Jon Meacham is clearly an intelligent person and skilled writer, but his judgment about America and what America needs is somewhat inferior to that of my cat Lexie. Last November, he was telling us that the election affirmed the nation’s conservatism. Now he is urging Dick Cheney to run for president in 2012.  It would be “good for the country,” he argues, “because Cheney is a man of conviction, has a record on which he can be judged, and whatever the result, there could be no ambiguity about the will of the people.”  

Let’s leave aside dated comparisons to leftwing parties in Europe urging stark choices between left and right in the hope that the right would discredit itself, and let’s just talk about America. This country has functioned best when there is a widely shared worldview about Constitutional government (e.g. separation of powers), equality (e.g. safety net for those at the bottom), and America’s role in the world (e.g.  important, but not imperial). Think of America under Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy, for instance. Much of our current woes – epitomized by the sheer craziness of the Republican Congress after 1994 and of George W. Bush’s two terms – is the result of the erosion of that consensus from the right, and the emergence of a frankly supra-Constitutional nationalism on the right.  Cheney began his career as the rightwing of the Old Guard Republicanism of Gerald Ford, but he became sometime during the ‘90s a spear carrier for this new, dangerous right.

It amazes me that someone who has written books about American history, and presumably knows something about the subject, would assume that stark choices between left and right bring about a plausible middle-ground. Politics doesn’t work like mathematics.  Having Barry Goldwater on the ticket in 1964 didn't lead to a more sensible centrist foreign policy, and George Wallace's candidacy in 1968 0r 1972 didn't encourage an affirmation of civil rights.   Instead, stark choices embitter and skew and polarize our politics and give credibility to notions that can only bring disaster to the country. Let Cheney enjoy the pleasures of retirement, and let the country enjoy a respite from his dreams of unitary executive and a pre-emptive imperial power.

In a New York Times story on Pakistan and Afghanistan, David Sanger writes:

Inside the Pakistani Army and the intelligence service, which is known as the ISI, it is an article of faith among some officers that the United States is deceiving them, and that it will replay 1989. If that happens, some Pakistanis argue, India will fill the void in southern Afghanistan, leaving Pakistan surrounded by its longtime enemy. So any talk of exit strategies is bound to reaffirm the belief of some Pakistani officials that they have to maintain their contacts with the Taliban — their hedge against Indian encroachment.

According to Matt Yglesias, this makes no sense because:

[It] seems in tension with the other popular theory that we need to stay in Afghanistan because a Taliban takeover would destabilize Pakistan. Or perhaps it’s better to say that the reasoning is circular. To win in Afghanistan we need to convince the Pakistanis that we’re staying forever, since otherwise they’ll back the Taliban and we won’t be able to beat the Taliban which we need to do as a favor to the Pakistanis. See!

I don't see the circularity. Yglesias is assuming that if we leave, and if the Pakistanis decide to once again back the Taliban, that desicision will be in the best interest of Pakistan. In fact, as Pakistan is learning all too well, supporting the Taliban can boomerang, and weaken Pakistani security instead of fortifying the country against India. What makes us so confident that this same cycle will not repeat itself?

What's the meaning of football in American life? Over the years, TNR has not been silent on the subject. Read our best archived pieces on the game:

"The Moral Equivalent to Football" by Wilcomb E. Washburn. July 23, 1977. Why football reflects the true--not the ideal--nature of the American character.

"Goodbye to the Bear" by Howell Raines. January 24, 1983. The football coach who was segregationist George Wallace's alter ego.

"Football Morals" by T.S. Matthews. November 26, 1930. College football is not a game. It is war, and every college its own barbarian state.

"Linebacker Labor" by Nicholas von Hoffman. November 1, 1982. Football strikes, capitalism, and American life.

"Becoming a Pro" by James Cramer. November 12, 1977. At the Eagles' training camp, meritocracy really works.

Today is Thanksgiving, the holiday in which Americans count their blessings by binge eating, seeing family, and watching television. But we aren’t the only ones who mark time with massive feasts. Click through this TNR slideshow to see holidays from around the world in which other cultures stuff themselves.

It’s hardly a secret or an accident that much of politics revolves around the elimination of doubt among voters on public policy issues. Base-mobilization strategies for elections typically involve convincing people with clear preferences but weak civic engagement (or doubts about their own “team”) that any given trip to the ballot box is of epochal importance. Swing-voter persuasion strategies also tend to focus on efforts to convince the undecided that one’s party or candidate will make the country a much happier place. And while doubt’s evil twin, fear, most definitely has a place in both base and swing strategies, it’s still aimed at convincing voters there is a clear and unambiguous, if largely negative, difference between the consequences of voting this way or that.

I mention the dubious political status of doubt in the context of a long and fascinating piece I just published on The Democratic Strategist by Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, director of The Progressive Project, entitled “Zero For Thirty-One: Lessons From the Loss in Maine.” A veteran of the struggle for LGBT rights and marriage equality, Beach-Ferrara concludes that ballot measures to stop gay marriage keep winning in no small part because equality advocates don’t talk much to conflicted voters, particularly those for whom religious dogma pulls them away from their own personal sense of fairness--i.e., non-bigots who are lumped in with bigots in most LGBT-rights strategies.

Based on her first-hand interviews with torn voters, Beach-Ferrara contends that marriage equality activists would do well to spend some time convincing such voters to reflect their true convictions by conscientiously passing up the opportunity to make a choice they aren’t prepared to make. In other words, rather than pushing people to come down on one side or the other, activists should have looked at doubt as a political asset.

There has been a lot of talk lately about whether Obama is or is not losing support among independents.   Charles Franklin, writing at Pollster.Com, insists there is no evidence of defection among independents or Democrats. “There is no evidence that any group of Democrats, especially liberal Democrats, are unhappy with Obama,” Franklin writes. But the most recent Gallup Poll shows significant signs of defection among independents and Democrats.  Obama lost 18 percentage points – from 62 to 44 percent approval – among independents. 

And what about Democrats? The figures here are disturbing. Obama has increased his approval among non-white Democrats from 90 to 92 percent over the year; but his approval rating among white Democrats has dropped from 87 to 76 percent, and his overall approval among whites by 22 percentage points. If you put these figures together with a 19 percentage point drop in approval among people who have attended college, but don’t have post-graduate degrees, it looks very much like Obama is hemorrhaging support in the middle and upper reaches of the white working class, where he had some trouble in the primaries against Hillary Clinton, and where Democrats have been vulnerable since 1968. It’s the McGovern problem. Obama can, of course, regain enough of these voters by 2012 to win re-election, but it’s still a danger sign for him and the Democrats.

From the A.P.:

ELLENWOOD, Ga. -- Someone made off with loot from a Georgia church but also left behind an apology. A note scrawled on the wall said: "Sorry but I'm poor. Forgive me Lord." The Rev. Roger Davis tells WSB-TV that expensive equipment including microphones and a laptop containing important records were stolen over the weekend from Berean Baptist Church. The robber broke locks and the church's safe, but it was empty.

It was the fourth time the church in Ellenwood, southeast of Atlanta, has been robbed in two years.

Davis joked he's considering putting up a note of his own telling potential robbers to call him instead and the church will take up a collection for them.

I detect a serious moral hazzard problem with this scheme.

I don't normally read Victor Davis Hanson, who's a fruitcake even by the standards of National Review Online, but i was intrigued by the headline of his latest column, "The New War Against Reason." Hanson's thesis holds that, despite promising to heed science, the Obama administration has gone to war against empiricism. Since this is one of the few things the right has not previously accused Obama of doing, I thought I'd see what Hanson's evidence is. Here we go!

For decades, the government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics has maintained a rational, scientifically based, and nonpartisan system of reporting the nation’s “seasonally adjusted unemployment rate.” Presidents of both parties respected its metrics. Their own popularity sunk or soared on the basis of officially released jobless numbers, as tabulated and computed by the nonpartisan Bureau. The public trusted in a common standard of assessing presidential job performance.

The BLS is still releasing its monthly report, but alongside it the Obama administration has created a new postmodern barometer called jobs “created or saved.”

Over the last nine months, the official government website Recovery.gov has informed us how the stimulus has saved jobs — even as hard data reflected the unpleasant truth of massive and spiraling job losses.

In other words, not the real number of jobs lost, but rather the supposed number of jobs saved by Barack Obama’s vast dispersion of borrowed money, was to be the correct indicator of employment.

Ok. Hanson doesn't say that the Obama administration has suppressed or altered the BLS's calculation of unemployment. He charges it with creating another website that attempts to calculate how many jobs were saved by the stimulus -- a premise that is shared by the major macroeconomic forecasting firms. Hanson seems to further believe that this figure is intended as a substitute for the unemployment level, betraying an inability to grasp the distinction between the current unemployment rate and how many jobs were saved as a result of the stimulus. How can anybody not understand the difference between these two things? His chain of reasoning is just so wildly illogical you can't even refute it.

The film version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road will hit theaters this weekend, taking the nightmarish story from the bookstore to the big screen. A few years ago, James Wood reviewed the post-apocalyptic novel for TNR, writing, "The new novel will not let the reader go, and will horribly invade his dreams, too." Click here to read the full review.

And click here to read Christopher Orr's review of the new film and other cinematic offerings this Thanksgiving weekend.

A new Washington Post poll shows that the proportion of Americans who believe global warming is occurring has dipped by one tenth in the past year (from 80 percent to 72 percent). Leave aside the fact that most of this shift might be explained by the margin of error. Isn't it still remarkable that a majority of Republicans still believe warming is occurring? Several years ago that fact alone would have been cause for a headline.

As its "Arena" question to pundits this morning, Politico has "Obama's Charisma: Where Did He Leave it?"

The implication seems to be--and I feel as though I've heard a variation on this question asked not infrequently of late--that Obama was such a dazzling, inspirational, transformational campaigner that it's hard to fathom where this wonky, chilly, pathologically measured grind of a president came from.

What? Are we all suffering from short-term memory loss? Especially early during the presidential primary, the big storyline on Obama was that he was a big ol' dud, boring audiences throughout Iowa and New Hampshire with his non-uplifting trail talk. As for the above-it-all, pointy headed, non-emotive streak, that has long been the rap on him.

Yes, Obama has the juice to thrill the globe with his from-the-pulpit-esque speeches. (Which he still delivers when occasion calls.) But it's not as though the guy has ever been known for his overwhelming warmth or charisma in the daily ebb and flow of things. He is as he has always presented himself to us.

Just when momentum was starting to build for increased capital requirements as the core element of an approach that will reign in reckless risk-taking, Morgan Stanley effectively demolishes the idea.

In “Banking – Large & Midcap Banks: Bid for Growth Caps Capital Ask,” (no public link available) Betsy Graseck, Ken Zorbo, Justin Kwon, and John Dunn of Morgan Stanley Research North America dissect the coming demands for more bank capital. 

“In short, we think the demand for growth and access to credit will trump desire for unprofitable capital levels…

For the large cap and midcap banks, we expect normalized median common tier-1 ratios to come in at 8.4% and 10.0% respectively.”

That’s less capital than Lehman had just before it failed--11 percent. (If you doubt this, read the transcript of the final Lehman conference call--link is in this NYT.com piece or try this direct link; see p.7, for example)