Today The Post and the Gray Lady are publishing several good op-eds on Obama’s policies and methods.

Michael Gerson argues that Obama’s promise of change now rings hollow.  While Gerson’s criticism of Obama’s governing style and the Limbaugh affair are largely irrelevant, he rightly notes that the President is continuing with business-as-usual, i.e. promising everything for the price of nothing:

The pledge of “honesty” and “sacrifice” has become the deceptive guarantee of apparently limitless public benefits at the expense of a very few…. None of this is new or exceptional — which is the point. It is exactly the way things have always been done.

Charles Krauthammer argues that Obama’s stem cell and science policy is unsophisticated and contains a significant logical contradiction:

[The President declared] that we must resist the “false choice between sound science and moral values.” Yet, exactly 2 minutes and 12 seconds later he went on to declare that he would never open the door to the “use of cloning for human reproduction.”

Does he not think that a cloned human would be of extraordinary scientific interest? And yet he banned it.

Is he so obtuse as not to see that he had just made a choice of ethics over science?

Eugene Robinson defends Obama’s method of confronting all challenges (i.e. banking, health care, entitlements, infrastructure, education, etc., etc.) all at once.  He astutely dismisses the critics:

What these critics really want, though, is to delay or derail the progressive reforms that voters elected President Obama to carry out.

Judging by the scarcity of fiscal discipline over the past few years, it’s probably wise to characterize the opponents of the all-at-once agenda as really just opposing the agenda part, not the all-at-once part.

We, however, still hold by our belief that when governments rushes policy, the results are rarely wise (e.g.).

David Brooks (a conservative!) praises Obama’s nascent education policy as recognizing the importance of familial influence, teacher accountability, and charter school competition.  He writes that the President “has broken with liberal orthodoxy on school reform more than any other policy”.

Here are three varying takes on the potential GM bailout.

On the Left, Jeffrey Sachs believes the Detroit automakers are indispensable employers in several rustbelt states whose economic decline would severely damage the rest of the national economy.  He fails to explain why this is or how Michigan, in economic decline for many years, didn’t manage to bring down the entire national economy with it.

Sachs also claims that there is huge global growth in auto purchases, but somehow assumes that foreigners, like Americans, would be reluctant to purchase vehicles from a bankruptcy-protected company.  That remains to be seen.

Sachs also partly absolves Detroit from the blame of the decades of mismanagement:

Some want to see the industry punished for its neglect of energy and environmental realities, but we should acknowledge that the SUV era reflected poor judgment across society. Yes, the industry ignored warnings about energy insecurity and climate, but so did the public and politicians.

Curiously absent from Sachs’s article is any mention of Toyota and Honda, two companies that invested in and started producing low-emissions and hybrid vehicles even when gas was significantly cheaper.  One wonders why GM, Ford, and Chrysler didn’t do the same.  Perhaps a lack of vision even when the increase of oil consumption was clearly outpacing the increase in supply?  One cannot so easily blame Detroit’s decline on “the system” when both Toyota and Honda are a part of the same system and not flirting with bankruptcy.

What is Sachs’s motive?  He seems intent on nationalizing Detroit automakers as a means of promoting various pet projects such a fuel cell cars, a new technology GM is within two years of producing—so they say.  If such a great revolution is within short reach, certainly there are private investors willing loan the company money for fuel cell vehicle production.  However, many doubt GM’s claims on the fuel cell Volt and Sachs wishes the government to act as an investment house for ideas that, if they were good on their own merits, could easily fetch private investment without the help of the Treasury.

Sachs mentions nary a word on the political realities the government money in any bailout.  Such funds would inevitably be directed to over-employ and over-pay people in politically powerful districts to produce cars that simply won’t sell.  State capitalism is not capitalism as any investment will inevitably be held hostage to various vocal political constituencies.

The Washington Post’s center-right economist Robert Samuelson lukewarmly advocates a bailout.  He asserts that a bankruptcy, even under Chapter 11, will damage the economy (again, unexplained).  However he also asserts that any bailout must not suit political goals (as Sachs would prefer).  Samuelson writes,

But neither does it make sense simply to heave taxpayers’ money at automakers. The goal is not to rescue the companies or workers; it’s to shore up the economy and improve the U.S. industry’s competitiveness. A bailout won’t succeed unless other things also happen.

He lists three things that must be done in order to make a bailout worthwhile to the taxpayers:

1. GM must shutter plants it does not need.
2. Workers’ lavish pay, benefits and pensions must be renegotiated to compete with other automakers.
3. The government must mandate lower fuel consumption, either through mandated increases in efficiency or through hikes in gas taxes.

But the devil is in the details, Mr. Samuelson.  How exactly does Samuelson expect the a recipient of public funds to lay-off thousands of taxpayers?  GM will find it hard to make business decisions that hurt separate communities when their public investment itself was premised on saving “the economy.”  If you’re in a town whose GM plant is about to close, surely you’d think that the closure is not saving your economy.

Furthermore, just as the Bush administration retained close ties to its corporate backers, the Democrats now coming into power will remember who funded their ascent: Big Labor.  Samuelson quotes the UAW President as saying that a bailout is necessary “so that auto companies can meet their health-care obligations to more than 780,000 retirees and dependents.”

At least the UAW is honest in its assessment of GM.  General Motors is an HMO that, by the way, just so happens to produce a few automobiles on the side.

Finally, government mandates for higher fuel efficiency have always met strong opposition from both Detroit’s auto executive and the UAW, the latter fearing that such standards will put their members out of work.  It’s unlikely the UAW is suddenly going to drop its opposition in the name of the public interest.

On the Right, NYU Law School professor Michael Levine, a former airline chief (probably familiar with bankruptcy!), makes a compelling case that Chapter 11 is the most thorough way to free the company from various laws and labor agreements that have served to increase the industry’s employment while diminishing the industry’s efficiency.  The obstacles GM faces are intimidating and better overcome through bankruptcy protection than through political goodwill, which, let’s face it, often favors sound-byte populism to sound macroeconomics.

Levine lists several of the challenges:

GM has about 7,000 dealers. Toyota has fewer than 1,500. Honda has about 1,000. These fewer and larger dealers are better able to advertise, stock and service the cars they sell. GM knows it needs fewer brands and dealers, but the dealers are protected from termination by state laws. This makes eliminating them and the brands they sell very expensive. It would cost GM billions of dollars and many years to reduce the number of dealers it has to a number near Toyota’s.

Foreign-owned manufacturers who build cars with American workers pay wages similar to GM’s. But their expenses for benefits are a fraction of GM’s. GM is contractually required to support thousands of workers in the UAW’s “Jobs Bank” program, which guarantees nearly full wages and benefits for workers who lose their jobs due to automation or plant closure. It supports more retirees than current workers. It owns or leases enormous amounts of property for facilities it’s not using and probably will never use again, and is obliged to support revenue bonds for municipalities that issued them to build these facilities.

The political pressure to resist any change to this stifling system is too powerful and will inevitably ruin the solvency of any nationalized (and thus politicized) automaker.  If GM were to receive government money, what’s to stop it from demanding even more cash six months later?  Twelve months later? Two years later?

•••

Lots of people see GM and project onto it different ideals.  Some see a social service provider obligated to provide what the state does not and never did.  Others see it as an environmental and geopolitical silver bullet to reduce environmental strain and reduce the power of oil dictators.  Others see it nostalgically as a symbol of American manufacturing prowess.

A bankruptcy judge is best positioned to see GM in a different view—not GM as cradle-to-grave patriarch, not GM as Jonas Salk of the skies, not GM as Winston Churchill of oil politics, and not GM as Neil Armstrong.  A bankruptcy judge is best suited to view GM in a new light, i.e. as a car company.

Says the New York Times:

While the gay and lesbian couples had about the same rate of conflict as the heterosexual ones, they appeared to have more relationship satisfaction, suggesting that the inequality of opposite-sex relationships can take a toll.

Thomas Friedman in the NYT is back to his usual environomics finger wagging:

It baffles me that President Bush would rather go to Saudi Arabia twice in four months and beg the Saudi king for an oil price break than ask the American people to drive 55 miles an hour, buy more fuel-efficient cars or accept a carbon tax or gasoline tax that might actually help free us from what he called our “addiction to oil.”

Friedman forgets is that our democratically elected president is simply representing the wishes of the American people, who steadfastly demand cheap oil.  No candidate has offered to raise the gas tax because they know that to do so would be touching a third rail of politics, “elite opinion” be damned.

Friedman further laments the Bush administration:

The failure of Mr. Bush to fully mobilize the most powerful innovation engine in the world — the U.S. economy — to produce a scalable alternative to oil has helped to fuel the rise of a collection of petro-authoritarian states — from Russia to Venezuela to Iran — that are reshaping global politics in their own image.

Though I don’t doubt the wisdom of developing such industries, it will only be possible with higher gas prices, as the demand for alternative fuels will necessarily increase.    Unfortunately, high gas prices are politically unpopular.

Friedman may be right about what energy policy shifts are needed, but his opinions are not going to go over well at the polls.  Not everyone can afford a Prius, Tom.

Future cultural divides, writes David Brooks, will not be along religious lines, but between the theistic and the atheistic:

In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day.

Two good articles from Post today.

The Manhattan Institute finds that immigrants in America adapt quickly. Though measuring economic, cultural, and civic integration is difficult, it’s useful to look at the index as a good way to compare different groups rather than interpreting 100 as a full integration (whatever that really should mean). Either way, the numbers tell a story that contrasts sharply with what one will find in the Parisian banlieues.

Despite this, sadly, there’s still plenty of racist hostility to blacks, as Sen. Obama’s campaigners are finding. It’s a story barely reported on the campaign trail over the past few months, but Sen. Clinton may have hinted at it when she discounted Obama’s electability. At first I thought she was referring to his liberal, if scant, voting record. Now I suspect she may have been referring to something else.

E. J. Dionne in the Post, like nearly every other professional talking-head on a deadline, is advancing his own theory about the Keystone State’s primary: the election is really about religion. And race. And gender. And age. And class.

Wow, that’s enlightening.

Anyway, Dionne sees a racist plot afoot by the North Carolina Republican Party:

On Wednesday, the North Carolina Republican Party released a television ad showing Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, giving his now-famous sermon in which he declared, “God damn America.”

Of course Wright’s comments were offensive, but to pretend that the ad does not have racial undertones would be to deny the obvious. After all, why didn’t North Carolina Republicans focus instead on attacking Obama’s alleged “elitism” or his foreign policy views?

Perhaps because Sen. Obama is spiritually close to a man whose vitriolic rhetoric could be easily mistaken for the rambling tirade of the latest Osama bin Laden video.

I’ve often thought of elitism as meaning that one simply has high standards. A dictionary’s definition is probably more nuanced (dare I say elitist?) than mine, but I suggest a read of Paul Farhi’s article in Friday’s Post about the term’s use in politics:

It doesn’t matter that those who run for president are almost always better educated, better dressed, more telegenic, far wealthier and more articulate — all in all, drawn from an elite class — than just about every voter in the country. We know it, but prefer to hear about log cabin beginnings and back stories brimming with Horatio Alger spunk and Norman Rockwell imagery. We want politicians, in the cliched formulation, that we’d be comfortable having a beer with (tellingly, no one ever says “have a nice glass of merlot with”; we are not France).

Elitism isn’t about money or privilege, it’s about attitude, says Farhi:

It might seem a tad ironic for multimillionaires such as Clinton and Limbaugh to be calling anyone “elitist,” but “elitism” isn’t really about money. Donald Trump has money, but few think “elitist” when thinking of Trump. Elitism is instead an attitude, a demeanor, a vocabulary, a self-possessed air. It suggests condescension and contempt, a lack of empathy, an arrogant aloofness.

It’s worth a read.