The next big fight in Congress revolves around extending the Bush tax cuts. Unlike issues like climate change or stimulus, where the public does not accept the Democrats’ basic analysis of the problem, on the tax cuts the Democrats hold the whip hand. The question is whether they emerge with a political win, a public policy win, or both.

Let’s review a few basic facts about the Bush tax cuts. When Republicans took control of government in 2001, their top priority was reducing tax rates on high income earners. Since tax cuts for the rich were unpopular, they had to pair those cuts with middle-class tax cuts in order to make them politically salable. That’s how they pressured Democrats into supporting them. By packaging the whole thing together, they could accuse Democrats of opposing tax cuts for the middle class if they voted no.

Now, ten years later — and what a decade of bountiful economic growth we’ve enjoyed with the energies of investors and entrepreneurs finally unleashed from restrictive Clinton-era tax rates! — the Bush tax cuts are scheduled to expire. Republicans want to extend the whole thing. Democrats just want to extend the parts that benefit people who earn less than $250,000 a year.

Now, here’s the underlying dynamic. Raising taxes on the middle class is unpopular. But raising taxes on the rich is wildly popular. The truth is that neither party cares very much about the portion of the Bush tax cuts that benefit the middle class. Republicans just threw that in to sell the upper-bracket tax cuts, which is what they care about. Democrats might prefer a more progressive tax code with lower middle-class taxes, but most of them would rather have the revenue instead. But Democrats promised not to raise taxes on people earning less than $250,000 a year — a promise they felt they had to make in order to win. And they can’t break that promise without suffering political consequences.

Republicans, on the other hand, don’t want to pass an extension of the middle-class Bush tax cuts without the upper-bracket tax cuts. That would leave the federal tax code more progressive than it was under Bill Clinton — you’d have a combination of Clinton-era tax rates on the rich and Bush-era tax rates on the middle class. Conservatives have been fretting about such a result for more than a year, warning ominously about a country in which half the population pays no income tax. (They’d still pay other taxes, but the central Republican goal is to minimize the progressivity of the tax code.)

So we’re down to a game of chicken. Here’s why the Democrats hold the whip hand. They can pass an extension of the middle-class Bush tax cuts through the House. If Republicans let the bill pass, then they’ve lost their leverage to extend the unpopular Bush upper-income tax cuts. If they filibuster it, then Democrats can blame them for raising taxes on middle-class Americans. It would let Democrats out of their pledge. (Hey, they tried to keep the middle-class tax cuts.) Then nothing would pass, and we’d instantly revert to Clinton-era rates across the board.

What kind of effect would that have on the deficit? A huge one:

[graph appears in the article-- at http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/76563/how-fight-the-tax-cut-wars]
That dark orange stripe is the portion of the deficit attributable to the Bush tax cuts. That would be wiped out. Ending the tax cuts would basically solve the medium-term deficit problem.

The key factor here is that, just as Republicans got to frame the debate in 2001 by combining the tax cuts into an up or down vote, Democrats can frame the debate now by separating the policies Republicans pretend to care about from the ones they actually care about. Republicans want to have a vote on the whole collection of Bush-era tax cuts. Democrats shouldn’t give it to them. You hold a separate vote on the middle class portion and dare them to oppose it.

This seems to be the plan:

“The Senate will move first, and it will be a test to see whether Republicans filibuster” to block the bill in a bid to also win tax cuts for higher earners, said Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, head of the House Democrats’ re-election effort.

“If you can’t get it out of the Senate, then you take it to the election,” Mr. Van Hollen said in a recent interview. “You say to the American people that Republicans want to continue to hold middle-class tax relief hostage for an extension of tax breaks for [the well-to-do]. That will be the debate.”

Letting Go
What should medicine do when it can’t save your life?

by Atul Gawande
The New Yorker, August 2, 2010

This is a modern tragedy, replayed millions of times over. When there is no way of knowing exactly how long our skeins will run—and when we imagine ourselves to have much more time than we do—our every impulse is to fight, to die with chemo in our veins or a tube in our throats or fresh sutures in our flesh. The fact that we may be shortening or worsening the time we have left hardly seems to register. We imagine that we can wait until the doctors tell us that there is nothing more they can do. But rarely is there nothing more that doctors can do. They can give toxic drugs of unknown efficacy, operate to try to remove part of the tumor, put in a feeding tube if a person can’t eat: there’s always something. We want these choices. We don’t want anyone—certainly not bureaucrats or the marketplace—to limit them. But that doesn’t mean we are eager to make the choices ourselves. Instead, most often, we make no choice at all. We fall back on the default, and the default is: Do Something. Is there any way out of this?

In late 2004, executives at Aetna, the insurance company, started an experiment. They knew that only a small percentage of the terminally ill ever halted efforts at curative treatment and enrolled in hospice, and that, when they did, it was usually not until the very end. So Aetna decided to let a group of policyholders with a life expectancy of less than a year receive hospice services without forgoing other treatments. A patient like Sara Monopoli could continue to try chemotherapy and radiation, and go to the hospital when she wished—but also have a hospice team at home focussing on what she needed for the best possible life now and for that morning when she might wake up unable to breathe. A two-year study of this “concurrent care” program found that enrolled patients were much more likely to use hospice: the figure leaped from twenty-six per cent to seventy per cent. That was no surprise, since they weren’t forced to give up anything. The surprising result was that they did give up things. They visited the emergency room almost half as often as the control patients did. Their use of hospitals and I.C.U.s dropped by more than two-thirds. Over-all costs fell by almost a quarter.

This was stunning, and puzzling: it wasn’t obvious what made the approach work. Aetna ran a more modest concurrent-care program for a broader group of terminally ill patients. For these patients, the traditional hospice rules applied—in order to qualify for home hospice, they had to give up attempts at curative treatment. But, either way, they received phone calls from palliative-care nurses who offered to check in regularly and help them find services for anything from pain control to making out a living will. For these patients, too, hospice enrollment jumped to seventy per cent, and their use of hospital services dropped sharply. Among elderly patients, use of intensive-care units fell by more than eighty-five per cent. Satisfaction scores went way up. What was going on here? The program’s leaders had the impression that they had simply given patients someone experienced and knowledgeable to talk to about their daily needs. And somehow that was enough—just talking.

The explanation strains credibility, but evidence for it has grown in recent years. Two-thirds of the terminal-cancer patients in the Coping with Cancer study reported having had no discussion with their doctors about their goals for end-of-life care, despite being, on average, just four months from death. But the third who did were far less likely to undergo cardiopulmonary resuscitation or be put on a ventilator or end up in an intensive-care unit. Two-thirds enrolled in hospice. These patients suffered less, were physically more capable, and were better able, for a longer period, to interact with others. Moreover, six months after the patients died their family members were much less likely to experience persistent major depression. In other words, people who had substantive discussions with their doctor about their end-of-life preferences were far more likely to die at peace and in control of their situation, and to spare their family anguish.

by Dean Baker
Beat the Press Round-up, July 7, 2010

In her column bashing AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka, Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus complains that Trumka got angry at the suggestion that the retirement age for Social Security be raised in response to the increase in life expectancy in recent decades. Apparently, Ms. Marcus did not know that the retirement age has been raised already. In 1983, Congress voted to raise the normal retirement age from 65 to 67 over the period from 2002 to 2022. Ms. Marcus seems unaware of this 27 year-old law.

Marcus also implies that Trumka believes that the country’s fiscal problems can be solved exclusively by taxing the rich. This is not true. Trumka and the AFL-CIO have consistently been strong proponents of measures that would make the U.S. health care system more efficient, such as a public health insurance option and negotiated prices for prescription drugs.

Such measures would make health care much more affordable for both the public and private sector. If per person health care costs in the United States were the same as in any other wealthy country, the United States would be looking at huge long-term budget surpluses rather than deficits. It is difficult to understand how Marcus could have missed this aspect of Trumka’s political agenda.

by Paul Waldman
The American Prospect, July 27, 2010

The latest installment in our never-ending “conversation” about race is underway, thanks to the Shirley Sherrod affair. But before we get to the week’s developments, a bit of history.

In June of 1988, George H.W. Bush started telling a very scary story about his opponent, Michael Dukakis. Or rather, not so much about Dukakis, but about a man named Willie Horton. Horton, a prisoner in Massachusetts, had skipped from a furlough while Dukakis was governor and victimized a young couple, raping the woman and assaulting the man. There were some key points of the story Bush left out: The furlough program had been started by Dukakis’ Republican predecessor, and Dukakis had ended it, for instance. Horton’s name also wasn’t actually “Willie” but William, and he had never been known by the name the Bush campaign was using. Bush also didn’t mention that “Willie” Horton was black and his victims white, but he didn’t have to — Horton’s menacing mug shot would soon be shown hundreds of times on the news, and the couple were available for interviews.

For Willie Horton to become a national figure, Bush had to have a conversation with his advisers, among them Roger Ailes, currently the head of the Fox News Channel, and legendary operative Lee Atwater. They told Bush about Horton and explained how in their focus groups, white voters went positively nuts when they heard the story and turned against Dukakis. The advisers asked Bush for permission to make Willie Horton one of the pillars of their campaign. Bush said yes.

Almost no one who knew him thought that George H.W. Bush harbored personal animus toward black people. But the contents of his heart didn’t matter when he made that decision, and they don’t much matter to history. Bush was neither the first Republican nor the last to decide that the path to victory lay in picking at the scab of race, in order to make white voters feel afraid, or angry, or resentful. And here we are again, with a group of conservatives — not a presidential candidate this time, but what we might call entrepreneurs of racial division — doing all they can to convince whites that they are threatened by dangerous, vengeful blacks.

The modern history of this tactic dates to Richard Nixon, who employed the “Southern strategy” meant to cut into the Democratic Party’s working-class base. By moving attention away from class divisions and onto racial divisions, Nixon would convince white voters that elitist Northern liberals were taking from them and giving to undeserving blacks. It would play out again and again, in ways symbolic and substantive, from Ronald Reagan’s imaginary “welfare queens,” to Willie Horton, to Newt Gingrich’s crusade against “midnight basketball.” The white-hot center of this argument is the idea that advancement by racial minorities necessarily involves taking something away from whites. “You needed that job,” said the infamous “White hands” ad from Jesse Helms’ 1990 campaign, “but they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota.”

When Andrew Breitbart posted on his website an out-of-context video snippet meant to fool people into believing an Agriculture Department official was discriminating against white people, he didn’t have to wonder whether the story would move outward from his hateful little corner of the Internet. Fox News, he knew, would unwrap it like a longed-for Christmas present and move it quickly into heavy rotation on its calliope of racial resentment. Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity would bellow their indignation. Rush Limbaugh and other conservative radio hosts would spend hours plumbing the depths of this latest outrage against oppressed white people. And within a day or two, the story would slither its way up the media ladder to the broadcast networks and major newspapers.

Breitbart knew it, because even before Barack Obama took office, the most venomous voices on the right were telling white voters that this man preaching understanding and reconciliation was conning them, hiding his inner Huey Newton, inevitably to unleash the fury of black rage upon them. And not just him — his wife, too. Remember how conservatives spread the false rumor that Michelle Obama had once referred to “whitey” in a speech? Remember how they tried to use her college thesis to prove she was a black nationalist? Remember how National Review put a picture of her looking angry on its cover, under the headline “Mrs. Grievance”?

Despite the fact that there is no subject the White House would like to talk about less than race, it has become a positive obsession for some on the right. When Glenn Beck, the conservative media star of our time, said that Obama “has a deep-seated hatred of white people,” it was only his most-publicized foray into race-baiting; it’s actually a regular feature of his rhetoric, which includes lots of talk of “reparations” — taking money from white people to give to black people. “Have we suddenly transported into 1956, except it’s the other way around?” Beck recently asked. “Does anybody else have a sense that there are some that just want revenge?”

Reparations is a major theme these days for Rush Limbaugh, too, with every Democratic program he doesn’t like characterized as an effort to stick it to white folks. He tells his listeners that “Obama’s entire economic program is reparations.” It makes sense, because as Limbaugh had told them before, “the days of [minorities] not having any power are over, and they are angry. And they want to use their power as a means of retribution. That’s what Obama’s about, gang.”

Beck and Limbaugh may be the two loudest voices, but it comes from multiple directions, including media bottom-feeders like Andrew Breitbart. Look at the controversies that have animated them since Obama took office: Van Jones, ACORN, Sonia Sotomayor’s alleged animosity toward white people, the phony New Black Panther voter intimidation story — and next month there will probably be another. In every case, the message to whites is the same: You are the victim. You are not the racist — they are the racists, and you are the victim of their racism. You are the oppressed, the held down, the kept back. If you see a black person or a Hispanic get a position of power, you’d better watch out, because they’ll be coming for you.

To be clear, what I’m talking about here isn’t racism, it’s race-baiting. For all I know, Breitbart is positively bursting with love for all humanity. But what we can say for sure is that he is a professional race-baiter, just like Beck and Limbaugh. What they are inside is unknowable and irrelevant; it’s what they do that is so vile.

There are no doubt many Republicans of good will who are made sick by the racial poison their ideological comrades pour into our national bloodstream. Perhaps some will be able to do what George H.W. Bush could not 22 years ago: say to those who come forward with the latest bit of race-baiting, “No. We will not do this. I know it works, and I know it may help us politically. But it demeans us and harms this country we always say we love so much. It is wrong. And we will not do it.”

To give you an idea of the topic, I will simply quote here the first (rather long!) sentence:

Have you ever wondered why people who are willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year to protect the United States against any possible threat from an external enemy, nonetheless say we can’t afford to sacrifice much of anything to combat the threat of climate change that could make our world, and our country, less livable?

You can HEAR the commentary, just as it was broadcast over the radio, at this site:

By Samuel Charap
Washington Post, July 23, 2010

The bill on President Dmitry Medvedev’s desk that expands the powers of the KGB’s domestic successor would seem to confirm our worst fears about Russia’s political development. But the story of how it got there shows that Russia’s political transformation is still unfolding and reminds us that the United States has a role to play in shaping it.

The proposed law would give the Federal Security Service (FSB) authority to issue warnings to individuals whose actions, though not illegal, “create the conditions for a crime.”

Human rights activists and opposition groups have condemned the legislation, citing fears that the powers will be used to preemptively silence the government’s political opponents. Memorial, Russia’s leading rights watchdog, has noted the similarities between the bill and a 1972 decree that allowed the KGB to warn citizens not to engage in “anti-social activities that contradict the state security of the USSR,” even if those activities did not violate laws. The “warnings” were used to intimidate Soviet dissidents.

Medvedev is unlikely to veto the measure, as he has taken credit for proposing it, dashing misplaced hopes that he is some sort of liberal foil to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a former KGB lieutenant colonel. So is this yet another nail in the coffin of Russian democracy?

Perhaps. But that’s not the whole story.

As bad as it is, the bill could have been a lot worse. During the legislative process, rights groups succeeded in getting removed provisions that would have allowed the FSB to publish its admonitions, to summon a person to receive a warning and to impose prison sentences of up to 15 days as punishment for refusal to appear. A mechanism to appeal the warnings was also inserted.

This episode demonstrates that politics, however warped, still exists in Russia, and that civil society, however marginalized, still plays a role in public life. While far from fully democratic, Russia is not a one-party dictatorship.

The policy challenge for the United States is how to foster those trends that might lead Russia toward a more open political system while counteracting those that might take it in the other direction.

Some argue that the Obama administration’s major expansion of government-to-government engagement (the “reset”) on issues it considers top global challenges, such as preventing the proliferation of nuclear materials and stabilizing Afghanistan, makes the situation worse. They contend that this engagement implies an endorsement of the Kremlin’s limits on domestic freedoms and empowers a government that is irreconcilably hostile to those freedoms.

But done right, engagement with Moscow could be important to influencing Russia’s development in positive ways.

First, improved ties increase the chances that the United States can express concerns about what’s happening in Russia without the discussion devolving into a shouting match. The past decade has shown that a climate of antagonism between the governments makes discussions of these issues impossible. Whether such discussions lead to change is another question, but having them is a good thing, especially when the alternative — public finger-wagging — creates more backlash than progress.

Second, engagement undercuts the “fortress Russia” developmental model, which closely links greater confrontation with the United States to ever tighter political controls, a closed economy and domination in the former Soviet region. It deprives the Kremlin of the specter used to justify its turn away from open politics: the West as the enemy at the gates.

With that bogeyman gone, it is no longer credible to label any nongovernmental organization (NGO) that receives Western funding part of a “fifth column” or to equate pro-Western policies with treason. Engagement creates space for those groups to operate domestically and for thosearguments to be heard. It also increases Russian citizens’ exposure to the United States and its political system, through increased travel, trade or more frequent positive coverage on (tightly controlled but widely watched) TV news.

Finally, successful governmental engagement will, over time, raise the cost to the Kremlin of actions that would undermine ties. If Moscow has something to lose, it might (or at least has more incentive to) think twice.

Robust engagement with the government must not entail ignoring difficult issues and must be complemented by direct engagement with society. On this score, the Obama administration says the right things and is trying new ideas, such as holding parallel civil society meetings during presidential summits, but its delivery has been somewhat lacking.

by Robert Creamer
Huffington Post, July 23, 2010

The first rule for Democratic success this November is the immutable iron law of politics: if you’re on the defense you’re losing. Who ever is on the offensive almost always wins elections.

That’s why Democratic victory requires that this election cannot simply be a referendum on the speed with which Democrats have been cleaning up the economic mess created by the Republicans and their allies on Wall Street. It must be a choice between Democrats who are charting a new path forward out of the economic ditch and the failed economic policies of the Republicans that drove us into that ditch in the first place. Democrats must make it clear that if the Republicans once again get their hands on the keys to the economy, those same, reckless failed policies will result in yet another economic catastrophe.

It’s fine, for instance, for Democratic office holders to explain the details of the Health Care bill. After all, the more that people know about it, the more they like it. But that explanation should not constitute the be all and end all of the Democratic health care message. We have to challenge the Republicans — who have been bought and paid for by the insurance companies — to justify their vote against preventing those companies from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions. We have to challenge them to explain their proposals to eliminate Medicare and replace it with vouchers for private insurance.

The same goes in every arena. And it is doubly important because voters vote for people — not policy positions. Voters want leaders who are strong and self confident — not leaders who spend their days in a defensive crouch. They want leaders who stand up straight and defend their deeply held values — not leaders who bob and weave.

The thing we have to remember most is that Democratic positions on the issues – and the values that underlie them — are very popular. Voters generally respond very favorable to candidates who stand up for those values — for average Americans not the wealthy and special interests.

This all seems obvious to normal people who size up candidates. Unfortunately it is often less obvious to the sometimes risk averse consultant class that has so much to say about the way political campaigns are organized.

But all they need to do is take a careful look at the polling that makes the importance of staying on the offensive ever so clear.

Here for instance are some of the questions that have scored well in raising serious concerns about Republican swing district candidates in polling I’ve seen over the last month. The first two are particularly powerful among senior citizens that make up a big chunk of swing voters in many key districts.

* Candidate A took hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions from the insurance companies and now he supports abolishing Medicare and replacing it with vouchers for private insurance.

* Candidate D took tens of thousands from Wall Street Banks and now he supports privatizing Social Security and replacing a guaranteed benefit with investments in the stock market.

* Candidate E takes thousands of dollars in contributions from defense contractors and refuses to vote against wasteful and ineffective defense projects.

* Candidate F receives hundreds of thousands in donations from wealthy supporters. He is all in favor of spending hundreds of billions on tax cuts for the rich, but he refuses to support money for unemployment benefits to laid off workers or preventing states and local government from laying off teachers, firemen, and police.

* Candidate Y took $500,000 from the health insurance companies and then voted against banning discrimination against people with pre-existing conditions.

* Candidate J took $250,000 from the health insurance companies and then voted against stopping insurance companies from imposing lifetime or annual caps on coverage and dropping people when they get too expensive to insure.

* Candidate F took $50,000 from the health insurance companies and then voted against stopping insurance companies from charging women more than men and denying coverage to pregnant women because it was considered a pre-existing condition.

* Candidate U used every excuse to vote against requiring that Members of Congress like him are covered under the health care reform law just like everybody else.

* Candidate Z took $100,000 from the oil industry and refuses to support legislation that would break the stranglehold of foreign oil that leaves us more and more vulnerable to our enemies that control our oil supplies.

These are the kinds of questions that Democrats need to force onto the agenda this fall. They apply to almost every incumbent Republican, and most challengers. These statements symbolize the fundamental differences between Democrats and the Republican candidates who want to return to the failed economic policies of the Bush era that favored the interests of Wall Street, big Oil and the insurance industry — not the interests of everyday Americans.

If we take the offensive, Democrats may lose some seats this fall, but we definitely do not need to lose control of sizable majorities in either House of Congress. If we take the offensive, Conventional Wisdom will spend the evening of November 2 scratching his head and wondering how he could have been so wrong. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

What do you think a comparison of the two sets would reveal?

Here’s what I think it would show: compared with the era of campaigning, since Inauguration Obama has virtually stopped showing us who he is at the feeling level, the human level.

In the campaign, Obama was often playful. He sometimes spoke in colorful language that expressed something of his own personhood. He gave us frequent glimpses of his feelings. Week after week, in his orations at post-primary rallies, he would give his audience a clear view into the basic energy at his core.

In other words, he allowed the American people to experience him as a human being, at the feeling level.

As president, by contrast, he is almost continually “presidential,” which in this case means formal and stiff. He seems to be caught in some image of a role –the dignified president– and thus presenting himself in a way that prevents us from seeing his own true self and thus from feeling a connection with him at the human level.

Why does this matter?

It matters because people’s openness to communication from another is determined –or so I suspect– less by the cogency of that communication’s content than by their feeling of emotional openness to the person who’s doing the communicating. Without that feeling connection, the message may be “heard” but it will not “register” strongly.

And sure enough, poll after poll, on issue after issue, shows that the president’s version of things is being overpowered by the version put forward by his political enemies. This despite the fact that his opponents’ version consists largely of lies and distortions while Obama’s presentation is substantially responsible and true.

Consider two of our greatest, most transformational presidents: Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Both these presidents became palpable emotional presences to their publics, and in both cases, their leadership was magnified by the feelings of the people for their president.

I’ve been arguing here for more than a year that President Obama has been allowing his power to slip away because of his refusal to fight back against those who have been willing to use any fear-mongering lie to weaken him and make him fail. I still believe that to be true. But if, for whatever reason, it is not in this president’s repertoire to fight back strongly, here is another route by which Obama might strengthen himself:

I’d love to see him loosen up. Be playful. Show us more of himself at a level of feeling and spontaneity. Show us more of who he really is at the human level.

All these things would allow the American people to feel closer to him than they do now with this formal “presidential” demeanor. And feeling closer, the American people would hear his voice as if it had been amplified. With his message coming across “louder,” it would begin to register more deeply.

If by simply sharing with us more of his humanity –as he did before he became president– he’s able to shape more powerfully the public understanding of the issues, his ability to achieve his political goals will be correspondingly magnified.

By E.J. Dionne Jr.
Washington Post, July 26, 2010

The smearing of Shirley Sherrod ought to be a turning point in American politics. This is not, as the now-trivialized phrase has it, a “teachable moment.” It is a time for action.

The mainstream media and the Obama administration must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently forced its propaganda to be accepted as news by convincing traditional journalists that “fairness” requires treating extremist rants as “one side of the story.” And there can be no more shilly-shallying about the fact that racial backlash politics is becoming an important component of the campaign against President Obama and against progressives in this year’s election.

The administration’s response to the doctored video pushed by right-wing hit man Andrew Breitbart was shameful. The obsession with “protecting” the president turned out to be the least protective approach of all.

The Obama team did not question, let alone challenge, the video. Instead, it assumed that whatever narrative Fox News might create mattered more than anything else, including the possible innocence of a human being outside the president’s inner circle.

Obama complained on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack “jumped the gun, partly because we now live in this media culture where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody scrambles.” But it’s his own apparatus that turned “this media culture” into a false god.

Yet the Obama team was reacting to a reality: the bludgeoning of mainstream journalism into looking timorously over its right shoulder and believing that “balance” demands taking seriously whatever sludge the far right is pumping into the political waters.

This goes way back. Al Gore never actually said he “invented the Internet,” but you could be forgiven for not knowing this because the mainstream media kept reporting he had.

There were no “death panels” in the Democratic health-care bills. But this false charge got so much coverage that an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll last August found that 45 percent of Americans thought the reform proposals would likely allow “the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care to the elderly.” That was the summer when support for reform was dropping precipitously. A straight-out lie influenced the course of one of our most important debates.

The traditional media are so petrified of being called “liberal” that they are prepared to allow the Breitbarts of the world to become their assignment editors. Mainstream journalists regularly criticize themselves for not jumping fast enough or high enough when the Fox crowd demands coverage of one of their attack lines.

Thus did Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander ask this month why the paper had been slow to report on “the Justice Department’s decision to scale down a voter-intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party.” Never mind that this is a story about a tiny group of crackpots who stopped no one from voting. It was aimed at doing what the doctored video Breitbart posted set out to do: convince Americans that the Obama administration favors blacks over whites.

And never mind that, to her great credit, Abigail Thernstrom, a conservative George W. Bush appointee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, dismissed the case and those pushing it. “This doesn’t have to do with the Black Panthers,” she told Politico’s Ben Smith. “This has to do with their fantasies about how they could use this issue to topple the [Obama] administration.” Instead, the media are supposed to take seriously the charges of J. Christian Adams, who served in the Bush Justice Department. He’s a Republican activist going back to the Bill Clinton era. His party services included time as a Bush poll watcher in Florida in 2004, when on one occasion he was involved in a controversy over whether a black couple could cast a regular ballot.

Now, Adams is accusing the Obama Justice Department of being “motivated by a lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law.” This is racially inflammatory, politically motivated nonsense — and it’s nonsense even if Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh talk about it a thousand times a day. When an outlandish charge for which there is no evidence is treated as an on-the-one-hand-and-on-the-other-hand issue, the liars win.

Will Obama let down liberals – and women – again? Inside the fight over Washington’s new consumer-protection agency.

By Eleanor Clift,
Newsweek, 24 July 2010

Here’s a 2.0 version of health care’s public-option debate, and her name is Elizabeth Warren. She’s the Harvard law professor who’s been overseeing the Troubled Assets Relief Program and giving Treasury Department insiders heartburn over their excessive generosity to Wall Street bigwigs. Liberals are lobbying hard for Warren to head the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, warning the White House that failure to do so would rival the left’s disappointment over President Obama’s refusal to fight for a public option. Warren’s backers consider her the Joan of Arc of the financial consumer movement.

Warren is the only woman under consideration, and the job should be hers if it weren’t for some intramural friction that has taken on a gender cast. Her credentials are impeccable, underscored by her prescience in originating the idea for a consumer financial agency three years ago, well before the storm that would take down the markets and cost taxpayers trillions in wealth. Writing in a 2007 article in the journal Democracy, Warren challenged the rah-rah boom times, arguing that consumers are “effectively unprotected in a world in which a number of merchants of financial products have shown themselves very willing to take as much as they can by any means they can.”

In her clear-eyed and earnest way, Warren has broken through in testimony on Capitol Hill and on television as a voice for the people, ticking off powerful business interests and irritating the boys’ club that Obama has entrusted to steer the economy. If Obama chooses her to head the new consumer agency, she would have to be confirmed by the Senate and would likely provoke a partisan battle on the scale of a Supreme Court nomination. On Friday morning, three Republican senators warned the White House not to use a recess appointment to fill the new position. For Obama, it’s a classic political choice: how much of a fight does he want or need going into the fall elections?

His base is telling him that Warren is what the left needs to believe in him again. Obama loves the woman; there have been articles written about how he sought her out, and how admiring he is of her. As the financial-reform legislation made its way through Congress, she was consistently named as the likely head of the first consumer-protection bureau. If Obama backs down now, he looks like he’s afraid of a fight, which is not a good perception for a president who needs to burnish his leadership cred going into the November election. Warren is the voice of Main Street, and if the Republicans want to block her, Obama’s attitude should be “Bring it on.”

Warren has dared to challenge the captains of international finance, and she has rattled the protectors of Wall Street, many of them Republican and male, just the kind of opposition that Obama could use to drive women’s turnout in November. Warren embodies his efforts to revive the economy and create jobs in a way that everything else he’s done hasn’t conveyed. Her persona as a champion for the people is so ingrained that Obama wins simply by having the fight. “The only question is whether Elizabeth Warren is Moses whose candidacy expires overlooking the Promised Land, or Joshua who gets to lead the troops,” says Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former Clinton domestic policy adviser.

A decade ago, when Wall Street was riding high, Time dubbed the era’s chieftains of finance – Alan Greenspan, Bob Rubin, and Larry Summers – “The Committee to Save the World.” We learned later how their disdain for regulation and their faith in the markets was misplaced, and how one astute regulator, Brooksley Born, head of the obscure Commodities Futures Trading Commission, took on Greenspan et al. to argue for regulating those funny new financial instruments called derivatives that nobody understood, and how she was put down and marginalized and ultimately ignored. Former SEC chairman Arthur Levitt, in a Frontline documentary about Born’s lonely and futile quest to sound the danger, recalled the disparity of power and how condescending the men were in thinking this was a woman you could “flick off with the back of your hand.” Her warning unheeded, Born ultimately resigned, a case history of a missed opportunity that would have done more to save the economy, if not the world, than all the pooh-bahs who made Time’s cover.

Warren has advanced further into the club than Born, and if she makes it, she would bolster Mary Shapiro at the SEC and Sheila Bair at the FDIC, who like Warren have been at odds with the Obama team. Gender is at play in these debates, as well it should be. With women controlling more discretionary spending in America than men do, it’s far past time for better representation in the highest councils of power.

The conversation between Grayson and the host, Ed Schultz, seems a fitting companion to that piece I was running at about the same time, William Rivers Pitt’s fine article on “Dog Whistles,” wherein he excavates how a bit of Pat Robertson’s TV messaging looks like a covert call to assassinate President Obama. Robertson has been featuring Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a hero for trying to assassinate Hitler (in 1944), and that apparently distant piece of history connects menacingly with the persistent right-wing media effort to instill in their audience an equation between Obama and Hitler.

So here’s the threat against Grayson, and it turns out that this is not an isolated matter: it was said more than once that THREATS AGAINST MEMBERS OF CONGRESS ARE UP 300 PERCENT THIS YEAR.

(They did not break it down, indicating how many of these threats are directed against Democrats/progressives and how many against Republicans/the-right. But I would feel safe betting heavily that this threat of violence is quite imbalanced, with the overwhelming majority coming from right-wingers and directed against liberals.)

The discussion came to a focus on the responsibility of the Republicans to denounce violence. Which they have been very far from doing: Grayson cited how Sarah Palin called upon people to “take him out.”

This thuggishness is really the face of fascism. It is the same spirit. And it is fundamentally anti-democratic.

As Ed Schultz said, the idea of an assassination is that one person would be able to counter the will of 170,000 people who chose Grayson to be their representative in Congress.

Our Constitution creates an arena in which these battles are to be fought out– non-violently– and this arena is the election process.

The people who acted as if it were somehow illegitimate for a president elected with a decisive majority of the votes, and who campaigned with a pledge to pass such legislation, to get health care reform through Congress.

The same spirit that foments these threats of violence shows in such other ways its fundamental rejection of the democratic process.

He was one of two people on NPR for whom I’d stopped what I was doing, if that were necessary for me to hear. (The other being a report on some Supreme Court case from Nina Totenberg.) I didn’t want to miss a word. Daniel Schorr’s comments always illuminated something, always taught me something.

His death means that this voice that I can remember paying attention to lo this past half century will no longer be heard. We’re on our own.

He will be missed.

Schorr also had come to seem like a many who defied the victory of time over us mortals. He continued to bring his voice into the world well into his tenth decade. His commentaries had become less penetrating, but they still showed an intuitive sense of what was important in a given drama of our times.

She wrote:

I saw “The Passion of the Christ” ….

…… as an agnostic. Indeed, the apparently historically accurate suffering Jesus endured was hard to watch, well, because there was a deeper meaning behind it. It’s somehow no big deal to watch other Hollywood films depicting arms and legs blown off and brains splattered all over. Might the directors of those types of non-religious films be abusive toward their girlfriends in far greater percentages?
“The Passion” affected me. It was deeply moving, but it moved me toward a feeling of peace, compassion and forgiveness rather than one of violence, bitterness or revenge. As I tried to hide my tears of expression of those feelings leaving the theater, I noticed many others doing the same.

Which of course makes the analysis here rather nonsensical, IMHO. Gibson’s bizarre, possibly bi-polar/alcohol induced behavior is about as far removed from the mindset of your average Evangelical Christian as Pluto is from the Sun.

“The Passion” was not about violence and abuse, it was about salvation. If this agnostic could get that, most anybody should be able to. Probably one of the most powerful influences on me in the direction of believing.

On the other hand, we’ve got the Black Panthers threatening death to white people and their babies. Apparently we’re to conclude that is is some kind of pervasive, deeper indication of the true mindset of the black community at large.

by Natalie Oberman
*****************
I then responded:

Reply: who knows what all goes on in the human heart?

At one level, Natalie Oberman, your comment is indeed an important piece of testimony challenging my argument. And I know that for many people, the film was moving in just that way.

Whether that proves my argument nonsensical, however, is another matter. The whole nexus of feelings in people’s hearts is rarely simple, with layer often piled up on layer. Look at the faces of the throngs in the main square in Nuremberg, as Hitler spoke to them. Look at Leni Riefenstahl’s great film, THE TRIUMPH OF THE WILL, that expresses the most beautiful and lofty of sentiments, in its depiction of these Nazi rallies. Can we conclude that these portraits of inspiration and nobility of aspiration mean that it is nonsensical to talk about the darkness that lay at the core of Nazism? Can we even conclude that the people in the square at Nuremberg were not having their darker passions stoked by Hitler’s rhetoric?

I think not. And similarly, I think one cannot accept at face value the idea that “The Passion” was not about violence and abuse, it was about salvation.” And what all the feelings were involved in how you were moved is also not necessarily as simple as you suggest.

I’m not saying that I KNOW what was the truth of your experience, but only that there are reasons to imagine that your certainties are not necessarily warranted either.

And indeed, in your comment, you may be providing us with a clue to some of the darker dynamics that go with your commitment to “peace, compassion, and forgiveness.”

You write that “we’ve got the Black Panthers threatening death
to white people and their babies.” As I understand it, this New Black Panther Party that the right wing is making so much of these days is a tiny, tiny, almost to the point of non-existence, segment of the black population. Are there even 20 members in this group, out of a black population a million times greater than that?

On the other hand, Mel Gibson’s PASSION spoke to many millions. And the right-wing CHristian movement has been a significant component of a political force that has given us a war (in Iraq) that seems to have been in part a “Crusade.”

To compare the infinitesimal and the trivial pathologies that may have arisen among a few blacks with the widespread and world-changing pathologies that have arisen on the right, most certainly including a major component of contemporary American Christianity, is not only inappropriate. But even this passing on of this new right-wing meme of black racism threatening white people seems possibly a sign of the kind of world-dividing, hate-oriented viewpoint as Mel Gibson reveals in his rants.

by Andrew Bard Schmookler

***************************

[A short while later, I had second thoughts about part of what I'd written, and I posted this comment immediately after the other.]

Andrew Bard Schmookler
Reply: partial retraction

Upon reflection, I think I’d like to retract my final point in my comment above. As I look more closely at what Natalie Oberman is doing in her own last paragraph –where she mentions ” we’ve got the Black Panthers threatening death to white people and their babies”– and note more fully the context in which she makes that statement (i.e. using it to say, indirectly, that these Black Panthers are NOT indicative of anything larger), I feel it is inappropriate for me to suggest that her mention of this new bogus right-wingmeme (now generally associated with a bogus charge against Obama’s Department of Justice) might have some flavor of her own racial prejudice to it. Based solely on what Ms. Oberman says here, I feel she deserves the benefit of the doubt. And I withdraw my tentative interpretation that leans otherwise.

by Andrew Bard Schmookler

**********************

[A day later Ms. Oberman replied:}

re: a partial retraction

Yeah, that really was over the top Andrew! I'm glad you recognized what my point was, and how ridiculous it was to try and lump me in as well with Mel Gibson. But you revealed your eagerness to make unfounded linkages, I'm afraid.

The folks viewing TPOTC were not there to quench their lust for violence and abuse. Rather, in spite of the violence, which was an important element of the story, they were there in solidarity with the victim of it, and in admiration of how He dealt with it. The hero, the loved and revered character in the movie was beaten. The villains in the movie were the ones dealing the blows.

I honestly don't follow your logic in attempting to tie the movie via Mel Gibson's outbursts to today's Evangelical Christians. You seem to think they were somehow a key driving force in us going into Iraq. I don't remember that being the case, but I do remember many high-ranking non-evangelistic Democrats giving impassioned speeches urging us to do what must be done in Iraq, to varying degrees. I remember 75% approval (ABC-WaPo poll 4/30/03 "Do you approve or disapprove of President Bush's handling of Iraq situation") of our invasion in the early days of falling statues and being greeted as liberators. Evangelical Christians may or may not have approved of the whole affair in significantly greater percentages than the population as a whole, but it seems to me that it was more a case of America at large being behind the effort, that is until things started to go sour.

But even given that Evangelicals backed the war effort, and had some disproportionate influence, is this somehow an indication that they're lusting for violence and death? That they're echoing Mel Gibson mindlessly spewing at his girlfriend? Well maybe their support was based on the ultimate goal of an end to violence. Both to Saddam's own citizens and to innocent Israelis being blown up for the rewards he was sending to their families. An end to his support for terrorism region-wide. I'm really quite confident that Evangelicals were no more comfortable with any of the deaths in Iraq than they were with seeing their savior pummeled. But there are other factors at work here, besides the violence itself.

Was FDR responding to Evangelicals when he committed us to war resulting in hundreds of thousands dead? Was LBJ responding to Evangelicals when he escalated the war in Vietnam? Or, as possibly with Bush, were they doing what they felt had to be done to insure the security of the country?

Meanwhile, apart from war, where death and violence do usually happen, it seems the left is where the Mel Gibsonish behavior is always at.

Boisterous and violent anti-war marches, brimming with posters depicting Bush as Hitler, his head being cut off, etc. Yes, explicitly calling for his death. Nary an Evangelical to be found as you scroll down the page and view all the lovely, "peaceful" sentiments.

G-8, G-20, G-whatever protests around the world featuring burning cars, massive property destruction and all kinds of general mayhem.

Pro-illegal immigration marchers break windows and spray-paint graffiti. Jerry Falwell Jr. reportedly did not attend.

Students violently rioting against cuts in education budgets. These are not Tea Party folks. These are not Evangelicals.

Unions terrorizing private citizens at their homes. Again, not an Evangelical to be found anywhere.

And last but not least, the New Black Panther Party openly calling for the death of white people, their babies, and the police. Definitely not an indication of the greater sentiment in the black community. However, have you seen/heard a gangsta rap video/song lately? My son has, and sadly he's now no longer a friend to the police, or believes they're friends of his. And I do believe there ARE significant ties between the Panthers of old and new to Farrakhan, thus to Reverend Wright, and thus to our President. Wright essential echoes the NBPP in a somewhat more refined manner. The NAACP may, I repeat may, have lobbied the justice department to drop charges against any and all folks named Shabazz. But this is just a bunch of stuff that happened, and means nothing -- of course.

But no I kid. --- I don't really think it's reasonable or sensible, or fair, to attempt to link the NBPP with the black community as a whole ... but I DO think it makes actually MORE sense than what you Andrew have tried to do regarding Gibson and the mindset of Evangelical Christianity. Which is to say, not a lot. --- IMHO.

Natalie Oberman

**********************

[Which evoked this from me:]

Reply: so, violence and hate in our times is mostly on the left

Ms. Oberman, you are making me reconsider my retraction.

I recall something Jesus said about motes and beams.

Take a look at opinion polls around the world over the past half century: even our long-time friends perceived that the U.S., previously considered mostly a benign force in the world, had become the greatest threat on the world stage.

And as for the role of right-wing Christianity in supporting the most lawless and lying American presidency in American history, and the most imperialistic in at least a century, it seems that you were perhaps not paying attention to the real workings of power early in this decade.

Perhaps you were distracted by all that union-instigated terrorism, all those unruly students, all those foreigners who don’t belong here acting like vandals, all those fringe protesters acting up while the world economy got stacked to give more to the haves of the world at the expense of everyone else.

This is the kind of worldview that runs counter to what Jesus taught, and modeled. You seem to have aligned yourself with the principalities and powers, and against the kinds of people that Jesus himself hung out with.

The topic for tomorrow morning’s show is Obama’s leadership, and more particularly the apparent disjunction between a) all his accomplishments in a year and a half, and b) the polls showing a lack of confidence in him.

Unlike the previous show, where the program director for the station substituted for the vacationing host, this one had the usual host.

Here are the links for hearing the first hour, and the additional half hour I was on.

www.wsvaonline.com/play_window.php?audioType=Episode&audioId=4816981

The Dog Whistles

by: William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t, 23 July 2010

It is all too tempting to dismiss the far-right Teabagger legions and their idiot media allies as nothing more than a band of brain-addled yahoos who regularly make solar flare-sized fools of themselves in ways undreamed of by the Founders. I’ve mocked them a time or three myself; it’s almost impossible not to. When a Tea Party web forum goes into paroxysms of fear and loathing about an Obama-led fascist takeover of America because they read a 2007 satirical article from the Onion and thought it was real, all you can do is put your head in your hands and thank God for showing us His sublime sense of humor.

Then, of course, there is the ridiculous Breitbart/Fox News farce regarding former USDA employee Shirley Sherrod and her alleged black-on-white reverse racism. Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last few days, you probably know the story already, but just in case: after the NAACP (correctly) accused the Tea Party of being a fundamentally racist organization, a right-wing fraud of a blogger named Andrew Breitbart heavily edited a video of Sherrod to make it look like she was admitting to having deliberately screwed a white farmer because he was white. The full video shows Sherrod going on to say that she did in fact help that farmer, that she learned from the experience and grew from it, and that she and the farmer became great friends. The video still cost Sherrod her USDA job, at least for now, because Fox News took the Breitbart video and ran it across the sky with enough volume to cause Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to go into total bonehead mode and fire her.

Once everybody realized they’d been duped by Breitbart and Fox News – and a hat-tip to CNN and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for doing the heavy lifting to expose the story for the bag of crap that it was – everybody backpedaled and apologized to Sherrod…everybody except Breitbart and Fox, that is. They pretty much said the whole thing was the fault of the NAACP and Obama for promoting reverse racism in America. Yeah, they actually did, which makes you wonder what one has to do to lose credibility in the realm of right-wing news. Andrew Breitbart and Roger Ailes could bend over double and take a dump on their own faces in the middle of the Washington Mall, and they’d still have plenty of people who treat their swill as if it were holy writ.

So, yeah, it can be funny, it can be silly, and it can be (and often is) simply mind-boggling. After a while, all the screaming and blabbering about Obama being a fascist racist socialist Muslim terrorist tyrant who wants to destroy America and Christianity turns into only so much noise that can be all too easily dismissed as the nonsense it is.

Dismiss it too easily or too quickly, however, and you’ll miss the dog whistle buried in the message. I hadn’t heard of the term “dog whistle” until I saw a disturbing post on the web forum DemocraticUnderground, but the term perfectly describes the phenomenon. Wikipedia describes the term thusly:

Dog-whistle politics, also known as the use of code words, is a type of political campaigning or speechmaking employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has a different or more specific meaning for a targeted subgroup of the audience. The term is an analogy to dog whistles built in such a way that humans cannot hear them due to their high frequency, but dogs can.

The DU post referring to a “dog whistle” was highlighting a recent broadcast of Pat Robertson’s “700 Club.” During this particular broadcast, author Eric Metaxas was being interviewed about his new biography of attempted Adolf Hitler assassin Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Metaxas’ book paints Bonhoeffer as a prophet of God who was doing holy work through his plot to kill Hitler. Bonhoeffer, a trained theologian who resisted the Nazis based on his Christian faith, has been a revered figure in many religious circles ever since his death, so a book calling him a holy prophet isn’t wildly out of line on its face.

But here’s the thing. During the interview, descriptions of fascism and tyranny were used extensively. Again, given that the topic dealt with Hitler and Nazi Germany, the use of this language isn’t immediately improper…except when it’s in the context of the kind of rhetoric used by Pat Robertson, Fox News and bloggers like Andrew Breitbart to describe President Obama. The interview basically stated that it is the holy work of any good Christian to assassinate a fascist tyrant, and given the serial ways these right-wing media people have used those exact terms to describe the president, it is a pretty short leap to realize the “700 Club” was essentially sending the message that whoever puts a bullet in Obama will be considered a saint on the level of Bonhoeffer.

And who was this dog whistle aimed at? There are many potential candidates, as evidenced recently in Sarah Palin’s former stomping grounds in Alaska. Tea Party backers of right-wing Senate candidate Joe Miller staged a march during a rally for Miller. Many of the people in that march carried Miller signs, American flags…and assault weapons. You can watch a video of the march here.

This is far from the first time Tea Party people have brandished weapons at public rallies, and most of them are you’re typical armchair warriors, all flash and no substance, and only the outline of a real threat. It only takes one, however, to hear the dog whistle and decide to take on God’s holy work.

Jonathan Chait

by Jonathan Chait
The New Republic, July 18, 2010

One interesting sidelight of the current election cycle is that there are several races in which the Republican establishment has either lost control of the race or lost any sense of its own partisan self-interest. The Nevada Senate race is a prime example. Harry Reid, once a dead man walking, is now sitting on a nice lead because Republicans nominated a lunatic to oppose him. “A total f*** up by the state and national Republicans to allow Angle to get nominated,” a source notes to Ben Smith.

But of course there are numerous such fuckups. In Kentucky, Republicans turned a rock-solid safe seat into a toss up by nominating ultra-radical Rand Paul over party hack Trey Grayson. In Pennsylvania, they turned a relatively safe seat in Arlen Specter, who had been almost completely housebroken by the right since 2004, into another toss-up. (More importantly, they drove Specter from the party and made him the 60th Senate seat, allowing the passage of health care reform.) And in Florida, they turned another safe hold into a toss-up by challenging, and driving from the party, Charlie Crist.

Florida is actually the closest thing to a rational move for the right. First, I think Crist’s current lead is far from safe, because the Democratic vote is likely to consolidate above its current abysmal level and that will come out of Crist’s hide. Second, Crist is a genuine moderate, so there really was a more reasonable risk-reward calculation for conservatives looking to gain a more ideologically reliable Senator at the risk of losing the seat altogether. There’s at least a strong chance that the Rubio challenge will burn them.

This is four Senate seats put at serious risk by running right-wing primary challenges, plus one enormous liberal domestic policy accomplishment. In all these instances, conservatives either celebrated the right-wing primary challenge or, at the very least, quietly accepted it. There was very little pushback at the time from the party establishment, other than a feeble effort in Kentucky. I have seen no recriminations whatsoever in hindsight. And yet it seems perfectly clear that the effect of these challenges has been a disaster from the conservative perspective. You don’t have to love Sue Lowden to understand that a 90% chance of Lowden winning is better than a 20% chance of Sharron Angle winning. Nor is there any recognition on the right that conservatives paved the way for health care reform by driving Specter out. In conservative lore, the Pat Toomey primary challenge remains a glorious triumph, when in fact it’s a disaster of historic proportions.

Obviously the conservative movement is intoxicated with hubris right now. Part of this hubris is their belief that the American people are truly and deeply on their side and that the last two elections were either a fluke or the product of a GOP that was too centrist. It’s a tactical radicalism, a belief that ideological purity carries no electoral cost whatsoever. Right-wing tactical radicalism has an old pedigree, and of course there is an equivalent (though less influential) tactical radicalism on the left-wing of the Democratic Party. Tactical radicalism is not the same thing as ideological radicalism. Tactical radicals are a subset of ideological radicals; some ideological radicals have clear-eyed of the pragmatic steps needed to advance their goals incrementally.

In the past, the Republican Party has always managed to hold in check the tactical radicalism of its base. It’s starting to run wild. In past elections, I would have totally discounted the possibility that the party might nominate a figure like Sarah Palin, because the party establishment has always been strong enough to push aside candidates who were not strong electoral vehicles for conservatism. I’m no longer sure they have that power anymore.

By Drake Bennett
The Week Magazine, July 16, 2010 issue

SUMMER HAS BEGUN, and our imaginations have turned to vacation: to idle afternoons and road trips, to the beach and the mountains. But where to go? When? What to do? Is it better to try somewhere new and exotic, or return to a well-loved spot? Doze on the beach or hike the ancient ruins? Hoard vacation days for a grand tour, or spread them around? Time off is a scarce resource, and as with any scarce resource, we want to spend it wisely.

Partly, these decisions are matters of taste. But there are also answers to be found in behavioral science, which increasingly is yielding insights that can help us make the most of our leisure time. Psychologists and economists have looked in some detail at vacations­—what we want from them and what we actually get out of them. They have advice about what really matters, and it’s not necessarily what we would expect.

For example, how long we take off probably counts for less than we think, and taking more short trips leaves us happier than taking a few long ones. We’re often happier planning a trip than actually taking it. And interrupting a vacation—far from being a nuisance—can make us enjoy it more. How a trip ends matters more than how it begins, who you’re with matters as much as where you go, and if you want to remember a vacation vividly, do something during it that you’ve never done before. And though it may feel unnecessary, it’s important to force yourself to actually take the time off in the first place—people, it turns out, are as prone to procrastinate when it comes to pleasurable things like vacations as unpleasant ones like paperwork and visits to the dentist.

“How do we optimize our vacation?” asks Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University and the author of the new book The Upside of Irrationality. “There are three elements to it—anticipating, experiencing, and remembering. They’re not the same, and there are different ways to change each.”

There is, of course, plenty that we still don’t know. People take vacations for all sorts of reasons beyond pure hedonism—to learn about new places, to test themselves, to placate their children, to bask in the envy of their friends and co-workers. Research cannot settle questions like whether the pleasure we derive from anticipating a minutely planned trip will be outweighed by the disappointment when things don’t measure up.

For psychologists and behavioral economists, vacations are a window into the still only dimly understood mystery of human pleasure, a field known as hedonic psychology. Their research, along with other work on prototypically pleasant (and unpleasant) experiences, has begun to yield a portrait of your mind on vacation. And if the findings tell us anything, it’s that we might actually need some help. When we guess the best way to spend our free time, it seems that we often guess wrong.

THERE ARE UNTOLD shelves of books dedicated to the art of maximizing our time at work, but no corresponding literature on maximizing our leisure time. Even asking the question of how to “optimize” a vacation seems fundamentally un-vacation-like. And yet people constantly puzzle over how to get the most out of their valuable time off: poring over guidebooks, checking the forecast, looking up online reviews of hotels and restaurants, arguing with spouses over where to go and what to do, and when.

The problem, say some social scientists, is that people do all this—and spend thousands of dollars—with an incomplete understanding of what qualities make an experience enjoyable. Take duration. A longer vacation seems, by definition, better than a shorter one, and having lots of paid vacation time is a highly valued job perk. But when we recall an experience, and how it made us feel, it turns out that length isn’t terribly important.

The strongest evidence here comes from social psychology experiments that looked at people being subjected to various pleasant and unpleasant stimuli. The most frequently cited study is one done by the physician Donald Redelmeier and Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist whose work helped launch the field of behavioral economics. Patients undergoing colonoscopies—a quite painful procedure when sedatives aren’t used—were subjected to a few extra minutes of lesser pain at the end of the procedure. Overall, those patients rated the experience as less painful and less unpleasant than others, even though they had been in pain longer. Kahneman has found similar results for stimuli like watching film clips of playful puppies and soothing landscapes—a pleasant experience isn’t recalled later as more pleasurable just because it lasts longer.

Looking back, what matters far more is the intensity of sensation, whether it’s excitement or pain or contentment. And it’s not the overall average of the experience that people remember, but how they felt at the most intense moments, combined with how they felt right as the experience ended. Psychologists call this the “peak-end rule.”

The research on the peak-end rule has focused on shorter-term sensations—colonoscopies, thankfully, are brief compared with vacations—but psychologists suspect that it also applies to longer experiences. If so, that means worrying about whether it’s possible to get extra days off to stretch a trip is wasted energy. And if you’re deciding between a longer trip and a more eventful one—if, for example, the money it would cost for a few more nights in a hotel would mean you wouldn’t be able to afford a coveted splurge dinner or surfing lessons or concert tickets or a rain forest guide—then it makes more sense to just shorten the trip in the interest of making it more intense while you’re there.

The peak-end rule also suggests that there’s little point worrying about how much fun or how relaxing every last moment of a vacation is, since the trip will be remembered for its high points. Of course, our peak-end proclivities also mean that a trip could be remembered for its low points, experiences of vacation trauma that overwhelm all else—gastrointestinal disasters, perhaps, or a stolen passport or camera, or epic, frustration-induced tantrums.

But research looking at how people actually feel about their vacations suggests that, by and large, they remember them warmly—more warmly, in fact, than they feel while taking them. The psychologists Leigh Thompson, of Northwestern University, and Terence Mitchell, of the University of Washington, reported in 1997 the results of a study in which they asked people on three different types of vacations to fill out a series of emotional inventories before the vacation, during it, and then after. They found that in all three cases, the respondents were least happy about the vacation while they were taking it. Beforehand, they looked forward to it with eager anticipation, and within a few days of returning, they remembered it fondly. But while on it, they found themselves bogged down by the disappointments and logistical headaches of actually going somewhere and doing something, and the pressure they felt to be enjoying themselves.

A recent Dutch study had a more striking finding. Looking not at vacation memories, but measuring general happiness levels through a simple three-question questionnaire, the researchers found that going on vacation gave a notable boost to pre-vacation mood but had little effect on post-vacation feelings. Anticipation, it seems, can be a more powerful force than memory.

VACATIONS CAN’T ALL be short and intense, and we wouldn’t want them to be. What if we want to just improve a week at the beach house?

One consistent research finding is that people have a stubborn unconscious ability to adapt to their circumstances, whether those circumstances are good, like marrying their true love, or bad, like getting divorced. Whether they want to or not, people quickly begin to take things for granted.

One way to head that off, psychologists have found, is by constantly varying how we do things. Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California, Riverside, has done a series of studies showing that in all sorts of everyday activities, from hobbies to studying to walking routes, people derive more pleasure from them the more they vary how they do them. When planning for how to keep ourselves (and our families) happy and engaged through a week off, it may help to keep the value of novelty and variation in mind.

The most effective way to inoculate a vacationer against the deadening power of adaptation, however, may be the most counter­intuitive—to break it up, to interrupt it with real life. The psychologist Leif Nelson of the University of California, Berkeley, working with Tom Meyvis of New York University, has found that people, whether having a pleasant experience like a massage or an unpleasant one like prolonged separation from a loved one, felt the pain or pleasure more intensely if the experience was stopped and then restarted.

“If you put a disruption in a hedonic experience, it intensifies it,” Nelson says. “You can imagine spending a weekend at some wonderful beach house. While it’s great for the first couple of hours, by the second day, it’s pleasant and then no longer exciting. If for some reason you’re forced to leave the beach house, when you return, you have all that new pleasure again.”

Other psychologists have a slightly different explanation for the hedonic boost that interruption gives. They see it less as a matter of adaptation and more a matter of evaluation. Having a trip interrupted in effect turns what had been a more open-ended experience into a bounded one, triggering the peak-end rule. That means, says Gal Zauberman of the University of Pennsylvania, that if we break up our trips strategically, we might actually get more enjoyment out of them. “If you partition after each peak experience, then you remember that piece as better than if you partition after each lousy thing,” he suggests.

But for those who can’t get away at all this summer, either because time or money prevents it, there is a finding for you, as well. Odd as it seems, people are often reluctant to take advantage of opportunities for pleasure that they do have, unless they’re in some way compelled. In a study published earlier this year, marketing experts Ayelet Gneezy and Suzanne Shu found that giving someone longer to redeem a gift certificate actually makes them less likely to do so. And using sidewalk surveys in London, Chicago, and Dallas, they found that people who live in cities with major landmarks are actually less likely to visit those landmarks than tourists are, and likely to only do so when hosting out-of-town guests.

The finding is a testament to the human tendency to procrastinate, in pleasure as in work. Seen this way, part of why we enjoy ourselves on a vacation stems from the fact that it gives us a deadline: an often sharply limited time window during which we have to go out and enjoy ourselves.

If you realize this, suggests Shu, you can give yourself some of the benefits of a vacation without going anywhere, simply by cordoning off a day or two and strictly scheduling it for leisure. That way you’ll actually go out and see the play or concert you would otherwise have skipped, or take the time to dig the tent and camp stove out of the basement.

“Give yourself a milestone or a deadline by which you’re going to go do this enjoyable thing,” Shu says, “and you’ll actually enjoy yourself more often.”

The idea arose that all that was changed was that a smaller portion of people’s paychecks was taken out in WITHHOLDING, but that the tax bill for people was UNCHANGED when April 15 came around.

In other words, it was argued that the only change was that people had more money in their pockets for a matter of months, but then they had to pay correspondingly more later when they paid their taxes.

That this was the case was argued pretty persuasively by several callers whose own experience should have put them in a good position to know, such as a “tax preparer” and a person involved in doing payroll for a semi-large outfit. Both said that the withholding rules changed, but that the tax rates were unchanged.

I don’t know what to make of that. On the one hand, besides the testimony of people who should know, I can readily imagine that there was SOME of that. But on the other hand, it seems implausible to me that this was ALL that the tax cut part of the American Recovery Act was about– for a couple of reasons.

For one thing, the Obamites were putting together a stimulus package that was supposed to unfold with a stimulative effect over a two-year period. It just makes no sense to devote 1/3 of such a “stimulus” to something that in a matter of months would become an anti-stimulus (taking MORE money from consumers at tax time).

That’s no stimulus, and they weren’t just seeking a few months of boost for the economy to be followed by a choking off measure of the same size.

Secondly, if it were just a matter of withholding less but not taxing less, then the 1/3 of the presumed “stimulus” that was dubbed a “tax cut” would not have been a net COST to the federal treasury, and one would hardly think that politicians would call something a cost when it was revenue neutral.

So I am perplexed. On the one hand, I credit the testimony from the tax-preparer and the payroll person who called into the show. On the other hand, I imagine there must have been more to the much-mentioned “tax-cut” than this simple postponement, for mere months, of the feds taking the same amount of money from the taxpayers.

Here he is having an exchange with David Dunning, who is identified as a Cornell professor of social psychology.
******************

DAVID DUNNING: There have been many psychological studies that tell us what we see and what we hear is shaped by our preferences, our wishes, our fears, our desires and so forth. We literally see the world the way we want to see it. But the Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that there is a problem beyond that. Even if you are just the most honest, impartial person that you could be, you would still have a problem — namely, when your knowledge or expertise is imperfect, you really don’t know it. Left to your own devices, you just don’t know it. We’re not very good at knowing what we don’t know.

ERROL MORRIS: Knowing what you don’t know? Is this supposedly the hallmark of an intelligent person?

DAVID DUNNING: That’s absolutely right. It’s knowing that there are things you don’t know that you don’t know. [4] Donald Rumsfeld gave this speech about “unknown unknowns.” It goes something like this: “There are things we know we know about terrorism. There are things we know we don’t know. And there are things that are unknown unknowns. We don’t know that we don’t know.” He got a lot of grief for that. And I thought, “That’s the smartest and most modest thing I’ve heard in a year.”

…

And yet there was something in Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns that had captured Dunning’s imagination. I wanted to know more, and so I e-mailed him: why are you so obsessed with Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns?” Here is his answer:

The notion of unknown unknowns really does resonate with me, and perhaps the idea would resonate with other people if they knew that it originally came from the world of design and engineering rather than Rumsfeld.

If I were given carte blanche to write about any topic I could, it would be about how much our ignorance, in general, shapes our lives in ways we do not know about. Put simply, people tend to do what they know and fail to do that which they have no conception of. In that way, ignorance profoundly channels the course we take in life. And unknown unknowns constitute a grand swath of everybody’s field of ignorance.

To me, unknown unknowns enter at two different levels. The first is at the level of risk and problem. Many tasks in life contain uncertainties that are known — so-called “known unknowns.” These are potential problems for any venture, but they at least are problems that people can be vigilant about, prepare for, take insurance on, and often head off at the pass. Unknown unknown risks, on the other hand, are problems that people do not know they are vulnerable to.

Unknown unknowns also exist at the level of solutions. People often come up with answers to problems that are o.k., but are not the best solutions. The reason they don’t come up with those solutions is that they are simply not aware of them. Stefan Fatsis, in his book “Word Freak,” talks about this when comparing everyday Scrabble players to professional ones. As he says: “In a way, the living-room player is lucky . . . He has no idea how miserably he fails with almost every turn, how many possible words or optimal plays slip by unnoticed. The idea of Scrabble greatness doesn’t exist for him.” (p. 128)

Unknown unknown solutions haunt the mediocre without their knowledge. The average detective does not realize the clues he or she neglects. The mediocre doctor is not aware of the diagnostic possibilities or treatments never considered. The run-of-the-mill lawyer fails to recognize the winning legal argument that is out there. People fail to reach their potential as professionals, lovers, parents and people simply because they are not aware of the possible. This is one of the reasons I often urge my student advisees to find out who the smart professors are, and to get themselves in front of those professors so they can see what smart looks like.

You can listen in at sp.crystalmedianetworks.com/player/?q=show/wsva

The topic for tomorrow morning’s show is Obama’s leadership, and more particularly the apparent disjunction between a) all his accomplishments in a year and a half, and b) the polls showing a lack of confidence in him.

It is a call-in show, and I would welcome good calls that would help make the program constructive and informative for its audience. The numbers to call are 540-433-9782 and 800-388-9782.