, not eating, scarcely moving. After a week of this, 30 pounds lighter, weak as wet string, the powers of recovery began taking over via the wonderful wife, the family members (those too young to understand grandpa’s condition having the most therapeutic power), the generous (Medicare-covered) outreach of modern medicine--a personal strength trainer, a 280-pound neckless oblong of command--“Hokay. Next hexercize”--a dear, ancient nurse who drew from a cracked cowhide satchel the apparatus of vital signs and a computer to register them, the e-mail counsel of first-rate doctors and the drugs, selected edibles, and routines they advised.

A friend called, shocked at turning 75--“How did I get here?"--and we talk about the death of a publisher, Aaron Asher, one of the last true men-of-letters publishers, who published us and Saul Bellow and Lyndon Johnson’s memoirs. Aaron had stories of the late president driving him on the ranch, slowing only for secret service men to refill his bourbon, of Lady Bird serving him first at dinner, of their discovery that day of the My Lai massacre  and checking their files (Aaron: “Did they have one for Massacres?”). We talked of his new (unreleased) book and about the late work of authors, the diminished energy for length, the ways of reconfecting familiar material, then our reading--he was relishing Thomas Mann’s great stories, his favorite, “Mario and the Magician,” and “Disorder and Early Sorrow,” throwing in with habitual generosity, “You and he are among the few who write with tenderness about the family,” and much more, the warm talk of old friends, tonic,  consolation, nostalgic enrichnment.

Then too, there were the music, newspapers, magazines, books, television series (the amazing “The Wire”) and Netflix (the wonderful installments of Michael Apted’s peerless series that films a dozen English children every seven years from seven to 49), indeed much that has composed so large a part of especially the recent life of one’s old age.

As for the great world, how much has it changed in these three weeks? Clearly Iraq is reboiling with tribal and criminal ferocity perhaps triggered by the American Surge. Cafes and bookstores which were open, markets to which one could send one’s children for bread and fruit, are again stages of  murder. The other festering spots of the world fester as ever. On the intensely-lit American stage, the political candidates perform along the lines of their complex characters: Hillary Clinton--gripping furiously to what her years of battles and triumphs seem to entitle her--fabricates, dodges, advocates, defends, charms, antagonizes, attacks; Barack Obama generally becomes more complex and straighter as he keeps uncovering what keeps his amazing presidential drive going; John McCain gives occasional glimpses of what has sustained his reputation as an independent thinker and doer; while around all three of them, the dramatis personae form, part of the national Oberammergau, Kerrys, Richardsons, Liebermans, Caseys, Ferrarros, Carvilles, sense, nonsense, and hyperbole pouring from them sufficiently to keep the commentary world in motion.

Given the alternative, it is good to be back.

--Richard Stern

Every hour of every day, people send angry emails they soon regret to people they barely know (or even worse, their friends and loved ones). Many people have learned a simple rule: Don't send an angry email in the heat of the moment.  File it, and wait a day before you send it.  But many others haven't learned the rule or don't always follow it.  Technology could easily help.
 
Here is a suggestion for those who are able to produce innovations of this kind: A Civility Check that can accurately tell if the email you're about to send is angry and that asks you, "WARNING: THIS APPEARS TO BE AN UNCIVIL EMAIL.  DO YOU REALLY WANT TO SEND IT?"  (Software already exists to detect foul language.  The Civility Check is more subtle, because it is very easy to send a really awful email message that does not contain any four-letter words.)  A stronger version, which people could choose or which might be the default, would say, "WARNING: THIS APPEARS TO BE AN UNCIVIL EMAIL.  THIS WILL NOT BE SENT UNLESS YOU ASK TO RESEND IN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS."
 
The Civility Check is a small part of the general program of what Richard Thaler and I call "libertarian paternalism," explored in detail in our just-published book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, available here.
 
The Civility Check seems to us a helpful nudge, and much more could be done, not least in the domain of investments and credit markets. With an appreciation of how and when people blunder, a little behavioral economics, and a few simple steps, private and public institutions could save people from a lot of trouble and even extend their lives--and do so without diminishing freedom in the slightest.

--Cass Sunstein

The Wall Street Journal has a remarkable interview with Clarence Thomas, available here. In the interview, Thomas states his fidelity to the Constitution "as it's drafted."

In context, it seems clear that Thomas means to follow the original understanding of the document (though he resists the term "originalism") The real point is that he is a neutral interpreter. "Maybe I am labeled as an originalist or something, but it's not my constitution to play around with. Let's just start with that. We're citizens. It's our country, it's our constitution. I don't feel I have any particular right to put my gloss on your constitution. My job is simply to interpret it."

The chief example, in the WSJ interview, is Justice Harlan's dissenting opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson, in which Harlan said that the Constitution does not permit racial segregation. As the WSJ has it, "Harlan's intellectual honesty trumped his personal prejudice, causing Mr. Thomas to describe Harlan as his favorite justice and even a role model. For both of them, justice is truly blind to everything but the law."

What nonsense! Harlan cannot contend that the text of the document "as it's drafted" mandates his conclusion. From Harlan's opinion, we learn essentially nothing about We the People's original understanding of the relevant constitutional provisions. Worse, the modern consensus, among legal historians, is that as a matter of history, Harlan had it wrong! Under Thomas' preferred method of interpretation, most historians think that Plessy v. Ferguson was correct. The irony is that Thomas singles out, as heroic, a Harlan opinion that failed to apply that method, and that must probably be judged dishonest, erroneous, and even lawless, if that method is the right one.

Of course segregation is unconstitutional, but the reason is complicated rather than simple, and it is not that justices can simply stare at the Constitution and declare it so. (Thomas might respond that segregation is necessarily inconsistent with the textual provision calling for "equal protection," but the provision need not be read that way, and most of those who ratified it did not read it that way.)

The title of the WSJ article is "Mr. Constitution," as if Thomas is really committed to the constitution, while other justices vote their personal preferences. But without seriously consulting history, Thomas has voted to strike down affirmative action programs, to protect property rights from regulation, to invalidate congressional enactments giving citizens the right to sue in federal court, and to treat commercial advertising the same as political speech. In most and probably all of these cases, Thomas voted in a way inconsistent with the Constitution as it was written (and it would be ludicrous to say that his votes were mandated by a neutral reading of the text).

"Mr. Constitution" votes, too much of the time, in a way that fits with the twenty-first century views of the conservative wing of the Republican Party. My own empirical studies, with Thomas Miles of the University of Chicago, show that in administrative law cases, Thomas is the most partisan member of the Court, with Justice Stevens a close second.

The real point here is not to pick on Justice Thomas, who has produced some exceedingly interesting, important, and creative opinions. The point instead involves a major irony of the modern era: Those who insist that they are speaking neutrally for "the Constitution" are often more, not less, likely to read their own political convictions into constitutional law.

--Cass R. Sunstein

That this woman, distinguished as remarkably able since her 20th year--and by no one more than the husband who in Little Rock and Washington appointed her to important roles and who now campaigns for her with heart-rocking energy--feels that she has to jump through the hoops of dropping "G"s arouses as much pity as disgust.

--Richard Stern 

Of the trillion words written and spoken by William Buckley, I was the recipient of but one: “Delicious,” which accompanied a check for two hundred dollars, payment for the only piece I published in the National Review (where from 1960 some of my books had been generously reviewed by the likes of then-23-year-old Joan Didion and the brilliant classicist, critic and caricaturist, Guy Davenport). My view of Buckley himself had been tempered by humane snippets garnered from our common friend, Hugh Kenner (whom Buckley, best man at Hugh’s wedding to Maryanne, once said was the most intelligent man he knew). I never took to Buckley’s preachments or his self-relishing wit. The eruptive flash of his tooth-bright smile was to me like chalk on a blackboard. As far as conservative thinking went, I was, after all, on the same campus as Milton Friedman, Leo Strauss (the influences on Willmore Kendall, Buckley’s Yale guru), and Richard Weaver (whose famous course in Expository Writing I took over with his amiable help), had read Russell Kirk, James Burnham, and other popular conservatives, and periodically questioned graduate students about Edmond Burke, Dr. Johnson, and other great conservative writers. Nonetheless, Buckley’s death removes another familiar piece of my world and is mourned as the Margaret in Hopkins’ famous poem mourns the “goldenrod unleaving”: “It is Margaret you mourn for.”

I’d just finished reading Emile Zola’s marvelous novel, Pot-Bouille (1882), translated a century ago under the odd title, Restless House. (The French means something like 'stewpot.") The book charts the two years of young Octave Mouret’s stay in a “most respectable” Parisian apartment house. With systematic power and extraordinary mimicry, Zola strips, floor by floor, family by family, every ounce of respectability from every tenant. Avarice, snobbery, shabby vanity, brutality, cruelty, unbridled, pleasureless lust, impotence, unfeelingness, mendacity, and what have you are scarcely veiled by social and religious genuflections and proclamations. The hypocritical tenants bully, connive, cheat, lie, and struggle to death’s door in intramural ferocity. The novel ends in one of the famous scenes of world literature, the self-delivery of her baby by the semi-imbecilic maid of the Josserand family, Adele, who, after managing to cut the unbilical cord and resting for an hour in the bloody birth mess, struggles down to the trash cans where she deposits the baby. Surrounded by the tenants’ high-minded denunciation of a recent plague of infanticide, Adele fears imprisonment. The book ends with this murder and with a final shower of self-boosting assertion of domestic, civic, political, and religious virtue .

The book is dated by one of the tenants’ denunciation of Renan (“He should be burned at the stake”) and his just published Life of Jesus (1863). This is two years after Octave moved into the veneer-thin splendor of the apartment house and just after he has married the beautiful, unfeeling widow who runs the small department store which she and Octave will transform into the Printemps-like grandeur of Au Bonheur des Dames, title and setting of a later volume in the 20-volume Rougon-Macquart series, Zola’s depiction of the rise and fall of genetically determined members of the two families and their society.

Sixteen years after Pot-Bouille, Zola would publish (in Clemenceau’s newspaper) J’accuse his famous denunciation of the French government’s indictment and imprisonment of the Jewish officer, Alfred Dreyfus.The subsequent uproar forced Zola to flee to England and perhaps, in 1902, back in France,  led to what might have been the murderous, at any rater, lethal blocking of his furnace which asphyxiated him.

Compared to Zola’s amazing depiction-creation of the social, political, economic, moral and spiritual horror of 19th century France, Buckley’s criticism of the America of 1950 to the hour of his death this week is that of a squeaky toy wheel compared to the B Minor Mass.

--Richard Stern

1. In his posting of January 27^th, Cass Sunstein, with the success of “McCain, Obama and to some extent Huckabee” in mind, wrote that “unifying candidates are now being taken as a most refreshing change from the last years.” I beg to differ.

In my view, the most remarkable aspect of the Obama’s campaign has been his ability to make the tone of his politics mask their substance as well as the willingness of highly educated voters to go along with this illusion. His voting record and his views on foreign policy place him firmly on the left-wing of the Democratic Party. His are the views of the left-liberal political and intellectual establishment echoed in print in The New York Review of Books and The Nation, and online via Moveon.org. His most frequent remark about foreign policy during the campaign is that he will withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible. Despite the fact that the surge has achieved many of its goals, the press has not challenged Obama–or Hillary Clinton for that matter–about the consequences of an American withdrawal in the face of apparent success. While the call to get out of Iraq as soon as possible is unifying for the activist young and liberal and left-liberal intellectuals, it is profoundly divisive in American society as a whole. Indeed, were either Obama or Clinton to withdraw troops from Iraq before the United States had achieved a tolerable end result, the bitterness and turmoil in our country could match that of the divisions over the war in Vietnam. “Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory” would not be just a clever slogan. Millions of people, with good reason, would believe it to be true. Were that to happen, partisan division could become so intense that the Democrats’ domestic agenda would be unlikely to survive the tumult. You could kiss goodbye to universal health care.

2. A second, bizarre aspect of the primaries is that for reasons of their own, neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama have stated the most obvious difference between them. It is, especially in foreign policy, that she is a centrist Democrat whose ideas are far “newer” than his while he is a left-liberal Democrat whose ideas are largely those of the Democratic orthodoxy of the pre-Bill Clinton Democratic Party. These are the same ideas that, except for the Carter interlude, kept the Democratic Party out of the White House in the three decades before Clinton’ election in 1992. If Hillary Clinton had stated this simple truth, she could forget about getting the support of the Democratic Party’s left-wing and thus would have little chance of getting the Party’s nomination. If Obama had stated this truth, then the post-partisan, unifying aura of his candidacy would evaporate. However fine a politician he may be, his political views are not those of the political center. The Republican Party will not be reluctant to bring this inconvenient fact to the voter’s attention.

3. The Obama candidacy is said to express a new idealism. To be sure, in the sociologist Max Weber’s terms, it does rest on an ethics of conviction that focuses on intentions rather than consequences. The refusal to publicly face the probable catastrophic consequences of rapid withdrawal from Iraq is typical of this kind of idealism. It contrasts with what Weber called the ethics of responsibility which focus as much or more on the consequences of actions than on the intentions of actors. Yet there is another sense in which the mood that has brought Obama to his recent successes is not idealistic at all. Aside from a lunatic fringe, no one claims that the enemy in Iraq is anything but utterly barbaric, inhumane and guilty of hundreds of repeated war crimes in the form of the intentional murder of innocents. A suicide bombing is a war crime. Yet in the face of this inhumanity, one looks in vain for passion and/or insight among the Democratic candidates about the nature of this enemy. To my knowledge, neither Clinton nor even more so Obama have even mentioned the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” in their campaign. The Party left-wing places Clinton  on the defensive for her Iraq vote in 2003 but no one puts either her or Obama on t he spot for failing to speak clearly about Islamic extremism. Why is indifference to the actions of an evil enemy a form of moral idealism? The Republicans will not be shy about asking that question.

 4. This year’s Democratic primaries raise the following question: Is the Democratic Party any longer the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that is, the Roosevelt of the New Deal as well as the Roosevelt whose leadership and decisions were absolutely indispensable to defeating Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan in World War II? Cass Sunstein, among others, rightly evokes Roosevelt’s legacy of domestic social and economic reform. Today, in the form of the now familiar varieties of radical Islamism, we face an enemy that bears more similarities to fascism and Nazism than any other ideological movement of similar dimensions since World War II. The radical Islamists celebrate the murder of innocent civilians, proudly declare their hatred for the Enlightenment, liberal democracy, capitalism, communism and socialism, feminism, wage war on black Africans in Darfur, despise the United States and yes, also revive radical anti-Semitism in ideology and practice. To point this out is not “neoconservative ideology.” It is the unpleasant truth. These ideas and actions call for an American counter-offensive, one animated by a liberalism with deep and abiding memories of Roosevelt.

The political habits and short historical memories of the past thirty years have brought us to a Democratic Party that does not want to speak too loudly about the fact that its greatest President was a great wartime leader in a war against fascism and Nazism. Vietnam became the formative experience of the Party’s leaders and a loss of enthusiasm for the hard-line during the Cold War became Democratic orthodoxy. It was not surprising that the Republicans would have more enthusiasm for the Cold War against the Communist. In the 1970s, Democrats who dissented from their Party’s course turned to the legacy of Harry Truman. Yet Truman’s legacy was formed in the early Cold War with the Communists. Today, although radical Islam has impeccably reactionary credentials, the Democratic Party candidates do not present the fight against it as a distinctly liberal endeavor. So it is no wonder that they don’t evoke the memory of FDR’s wartime leadership.

Yes, there are vast differences in power, ideology, geography and culture between the issues of the 1940s and those of our time. I am, after all, a historian with all of the attention to awareness of difference and specificity of time and place that our discipline fosters. Yes, much went very wrong in Iraq and much should have been done differently in the way the United States has fought the war on the terror inspired by radical Islam. Yes, a President in 2009 cannot slavishly copy the policies from the middle of the past century. Yet traditions and memories offer us a sense of how a President might face friends and enemies today. The unfortunate silence about Roosevelt, in this time of war, stems from a political party that has forgotten or even become uncomfortable with the ideas and policies of its most important political figure. A considerable component of the activist and passionate wing of today’s Democratic Party has distanced itself from the meaning of foreign policy liberalism in the Roosevelt tradition.

This is a recipe for electoral defeat in fall 2008 and, again, opens the door to the White House to a Republican willing and able to appeal to voters in the political center many of whom still look back with admiration to a liberal President whose revolution in American foreign relations launched the United States to its subsequent path to world power.

 --Jeffrey Herf

Paul Krugman has written a number of pieces that are highly critical of Barack Obama. Krugman is a distinguished economist as well as an exceptional writer, and on issues of substance, he raises reasonable questions and offers plausible objections. But as many people have noticed, the tone and intensity of Krugman's pieces are puzzling. It seems almost personal--a kind of campaign.
 
What accounts for this?
 
I don't know the full answer, but here's a significant part of it: Krugman and Obama have different approaches to political disagreement. Krugman likes partisanship, and Obama does not. In a revealing column in January 2007, Krugman cited Obama's lament that "politics has become so bitter and partisan," and rejected the Senator's suggestion that we have to become less partisan in order to solve our problems. In Krugman's view, we need an FDR, not a consensus-seeking Eisenhower. Politicians have "to tackle the big problems despite bitter partisan opposition."
 
Rejecting Obama's claim that we should begin with a new period of bipartisanship, Krugman quoted, with evident admiration, FDR's famous statement, in 1936, "Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me--and I welcome their hatred."
 
Krugman insisted that politicians who seek "a new New Deal" should welcome the hatred of the right. Obama doesn't hate those who disagree with him, and he does not welcome people's hatred. Krugman seems to hate that.

In a December 2007 column in Slate, Krugman amplified his views about partisanship and polarization. He wrote that "any attempt to change America's direction, to implement a real progressive agenda, will necessarily be highly polarizing." He suggested that "what we need is partisanship." He lamented the idea that Democrats should "play nice." More specifically, he attributed Obama's "highly favorable coverage" in the press to a (misguided) longing "for an end to the polarization and partisanship of the Bush years."
 
Krugman and Obama do appear to have a legitimate difference about strategy. Krugman thinks that problems cannot be solved without squarely accepting bitter opposition, while Obama thinks that problems are best solved by attempting to listen to opponents, to learn from them, and to defuse their opposition.

But I doubt that Krugman's writings about Obama are adequately explained by a dispute about strategy. Undoubtedly Krugman is right on some issues, and surely Obama would, on those issues, be willing to fight for his commitments. Undoubtedly Obama is right on some issues, and surely Krugman would agree that some of the time, bipartisan approaches are best.

I think that the difference between the two goes deeper, and that it is really one of temperament. This is a speculation, but it is not otherwise easy to explain Krugman's seemingly visceral hostility to Barack Obama.

--Cass R. Sunstein