It’s not because a reporter cozened a government employee into betraying a secret he was sworn to protect and then published it. It’s not because the leak jeopardized a rare source high up in the North Korean military. And it’s not because North Korea has a nuclear bomb and is prone to sharing its technology with other sinister actors on the world stage.

No, it’s personal. Obama just doesn’t like the press. “What is it about Obama that he so disdains us?” author and journalist Jonathan Alter asks the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd rhetorically. “Obama is not friendly with the press.”

It’s not just the press either. Obama doesn’t like members of Congress either. He’s missing the schmooze gene,” says Alter. He embarrasses them by not initiating conversations more often and by depriving them of “the thrill of letters from the president.”

Dowd and others point to the seeming irony that the Obama whose “emotional speeches…vaulted him into the Oval Office” now seems unable to form emotional connections with politicians and journalists. But there’s no irony. Obama isn’t emotional when he delivers his speeches; he inspires emotion in those he’s talking to—and it’s not politicians and journalists.*

Of course this isn’t the first time that the media have evaluated presidents and presidential candidates as though they were picking a BFF—Does he really like me? Do I really like him? George W. Bush defeated two clearly superior opponents on the strength of a perception of him as someone you’d like to have a beer with. Much was made of Al Gore’s and Mitt Romney’s supposed social deficiencies. And in a 2008 Democratic debate, it was Obama whose likability was compared favorably with Hillary Clinton’s, prompting Obama’s interjection, “You’re likable enough, Hillary.”†

The first months of a president’s second term are an opportune time (opportune as in opportunism) to air personal gripes, especially about a president with whom many of the gripers agree more than they disagree on the things that really matter. With Obama no longer in jeopardy of electoral defeat, critics need no longer fear that negative comments will add admission-against-interest fuel to the fire around the stake to which Republicans would like to tie the president.

I know how they feel, though. All of us are pleased to have the powerful and famous take notice of us. All of us prefer dealing with people who seem to like us and who seem to value what we do.

But likability has been a poor predictor of presidential success. Clinton exuded likability but left a thin legacy, squandering the best opportunity in at least a generation for health care reform and almost losing his presidency over an affair with an intern. George W. Bush projected likability but led us into war in Iraq and Afghanistan, turned a budget surplus into a crippling deficit, and presided over a near collapse of the financial industry.

By contrast, Alter writes in his new book, The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies, Obama “exude[s] an unspoken exasperation” and a certain hauteur. But he passed health care reform and financial market reform, has a shot at passing immigration reform, led us out of Iraq and is leading us out of Afghanistan.

I’d say he’s likable enough.

The NCAA may have thought it was throwing the book at Penn State over the Jerry Sandusky scandal.  The punishment—the $60 million fine, prohibition on bowl appearances, exclusion from bowl-appearance revenues, the $60 million fine and cancellation of past Penn State victories—was no slap on the wrist.

So they threw the book at Penn State all right.  But it was the wrong book.

The penalties the NCAA imposed were designed to punish the kinds of offenses the NCAA usually investigates, rule violations, like giving prospects illicit inducements to choose their college over others, which give one team an unfair competitive advantage.  But Sandusky’s rapes and molestations gave Penn State no competitive advantage, and neither did its failure to lower the legal or even organizational boom on Sandusky.

The offense that Penn State committed was different, and far graver.  Rather than giving it a competitive advantage, it went to the heart of the university’s relationship with its football program.  Fearing that admitting to Sandusky’s predations would destroy the reputation of their colleague and damage the football program, Penn State chose turning a blind eye to Sandusky’s crimes—not even barring him from the campus or athletic facilities–over obedience to the law and the protection of his vulnerable victims.  It gave the welfare of the football program priority over doing the right thing.  Can anyone imagine that the university would have made such a decision if the offender had been associated with the university’s real work, education—if the offender had been, say, an English professor?

The legal and moral guilt for what happened at Penn State extends only to the man who committed the underlying offense and the men—the guilty here, the offender and his willing enablers, were all men, weren’t they?  Hasn’t there been another powerful institution in recent years in which men molested young boys and then covered it up?  But I digress—who allowed him almost to get away with it.

But some background responsibility extends as well to the entire Penn State family: students, fans and media, who accorded a non-academic program like intercollegiate football such disproportionate importance.  It was their support, and the revenues that came with that support, that Paterno and his nominal superiors feared losing.

What punishment would fit that responsibility?  Some have suggested the so-called NCAA death penalty, cancelling a year or two of football games—the penalty imposed on Southern Methodist University a few years ago for repeatedly violating recruiting rules.  That would be a start.

But extirpating the disproportionate influence of football at Penn State might require more.  It might require making Penn State football start all over, with club or intramural football, and with no football scholarships for a few years.  It might require converting the football stadium to some other use.

What about the dozens of scholarship-holding student-athletes who were counting on their scholarships to pay for their education?  Let them keep the scholarships—and study academic subjects.

Starting football over at Penn State would hurt businesses that depend on football fans for most of their revenues.  But would anyone propose to retain football just so that sweatshirt shops can enjoy five or six good days—the number of college home games—a year?

And maybe making Penn State start over would have a salutary effect on other universities at which football or basketball reigns supreme.  “In this country,” Voltaire wrote in Candide*, they “kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others.”  Maybe salting the earth on which football has flourished at Penn State would encourage some others.

One of the great pleasures of listening to NPR is hearing stories about subjects you’re not naturally interested in and wouldn’t have listened to if changing the station hadn’t seemed like too much trouble.  One such unexpected pleasure was an All Things Considered feature on a book called Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus, Rabies.

The thing that caught my attention was its etymology of the phrase “the hair of the dog that bit you,” the idea that the best cure for a hangover is a drink of whatever made you drunk. The phrase dates back to the first century A.D., when Pliny the Elder identified burning some hair from the dog that inflicted the bite and rubbing the burnt hair in the wound as a treatment for rabies.

Hair of the dog is a dubious remedy for either rabies or hangovers.  It’s an even worse economic remedy.  Yet it’s a reasonably fair distillation of the Republican remedy for our economic hangover: more of what plunged us into the recession in the first place: less regulation, and less spending to help the victims of de-regulation.

The “hair of the dog” metaphor captures the meretriciousness of the conservatives’ economic nostrums. But it does not do justice to the outrageousness of the role they have played and their aspirations to reestablish control of economic policy.

For that, imagine a piece of property, a wood-frame house on a heavily wooded lot, publicly owned, but leased out.  On such a property, the risk of fire is ever-present.  But a succession of lessees deems the risk of small and manageable.  They refuse to build firebreaks, gaps in trees and other vegetation that would block a spreading fire.  They heat the house with open fires.  They light it with open candles.  And they disable the fire alarms and sprinklers.

Just before the lease is due to expire, fire breaks out, the worst in decades, fierce enough to jeopardize the house’s structural integrity.  When the lease term expires, the owners lease the property to a new tenant, who pledges to extinguish the fires, build the firebreaks, convert to electric heat and light, and install a sprinkler system.

The new tenant sets about containing the fire, resolutely, if perhaps not as aggressively as he might.  But the blaze is stubborn and resists being extinguished.  And the old tenants linger around the property, interfering with the fire fighters and hoses, and tying the work up with meritless law suits.  But at length, the fire is brought under control, and much more slowly than expected, rebuilding begins.  The fire-prevention measures are implemented.

But before anybody knows it, the lease is again up for renewal.  The old tenants bid to be restored.  They point to the slow rebuilding as evidence that what has been tried—measures they have resisted as fiercely as the Soviets at the battle of Stalingrad—hasn’t worked.  Disconnect the sprinklers, they say.  Build the fires.  Light the candles.

The owner is torn.  The rebuilding has been slow.  The tenant hasn’t been as sure-handed as had been hoped.  Maybe there is a better way.

But return the property to the people whose recklessness caused the fire in the first place?  People who still think they were right and promise to revert to their old ways?

It seems crazy.

“I like being able to fire people.”
—Mitt Romney

“The private sector is doing fine.”
—Barack Obama

Both of these quotes were actually spoken by the candidates to whom they are attributed.  Both are taken out of context:  Romney actually said, “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.”  Obama followed the quoted words with, “Where we’re seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government.”

In addition to being out of context, neither statement conveys quite what the speakers intended.  Romney was making the point that part of what makes free enterprise work is the ability to take your business elsewhere.  Obama was trying to point out that, in a generally shaky economy, the private sector was doing better than the public.  And both have been seized upon as by journalists and political opponents as brief windows to what Romney and Obama, otherwise rigorously disciplined to stay on message, actually believe.

These characteristics make both statements gaffes, in the special definition coined almost thirty years ago by Michael Kinsley, an editor and writer who combines finely tuned insights with a coruscating style. “A gaffe occurs not when a politician lies, but when he tells the truth,”—i.e. says what he actually thinks–Kinsley wrote about a Gary Hart campaign crack that he’d rather be in California than New Jersey.

Right-thinking political journalists see gaffes as the bane of campaign coverage.  “The centrality of the gaffe is an outgrowth of horse race coverage,” writes Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine.  “The increasing speed of campaign coverage surely means that there are more gaffes now than ever before, and thus more opportunities for the soul-crushing stupidity of the process to display itself.”  Washington Post wunderkind Ezra Klein agrees: “The result of our coverage of these press conferences and Q&As,” he writes, “was that voters ended up knowing less than they did before. That’s the saddest part of all.”

That might be true in some parallel political universe.  In that universe, journalists pose questions meant to draw out a candidate on policy issues.  Candidates respond candidly and directly to questions with their actual convictions.

In the universe we actually live in, however, none of those conditions obtain.  Candidates go into interviews or debates determined to say only what is in their own interest, and questioners are intent on breaking through the talking points and throwing the candidates off stride.  It’s like those job interviews that ask you to identify a weakness, a question which the wise job-hunter recognizes as an intelligence test:  Are you stupid enough to alert a prospective employer to a real weakness—I’m an awkward writer.  I find it hard to get to work on time.  I have problems with people telling me what to do.—or are you smart enough to put forward a “weakness”—I work too hard.  I care too much about my work.  I’m too dedicated to the cause.—that is actually a lightly-disguised strength?

Whether the journalists are only reacting to unrelentingly on-message candidates, or the candidates are merely defending themselves against questions designed mainly to elicit embarrassing answers, is impossible to tell.  Maybe both are at fault.

In either case, however, the outcome is the same: The bulk of what passes for political exchange between opposing candidates or between candidates and journalists is predictable and unrewarding.  Genuinely thoughtful questions and candor about anything that really matters are in short supply.

In such a miasma, the gaffe stands out like a halogen lamp.  And, often enough, should.

For the gaffes that catch on do not reveal the speaker as being different than what we thought he was.  Rather they reveal him as being precisely what we thought he was.  Nobody thought that when Romney said “I like being able to fire people” that he was saying that he savors the moment when he summons a subordinate to his office, takes his BlackBerry and key-card, and has security escort him off the premises.  Instead, we saw between the lines what seemed to be a larger truth: that Romney sees the loss of employment as being a fairly neutral part of the great cycle of employment, often beneficial or even necessary to the enterprise or the economy, regrettable for the employee, but not to be unduly lamented or avoided.  And is there any doubt that that is exactly Romney’s view?

So too with Obama’s “The private sector is doing fine” gaffe.  Few could have thought that he believed that a sector characterized by high unemployment, home foreclosures, and short credit is actually “doing fine.”  But it would not be unreasonable to read into the president’s words a belief that the public sector, part of whose purpose is to serve as a safety net for hurts suffered at the hands of the private sector, has a greater claim on federal sympathy and resources. And while Obama is a good deal less transparent than Romney, who would be surprised if this were what the president actually believes?

Why are we more ready to believe that gaffes represent a candidate’s genuine beliefs than his more thought-through statements?  Wikipedia offers an interesting perspective: It describes a “Kinsley gaffe” as being analogous to what is known in the law as an “excited utterance,” an exception to the hearsay rule.  The hearsay rule excludes from evidence statements that merely repeat what someone else has said, because such second-hand statements are less likely to be true than things a witness knows first-hand.  The “excited utterance” exception allows into evidence things that someone else has said but that have been blurted out spontaneously, because such exclamations are less likely to have been manufactured.

So, too, with gaffes.  “I like being able to fire people” and “The private sector is doing fine” were not scripted lines but spontaneous expressions.  In the miasma of political debate, gaffes stand out like beacons of candor—the only candor we may hear from the candidate in a dozen speeches or press conferences.

Michele Bachmann was a frontrunner—until the actual voting started.*  Herman Cain’s ideas and personality were even stranger than Ron Paul’s.  Rick Perry:  How could the winner of nine elections from two parties (he was elected three times to the state legislature as a Democrat)† in the country’s second largest state be so clueless a campaigner?  And Newt Gingrich: People marveled that he kept coming back from political oblivion, when what was really remarkable was his ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, like a vampire who keeps driving a stake through his own heart.

Which left Romney, the only recognizable political life form in the race.  The system worked!

So why not take our expertise in selecting presidents on the road?  Why not pick presidents for other countries?  Why not pick a new president for—oh, I don’t know—for Afghanistan?

That is what an assortment of western diplomats and strategic thinkers are mulling over, according to the Washington Post’s geopolitical columnist, David Ignatius.  President Hamid Karzai’s term runs until 2014.  But the British ambassador to Afghanistan thinks that 2013 would be better, so that western troops would be there to guarantee security.  Britain, says the ambassador, would have no objections. So good of them.

Who might succeed Karzai and his administration?  Not to worry.  The U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, reports Ignatius, “is expanding his outreach to Afghan politicians in the hope of encouraging a new generation of leaders, post-Karzai.”

How should the U.S. go about moving up the date of Afghan elections and replacing Karzai?  “Some would argue,” writes Ignatius, “that it should be a CIA function, since it may involve covert contacts and money. But why not do this political work openly, through the embassy? It seems crazy to have spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to stabilize Afghanistan, and then pretend Washington isn’t interested in shaping the political landscape and encouraging a strong and popular successor to Karzai.”

No.  What seems crazy is for the U.S. to attempt to manage the political system of yet another country which we do not understand.  Remember that we played an important role in installing Karzai.  How happy are we with how that has turned out, with Karzai in control only of Kabul and us trying to figure out how we can get our troops out before we are run out?  How happy are we with the succession of viceroys, proconsuls and cat’s-paws whom we installed and then uninstalled in Iraq?  In 1953, we ousted Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran and replaced him with the shah.  In Chile twenty years later, we replaced Salvador Allende with Augusto Pinochet.

Those are our whiffs.  What are our hits?

None of the leaders we have deposed could be confused with George Washington or Winston Churchill.  But the characters we put in their places more often than not turned out to be a motley crew of tyrants and dictators. Remember, we were for Saddam Hussein before we were against him, supporting him in his seven-year war with Iran.

We sometimes pick halfway decent presidents for our own country.  But if our succession of military misadventures in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan has taught us anything, it is that we are not equipped to govern other countries, especially those with cultures radically different than our own.  Not only do the leaders we install often turn out to be as bad as or worse than those we oust, but we sometimes come full circle, turning the country back over to the forces we previously ejected.  We went into Afghanistan to oust the Taliban; now we are negotiating to bring them back into some kind of governing coalition.

We are barely wise enough to govern our own country.  We are not wise enough—or powerful enough or knowledgeable enough—to govern Afghanistan.  Leave the elections where they are.  Leave the selection of a new president to Afghans.  Leave them, in other words, to their own political devices.

Their own devices: They can’t be much worse than ours.

Michael Dukakis was too phlegmatic.  John Kerry was pompous and awkward.  Al Gore was superior and condescending—to George W. Bush, who presented himself as, to borrow Churchill’s phrase, “a modest man, with much to be modest about.”

Now it’s Mitt Romney’s turn.  Republicans, writes Slate.com editor Jacob Weisberg, “are in the process of choosing a candidate whom hardly any of them actually likes.”

Why is it so important that people “actually like” their presidential candidates?  Are we electing them to be our friends?

It’s like going back to high school and electing a homecoming king, or choosing Miss Congeniality in a beauty pageant. Who’s nice?  Who would be great to have a beer with?  Who doesn’t get it?  In the 2004 campaign, Weisberg recalls, “John Kerry asked for his Philly cheesesteak with Swiss cheese” instead the customary provolone or Cheese Whiz.  In vain, says Weisberg, did supporters argue “that qualifications were what mattered.”  While “ordinary people found it easy to relate to [George W. Bush] at a personal level.”

Have we learned nothing from the last few elections?  We rejected Dukakis for being hyper-rational; we got George H.W. Bush—who looks better in retrospect, especially in comparison with his son, than he seemed at the time, but who got elected on the strength of an ill-advised and plainly-insincere no-new-taxes pledge (on which he reneged in office) and by traducing the moderate Dukakis as a Willie-Horton-furloughing, flag-disrespecting radical, and bequeathed us Clarence Thomas.

We rejected Gore, a clearly better-equipped candidate, because of his mannerisms, and got George W. Bush; ‘nuff said.

And in 2004, when it was clear that the war in Iraq was at best a fool’s errand and at worst based on falsified evidence; when it was clear that the administration of post-war Iraq had been disastrously mismanaged at the cost of thousands of lives and billions of dollars—after all that, we still chose Bush over Kerry because Kerry seemed vaguely continental and elitist.

None of this was secret.  We knew it all, and elected the less qualified candidates anyway.  The fault is ours—or at least belongs to those who knew (or should have known) better and still voted for clearly inferior candidates.

There is blame left over for the enablers in the media.  Weisberg may be right that “ordinary people” voted for George W. Bush because they “found it easy to relate to him at a personal level.”  But “ordinary people” didn’t report Kerry’s cheesesteak misadventure on TV.  Ordinary people didn’t inquire as to whether Dukakis, if his wife were raped and murdered, would “favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer”—as opposed, I supposed, to a reversible death penalty.

Why do they do it?  Why are voters and the media both so swayed by issues of personality that are at best tangential to a candidate’s fitness for office and at worse irrelevant?

Part of it has to be that stories about candidates eating cheesesteak, riding in tanks with odd-looking helmets and windsurfing make more entertaining stories.  They have visuals. They are easier to grasp and to form opinions on.

Stories about real issues, including a candidate’s experiential and psychological preparation for office, are harder to report and harder for voters to base decisions on.  Who really knows whether we should stay in Afghanistan, possibly more or less indefinitely and at a cost of billions of scarce dollars a year, to keep the Taliban in check, or leave and possibly see the country revert to its state before we came in?  Who knows how to balance the best interests of underwater mortgage-payers with the need to clear the housing market of foreclosed property?  Who knows how to ensure the long-term economic and political soundness of Social Security for a population with ever fewer paying into the system and ever more drawing from it, without reducing already meager benefits for those for whom it is the only source of income?

Far easier and more entertaining to report and form opinions on Romney’s awkward witticisms or Michelle Obama’s sleeveless dresses or Newt Gingrich’s account at Tiffany’s.

Those stories you can “Like” on Facebook.

Just like driving past a roadside car wreck, I found it impossible to take my eyes off the political collision between Newt Gingrich’s political ambitions and his second ex-wife’s recollection of his betrayal.

The context made the story irresistible: the fact that Newt was about to give a speech that touched on the importance of values.  The fact that he had led an impeachment effort against Bill Clinton for having a dalliance with a young staffer many years his junior at the same time as Gingrich himself was dallying with a young staffer many years his junior.  The fact that Newt had cast aside his second wife no longer in the first bloom of youth twenty years after divorcing his first wife and telling a friend, “She’s not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of a president.”

And all of it set in the even larger context of Gingrich’s id-driven personality, in which Slate.com editor Eric Weisberg spots “symptoms—bouts of grandiosity, megalomania, irritability, racing thoughts, spending sprees—that go beyond the ordinary politician’s normal narcissism that constituted evidence of a condition known as hypomania.”*

Irresistible?  Absolutely.  Satisfying?  ¡Claro que si!

But as a first question in a presidential debate?  Central to choosing a president?  No.

The issue would have been academic, maybe a subject for one of Gingrich’s counterfactual histories, if he hadn’t mashed Romney in the South Carolina primary.  But with Gingrich competitive, or maybe even slightly more than competitive, in what looks like a two-man race for the Republican nomination, the media and Gingrich’s opponents will have to decide how important an issue they think marital history is.  Politics and prurience being what they are, it will certainly play some role.  And given the inherent hypocrisy and licentiousness, maybe it should.

But not much.  The correlation between private and political behavior is not always strong.  History is replete with examples of political leaders whose political careers were stellar but who were poltroons in private life, and vice versa.  Gingrich has a long and well-documented public record.  Why not rely on that instead?

Don’t get me wrong.  I would rather have a president who had not betrayed and then dumped two previous wives.  I would also have preferred a president who had not had betrayed his wife with a White House intern.  I would prefer leaders of good moral character.  I welcome anything true that reveals Gingrich for what he is.

But the reason Newt Gingrich should not be president is not that he’s a serial adulterer.  It’s that the policies a President Gingrich would seek to enact would be almost entirely ill-advised and harmful.   Someone who worked with Gingrich before he became Speaker of the House† said that at GOPAC, the political action committee that was his pre-speaker base of operations, was a file cabinet labeled “Newt’s Ideas.”  On top of the cabinet, said the former associate, was a small in-box-type tray; it was labeled “Newt’s Good Ideas.”

Abolishing child labor laws so that low-income school children can work as low-wage janitors is a bad idea.  Allowing a president to ignore Supreme Court rulings he doesn’t like is a bad idea.‡  Creating local citizens’ councils, modeled on local draft boards, to decide which illegal immigrants should be allowed to stay and which should be deported, is a bad idea.  He has a lot of them.

Even if Gingrich’s moral character were pure as the driven snow, bad ideas like these is reason enough to exclude him from consideration for election to any office, let alone the presidency.

What do you call a political system that not only can’t make big decisions, like whether government should do a lot or a little, but can’t even make routine decisions: how to count votes in union elections at the FAA, filling cabinet and sub-cabinet positions, confirming uncontroversial judicial nominations? What do you call a system whose viability depends on the willingness of elected representatives not just to compromise but to abandon their most deeply held beliefs, the beliefs that got them elected in the first place?

You call it the American political system, the one ordained 224 years ago by the founding fathers, the one made up of multi-branch, bicameral checks and balances.

The recent debt ceiling fiasco was triggered by the Republicans’ refusal to raise taxes, even to reduce the federal deficit, much less to succor the unfortunate. Democratic unwillingness to reduce Social Security played a role, too. And so did the voters’ decision, having elected an active-government president in 2008, to give control of the House of Representatives, and effective control of the Senate, to a party unalterably opposed to an active federal government in 2010.

But the real culprit is the Constitutional system itself, which makes outcomes like this almost inevitable. First, by establishing three elective institutions, the presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, in the first place, all of whose agreement is required for laws to take effect. Then by staggering the election cycle for each of the three centers of power, so that each of them reflects the will of the public at different times. And finally by slicing and dicing the electorate differently for each body—electing the president nationally, the Senate statewide, and the House in districts small enough that there are 435 of them among the fifty states. We tend to think of unified government—control of the presidency, the Senate and the House in the hands of the same party, as the historical rule. But in the 33 elections since World War II, only thirteen times, and only six times in the last twenty elections, have the voters given control of the three elected branches—House, Senate and the presidency—to one party.

Often (seven of the thirteen elections and three of the six) unified-government elections have been associated with presidential first terms; voters often seem to give newly-elected presidents a unified Congress to carry out the promises that got them elected. (Interestingly, and perhaps revealingly, all six Democratic presidents elected to first terms in that time span got Democratic Congresses. But of five first-term Republican presidents, only one, Eisenhower, got a Republican Congress.) But in non-presidential-first-term election years, only five times in 22 elections have voters vested governing majorities in a single party.

So it’s the voters’ fault? Not really. Because it is in Congressional elections, 468 of them every two years, that Tip O’Neill’s maxim rings the truest: All politics is local. The vast majority of Congressional elections are referenda, not on the incumbent president’s performance or sharply focused national issues, but on local congresspersons’ record—and often not on their record on big national issues, but the issues that affect the district most directly and immediately.

That’s the system’s bad—a system designed for a smaller country, a country in which fewer could vote and those who could shared class interests across state and regional lines; and a country in which people were more concerned about government over-action, having only recently shed the colonial yoke, than government inaction and indecisiveness.

Interestingly, the political system we fought a revolution to shed, the British parliamentary system, is rarely troubled by divided government. In the 65 years since World War II, while America has endured forty years of divided government, Britain has had to resort to coalition government only once, last year. In Britain, the national government is managed by the leadership of the party that holds a majority in Parliament. Members of Parliament do not necessarily live in the district they represent, but are chosen for their reliability on their party’s national platforms. Once elected, they are expected, whether in the majority or minority, to vote with their party’s leadership. When the majority party cannot command a parliamentary majority for a key policy, they hold an election and bring in a government that can govern. Similarly, closer to home, Canada has had to resort to coalition government just twice in almost 150 years.

Imagine that: a government that has to act on critical issues or go back to the voters. It’s not for us, of course. Better to build government that depends on elected officials abandoning deeply-held beliefs and hopes of re-election. How’s that working for us?

Not even the kind of near-cataclysm we just confronted could induce us to switch to a form of government that could really work. But there was a debt-ceiling option that could have given us the next best thing: an election that focused on the big issues we face. And the architect of that option was the Senate’s Republican minority leader Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

After a series of plans to clear the way for raising the debt limit by reducing the deficit fell victim to conservative intransigence, McConnell came up with a plan to raise the debt limit without solving the deficit reduction plan. To oversimplify, McConnell’s plan would let President Obama raise the debt ceiling on his own, in phases between through the election, and let him shoulder whatever blame came with it. In other words, to use the Washington catch-phrase for postponing solutions, to kick the can down the road.

This is one time, though, when it makes sense to kick the can down the road, especially if the road is the campaign trail and the kicking leads up to the 2012 election. McConnell put forth this solution because he thinks that raising the debt ceiling will play badly. After all, who likes putting the country further in debt? The McConnell plan played on the supposition that voters will punish whoever raises the debt limit. Why not, it suggested, let that be a Democratic president in the middle of a campaign that will revolve around the country’s parlous economic condition?

Well, why not? Why not let the election campaign be fought over the deficit, whether it’s better to reduce the deficit by cutting the Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security benefits of elderly and low-income Americans—the average Social Security recipient, for example, gets about $14,000 a year—or to reduce the deficit by raising taxes? Or whether taxes are so poisonous to the economy that it would be better to default on the debt and risk the consequences than simply to pay for the services people want. What better issue could the election revolve around?

And what better time to hold such a referendum? The White House is on the ballot. The House and Senate are closely divided enough that a conservative or liberal wave could throw the government to one party or the other.

Alas, the McConnell proposal bloomed only briefly before being discarded in favor of a chimera that forced both sides to abandon core convictions.

My hope is that the debt-ceiling debate defined the parties so clearly that they will look past the deal they cut to first principles. And I hope that in a debate fought along those lines, faced with what seems to me to be a choice between sense and nonsense, the electorate will choose sense and give control to the Democrats. And if they don’t, the majority will at least have the government they want, and be forced to live with the consequences, rather than the dreary catatonia of permanent stalemate.

Just as though we had a parliamentary system.

If political prospects were determined by results, Barack Obama would be cruising to re-election.  Universal health care is on the books—passed over Republican opposition as bitter as the opposition of southern senators to civil rights.  Financial reform legislation is also on the books, again passed over die-hard Republican opposition. He has given education reform a higher priority and stronger commitment than any president since LBJ.  Taking over an economy in a hole dug by massive, unaffordable tax cuts and a bacchanalia of deregulation, he has brought the commercial part of the economy back far enough that the stock market is as high as at its pre-crash peak.  Unemployment, always a lagging indicator, has, for now at least, held at around 9 percent—too high, of course, but far less than a recession of this magnitude might have been expected to cause.

But is anybody happy?  Not the Republicans, of course:  Only a return to the policies that plunged us into the recession would make them happy.

But not many Democrats either.  Why, they ask, didn’t Obama fight for single-payer health care, or at least for a public option?  Why didn’t he fight to let the Bush tax cuts expire on schedule last year?  Why won’t he fight for another economic stimulus?  Why won’t he fight to confirm Elizabeth Warren as head of the consumer protection office established by the financial reform bill?  Why hasn’t he closed Guantanamo Bay prison as he promised?  Why, asks one group of Democrats, hasn’t he driven Qaddafi from office as we did Saddam Hussein?  Why, asks another faction, are have we committed our forces in Libya at all?

Because that’s not how Barack Obama rolls.  He’s not a fighter, but a compromiser—or, to be more precise, a pre-compromiser.  Not for him the storming of an unsustainable beachhead on the left to match the unsustainable Republican beachhead on the right, then compromising somewhere in the middle.  Instead, he determines where the process will end—and establishes his position there.

He knew the votes weren’t there for single-payer or the public option—for pity’s sake, the Clintons couldn’t find the votes to bring a health care bill of any description to the floor of either house—and refused to expend political energy or capital in a vain Pickett’s Charge for the lost cause.  After uncharacteristically pledging to close Guantanamo Bay on his first day in office, he soon saw that while he had the power to close it, he had neither the votes in Congress to transfer Gitmo prisoners to the U.S. nor other countries that would accept them, and kicked the issue to the curb.  He sees that nominating Elizabeth Warren would hand a hostage to Senate Republicans for which they would demand a steep ransom.  He could have held firm on extending the Bush tax cuts—extending them would require the passage of legislation he could veto—but couldn’t get a second round of stimulus without going along with a temporary tax-cut extension.

Obama’s role as the great pre-compromiser goes back farther than his presidency.   During the campaign, for example, it was not Obama but Hillary Clinton who favored universal health coverage; he proposed covering only children at first.  Although as a state senator he had spoken against going to war in Iraq, he proposed not a rapid pullout from the country and region, but a gradual redeployment from Iraq to Afghanistan, and a phased withdrawal even from there.  In fact his entire campaign promised not a liberal refloresence but only change, from Bush policies and politics to, well, something better.

In fact, almost from birth, he has lived his life in the middle.  He was a child of a marriage between black and white parents.  He was born in America but with a name redolent of Africa.  And the permanent absence of his father, combined with the intermittent absence of his mother, forced him to look for parental guidance sometimes to his mother, sometimes to his grandparents.

The middle path has taken Obama far.  It took him from unpromising beginnings to Columbia and Harvard Law.  It overcame his brief tenure in national politics and the opposition of highly experienced rivals to catapult him to the presidency

It has worked for the country as well.  We rolled back financial regulation under Clinton; under Obama, we rolled it forward.  Bill Clinton started out favoring an end to anti-gay discrimination in the military, but had to settle for don’t-ask-don’t-tell in the face of opposition from the military and conservatives.  Obama is ending don’t-ask-don’t-tell with support from military leadership.  Universal health care has eluded presidents since Theodore Roosevelt; now we have it.

Could Obama have achieved a better outcome by staking out more liberal starting positions on, say, health care?  If he had demanded single-payer, could he have settled for a public option?  Could he have not given so much away to the pharmaceutical and health insurance industry?  Who can say for sure?  But the closeness of the final outcome, and the months it took to reach that outcome, suggest that Obama may have read the portents correctly: that the votes for a public option were never there, and that the virulent opposition of big pharma and the health insurance giants would likely have doomed reform to an early demise.  Instead of leading reformers in a heroic charge that might have failed, Obama pre-compromised—and won.

Obama’s caution has not only brought about good outcomes but avoided bad ones.  He avoided stepping into the trap of proclaiming laudable but unattainable objectives in Iraq and Afghanistan, and as a result we are on our way out of both places instead of waist deep in the big muddy.  He refused to commit the U.S.to the removal of Qaddafi, who has proved to be more resilient than many experts thought, and so we are not part of what will almost certainly be either a prolonged and brutal Libyan civil war between almost equally distasteful rivals or a long, frustrating slog to rehabilitation and stability.

In his caution and pragmatism, Obama bears a resemblance to his hero, Abraham Lincoln.  We remember the Great Emancipator in bold colors and broad brushstrokes.  We don’t remember that before he freed the slaves, Lincoln would have compromised on keeping the country together and the slaves in bondage.  Before that, indeed until 1862, Lincoln supported a scheme called colonization, freeing the slaves but deporting them to colonies in Africa.  In fact, for Lincoln, pragmatism was a governing philosophy.  “The pilots on our Western rivers steer from point to point as they call it — setting the course of the boat no farther than they can see,” he told a senator as he contemplated the end of the war and re-uniting the country, “and that is all I propose to myself in this great problem.”

Pre-compromise has worked for Obama, but at a price: surrendering the power of aspiration and ceding it to the opposition.  People want to know the direction a leader is taking the country he wants to lead.  They want to know not only what a leader would settle for, not only the latitude and longitude of the likely destination, but where he would take the nation if he were unconstrained.  Almost by default, the Republicans have harnessed the power of aspiration, and ridden it to majority control of the House of Representatives, minority near-control of the Senate, and a decent shot at winning the White House—without any realistic shot of achieving the ill-advised policy objectives they proclaim.

Which illustrates the risk inherent in the politics of aspiration.  Aspiration can illuminate and serve as a beacon.  But it can also blind those who look at it too intently.  It can raise expectations beyond what can be achieved, and result in cynicism when problems turn out to be less simple than they imagined and less susceptible to simple solutions.  It can lead to outright disaster when leaders follow their own aspirational rhetoric.

The 2012 campaign will be a clash of governing philosophies.  But it will also be a contest pitting the mirage of aspirational rhetoric against the less thrilling evidence of accomplishment.  Adlai Stevenson campaigned—and lost—twice on the promise to talk sense to the American people.  Here’s hoping it works better for Barack Obama.

This is the second of a two-part story.  The first part is here.

Sixty years after a federal jury convicted a Chicago woman named Iva Toguri of treason for being a Japanese propagandist called Tokyo Rose, a Google search for “Tokyo Rose” yields more than 600,000 hits.  Yet Frederick Close’s penetrating book, Tokyo Rose: An American Patriot, makes a persuasive case that not only was Iva Toguri not guilty of being Tokyo Rose, but that there was no Tokyo Rose. (The events that led to Iva Toguri’s conviction are discussed in greater detail here.)

How could a prosecutor, a jury, appeals courts and parole boards have perpetrated such an injustice?

It wasn’t for lack of effective counsel.  In Wayne Collins, Iva Toguri had an experienced, principled and aggressive defender, who had handled and won cases on behalf of Japanese American internees.

There was doubtless a residue of anti-Japanese feeling from the attack on Pearl Harbor and the war that followed, despite the fact that no Japanese American had been proven to have betrayed the U.S. on behalf of their ancestral country.

But Close points to two factors not connected to the post-war environment that played critical roles in convicting Iva Toguri, factors intrinsic to our system of justice and indeed to human nature.

One is the testimony of soldiers and sailors who came forward to testify that they had heard “Tokyo Rose” broadcast taunts about American battlefield setbacks and the risk of being betrayed by stateside wives and sweethearts—taunts that took place well before Iva Toguri became a broadcaster.  Close adduces a number of explanations of how well-intentioned servicemen could have testified to broadcasts that never took place. Perhaps they heard some other woman make such broadcasts; there was in fact a Filipina-American broadcaster named Myrtle Lipton who broadcast from Manila and became known as Manila Rose.  Perhaps the servicemen’s recollections were the product of a psychological elixir of fear, anger and loneliness.

But there was something else as well: the inherent unreliability of eyewitness—or in this case “earwitness”—testimony, the inherent unreliability, in other words of human memory

Just before the beginning of my first law school class, while the professor prepared his notes, four students brought a table into the classroom.  The professor told them he had not requested a table, and that class was about to start. The leader of the table-carriers took out paperwork that he was carrying, and showed it to the professor as proof that they had been directed to deliver the table.  Then do it later, the professor said; I’m trying to start a class here.  After some additional haggling they left, taking the table with them.  Six weeks later, the professor announced that he had staged the table delivery, and asked us to write descriptions of the incident.  A week later, he told us that the 125 students in the class had submitted 60 materially different descriptions of the incident. “This was your first class, you had no cases or notes to review before class began, nothing to look at except this incident,” he said.  “I want you to remember this,” he said, “when you’re out in practice, and asking a jury to rely on the memory of someone who saw a car crash out of the corner of their eye six months ago.”

The verdict against Iva Toguri rested almost entirely on the memories of sailors, most of them young and frightened in those early months of war.  They were testifying about things they recalled hearing early in the war eight years before—memories that, like almost all trial testimony, had been thoroughly rehearsed, and thus locked in, before they took the witness stand.  And they had lived through four years of Tokyo Rose coverage.  “The Tokyo Rose legend obviously influenced GIs testifying at the trial such that they truly believed their own testimony,” Close writes.

Another staple of criminal law, doomed Iva Toguri as well: careerism, in the form of a doubting but dutiful prosecutor.  Special Assistant Attorney General Thomas DeWolfe, who was brought in from Seattle after the U.S. Attorney for San Francisco, where Toguri was tried, declined to prosecute, led an aggressive defense team.  But, Close writes, “he knew the defendant was innocent.”

DeWolfe shared his doubts with his Justice Department superiors, Close reports.  “There is no available evidence, he wrote, “upon which a reasonable mind might fairly conclude guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” The recommendation was bucked up the Justice Department’s chain of command, to Attorney General Tom Clark.  “Tom Clark’s reply the next day was terse,” says Close.  “’Prosecute it vigorously.’”  DeWolfe “was a great soldier,” the Associate Press reporter covering the trial said later, “so he did it.”

How many other legally innocent defendants are prosecuted in spite of prosecutors’ misgivings?  Not many, perhaps; the vast majority of criminal cases are resolved by guilty pleas.  And fewer yet as the result of the kind of popular demand that led to the Tokyo Rose conviction.  But the number of prisoners freed after the review of DNA evidence, to say nothing of Muslims wrongfully prosecuted since 9/11 suggests either that many careerist prosecutors let their ambition override their obligation to prosecute only the actually guilty.

The fallibility of memory and the willingness to risk career advancement are parts of human nature.  The wise and the scrupulous recognize their ubiquity and attempt to resist their power.  It is one of the many rewards of this book that it avoids the pitfalls that beckon historians in general and biographers in particular: the temptation to whitewash sympathetic subjects and condemn the unsympathetic.  By writing a searching and nuanced account of the Tokyo Rose episode, and of the historical and cultural environment in which it took place, Frederick Close not only informs us, but prompts us to think about the enduring issues raised by the story of Tokyo Rose.

If you’re Interested in learning more about Tokyo Rose, viewing actual case documents, or viewing exhibits about American culture in 1940-41, visit the official web site for Tokyo Rose: An American Patriot.