In a time like this, when tempers are riding high and many Americans are close to panic about their jobs and finances, you have a special responsibility to consider the accuracy of what you say and the consequences of inflammatory and erroneous statements. In the last few days, manifestly distorting my words and pulling them out of context, you have accused me of wanting to exclude white males from jobs generated by the stimulus package. Anyone who takes a moment to examine what I actually said and wrote knows this to be an absurd misrepresentation of my position (see this). My goal is and has always been to create as many opportunities for as wide a group as possible, and not exclude anyone from access. There is and has never been any ambiguity about this. The hate mail I have received since your broadcast suggests that the mischievous consequences of your demagoguery are potentially dangerous, in addition to being destructive of rational and constructive political discourse. I urge you to take responsibility for your words. Words and ideas have real world consequences, and you have demonstrated a cavalier disregard for both.

Hold onto your wallets. The bankers are coming bank for more money. They burned through the $350 billion that we gave them in the first round of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and they are worried that even the second $350 billion will not be enough money to keep them solvent. The selective leaks from Treasury tell us that the banks will need far more money to cover their bad debts.

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America has embraced Lemon Socialism.

The federal government -- that is, you and I and every other taxpayer -- has taken ownership of giant home mortgagors Fannie and Freddie, which are by now basket cases. We've also put hundreds of millions into Wall Street banks, which are still flowing red ink and seem everyday to be in worse shape. We've bailed out the giant insurer AIG, which is failing. We've given GM and Chrysler the first installments of what are likely to turn into big bailouts. It's hard to find anyone who will place a big bet on the future of these two.

It gets worse. While Washington debates TARP II, the Federal Reserve Board continues to buy or guarantee or provide loans for a vast and growing pile of questionable financial and corporate assets, much of which are likely to be worth far less than the Fed has paid or guaranteed or accepted as collateral. We're talking big money here -- so far over $2.4 trillion. (The entire TARP -- parts I and II -- in combination with the proposed stimulus package come to just over $1.5 trillion.)

Taxpayers are on the hook for this Fed bailout money, too, of course. We have to pay the interest on the ever-growing debt used to make these payments or guarantees and loans. Yet while TARP II and the upcoming stimulus package are receiving a great deal of attention, this much larger public commitment by the Fed is not. That's partly because the media doesn't much of understand it, but also because the Fed is doing it in secret, using provisions of its charter never before utilized, and avoiding discussion before the full Board of Governors for fear such meetings would be subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

Put it all together and at this rate, the government -- that is, taxpayers -- will own much of the housing, auto, and financial sectors of the economy, those sectors that are failing fastest.

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There's little I disagree with in Michael Waldman's post or in his article on democracy for Democracy, and yet if it were a box of ideas, I would be unable to resist the temptation to dump it out and repack it differently.

The article brought to mind a concept one often hears in discussions of education or community development: We tend to focus on deficits - children's behavior problems or a community's problems with crime or poverty - and instead we should look for the child's or the community's strengths and build on those strengths.

It's a cliché in other fields, but the concept hasn't penetrated our discussions of democracy and the political process. The standard paradigm for talking about American democracy still always follows the deficit model: Identify a bunch of problems - big money, low participation, obstacles to voting -- and a set of procedural solutions to fix each one. The result is a list of reforms as long as your arm, not one of which is inspiring or has enough of an enthusiastic constituency to move it forward. For the last ten years, I've sat through countless meetings where democracy-reform activists insist that people "should" be more interested in these issues and then argue among themselves about which of the dozen or more complex, bloodless, over-hyped process reforms should be given priority, when and if the masses actually become interested.

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I just want to add a couple of points to the discussion on opportunity, one relating to progressives' tendency to get distracted by inequality when thinking about opportunity, and one relating to the evidence that is brought to bear when assessing how much opportunity there is.

When most progressives think of opportunity, they have in mind something like Amartya Sen's concept of capability - the chance to pursue whatever personal aims a person holds dear. As numerous political philosophers have recognized, there must be limits to what individuals can legitimately claim from their fellow citizens in pursuit of their aims. For instance, no amount of money might suffice to give the severely disabled "equal" opportunity. And I would expect that asking you all to subsidize me so I can go to Paris with my girlfriend would go over like flatulence in church. Nevertheless, the basic progressive conceptualization of opportunity is much less muddled than the idea among some conservatives that so long as there is a chance--any chance--at success in life, then there is equal opportunity.

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The big annual economic meeting at Davos opens next week (Jan 28-Feb 1 are the official dates), and the discussion there - in both formal and informal interactions - is worth scouring for indications of the current situation around the world and where we all may be heading.

Given the likely composition of the main players this year - world corporate leaders and the non-US policy elite (with the new US policymakers stuck in Washington, doing real work) - I would suggest viewers at home and on the ground keep watch for answers to the following.

Are we on the same planet? It is not unheard of for Davos participants to appear as if they are living in their own bubble (in more sense than one). Watch for opulent parties and excessive consumption, particularly if the people involved have nominated themselves for any kind of government handout. If you meet someone from Merrill, ask if their attendance fees came out of 4th quarter earnings - or if there is still more bad news to come.

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President Obama is getting nearly as much advice about Israelis as about puppies, and at times the advice seems eerily the same: we want them close, but they can get too scared, or wild, or selfish; we cannot indulge their ferocious instincts or territorial overreaching--anyway, they'll need some leashing in. "Tough love," writes the New York Times' Roger Cohen, and this counsel--these very words--have been repeated (by my count) by five other prominent journalists and diplomatic hands in recent weeks.

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It's hard to disagree with much of Michael Waldman's lovely post. It is inviting at the level of principle (who, after all, is against creating a robust participatory democracy?). And he's right at the level of practice - matching funds and universal voter registration are entirely sensible policy proposals What Waldman doesn't say, however, is precisely why the proposals he offers will lead more people to engage with politics, and the why is far less idealistic than the happy notions of grassroots organizing and civic engagement that typically spring to the mind of progressives when they think about election reform. Political elites (parties, campaign organizations, political professionals, and candidates - all of the actors that progressives tend to disdain) are all but essential for generating the type of participatory energy and engagement that Waldman seeks.

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The suggestion that the President may wish to add to the White House's existing bodies a Council of Social Advisers (CSA) has two versions. One, suggested by Fritz Mondale, is one outlined here:

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Julian Zelizer is right to stress the common theme of under-consumption that underpinned the New Deal rhetoric of the 1930s. As he points out it was a rhetoric that united middle-class consumers and workers that was key to support both for Social Security and the Wagner Act. It was the key to the Democratic Party electoral successes of 1936 and 1940. At the local level it also helps explain why there was so much community support for striking workers: middle-class political sentiment was not necessarily on the side of 'law and order' and the employer. It was one of the factors that made the 1930s so distinctive in American history. Before the 1930s you had to go back to the mid to late nineteenth century, as Herbert Gutman noted, to find local middle-class solidarity with local artisans and workers against 'outside' employers. After the 1940s Meg Jacobs showed how consumers could be persuaded that organized labor, not business, was the cause of their difficulties during World War II and in the post-war inflation.

Partly because of that consumer-producer link, there was as Don Guttenplan's posts remind us, a radical cutting edge to the politics of the 1930s that we have never seen again. It is also a radical cutting edge that is absent today. No wonder historians on the right blame the New Deal for promoting class conflict rather than class unity.

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America has embraced Lemon Socialism.

The federal government -- that is, you and I and every other taxpayer -- has taken ownership of giant home mortgagors Fannie and Freddie, which are by now basket cases. We've also put hundreds of millions into Wall Street banks, which are still flowing red ink and seem everyday to be in worse shape. We've bailed out the giant insurer AIG, which is failing. We've given GM and Chrysler the first installments of what are likely to turn into big bailouts. It's hard to find anyone who will place a big bet on the future of these two.

It gets worse. While Washington debates TARP II, the Federal Reserve Board continues to buy or guarantee or provide loans for a vast and growing pile of questionable financial and corporate assets, much of which are likely to be worth far less than the Fed has paid or guaranteed or accepted as collateral. We're talking big money here -- so far over $2.4 trillion. (The entire TARP -- parts I and II -- in combination with the proposed stimulus package come to just over $1.5 trillion.)

Taxpayers are on the hook for this Fed bailout money, too, of course. We have to pay the interest on the ever-growing debt used to make these payments or guarantees and loans. Yet while TARP II and the upcoming stimulus package are receiving a great deal of attention, this much larger public commitment by the Fed is not. That's partly because the media doesn't much of understand it, but also because the Fed is doing it in secret, using provisions of its charter never before utilized, and avoiding discussion before the full Board of Governors for fear such meetings would be subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

Put it all together and at this rate, the government -- that is, taxpayers -- will own much of the housing, auto, and financial sectors of the economy, those sectors that are failing fastest.

Consider too that the government already finances much of the aerospace industry, which is still doing reasonably well but depends on a foreign policy that itself has been a dismal failure. And a large portion of the pharmaceutical industry and health care sector (through the Medicare and Medicaid, the Medicare drug benefit, and support of basic research). These are in bad shape as well, and it seems likely the Obama administration will try to reorganize much of them.

What's left? Most of high-tech, entertainment, hospitality, retail, and commodities. So far, at least, we taxpayers are not propping them up. And when the economy turns up -- perhaps as soon as next year, most likely later -- these sectors have a good chance of rebounding.

But the others -- the ones the government is coming to own or manage -- are less likely to rebound as quickly, if ever. If anyone has a good argument for why the shareholders of these losers should not be cleaned out first, and their creditors and executives and directors second -- before taxpayers get stuck with the astonishingly-large bill -- I would like to hear it.

It's called Lemon Socialism. Taxpayers support the lemons. Capitalism is reserved for the winners.

My old comrade Jonathan Alter is right. Symbolism matters. Psychology matters. Mood music matters. Both of my paternal grandparents were on the WPA payroll, so for them the fact that the New Deal "gave employment to a lot of workers who needed it" was pretty important. Alonzo Hamby knows as much about FDR as any man alive, but perhaps he needs to be reminded that the long-term costs of long-term unemployment are not just reflected in a shrinking GDP. (Maybe a refresher on the state of American private utility companies in the 1930s is in order as well. Just because Samuel Insull appears in Dos Passos's great trilogy USA doesn't make him a fictional character.)

Those of us in the fact-based community are deeply indebted to James Galbraith and Marshall Auerback for providing the statistics to rebut what has now become the prevailing orthodoxy about the New Deal and unemployment. (Though a look at the comments below Galbraith's contribution reveals how far we have to go.) Whether the New Deal moderated or ended the Depression seems to me less important than recognizing that, for those on the receiving end, even amelioration was no small matter.

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President Obama needs an argument. The economic stimulus plan is already coming under fire from the left and the right, only days after he was sworn in as president (two times, in fact). In The New York Times, my colleague at Princeton Paul Krugman has written that he "ended Tuesday less confident about the direction of economic policy than I was in the morning." Krugman goes on to criticize the "platitudes in his Inaugural Address" as a warning sign that Obama might find his administration "dangerously behind the curve." Republicans are now raising their concerns as well. Republican congressional leaders are complaining that the stimulus bill coming out of the House is big on pork-barrel spending projects and deficient on measures that would actually stimulate the economy in the short term.

The waters are getting rough and Obama has barely stepped into the ocean. The President can't wait too long or he could lose control of the debate. An effective response will depend on many things, with one of the most important being his ability to develop an overriding and compelling argument about how we ended up in this economic crisis and how we can get out.

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Theda Skocpol rightly draws attention to President Obama's focus in his inaugural address on promoting more broadly shared prosperity: "The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity," he said.

Indeed, to date, too many Americans have failed to benefit from our nation's economic growth. Between 1947 and 1973, productivity and real median family income both grew by 2.8 percent a year. Since 1973, however, productivity has grown by 1.8 percent a year while real median family income has risen by less than half of that. The disconnect between aggregate economic growth and the income of typical families is accompanied by a large increase in inequality. Since 1979 the share of income going to the top 1 percent has risen by 8 percentage points while the share of income going to the bottom 80 percent has fallen by the same amount. The problem has been particularly acute in recent years, with the gains of economic growth accruing largely to those at the very top; the tax cuts enacted since 2001 have reinforced this long-term trend, increasing after-tax incomes for high-income families substantially more than for the rest.

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President Barack Obama's inaugural address may well be remembered as one of the rare moments in history where substance matched symbolism. On January 20, 2009 the very aesthetics of American democracy changed, both symbolically and substantively, through the acension of a black man to the nation's highest office.

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I admire Michael Waldman's idealism in matters of campaign finance, for I have long since given up any real hope for reform in that thicket. Given the pre-eminence of the First Amendment, most proposed reforms won't work. Given the clever minds attracted to the highest levels of politics, most regulations are soon circumvented. The combination of these givens is toxic to finance reform.

But Waldman is absolutely correct about voter registration, though he leaves out the essential companion to his idea. In my own book, A More Perfect Constitution, I proposed that registration be automatic for Americans--a legitimate function of the state, just as it is in most European democracies. Opposition to this proposal is based almost entirely on a fear of popular will. That is incompatible with democracy, but it is based on a legitimate recognition that most Americans simply don't understand the issues or the system. There is no question that ignorance on civic matters is widespread; a thousand studies prove it. But the solution is not to place barriers in the way of broader civic participation. Rather, the answer is to dramatically improve the quantity and quality of civic education in our schools, from kindergarten through college. Nothing will invigorate a representative democracy more than a combination of civic knowledge and voter participation. The two goals go hand in hand, and both must be strengthened and broadened simultaneously.

Our government's current operating principle seems to be bailing out people who were culpable in the financial meltdown. If so, journalists are surely entitled to billions of dollars.

Why? Journalists were grossly deficient when it came to covering the reckless behavior, sleaze and willful ignorance of fundamental economics, much of which was reasonably obvious to anyone who was paying attention, that inflated the housing and credit bubbles of the past decade. Their frequent cheerleading for bad practices -- and near-total failure to warn us, repeatedly and relentlessly, of what was building -- made a bad situation worse.

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I don't know about you, but I'm still glowing. The sight of Barack Obama, standing tall, taking the oath - cheered by one, heck, two million flag waving Americans, was an epochal affirmation of democracy. The Mall seemed a Walt Whitman poem come to life. It would be easy for our minds to follow our hearts, and assume that American democracy is in robust health.

So what's the worry about American democracy? Isn't the fact of Obama's election proof enough that the system works? And aren't there more pressing matters to occupy our attention?

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Theda Skocpol, as always, makes a compelling case for reweaving the social contract. But one crucial ingredient is missing in her list: organized labor. One of the greatest accomplishments of the New Deal was the National Labor Relations Act, which dramatically transformed the fortunes of working Americans. In 1950, more than one third of working Americans belonged to unions. Wages rose, work grew more secure, and the gap between the wealthy and the working class narrowed. The benefits of unionization provided an economic boost for most workers--even those in nonunionized industries. For a few decades in the mid-twentieth century, it was possible to hold a blue-collar job, live modestly but comfortably, and save for the purchase of a home and even a college education. Unionization made possible the emergence of a broad middle class in the United States.

Those days are gone. Today only a little more than seven percent of private-sector workers belong to unions. Nonunionized blue-collar and pink collar jobs are notoriously insecure. Many service sector jobs don't pay enough to lift workers out of poverty.

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I am very grateful to James Galbraith for his post. It is very important to count in the people the government directly employed on the WPA and other programmes when calculating the impact on unemployment. James's father's analysis of the economic impact of public works projects that stimulated private sector employment is still indispensable. My only note of caution is that the New Deal was unable to fulfil Hopkins's hope that WPA jobs would have the same legitimacy and moral worth for the unemployed that private sector jobs had. Congress never allowed the WPA to pay wages that were comparable to the uncertainties created by unpredictable appropriations meant that workers could be suddenly laid off for reasons nothing to do with job performance.

One practical note on Jonathan Alter's shrewd observations about the importance of communications. Will all those millions of people engaged and energized by email and the web by the Obama have the same impact n Congress as those thousands who wrote every week to Roosevelt and members of Congress in 1933? Will they be activated to demand that Congress enact the President's program?

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The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is supposed to be a non-partisan organization providing neutral analysis on budget and economic issues to members of Congress and the general public. CBO has generally adhered to the principle of careful neutrality regardless of the political affiliation of its director.

In a seeming departure from its history, CBO has apparently selectively made available a report that finds that much of the impact of the stimulus will not be felt until after the end of the 2010 fiscal year. While it is not clear that the contents of the report are very damning to the package being debated in Congress, the CBO report is being presented as a serious setback to President Obama's effort by some in the media and the Republican Congressional leadership.

The parts of the report discussed in the media should not actually raise much concern.

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Hopefully, George Mitchell's tenure as Special Envoy to the Middle East will turn out to be a case of, what Yogi Berra would call, "deja vu all over again." Specifically, we could use a repeat of May 9, 2007 which was the highlight of Mitchell's career, thus far.

That was the day that the conflict over Northern Ireland, which began in the 12th century (and in which 3500 people had been killed since 1966) ended. It was the day when ultra-hard-line Protestant leader Reverend Ian Paisley joined former senior IRA commander Martin McGuiness in a power-sharing Catholic-Protestant unity government.

It was a day, in the words of the BBC, "of such improbability that it sets a new benchmark against which the future will judge unlikely events still to come" - like an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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Once in a blue moon a magazine essay explains immediate crises so well that it also lights up broader challenges and horizons. Jonathan Schell does it this week in The Nation by reckoning with our country's converging crises and prospects.This essay should be anthologized and, if we survive, canonized.

It sometimes catches the echoes of its own greatness a bit grandly. But this essay is great enough to be required in every serious high school, college, and grand-strategy program or agency. If the Obama Administration's Ivied wunderkinds haven't enough time, mental space, and moral disposition to absorb these arguments, we're finished. Obama should read it while drafting his State of the Union speech.

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"Sen. Mitchell is fair. He's been meticulously even-handed," said Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. "But the fact is, American policy in the Middle East hasn't been 'even handed' -- it has been supportive of Israel when it felt Israel needed critical U.S. support. So I'm concerned," Foxman continued. "I'm not sure the situation requires that kind of approach in the Middle East."

Thus the Jewish Week.

In all seriousness, why is an organization that opposes defamation, that prides itself in "combating anti-Semitism and bigotry of all kinds," in the business of defaming even-handedness? The League was founded by B'nai Brith in 1913

to stop, by appeals to reason and conscience and, if necessary, by appeals to law, the defamation of the Jewish people. Its ultimate purpose is to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike and to put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against and ridicule of any sect or body of citizens.

Under Abe Foxman, the ADL opposed a Congressional resolution denouncing the Turkish genocide against the Armenians on the ground that it "will not foster reconciliation between Turks and Armenians." And opposing the Mitchell appointmentis supposed to foster reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians? Or is reconciliation bad for the Jews? How about judgment? Good taste? Doesn't anyone at the ADL care a smidgen for irony?

The phrase "hundred days" came to mind so easily in 1933 because it already had been used to refer to the period after Napoleon's triumphal return from Elba. Alas, that ended with Waterloo. Franklin Roosevelt's hundred days still appear to many scholars a triumph of presidential leadership, but the end result was not much better. We all know that the New Deal did not end the Great Depression in the United States; it was an ambitious mixture of failure and accomplishment. One way to approach its initial phase is to sort through its ambitious list of programs and ask how they worked out economically. One also might ask what could have been attempted, but was not. A few thoughts follow:

Rhetorical Leadership: Here Roosevelt remains the master. His inaugural address and follow-up fireside chat uplifted the nation and restored a large measure of hope. This alone was no small achievement. Unfortunately, Roosevelt's rhetoric also became increasingly less unifying and more divisive. The gratuitous inaugural swipe at the "money lenders" would escalate accordingly. At the very least, it was an unpromising way of dealing with a continuing national crisis.

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There's a paradox at the heart of Obama's new presidency. I think it's one he recognizes, but, like most problems, recognizing it alone does not solve it.

The problem is a puzzle of power, and it is not just a technical one.

Much of the discussion of President Obama's rhetoric rightly praises him for finding a way to describe an imaginable, collective public -- a community. In Obama's America a self-conscious community works together to describe and then realize our public good. But that works only if representative government works. I would argue that President Obama, in his language as well as actions, also needs to help recreate Congress as the focal point of political power.

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I see that the early commenters on Jed's thoughtful and stimulating contribution seem a little suspicious of this whole community business. They raise fair points that those of us who are, to put it crudely, "pro-community" have to grapple with, because their comments reflect the age-old tension between the community and the individual - or between the larger national community, presumed to be an attempt to shoehorn all Americans into one category, however uncomfortable the fit, and the smaller, more self-selecting affinity groups whom Jed identifies, citing the work of Bill Bishop and others. This tension in turn reflects the vitally important question, for liberals, of how we best accomplish progressive goals - under the banner of the national community or of smaller discreet ones.

History teaches two different lessons here, both legitimate. There were times - the Great Depression and World War II most obviously - when we acted as a national community, or something close to it, in accomplishing great goals. But we ("we" weren't alive, but our forbears) learned later that that community wasn't as inclusive as Life magazine assumed it to be; it left lots of people out. Thus began the work of including those people and groups in the larger project. Here, the community often fractured. Significant portions of it opposed the work with literal violence. The civil rights movement, I would submit, was both things at different moments - at times a great communal effort that succeeded in part because millions who weren't directly affected by Jim Crow were able to see their own self-interest as bound up in the interest of those who were directly affected, and at other times a more particularist effort to secure individual and group rights.

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Without taking anything away from the authors of the other Democracy pieces, I want to especially recommend Jed Purdy's essay to anyone who has yet to read it. It concisely applies Tocqueville's observations on the paradoxical American brand of libertarian communitarianism to our post-materialist era, in which even fellow-feeling is steered in the service of self-fulfillment and -actualization. It's one of the most insightful reflections on American values that I can remember reading.

BUT....no, actually there's no but--it's just a great piece.

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I always learn so much from reading what Aziz Rana writes, and I'm grateful for his taking the trouble to join this conversation. The bottom line is that I agree with him: for Obama's language to turn into a real, concrete, and lasting version of national community, he's going to have to put on the line just what it means for us to take responsibility for one another. And although it may well be that more Republicans, more evangelicals, and more businesspeople will get behind, say, universal health care when Obama explains it than would have for a Clinton (this has been my hope since the start of the primaries), there's no question but that some oxen are going to get gored. (Everyone knows you can't make an omelet without goring some oxen - the bloodstained wisdom of a rural youth.) As Aziz says, we can't achieve a new social compact otherwise. At the very best, we can hope that Obama's politics of unity, and the still-ecstatic movement behind it, help to distinguish between two kinds of division: the dispensable kind, sown by tactical politicians or inherited from someone else's fight, and the (for now) indispensable kind, based in real disagreement about the good society or obdurate conflicts over wealth and power. The intense response to Obama's candidacy and the beginning of his presidency highlights how strong is the appetite to get past that first kind of division, and what a gorgeous relief it is to feel that (some of us, more of us than before) are just all Americans, together. With any luck, that will give progressives more confidence in engaging the second kind of division, and maybe even give everyone a stronger basis of commonality in coalescing around whatever arrangements come out of that struggle. I feel pretty sure there will be struggle, and some kind of unity after it.

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Jedediah Purdy's eloquent and careful examination of Obama's inaugural language and potential vision of community captures two critical points about the current moment. First, he underscores how Obama's election suggests a dramatic generational shift in American politics. As the camera panned to both the Clintons and the Bushes, one could not help but feel that power had been wrested finally (although perhaps impermanently) from the preceding decades' dynastic power struggles and cultural framings. Even more importantly, Purdy explores an ideal of national unity at the heart of Obama's appeal. This vision carries with it a sense that all Americans enjoy a "common fate," one capable of replacing our "balkanized communities" with "shared effort" and commitment. In my mind, the most moving element of yesterday's pageantry was the sea of people of all ages, creeds, and colors celebrating jointly in the possibility of a new American order.

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Just a short post. I've had more than my say on the 100 days. I'm an admirer of Anthony Barger's book, which does an excellent job illuminating the longer term consequences of New Deal legislation. I try to do a little of everything in my book (which actuallly covers the period from June of 1932, when FDR was nominated until June of 1933, when the 100 days ended) but I put particular emphasis on the psycholigical dimensions of FDR's achievement in this period and I hope we can introduce that into the discussion.

FDR made tough decisions like cutting pay for himself and Congress (imitated by Obama, who froze pay), but he also looked for a bit of sugar to make the medicine go down more smoothly, like legalizing beer. He held two tightly controlled press conferences a week to spread his magic through the print press, and much less regular fireside chats, which were magical. Obama won't hold as many press conferences (though he recently held five in five days), but his speeches may end up aging at least as well as FDR's. My point is that communication skills are critical.

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I wrote elsewhere last week (in Scotland's Sunday Herald) on my sense of how the campaign now segues into the presidency, and won't repeat any of that here. (The headline, "Rebirth of the USA," was the Scottish editor's idea, not mine, but it tells you something about the collective longing that inhabits the world.) But just a few words about the Occasion and the speech.

After a short trip to Washington, I arrive back into conventional time, space, and punditry, to hear a chorus of carping that Obama flubbed his great moment by failing to awe, failing to deliver quotable phrases, failing to bring the crowd to its feet, failing to fire them up for the long fight to come, all that.

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Although some have pooh-poohed Obama's Inaugural Address, it rewards thoughtful rereading of its central message and resonate passages. One powerful part speaks to today's TPM/Democracy discussion about Opportunity.

Having acknowledged the power of market capitalism to generate wealth and expand freedom, just-minted President Obama reminded us that socially regulated markets are necessary because "... a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart -- not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good."

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The banking crisis is worsening as the economy continues to sink. It's not just that bank balance sheets are still stuffed with "toxic" assets probably worth far less than what they're listed for -- subprime loans mixed up with all sorts of other things. It's because more and more individuals and businesses that had been credit-worthy six months ago can't make their payments. As a result, bank shares are plummeting. So what should the new administration do?

Set up an aggregator or "bad bank" to buy up assets the banks want to unload -- along with the conditions I set out a few days ago designed to prevent remaining shareholders, creditors, executives, traders, and directors from profiting off taxpayers.

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I'd like to offer a bridge between Rick Kahlenberg's very smart essay about education and integration and Jedediah Purdy's provocative piece on community. That bridge is metropolitan policy.

For the first time since the 1970s, when Jimmy Carter created a short-lived and ultimately ill-fated Urban Policy Research Group, we have a president who has put cities and their metropolitan regions at the center of the national agenda. During the campaign, Barack Obama promised to take a comprehensive approach to urban development. What that entails exactly remains to be seen, but we have some important hints from the newly posted White House urban agenda (for the sake of full disclosure, I was a member of the Obama campaign's Urban and Metropolitan Policy Committee, though it should be said, not a very active one.) This is momentous news. For most of the last three decades, cities have been pretty close to the bottom of the list of presidential priorities and even the most innovative programs, like Hope VI, have been enacted in a rather piecemeal fashion.

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So as a formerly almost-B-list blogger at The Democratic Strategist, I'm excited to be participating in this week's discussion--thanks to the folks at TPMCafe and Democracy for the invitation. I thought I'd weigh in with a quick-hitting post in response to Orlando Patterson's excellent Democracy piece. Question for the group to discuss or not discuss:

I was on the Mall yesterday, crammed up against thousands of my new friends to the point where I couldn't lift my arms. (When my better angels are asleep, I curse those of you who had tickets and managed to get in.....). Like everyone else, I was incredibly inspired, and the magnitude of the day's importance for the country was almost impossible to fully feel and comprehend. That said, I still feel like the victory for American racial justice--as historic and profound as it was--is in some way incomplete. Like there should be a (small) asteriks next to it.

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Yesterday's stunning spectacle of Barack Obama's inauguration - a biracial president looking out over an enormous crowd filled with people of all colors and backgrounds standing shoulder to shoulder - augured well for a nation long divided by race. But as Orlando Patterson notes in his brilliant essay on Equality, the reality is that in 2009 blacks are "cut off from the private life of other Americans, a separation that accounts in good measure for blacks' besetting socioeconomic problems." When the inaugural crowd dispersed, most blacks and whites and Latinos set off to homes and schools in separate and grossly unequal neighborhoods.

On President Obama's first full day in office, it is fair to ask: what will he do to promote integration, particularly integration of American schoolchildren?

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Sometime in the mid-1980s, my friend Chris Lydon, his eyes glowing and finally tearful, told me that he had joined the Twelfth Baptist Church in Roxbury. Born a Catholic, raised to be erudite and free, he had been searching. The pastor, the Rev. Michael Haynes, once a friend of Martin Luther King, had gradually become his spiritual guide. Chris did not quite know how to explain this, and I did not quite know how to interpret it, but he told me with conviction that he had been "saved." I suppose my envy was a kind of faith.

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The view that the New Deal was too small and accomplished little, that only WWII ended the Depression, is very widely held. But it is not correct. It is based on a mis-reading of reconstructed unemployment statistics from that time, which treat the workers actually employed by the New Deal as though they were unemployed. Which they were not.

In fact, the New Deal accomplished a huge amount, both in specific construction projects and in providing employment to the American people.

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Early this morning interviewed on CNBC, I was questioned about an e-mail from a listener in the United States who said that finding lessons from FDR in the 1930s was futile. Only the defense spending associated with World War II brought the country out of Depression. I agree with Julian's point that the New Deal had multitasked objectives - many achieved in terms of long-term reform and the infrastructure even if the purely economic record could have been better. I also feel that stopping things getting worse and enabling ordinary Americans, the unemployed and the farmers to survive the 1930s until the war provided 17 million jobs was a not unimportant achievement.

Incidentally, the most hostile comments that I have received about essays on the 30s in the British media that I have been asked to write come from Americans who either argue that recovery was simply about World War II or demonize FDR as a crypto-socialist.

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I like Julian Zelizer's division of FDR's objectives into three parts: immediate economic relief, infrastructure investment, and social engineering (that's a paraphrase, but I think an honest one.) But I'm not sure Badger's analysis entirely supports Zelizer's argument.

Zelizer writes: "It is clear that government spending during WWII was responsible for lifting us out of the Depression, not the New Deal. During the 1930s, FDR was not willing or able to go far enough in growing government." Both of those points are true as far as they go. But what they don't say is that, at least in Badger's reading (and I confess, in my own) government spending actually did a good job of lifting the U.S. economy, if not out of the Depression, then at least out of the immediate crisis. For one thing, part of that economic relief was in direct aid to states: both states like New York that already had "outdoor relief" programs (i.e. programs to aid people who didn't reside in state institutions) and states, like Pennsylvania, that left such relief up to private charities. As Mauritz Hallgrenm the editorial writer of the Baltimore Sun, observed in The Nation in his study of "Mass Misery in Philadelphia," by 1933 starvation was around the corner for millions of Americans. And the New Deal's programs largely averted that potential humanitarian catastrophe. (That most developed European countries already had social insurance programs by the 1930s shouldn't distract from the fact that the U.S. didn't, though it may account for this aspect of the New Deal's success being under-weighted in latter-day assessments). Badger also makes a case for the view that the stimulus of New Deal government spending did actually lift the U.S. economy as well. Here the data are more mixed, but it is at least arguable that it was FDR's misguided insistence on balancing the federal budget after 1936 that sent the recovery into a stall that only wartime spending would reverse.

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One of the most important lessons that we learn in Badger's book is that there were really three different economic goals in the First Hundred Days. The first was the goal with which we are most familiar--to revitalize the economy and move the nation out of the Great Depression. When we evaluate FDR's success in meeting this challenge, the New Deal does not look very good. It is clear that government spending during WWII was responsible for lifting us out of the Depression, not the New Deal. During the 1930s, FDR was not willing or able to go far enough in growing government.

There was a second goal, however, and that was to rebuild the infrastructure of the economy to create a foundation for stronger economic growth in the future. Badger offers compelling evidence about how the New Deal established the foundations for the era of Great Expectations between 1940s and 1970s, when a wide range of Americans enjoyed unprecedented economic growth. The stories of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Rural Electrification Administration are some of the best examples that we see from this component of the First Hundred Days. As a result of those programs, rural America exited the 1930s with more of the tools citizens needed to participate in economic growth.

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In four columns this month at TPM Café and an interview with Brian Lehrer on New York's NPR station I've developed an assessment of "Israel's blind, crushing, doomed war on Gaza." In one column I criticized two reporters on either side -- Chris Hedges, for imposing a divinity school moralism about imperial wars and the necessity of resistance that strays into apologetics for Hamas; and Jeffrey Goldberg, for his "irresistibly entertaining, informative, cagey, and often duplicitous neo-con explanations for everything" that promote fear more than understanding.

Hedges has responded sermonically and loftily enough to reinforce my assessment somewhat. He also neglects blogging's first commandment by failing to cite or link for his Truthdig readers the provocation he's answering. That keeps them from digging truth for themselves. But Hedges has some important points to make, so let me set this right with a quick summary of my arguments and his and with a few observations.

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President Obama (and I do like typing that) made a large number of evocative, important, and profound statements, but none more so in any of these respects than his commitment to rebuild our economy on a green base. In the stimulus appropriation and tax bills, in his continued reminder of the importance of obtaining energy independence and abating climate change, while creating millions of new green jobs (a trifecta of policy goals), our new and much welcomed President is making a clear statement of strategic direction. No other President has ever said and done so much to alter at the basic level the energy platform of our economy, and President Obama has only had a half-day in office.

Execution on his promise, pursuit of his direction, will be a monumental and hellishly complicated task. It will require not only the full force of the existing governmental apparatus but also many companion efforts outside government. But the direction set by the President is absolutely clear and that is the necessary, crucial first step.

For those it really reached, Barack Obama's campaign rhetoric had two revelatory effects. One was his power to conjure up an ideal America that listeners could recognize and believe in. The other was his ability to convey a living idea of duty to other citizens and the country. In his voice, that duty was not a debt to be paid grudgingly or a tragic sacrifice, but a gift we had the power to give, a connection that strengthened us when we acknowledged and honored it. The listeners I'm talking about are a generation--mine--shaped by experience as post-traditional and fragmented as the new president's own life. We wanted, sometimes without knowing it, a way to believe in America as being, like us, an amalgam of inheritance and choice, a product of experiment and hope. If you want to remember how unreachable these ideas were for progressive politicians for at least half a generation, look back to the campaign speeches of Al Gore and John Kerry, and see whether you can find language there that could tie Obama's shoelaces. The country he proposed to govern today is the one he helped his supporters to rediscover in our minds over the last 18 months.

That country is the ethereal, emotion-charged community of the imagination, which Obama called up so readily, and of the movement that grew up around him. Now the question is whether and how we can build it in the America where we already live, in all our smaller but more indubitably real communities. What do all those places have to do with Barack Obama's America?

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Barack Obama's presidency marks our democracy's triumph over half the problem of race in America. It underscores the vitality of America's most distinctive and powerful master trend--assimilation, an invincible force that selects from, absorbs and integrates difference, not always kindly, but always to the profit of the nation's mainstream. But Obama's win also highlights the stark paradox that is the other half of our racial problem: while black Americans have been fully incorporated into the nation's public life, they continue to be cut off from the private life of other Americans, a separation that accounts in good measure for blacks' besetting socioeconomic problems.

How did we arrive at this strange racial pass? Blacks have always figured in a complex way into the progress of American democracy. Slavery, under which they suffered for nearly two thirds of their history in America, was a brutal form of double exclusion: from both the public sphere and from the private, intimate sphere of the dominant group. The slave was the quintessential outsider: he was not, and could not be, a citizen participating in the public sphere, nor could he belong to the community, family or formal culture of the master class.

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Almost every economist will tell you the stimulus has to be massive to have any real impact. Even Marty Feldstein, who headed Ronald Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors, told Congress it had to be $800 billion. But a price tag like that scares Republicans and so-called "Blue-Dog" Democrats who worry about government debt.

So here's Obama's strategic choice. He can fight for the biggest stimulus possible - twisting arms and counting noses to get a bare majority in the House and sixty votes in the Senate. That's how Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush got their huge tax cuts, and how Bill Clinton got his first budget through Congress.

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We have overcome. We have reached the mountaintop. We have entered a post-racial era. We are witnessing a racial thaw. For many Americans--especially whites--the Obama inauguration is a moment of self-congratulation. That 43 percent of white voters pulled the lever for Barack Obama is seemingly incontrovertible evidence that the long struggle for civil rights has finally come to fruition.

Orlando Patterson offers a bracing corrective. Patterson does not for a moment gainsay the historic significance of Obama's victory (who could have predicted it even four years ago?). Obama's election is the culmination of a long and mostly successful black struggle for political recognition.

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Sitting here in The Nation's London bureau watching Barack Obama take the office was a surreal experience. I'm still coming down from the thrill of hearing Aretha make "My Country Tis of Thee" a truly beautiful song--and the deep, deep relief of watching Dick Cheney slide into his limo and out of our lives. The 100 days have just begun.

So what can we learn from the past, and more specifically from Anthony Badger's brilliant evocation of a desperate time when a callow young president known best for his oratorical gifts came to office at a time of national crisis, with the world economy locked in a downward spiral, newspaper headlines dominated by bank failures and financial chicanery, rising unemployment and falling stock prices? First, that economic history isn't over either, and that the overweening confidence swelling the many apologias for capitalist triumphalism over the past decade were no more grounded in reality than those who saw in George W. Bush's imperial arrogance merely the righteous inevitablity of American dominance. Second that if we are indeed, as President Obama pledged, about to embark on remaking America, we would do well to begin on the ground of solid fact rather than ideological conjecture.

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Today we celebrate Barack Obama's inauguration. There is danger in forgetting to celebrate. Orlando Patterson tells us that we need a renewed focus on racial integration particularly in schools and housing. Not integration for cosmetic purposes, but the substantive integration that ensures all groups access to quality schools, and helps transform economically depressed high-minority enclaves into vibrant neighborhoods that provide rich opportunity for economic mobility. Some research on school and housing integration should provide cause for optimism. Professor Ingrid Gould Ellen has concluded that the number of stably, racially integrated neighborhoods increased significantly through the 1990s. Studies from the Civil Rights Project at UCLA show fairly high levels of school segregation, but stably integrated school districts do exist in many large metropolitan areas. Research by Professors Amy Stuart Wells and Jomills Braddock and others show the long-term benefits of integration programs on graduates of every race: in addition to the educational and income gains experienced by blacks who attend integrated schools, white students who attended integrated schools (often under court-mandates in the 1970s) show greater comfort for integrated settings themselves. In this way, the residential preferences cited by Patterson that appear to undermine our quest for racial integration in housing, might be changed.

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Barack Obama became president today in no small part because his amazing Democratic primary campaign convinced many liberals and leftists for the first time of a truth they'd found counterintuitive and uncongenial. It's a truth Orlando Patterson has been telling for a long time, in books like The Ordeal of Integration, against a lot incomprehension and resistance. It is that anti-racist protest tactics and policies that were necessary, even heroic, before the 1980s are seldom now the best ways to defeat racism and the inequalities and wounds it unquestionably has left behind.

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My first impression of President (yes, President!) Obama's first speech is that it was more sober, less inspirational than it could have been. But my favorite parts were about how we shouldn't debate over big government or small government, but government that works; and that the market has to be put under a "watchful eye," and that "a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous."

Geoffrey Stone has made a powerful argument that the U.S. should strike a new balance between secrecy and liberty and that the Obama administration should do more than its predecessor has to defend individual freedom, disseminate honest information, and promote open government. Stone's characterization of Bush's and Cheney's penchant for secrecy at a time of national security threats is detailed, insightful, and convincing.

One point that I would add to bolster Stone's argument is that during the cold war, secrecy was the prevailing approach when it came to what was a big issue back then--civil defense. The federal government on numerous occasions told the public one thing when it knew that the information was misleading or just plain wrong. Deception reigned at the highest levels of American officialdom. It did little to make us any safer though.

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Geoffrey Stone eloquently reminds us of the ways in which secrecy can be used to avoid democratic accountability. The greatest prophet of transparency, of course, was Louis Brandeis. "Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases," he warned in Other People's Money (1914). "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman."

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Today, at noon eastern standard time, we have a new president. And after all the pomp and parades and parties are over, President Obama will turn to his first major job, which is to revive our moribund economy, which means attending to getting his stimulus package through Congress.

Almost every economist will tell you the stimulus has to be massive in order to have any real impact. Even Marty Feldstein, who headed Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisors, told Congress it had to be $800 billion. My own view is at least $900 billion. But a price tag like that scares Republicans and so-called “blue-dog” Democrats who worry about government debt.

So here’s our new president's strategic choice. He can flight for the biggest stimulus politically possible – twisting arms and counting noses to get a bare majority in the House and sixty votes in the Senate. That’s how Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush got their huge tax cuts, and how Bill Clinton got his first budget through Congress.

Or Obama can aim to get the backing of a much larger majority than he needs to get the stimulus enacted – including a majority of blue dogs and Republicans. To do this he’d likely have to settle for a smaller stimulus package – one that may not be enough to jump-start the economy.

Why would he ever choose the second strategy? Because his goal is not just to get the biggest stimulus package he can squeeze through Congress. It’s to get a Congress that’s mostly united behind whatever stimulus package emerges. This would ensure that Republicans and blue-dog Democrats take some ownership of the package, and therefore responsibility for making it work.

If they feel ownership and responsibility, Obama could return to them later if more money is needed, and probably get their backing. Just as important, he starts to build bipartisan support for other things that have to be done in the next few months – keeping the U.S. auto industry
afloat, reducing mortgage foreclosures, and devising new regulations of Wall Street. And he lays the foundation for a more united Congress capable of tackling a new health-care system, a new system for reducing carbon emissions, and reform of Social Security and Medicare.

It’s not the strategy his predecessors used to get their economic plans enacted. It’s not hardball politics, and it may not be the best move for the economy in the short run. But given the challenges our new president and our nation face over the long run, this may be the smartest politics and smartest economics.

Anthony Badger reminds us that the First Hundred Days of the New Deal were imperfect. According to Badger, FDR did not do enough to end the Great Depression, many of his programs did not work, he was not fully prepared to handle the challenges that he faced, and Congress was actually responsible for many of the ideas and programs that we still associate with his White House. In Badger's portrait of the First Hundred Days, we don't see an infallible president who hit every challenge out of the ball park, but instead a very human president who struggled to confront a severe crisis and did not always know the best path to take.

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Anthony Badger has provided a wonderfully detailed and balanced account of FDR's First Hundred Days in his post. I do not intend in this more modest post to match his in-depth analysis or to debate the merits of particular policies enacted during this period. Rather my goal is to outline lessons that Obama could learn from FDR's success in enacting numerous major policy initiatives in his still unmatched First Hundred Days.

Like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Obama is a progressive Democrat elected at the end of a conservative era in American politics. Like FDR, Obama has an opportunity to become a transformational president. To achieve this goal, Obama would be well advised to follow Roosevelt's precedents for governing. Roosevelt not only won an unprecedented four presidential elections, but he also transformed the Democrats from a weak minority to American's dominant party.

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Even as we progress from symbolism to substance in the most stately way imaginable, I hope that everyone appreciates the symbolic and substantive rewards of Obama's being sworn in as "Barack Hussein Obama." This is the moment to explain again briefly why it matters so much.

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Hello, all. I'm very happy to be joining the conversation on the greatest public day of my life so far. I'll say more about that when I anchor the Wednesday discussion on Community. For the Liberty topic: The reforms that Geof recommends strike me as depending on a more basic change: a national recognition that we have to - we inevitably do - accept a certain level of terrorist threat. Conceptually, this is just a logical prerequisite of balancing the cost to security against the cost to public openness in weighing a proposed concealment of information, whether in a specific decision (whether to classify information under the Freedom of Information Act) or in legislative line-drawing (in enacting the State Secrets Protection Act). Politically, though, openly weighing national security against other values would be an explicit departure from a mostly implicit premise of Bush Administration talk around terrorism: that no level of terrorist threat is acceptable, so any openness or liberty value that runs up against any front of the War on Terror has to give way.

The Bush-era conceit that we accept no level of terrorist threat is, as philosopher John Searle once said about Jacques Derrida's work, the kind of bullshit that gives bullshit a bad name. The Bush administration couldn't zero out the threat by purporting to pull out all stops, nor could it ever avoid, in practice, trading off national security against other interests, such as maintaining open flows of money, information, and commerce. But by cultivating the impression that it yielded nothing nothing nothing in preventing terror, it gave an illusory absolutism real political currency. The concrete political effect was that anyone willing to be explicit about balancing national security against other values could be accused of gratuitously endangering Americans (as Justice Antonin Scalia basically accused his Supreme Court colleagues of doing when they declined to strip Guantanamo detainees of all procedural rights). That vulnerability goes way up for a Democratic administration that's willing to acknowledge that it weighs civil liberties and public openness alongside national security, and that sometimes security yields. If an attack gets through on that administration's watch - and an actuarial hunch suggests it's not so unlikely - all the professional demagogues of the right will be waiting to jump on the Democrats' "weakness" and lack of "realism." So anyone who cares about getting the liberty-security relationship right has to care about whether the country repudiates the Bush conceit. And leadership in that repudiation is almost certainly going to have to come from the top, in the form of a clear and candid discussion that tests whether smart really is the new cool.

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It may seem ironic (or at the very least counterintuitive), but one of the more well-documented erosions of liberty during the Bush Administration has been that which has resulted from the culture of secrecy pervading governmental operations during the past eight years. It's now beyond doubt, as Geof Stone argues, that this culture has led to a sharp decline in both governmental accountability and transparency. Everything from low-level personnel decisions to the existence (let alone location) of overseas detention facilities has been obscured from public scrutiny, notwithstanding Justice Brandeis's famous observation that "sunshine is the best disinfectant," or, more recently, Judge Damon Keith's admonition that "democracies die behind closed doors."

Thus, I'm in 100% agreement with Professor Stone that governmental transparency is and must be a vital goal for President-Elect Obama's America, and passage of the four statutes he invokes in his post (and his longer essay in Democracy) would certainly be a helpful--albeit insufficient--step in that direction.

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I share Geof Stone's criticism of the Bush administration's penchant for secrecy and his hope that the Obama administration and Congress strike a new, healthier balance between security and transparency.

Stone offers the welcome suggestion that Congress should enact the pending Free Flow of Information Act, which would recognize a qualified journalist-source privilege. It's about time. But I worry that this will be an incomplete victory, given the current crisis in the national news media. Many once great papers have gutted their staffs and cut the resources necessary for good investigative journalism. The result is that most Americans get their news about inside-the-beltway politics from a handful of news services, or worse yet, from the evening television news. Blogs have filled in part of the gap left by newspaper cuts, but most online news providers don't have the staff or the resources to engage in long-term, in-depth reporting. There are, to be sure, extraordinary journalists who have survived buyouts and budget cuts. Against the odds, they continue to shed light on the dark corners of government. They deserve the assurance that they won't be putting their sources and their careers at jeopardy because of the lack of source privilege. But those journalists are an endangered species--and preserving liberty and opening up government to healthy scrutiny requires taking them off the endangered species list.

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Opening my email on Monday morning, Nov. 17th, I found a message from CNN urgently requesting a live TV interview. I was told Barack Obama had mentioned reading a new book on FDR and the first Hundred Days the previous evening in his first major national TV interview. It was flattering that CNN assumed it was my book that he was talking about. CNN was undaunted by the fact that, as it turned out, Obama had been reading a different book, an earlier one by Jonathan Alter. Anxiety increased during the day as a high-tech CNN van tried to make it to medieval Cambridge. Eventually I stood in the driving rain on the steps of Clare College founded in 1326, telling American viewers about what their president-elect might be expected to learn from their own history.

Two weeks later British Prime Minister Gordon Brown recommended my book to readers of the Guardian newspaper as 'a classic example of how a work of history can illuminate the issues we're dealing with today.' Brown has cited Roosevelt and the New Deal as the model for his own recovery package in the UK. Media interest and requests for interview came from the US, the UK, Europe and Australia. By January 4th, the Observer (London) asserted that the book was 'Top of the political class's reading list on both sides of the Atlantic at Christmas.'

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The past eight years of the George W. Bush Administration have seen significant restrictions of individual liberty. Much of the impetus for these restrictions has come from the tragedy of September 11 and its complex aftermath: War inevitably magnifies the tension between individual liberty and national security. But there are wise and unwise ways to strike the appropriate balance. In the years since September 11, the Bush Administration has embraced a series of policies-including torture, aggressive surveillance of international communications, clandestine detention of American citizens, secret prisons in Eastern Europe, closed deportations proceedings, and restrictions on the writ of habeas corpus-that have unnecessarily undermined the fundamental American value of individual liberty.

However, the most unfortunate policy of the Bush Administration in terms of American liberty has been its deliberate and consistent effort to hide some of its most important policy decisions from the American public. Of course, there are legitimate reasons to keep certain information secret to protect the national security. But secrecy can also be used to evade responsibility and to manipulate and distort public debate and understanding. Overbroad government assertions of secrecy can cripple informed public debate. It is impossible for citizens responsibly to consider the merits of the actions of their elected representatives if they are kept in the dark about their conduct. As Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once observed, "Secrecy is the ultimate form of regulation because people don't even know they are being regulated." This has been a legacy of the Bush Administration.

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So, it's a pretty special week. And here at Cafe we're going to be delving into some of the excitement with two week long discussions-- each gazing in a different direction from this very particular point in history. In conjunction with Democracy Journal we'll be hosting a conversation about Obama's America. After eight years of Bush Administration malfeasance, we'll be examining where America stands, as measured by the values that define our nation, and what that means for the Obama Administration going forward. Over at book club, we'll be looking back-- to the first hundred days of FDR's administration.

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As is perhaps appropriate, the press, the pundits, and our political leaders often turn at this time of year to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream Speech" as the touchstone of discussions of his life and work. So it has been with President-elect Barack Obama, who presided over a concert and celebration of freedom at the Lincoln Memorial last night -- the site of the "I Have a Dream Speech," given at the 1963 March on Washington.

One passage from that speech rings particularly true today: "We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy." The extent to which we move with urgency to make those promises real will be a measure of the Obama presidency, and of our ability as a nation to seize this historic moment.

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Though the future is yet unknowable, let us for a moment imagine that when we wake tomorrow it will be a new day in America.

Let us appreciate the poetry that once upon a time, a one-term congressman from Illinois became President of the United States and freed four million African slaves and, 145 years later, an African American first-term senator from Illinois - borne not of the rapacious legacy of that compulsory migration but rather of a voluntary choice by two adults - should become President of that same land.

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Barack Hussein Obama is human--he is also a young and ambitious politician that likely already has his eye on a second presidential term. This all may sound self-evident, but listening to the expectations Americans and much of the world have for him, makes one wonder.

Seeing what Israel did in Gaza over the past three weeks--as if in a rush to complete their crime against humanity before President-elect Obama is sworn into office--seems to indicate that Israel is fearful that its 60-year free ride with the US may be coming to an end. Thus, Israel decided to set the terms--in Palestinian blood and destruction of Gaza--of its relationship with the Obama administration. On the other hand, listening to the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah building up hopes that this US president is going to come to its rescue makes one sick to the stomach yet again. For sure, President Obama is making history by being the first African-American president, but as far as the Palestinian issue is concerned all would be well advised to look deeper into how US government policy is formulated before expecting a superman-like US president to come to our salvation.

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Four days ago British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, writing in The Guardian, gave a slap in the face to George W. Bush and to Ehud Olmert, two departing comrades in the Global War on Terror, by saying that the War on Terror was a mistake.

Her Britannic Majesty's chief diplomat didn't mention either by name, of course. But his declaration, along with Barack Obama's arrival in the Oval Office, puts Israel's politicians and their American interference runners such as AIPAC and Jeffrey Goldberg on notice that Israel is being cut loose ideologically by the great powers on whom it has relied so heavily for so long. And not a moment too soon.

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It looks like former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell is going to be the Middle East Special Envoy.

This is great news. Absolutely impartial (although of Arab-American descent), Mitchell has the respect of both sides. He is best known for having been Bill Clinton's Special Envoy to Northern Ireland where he brought the IRA and the Protestant militias (plus all the moderates of both sides) to the Good Friday agreement and peace.

Mitchell will not sully that reputation by not succeeding with Israelis and Palestinians. Obama is not yet President but it appears (nothing is 100%) that change has ciome already.

A telling moment at the terrific concert at the Lincoln today.

Bono was singing "In The Name of Love." He sang the song, then added a coda: "It's not just an American dream. It's an Irish dream. It's a European dream. It's an Israeli dream,"

Then he took a long dramatic pause to underline his next words, his face worked in pain, and he sang out, "it's a Palestinian dream." And the crowd (at least near us) cheered.

In 1992, that never would have happened. Today, in front of the new President, the biggest entertainer/philanthropist in the world expressed human solidarity with Palestinians.

It is changing out there. The Israelis need to understand that. They need to end this war, end the siege, and end the occupation. The knee-jerk sympathy of the Bush/Cheney crowd and their voters is gone. The last three weeks have done serious, maybe incalculable damage to Israel.

Of course, it is nothing compared to what it has done to the people of Gaza.

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Many people have many expectations for Barack Obama. Although I generally write about economics, the issue I am most interested in hearing about from the new president is torture. And this is the speech that I want to hear him give:

Our nation today faces the most serious set of challenges it has faced in several decades. We are in the midst of a financial and economic crisis that has already cost millions of people their jobs and threatens the livelihoods of tens of millions more. We are fighting two wars thousands of miles away, with a military that is strained from over seven years of heroic efforts. We still face the constant threat of attack from terrorists who want to destroy our society and our way of life every bit as much as they did in September 2001. And on top of this, we face the long-term threats of global warming and maintaining the promise of financial security for an ever-growing population of retirees.

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It looks increasingly likely that a big chunk of the TARP II funds will be used to set up what's being called an "aggregator" -- or "bad" -- bank to buy up the bad assets that continue to hobble the balance sheets of private-sector banks. That's what Hank Paulson and Sheila Bair suggested Friday. Obama officials-in-waiting seem to view the idea favorably.

A Bad Bank is surely better than the piecemeal, unpredictable, and opaque approach of TARP I. But in order that the Bad Bank not turn into another giant taxpayer-financed boondoggle for the benefit of shareholders, creditors, executives, traders, and directors of the banks that got us into this mess in the first place, any Bad Bank purchase of their toxic assets ought to carry conditions similar to the ones I suggested recently for dispensing TARP II funds.

Until the taxpayer-financed Bad Bank has recouped the costs of these purchases through selling the toxic assets in the open market, private-sector banks that benefit from this form of taxpayer relief must (1) refrain from issuing dividends, purchasing other companies, or paying off creditors; (2) compensate their executives, traders, or directors no more than 10 percent of what they received in 2007; (3) be reimbursed by their executives, traders, and directors 50 percent of whatever amounts they were compensated in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008 -- compensation which was, after all, based on false premises and fraudulent assertions, and on balance sheets that hid the true extent of these banks' risks and liabilities; and (4) commit at least 90 percent of their remaining capital to new bank loans.

Why is that every time people in Washington come up with a scheme to help homeowners most of the money ends up in the pockets of the bankers? Most of the latest plans center on the idea of buying up underwater mortgages from banks at hugely inflated prices and then guaranteeing new mortgages at close to the market price of the house.

The banks gets the money, the homeowner ends up in a home with little or no equity. Only in Washington can this be called "helping homeowners."

But, at no extra cost we could employ the economist's solution, which would actually help homeowners. The deal is simple: offer the homeowners the money.

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