Sen. Chris Dodd, the jolly legislator who spent his career partnering with Ted Kennedy in roistering and promoting the liberal agenda, is spending the most significant moment of his political widowerhood by turning into a puddle of goo. Charged with reforming the banking system–what he has called “one of the two most important issues of our time”–Dodd, who has announced his retirement from the Senate, seems to be collapsing in the face of an onslaught of lobbying, and is leaning to taking one of the key provisions of the plan—creating a Consumer Financial Protection Agency—and turning what ought to be a ferocious and independent tiger into part of the Department of the Treasury. Some valediction

Forget for a moment that the Consumer Financial Protection Agency has earned the staunch backing of Elizabeth Warren, whose reputation for intelligence and integrity is burnished every time she opens her mouth. Just think about what we’ve learned about the working of government during the last two years. The Department of the Treasury exists to promote the general welfare and well-being of the banks. As a matter of philosophy and religion, Treasury believes strong banks mean a strong America. I don’t think this implies that Treasury is complicit in chicanery or that even it would make sense for Treasury to believe anything different, and as anybody who worked for Lehman Brothers can tell you, Treasury doesn’t roll over just because a bank wants it to. But read a book like Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin and it will be clear: placing a consumer advocacy within Treasury is either to consign it to oblivion or to invite it to be compromised.  If this agency is to do all the good it needs to, it’s mission can’t be subsumed under anyone else’s agenda.

One reason Dodd is pressing for this alternative is that he is emulating the fool’s errand President Obama has continued to pursue, and is seeking bipartisan support. Never has there been a moment when an enemy–fat cat bankers–presented a riper target of opportunity. Why Dodd and Obama and the Democrats are holding their fire in favor of pursuing some weird, spiritual quest for zen bipartisanship is a stumper.

Last year at this time, we were imbibing on a fine spring wine, Nouveau Obama, thinking of all the wonderful things the president was going to accomplish in his first hundred days. A long year later, the hangover not yet dissipated, we are unhappy to read about the lingering health care reform bill; to read Gretchen Morgenson’s column in the Times about how credit default swaps continue to threaten the dry timbers of our economic superstructures; to read in Paul Krugman’s column in the Times about the idiotic notion that a Consumer Financial Protection Agency can be safely tucked into the manifestly, justly, pro-bank Treasury Department. We read about the president’s continued dream of solving America’s problems with a wave of the wand of bipartisanship. We are haunted by the questions Candidate Hillary Clinton raised in 2008 about the neophyte’s readiness to lead.

Sometime, somewhere, some friend of the president needs to give him a swift kick in the ass. Somebody ought to explain to him that the country is hopping mad, and it’s mad not because `government is too big’ but because people don’t have jobs and the government isn’t doing anything about it and—here’s the kicker—highly bonused investment bankers whose skins were saved by the public continue to wager and collect without impunity. It would do the president a world of good if instead of inviting Republicans to come over for milk and cookies, he began throwing his weight around—ordering this, directing that, opening an investigation on something else. He must stop yielding his authority to compose the national narrative to tea baggers and Fox Newsmen.

The president needs to return to whoever sold him the idea of bipartisan support for programs and get his money back. It’s a pretty idea but nonsensical.  No bill was ever improved by who else supported it. The president would do well to recall what the great teacher of politics Machiavelli famously wondered, whether it be better to be loved than feared? “It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, is much safer to be feared than loved . . . [because] men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared, for love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.’’ In other words, forget bipartisanship, and bring me the head of Mitch McConnell.

If Machiavelli doesn’t do it for the president, let him dial up the great teacher of life and politics, Al Davis, the owner of the Oakland Raiders. “Just win, baby,’’ was Davis’s mantra, and it’s one both he and the president should endeavor to remember. Obama’s predecessor launched a war without enough regard for the essential truth of Davis’s point, and by the time he got around the winning the war, he had lost his country, his raison de’etre, and his place in history. Obama needs wins. He has spent a year without one, and the country will stop following him if he fails to achieve success.

The most necessary story of the young year is Jane Mayer’s article in the most recent issue of The New Yorker. It’s called The Trail, and it very carefully picks through the discussion about what legal powers we can bring to bear terrorists like the Underpants Bomber and the other dangerous individuals whom we have ensnared in this war on terror. As Mayer makes clear, former Vice President Dick Cheney and William Kristol and Senator Scott Cosmopolitan and the others who would deny these detainees basic legal rights are simply wrong as a matter of law. There is no mechanism for turning such people over to the army. The Bush administration tried it. The Supreme Court said the government couldn’t do it. (In other words, Dick, when you took Juan Padilla and Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, and turned them over to the military to be held indefinitely without charges, you were the outlaw.)

I have an inherent suspicion of political leaders who try to frighten their citizens. There is no lower leadership technique, and Dick Cheney is the master of this dark art. One reason is that one can never entirely dismiss such a warning; once uttered, it hangs in the air like the raving visions of a deranged hermit, always ready to snatch hold a passing pretext that could be pressed into service as a validation. But unless al-quada gets hold of weapons of mass destruction–and where is there any sense that they have?–they represent no greater threat to America than did the Barbary Pirates. A menace, yes; capable of causing great pain and suffering, for sure; a scourge that must be eradicated, no doubt. But to pretend that it is more, and to argue for its eradication through the abrogation of normal procedures and basic rights, is political posturing and rank demagogy.

We have seen this act before. Frightened by bombs and demonstrations and strikes, political leaders in the twenties locked people up and deprived them of their rights and deported them. They were attempting to assert control, and within a couple years, we were ashamed of them. In the forties, frighted by Imperial Japan’s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, our leaders rounded up the Nisei and, depriving them of their freedom and their property, relocated them in concentration camps in our barren and isolated inland. After a few years, we were ashamed of them. In the fifties, frightened by a Soviet Union that used spies in our ranks to learn our atomic secrets, some of our leaders sought to destroy the lives of anyone who had any kind of socialist connection. And it didn’t take very long for people to become ashamed of them.

I’m ashamed now. It’s embarrassing to hear Dick Cheney say on a Sunday talk show that he supports water-boarding. It’s humiliating to think that he can say that still be accorded any respect whatsover. It’s time we stood up and made it clear: Khalid Sheik Muhammad and Juan Padilla and Captain Underpants have these rights not because they are God’s children and deserving of a lawyer in the court room and a teddy bear at night. They have these rights because we’re Americans, and it is our strength that we hold to a way of life insists on rules, that we greet their depravity and disregard of human life with confidence in our institutions and the majesty of law. The contrast could not be greater. We do this because we’re Americans, and if we react to their provocations by abandoning who we are, then truly, the terrorists have won.

As much as it pains me to admit it, the awful Ann Coulter made an apt point some years ago when she criticized liberals for calling Republicans dumb. She ran through a list of presidents that she said liberals smugly labeled as stupid–Ike, Ford, Reagan, George W. Bush–none of whom were. More to the point, we keep taking refuge in our intelligence. We’ve been to the good schools, we must therefore be entitled to govern. President Obama, as intelligent a man as we’ve had in Oval Office in my lifetime, is unfortunately demonstrating that intelligence is not enough.

Writing in Slate yesterday, Eliot Spitzer showed why the Democrats have lost control of the debate to a party that really offers no answers of its own. Keep It Simple Stupid, says Spitzer. The RepublIcans are “much better at telling stories, narratives that through their simplicity appeal to the public. . . .Exhibit one is health care reform, which fell prey to stories of `death panels’ and demands by Medicare recipients to `get government out of my health care.’ The Republicans successfully exploited the public’s disdain for government—even though it is government itself that is providing the Medicare they so prize.”

Spitzer credits the Republican strategist Frank Luntz (above) as the master of the dark art of phrasing things in a way that wins arguments, and Spitzer is right. Many people spin, but what Luntz does is nearly Orwellian, advising Republicans to support not `off-shore drilling’ but `deep-sea exploration,’ that sort of willful perversion of language designed to gain political advantage. Fresh off of (so far) all-but killing health care reform, Luntz has now published a 17 page playbook designed to torpedo Democratic efforts to reform the financial system. “If there is one thing we can all agree on,” Luntz writes, “it’s that the bad decisions and harmful policies by Washington bureaucrats that in many ways led to the economic crash must never be repeated.” (The full memo appeared in The Huffington Post.) Of course, what is manifestly true is that sensible regulations like the Glass-Steagel Act (which was enacted by Democrats, and which was the truss upon which 75 years of economic stability rested) were repealed, mostly at the behest of free market-minded Republicans, and that, ultimately opened the door for greedy Wall Streeters to gamble away our prosperity. When Republicans have Democrats to run against, the run against Democrats; when they have only themselves to run against, the run against Washington.

Spitzer smartly advises Democrats to focus not only on reforming the system, but on coming up with plain language that explains why the reforms are needed. “Here are a few off-the-cuff suggestions for phrases Democrats can use to regain the momentum:

1. It is time to get the cops back on the beat and the bank robbers out of the bank vault. It is your money—not theirs.
2. “Heads I win; tails you lose” is a first-grade joke—not a theory for our banking system. Yet that is the game that has been played on us.
3. If Wall Street wants to gamble on a casino economy, they will not use the American taxpayer as a chip on the table.
4. For the first 50 years after the Great Depression, we avoided disaster—but then Washington bought the oldest line in the book from Wall Street bankers—trust me. We have learned the lesson—and we don’t, and we won’t.”

If this isn’t clear enough, here’s the conservative radio talk show host Michael Smerconish, writing in The Daily Beast, about Luntz’s new position on global warming. Luntz once had the skeptical, George W. Bush position on global warming, but having recently been retained by the Environmental Defense Fund, and having conducted a poll that shows that 57 percent of Americans believe global warming is “definitely” or “probably” occurring, Luntz has arrived at a considerably greener view. Importantly, Luntz was not persuaded by scientific data or photos from space or penguins washing up on the beaches at Rio. Luntz, Smerconish writes, says that the climate change debate can be won by emphasizing America’s need to decrease dependence on Middle Eastern oil, and create cleaner, safer energy sources that would create American jobs and build new technologies that wouldn’t be outsourced to China or India.”

And there’s the lesson for liberals: stop trying to appeal to people’s intelligence, and start appealing to their worries about their pocketbooks and the fears about Third World foreigners.

Weird, huh?

The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr, by Duquesne law professor Ken Gormley, appears more than a decade after the sex-and-real estate scandal called Whitewater ebbed out, but even though Gormley does a fine job in retelling the tale, by the time the reader wades through the nearly 700 pages of bad judgments and self-serving decisions committed by Bill Clinton, Kenneth Starr, and the many colorful supporting players who populate this sad drama, a sickening cringe has resettled on the reader’s shoulders. Ten years turns out to be not nearly enough time at all.

It’s hard to review Clinton’s many tawdry escapades. Today we’re mocking John Edwards for his deceptions and delusions in trying to campaign for president and cover over his embarrassing relationship with Rielle Hunter. But Clinton did it, and obviously got away with it. More important, he got away with violating his path of office, in which he swore `to faithfully execute the laws.” Well, when you lie under oath, you commit perjury, and that’s a violation of his oath. He ought to have resigned.

But he ought not to have been driven out. The simple truth is that there were people who were out to get Clinton, who denied that he was a legitimate president and who sought his ouster. And their vicious campaign to drive him from office constituted a kind of coup.

It was an ugly time. Gormley does a fair and reasonable job of recreating the story, and his interviews with many of the subjects are thoughtful and enlightening. There are even times when Gormley even manages to enlarge our understanding of this well-reported story, as in his account of the day the Special Prosecutor and the FBI detained Monica Lewinsky in an exercise of that is at once farcical and harrowing. Many readers will enjoy this book, but I wouldn’t advise them to wander far from a shower.

I’m a little surprised by the wave of acclaim that has buoyed Game Change onto the top of the bestsellers’ list. The book was written by Mark Halperin, whose excellent work a few years ago on ABC News’s The Note revolutionized political coverage, and by John Heileman. Halperin now writes for Time; Heilemann, for New York magazine, and much has been made of the amount of shoe leather reporting these two undertook in interviewing 300 or so people for this book about the 2008 elections. It’s true that they uncovered lots of inside stuff, but I am not sure that it amounts to much. The much-discussed Harry Reid comment about Obama being light-skinned and speaking without a Negro dialect comes and goes in the story with so little consequence that I rather suspect that without the aid of tub-thumping publicist, the remark would have passed virtually unnoticed. What else? We learn that everyone in politics says fuck a lot. We get chapter and verse on the rivalries inside Hillary Clinton’s high command, but the number of people who care about the antics of these high school student council nerds (with one exception, to come) could fit in the palm of Chris Matthews’ hand. We learn that Elizabeth Edwards isn’t really nice and that John Edwards really isn’t decent, but the woman is dying and the guy is destroyed, and so there’s only so much pleasure to be gained from watching their immolation. There may be much that is new, as in not previously reported, but there is little that changes our views about people. Stlll, some good nuggets. “Jim Wilkinson, a longtime Republican operative, served as [Hank] Paulson’s chief of staff during the [financial] crisis, an his impression of the candidates could hardly have been clearer. “I’m a pro-life, pro-gun, Texas Republican,’’ says Wilkinson. “I worked all eight years for Bush. I helped sell the Iraq war. I was in the Florida recount. And I wrote a letter to John McCain asking for my five hundred dollar contribution back when he pulled that stunt and came back to D.C. Because it just wasn’t what a serious person does.’ To him amazement, Wilkinson determined that he would be voting for Obama.’’

What’s most weird is that the writers fail to extract a sense of drama from the most dramatic election in years. Obama moves through book unchanged, an amazingly composed and charismatic figure who rises to every occasion. The country’s plunge into a desperate financial crisis just weeks before the election becomes just another plot point. Obama aces the test, McCain chokes, but for all their interviews, the authors never deliver what was going on inside the heads of the candidates at this crucial moment.

One very odd thing: the authors devote two pages to an interview with Mark Penn, the widely disliked campaign guru whom many blame for Hillary Clinton’s strategic blunders in positioning herself and creating her message. (To be fair, many blame, and many are blamed, and there is much blame to go around.) But here Penn relates a personal conversation with Clinton in which she largely exonerates Penn. “It was just dysfunctional, and I take responsibility for that,’’ he quotes her as saying, before going on to say that the campaign was probably unwinnable anyway, and—here’s the grabber—that Penn’s rival Patti Solis Doyle was “a disaster’’ who “was in over her head.’’ Penn allows that Hillary told him that he rubbed people the wrong way and should seek therapy. Still, it’s an amazing example of self-serving and largely uncheckable quote that plops into the book virtually undigested.

“I don’t believe the American people want us to focus on our job security, they want us to focus on their job security,” President Obama said at his face-off with Republican members of the House yesterday. In fact, one of the keys to getting Washington focus on our job security, and any and all other issues we’re concerned about, is to focus on the security of our legislators.

Everyone knows that Congress is a bit like a university: once people gets tenure, it’s hard to get rid of them. Incumbents in both houses of Congress have enormous advantages–higher name recognition, the ability to raise money, the ability to do things (or to at least appear to.) But the single greatest advantage incumbents enjoy is having a safe seat–a seat where the incumbent’s party enjoys a huge advantage in registration. Thanks to state of the art district-drawing processes, most districts are drawn to give one party or another that huge head start. (Take a look at the map in the illustration, which can be viewed more clearly here; it aims to show the tornado-twisty 15th district, but just looking at the bizarrely-drawn shapes of on this map shows that a clever hand was at work here.) And that means that voters lose out, and not just the voters from the other party. The incumbent doesn’t have to work as hard for any of his constituents.

It’s not a hard concept to understand. You may be a committed Coke drinker, but you benefit enormously from having Pepsi in the world. The presence of Pepsi makes Coke compete harder, to get in more outlets so as to be more available, to add new products and premiums and promotions, to keep prices down. Wherever Coke or any brand has a monopoly, it just doesn’t have to do as much to please its customers.

Ideally, legislative seats should be competitive. Ideally, candidates from both parties, including incumbents, would be working hard to try to attract voters from the other side, through service, through initiative, by getting things done. Yes, we want our elected officials to take strong stands and offer firm leadership. But seldom does it benefit the majority when they are hard-core partisans.

But that’s what we’ve got. In most districts, the incumbents have to please the party activists, who are usually more partisan and more extreme than the ordinary voter. And so the incumbents have no incentive to compromise. As long as they keep delivering to their base, their jobs are secure. And that’s why changing parties seldom gets us what we want. We get new faces and new positions, but we get the same old way of doing business.

What we need is a voter movement–a bipartisan, cross-party movement to insist that next year, after the census results are in, the state legislators who are drawing the new Congressional districts stop serving the political incumbents and the political parties. They need to draw fewer safe seats, and to start drawing more competitive seats. President Obama speaks for millions when he says that he’d like to end the partisan obstructionism epidemic in our politics. Persuasion, however, is not the way to do that. Competition–good old market forces–is the best way to put the good of the people back in politics.

According to a new book by a professor at Duquesne University Law School, Osama bin Laden tried to assassinate President Bill Clinton during a 1996 visit to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in the Philippines. This is something of a scoop, for although Ramzi Yousef confessed to plotting the assassination of Clinton in the Philippines in 1994–a plot that he said he abandoned because of tight security–and although Khalid Sheik Muhammed included a plot to kill Clinton during the 1996 visit among his confessions, this is the first published account that makes it seem that Clinton had something of a narrow escape.

The story appears in The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr, by Ken Gormley, a thoroughly researched retelling of the investigations into Clinton’s finances and sexual habits that will be published in February. In the book, Gormley recounts a story told to him by Louis Merletti, the former director of the Secret Service. During the 1996 visit, Clinton was scheduled to visit a Filipino politician. The route he was to take required him to cross a bridge in downtown Manila. As the motorcade was about to depart, Merletti received “a crackly message in one earpiece” informing him that intelligence operatives had picked up a transmission that used the words ‘bridge’ and ‘wedding’ in the same sentence. Since ‘wedding’ was known to be a code word for assassination, Merletti ordered that the motorcade be re-routed. An intelligence team then discovered that a bomb had been planted under the bridge. No estimate is given in the passage for how soon the motorcade would have crossed the bridge, but the implication is that the bridge was not far away. (Oddly, David Sanger, covering the trip for The New York Times, wrote in almost as an afterthought to a dispatch that authorities had uncovered two bombs– “one in the passenger terminal of Manila’s airport and another at Subic Bay, the former American naval base where the 18 leaders will meet on Monday.” Could this have been the bomb at the bridge? If not, it’s wild to think that three bombs had been planted. Sanger mentioned the bombs within the context of a still-active communist insurgency in the Philippines, and said that authorities were investigating.

“The thwarted assassination attempt was never made public,” writes Gormley. “It remained top secret except to select members of the U.S. intelligence community. The American government’s subsequent investigation of this plot to kill Clinton, however, revealed that it had been masterminded by a Saudi terrorist living in Afghanistan–a man named Osama bin Laden.”

If Merletti’s account is correct, this raises a number of interesting questions:

Why is this the first time we are hearing of this?

Why did Clinton not reveal that he was a target of this attack? Surely the incident, in combination with the embassy bombings and other attacks, could have helped create the basis for a vigorous response. In particular, why was this plot still a secret as late as 1998, when Clinton’s presidency was in jeopardy, and especially in August 1998, when the missile attacks he ordered on al Qaeda training bases were suspected of being a Wag the Dog-type ploy designed to deflect attention from his legal problems?

Most importantly, how does this change our view of the low priority the Bush administration placed on responding to the al Qaeda threat prior to September 11, 2001? After all, the Bush administration has been largely been given a pass for its failure to thwart the attacks, for after all, no one could have predicted that terrorists would hijack planes and fly them into buildings. But now we see al Qaeda, in addition to the embassy bombings, the attack on the Cole, and the thwarted airport plot in 2000, had actually attempted to assassinate an American president. “Chatter,” we’ve been told, was high throughout the month of August; shouldn’t security apparatus been placed on a higher level of alert?

And so now, after months of tedious, tendentious argument, after riotous town meetings and the hysteria over non-existent death squads, after the Palin moment and the Lieberman moment, passage of historic legislation a hair’s breadth away, and here comes Howard Dean to say that the whole thing isn’t worth a damn thing. Bag it, says Governor Doctor Chairman Dean on every cable news program that will have him. Let’s start the whole thing over.

This raises an interesting question: is Howard Dean a comic figure or a tragic figure? Certainly it’s easy to see the comedy: imagine National Lampoon’s Washington Vacation, with Barack Obama in the role of Clark Griswold. Clark has, after hilariously strenuous effort, packed up the car, the kids, the dog, and is about to back out of the driveway when along comes the well-meaning neighbor Howard, to tell Clark how he’s packed the car all wrong, how he should have used a slipknot instead of a granny knot to tie up the bags, how putting the American Tourister on top of the wife’s overnight bag is going to squash everything, and how giving the kids a snack of pretzels is just going to make them thirsty and that’s eventually going to pay off in more time-wasting rest stops. And what makes him so infuriating is that he’s right. Or rightish. Or only possibly right. Or he’s wrong, but now the wife has doubts.

So we have to say that Howard Dean is good for a laugh. But Dean is also a tragic figure, too, because he’s one of those seriously brilliant men with seriously limited political skills. These are men who always have an answer and who are positive not just of its correctness but of its absolute brilliance, and who cannot help themselves from letting you know that no answer is better than theirs. These are men (and I don’t know why, but we seem to get more versions of this man from New England than from anywhere else–Tsongas, Dukakis, Kerrey, Dean) who lack basic political intelligence. They cannot see that half a loaf is better than none, or that the best is the enemy of the good, or that you can accomplish a lot if you don’t mind who gets the credit.

Or that Rome wasn’t built in a day. None of the great federal programs arrived fully formed. They all had holes and contradictions, and they were all amended and expanded and modified and improved. Somehow that’s not good enough for the smartest guy in the room.

Want to know how dumb the smartest guy in the room is? Today on Morning Joe, he said that the administration should bag this proposal and start over. Imagine–the administration that has taken health care reform deeper though the process than any predecessor since Truman should bag it and start over. Scarborough doubted that the adminstration could go back to the issue. “Sure they will,” Dean said. “It’s a crisis.”

Yes, Mr. Governor Doctor Chairman, it’s a crisis. Which is why someone who is truly smart and not just egotistical would shut up and get with the program.

Being from Chicago, but by way of Honolulu and Jakarta and many other points west and east, President Obama may not be fully steeped in the doctrines of the Chicago School of Management, as expounded by the eminent Professor Al Capone. Employing phraseology composed by wordsmith David Mamet, Mr. Capone discoursed on the fundamentals of organizational success by employing a baseball metaphor. “A man stands alone at a plate. This is a time for individual achievement. But in the field–what? [He’s} part of a team. Looks, throws, catches, hustles–part of one big team.” With his recalcitrant behavior on the health care bill this week, Joe Lieberman, the entirely-too-independent senator from Connecticut, has made it abundantly clear to the president and his colleagues on the hill that he has forgotten this principle entirely. Therefore, after the new year, after a weaker health care bill is passed, this entirely-too-independent senator should get a pointed reminder, and be replaced as chairman of the prestigious Senate Homeland Security Committee. It is past time to get tough. The president has spent his entire first year playing Kumbaya with the Congress, and it has netted him less than optimal results–a smaller and more scattered stimulus bill, more anemic health care reform than was once thought possible, no bipartisanship to speak of. Machiavelli advised the prince that it is better to be loved than feared, but since it is not possible to be loved all the time, it is more useful to be feared. Everyone in Washington loves President Obama, but no one fears him. He desperately needs to administer a dose of discipline, as close to Chicago-style as possible, and Joe Lieberman s begging to be the recipient.