WASHINGTON -- He barely speaks in his own first general-election ad. On the top floor of his Boston campaign headquarters, the most visible poster is one of his dad's. His party's leaders in Congress, the states and the lobbying world don't bow to him, or mention him much, even as they make moves that can't help but define his agenda for him. Arguably the key person in his campaign is Republican kingpin Karl Rove, but Rove doesn't work there.

And this is just the way Mitt Romney and his team like it. Romney is the incidental candidate in an incidental campaign. He's a bland, blunt instrument, but only an instrument, in a wider crusade dedicated to one goal: ousting President Barack Obama and reversing whatever policy victories he has won.

Goofy or creepy when off script, burdened by an ideologically muddled record and a penchant for privacy in his business and religious life, Romney has chosen to focus on everyone but himself and to surrender his campaign to a larger conservative effort.

The question is whether Romney's attempt at political self-abnegation will work. Will voters see him as selfless, shrewd and focused on the unglamorous task at hand? Or will they dismiss him as a weak, evasive figure with contempt for facts and a lot to hide?

So far, the answer isn't clear. Romney's likability and fundraising numbers are up, but he trails in the Electoral College projections. The consensus on the fall race: it's close.

There hasn't been a presidential campaign like Romney's in more than half a century -- since before 1960, when another Bostonian and Harvard graduate, John F. Kennedy, burst onto the scene.

In that year, television transformed politics into a contest between personal narratives and a search for the most convincing communicator. Also that year, presidential campaigns themselves -- the mechanics, the harried advisers, the closed-door dramas of decision-making -- took on Homeric public stature. The party was incidental in this saga; it was all about the Kennedys.

It's not all about Mitt; it's about everything but Mitt. It's not about his Boston campaign apparatus; it's about everything and everyone else surrounding it. As for the party, Mitt is glad to let them lead.

The strategy is reflected in his staff. They are not the kind to quote Tennyson.

Romney's campaign manager, Matt Rhoades, is a publicity-shy ninja of "oppo." If many voters concluded in 2004 that Sen. John Kerry was a French-fried, flip-flopping toff, Rhoades is the reason: He was head of "research" for the Bush-Cheney campaign that year. Stuart Stevens, Romney's top message and advertising man, is known for his penchant for attack spots.

There's no "Making of the President" or even "Game Change" aura here. One reason may be that the indirect godfather of the enterprise isn't on the premises. Karl Rove's influence lies in the accumulation of personal ties and changes in the way presidential campaigns are operated and financed.

Much of the top staff is composed of protégés of "The Architect." Rhoades was Rove's research aide in 2004; Stevens was a key part of the Bush advertising team in 2000 and 2004 under Rove. Romney's close friend and former gubernatorial chief of staff, Beth Myers (who is now in charge of vetting vice presidential candidates), received her start in politics working with Rove in Texas.

As the man behind the super PAC American Crossroads and its affiliate Crossroads GPS, which together are expecting to raise more than $300 million for "independent" spending, Rove may have more impact on Romney than Romney's own campaign. Federal law bars Rove and his Boston friends from talking strategy with each other. But they don't have to. They know each other's thinking and how to read the public signals.

American Crossroads will be the largest Republican-oriented super PAC and one that Rove & Co. hope will draw money and attention away from renegade operations that would drag the party off its economic message and into counterproductive attacks on religion and race.

As for GOP congressional leaders, Romney has long since tied his destiny to theirs, and far more willingly than presidential candidates generally like to do. When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell engineered a day of votes on draconian GOP budget plans, Romney was happy to stress his own, only slightly less drastic plan.

He signed onto Rep. Paul Ryan's budget in the House early and has repeated his support often. Doing so gave Romney a way to ingratiate himself with conservatives who were and are suspicious of him.

Romney's speeches and interviews rarely produce news or provide much information, and rarely seem designed to do so. His May 12 speech at Liberty University was a chance to deliver a memorable moment of eloquent faith witness. Some evangelicals professed to be pleased by what he said, but it was, in fact, nothing more than an anodyne, risk-free homily on the value of service, with one line tucked in about his belief in man-woman marriage.

When he has to answer unscripted questions, the results have been so problematic so often that he now is determined to fade into the woodwork as quickly as possible. Asked to defend an earlier comment about President Obama's relationship with the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Romney tried to erase himself from view. "I'm not familiar precisely with exactly what I said," Romney said, "but I stand by what I said, whatever it was." In other words, he is incidental to his own history.

Anti-tax lobbyist Grover Norquist depicts the Romney presidency -- if there is one -- as a kind of figurehead monarchy in which the real power will lie with Congress, and within Congress, the power will lie with tax-cutting conservatives such as Norquist.

"All we have to do is replace Obama," Norquist said in February. "We are not auditioning for Fearless Leader. We don't need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We want the Ryan budget. We just need a president to sign this stuff."

If Romney objected to this view of his role, he didn't say so. And why would he object? In Norquist's view, the identity of the person who isn't Obama is incidental. And that seems to be Romney's point.

Cate Plys, Northwestern Magazine
No wonder you can date pictures of Rahm Emanuel by the darkening circles around his eyes, the way botanists count tree rings. Most people settle for half-circles under their eyes. The famously competitive Emanuel goes the full 360 degrees. Chicago’s new mayor never stops, and sleep is seemingly optional.A look at Emanuel’s daily schedule, courtesy of a Chicago Reader investigation, shows why the mayor is in a hurry. The down-to-the-minute itineraries typically track him from breakfast meetings through dinner receptions. In three months the phrase “lunch with a...

Robert Tracinski, TIA Daily
When President Obama's re-election campaign put up its "Life of Julia" feature, the mockery from the right came thick and fast, focusing on Julia's creepy faceless anonymity"”literally, the way she is drawn, she has no face"”and on the apparent absence in her life of family, friends, a mentor, a spouse, or anyone or anything to compete with the beneficence of the federal government.Beyond the mockery, though, there is a sense that "Julia" reveals some very important things about the worldview of the left. Here's one...

Amid the celebration of Mother's Day and a child's college graduation this past weekend, there emerged a kernel of wisdom that can break the gridlock, preserve our nation's strength, and allow America to continue to lead the world to peace and prosperity.

Dramatic? Admittedly. True? Absolutely.

This powerful insight is simply that incentives work.

Sunday's University of Dallas graduation ceremony was a powerful witness to a wonderful mother on Mother's Day. My wife and I watched our youngest graduate from college, enjoyed the company of all four of our children together, witnessed all four complete college in four years, and paid our last tuition payment! Oh, happy days!

Without taking anything away from my wife's nurturing guidance and the talent and drive of our children, my role also played a vital part: I exercised graduate economics! I have great children. America is full of wonderful people. Yet well-defined and well-intentioned incentives can powerfully and positively impact behavior for even the best people.

I negotiated with my children before they were born (it's easier that way) that if there was no dating before they were 16, Dad would help with the first four years of any college where they were accepted. The fifth year was on them. Amazingly, they all met the criteria and completed their degrees in four years at great schools -- Notre Dame, Michigan, and the University of Dallas.

This approach of clearly defined incentives, if applied to many government services, would go a long way in solving our deficit.

How could incentives break the stalemate in Congress and save the union? The simple answer is in their application to health care. In making the case for health care reform, President Obama said, "Put simply, our health care program is our deficit problem. Nothing else even comes close." As a former CFO, I absolutely agree. California Gov. Jerry Brown recently outlined his budget prescription by warning citizens that he had no choice but to cut spending and raise taxes. I absolutely disagree. Regrettably, like so many politicians, Gov. Brown has ignored the power of incentive in his own state. As a result, many will suffer.

California's Safeway grocery stores estimate that applying incentives to health care could result in a 40 percent reduction of direct health care spending in the United States. This could balance the budget without benefit cuts or tax increases.

How can this be? The problem of rising health care costs could be solved by allowing businesses to apply their well-honed expertise in offering customers the opportunity to have more for less -- in this case, better health at a lower cost. Individuals also must have incentives to make healthy lifestyle choices.

From where do these gigantic savings come? First, benefits would spring from improved transparency. Safeway's study revealed wide differences in the cost of medical care. An easy comparison of providers' cost and quality, combined with an incentive to seek out the best deal, could yield dramatic results for consumers.

Safeway found that substantive savings also would come from better lifestyle choices. By its estimates,

1. 70 percent of health care costs are driven by behavior
2. four chronic conditions are responsible for 74 percent of health care costs, and
3. obesity is a driving factor in all four chronic conditions.

Taken together, this means that the biggest driver of health care costs is obesity, which is largely behavioral and reversible. Kudos to Michelle Obama for shining a light on this priority!

Safeway used these findings to implement a health care plan that rewarded people with incentives and lowered premiums based on progress in four measures:

• Weight
• Tobacco use
• Control of cholesterol levels
• Control of blood pressure levels

Safeway achieved lower health care costs at a time when others were experiencing significant increases. And Safeway employees became healthier over that same period.

Unleashing the power of choices in health care for private companies and government programs could dramatically reduce health care costs while improving the health of the overall population and the competitiveness of the national economy.

Providing incentives to my children helped me to balance my checkbook. By doing the same, America could remain solvent with a lot less pain to beneficiaries and taxpayers. Perhaps Gov. Brown and other politicians need a remedial course in incentive economics.

Mark R. Kennedy leads George Washington University's Graduate School of Political Management and is Chairman of the Economic Club of Minnesota. He previously served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and was Senior Vice President and Treasurer of Federated Department Stores (now Macy's).

On Valentine's Day 1998, the four founders of Marriage Equality California (two gay men, a lesbian, and a straight guy) staged America's first public "mass-marriage" protest for gay couples. We organized about three dozen same-sex couples to line up at the Beverly Hills Courthouse and marched in, two by two, to have our purported marriages rejected by the city clerk's office. At the time -- only 14 years ago -- the protest had an air of unreality. People questioned why gay men and lesbians would even want to get married. How far we have come.

In 2000, another California lawyer and I drafted California's first civil unions bill, only the second one in the country after Vermont's. We did something unprecedented: we gave California gay couples equal rights to straight couples, something that had not even been done in Vermont. This idea, less than marriage but the fullest equality allowable by law, was considered so radical at the time that even the premier nationwide and local gay-rights organizations refused to support it. These organizations considered it politically impossible to even propose that gay people should have equal rights under the law and forced the pro-gay (but straight) legislator who introduced the bill to kill it and to substitute it for a bill that a gay-rights organization had drafted in its stead, a bill that allowed hospital visitation and a few other protections for gay couples but less than 1% of the thousands of legal and civil rights that marriage provides to couples under California and federal law. How far we have come.

I was pleased that Vice President Biden mentioned Will and Grace as one of the societal changes that helped change his mind. In 1994, I joined with a few dozen other advocates in a march on Hollywood where we met with high-ranking studio executives and asked them why it was that gay and lesbian characters were always minor characters and stereotyped. We reminded them that the depiction of African Americans in situation comedies had led to a decline in racism and an understanding by white Americans that black families were not so different from white ones, with the same joys and sorrows, pleasures and pain that all humanity faces. We urged them to show that gay families were not so different from straight ones and noted that it could be done with humor and sensitivity. I remember the face of a pained studio executive who had no counterargument. He knew we were right, but felt the "time was not right." How far we have come.

Last year, Frank Kameny died. One of the founding fathers of gay rights in the United States, Kameny served bravely in World War II but was fired from the Army in 1957 for being gay. He took his case all the way to the Supreme Court, which argued in 1961 -- and still says today -- that you can be fired just for being gay. That didn't stop Kameny. He organized dignified protests in front of the White House. He worked to change laws that made it illegal for two men to have consensual sex. He worked to change the view of the American Psychiatric Association that claimed until 1973 that homosexuality was a disease. It is less than a decade ago that the United States Supreme Court finally held that a state cannot put adults in jail for private consensual oral sex, something the State of Georgia had found punishable (even between a husband and wife) with up to 20 years in prison. How far we have come.

Fifty years ago, Bayard Rustin, the inimitable organizer of the March on Washington, was almost prevented from speaking at the event he organized, by civil rights leaders who feared his sexual orientation would detract from the Event. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. overruled the naysayers at a time when being gay was still considered a disease and a crime. Dr. King was way ahead of his time. How far we have come.

As brave as President Obama is for being the first sitting president to endorse marriage equality, his "evolution" on the issue must be understood in the context of America's evolution. On perhaps no issue other than marriage equality has public opinion changed so dramatically in 15 years, from a quarter of the population to majority support. People under thirty today have difficulty understanding why anyone would deny equality under the law to two loving, committed individuals in an attempt to prevent them from their pursuit of happiness. Just as people under 60 today fail to understand why this country once banned the marriage of the president's parents. How far we have come.

I'm proud to have played my small part in this evolution, from co-founding Marriage Equality California to helping draft the marriage-equality legislation that just recently passed in the District of Columbia. I'm quite confident that state after state will follow suit until, 15 years from now, all 50 states allow gay and lesbian couples the equal protection under the law that the Constitution purportedly guarantees. We still have a lot of work to do. But when the president of the United States finally openly affirms that gay and lesbian Americans should have the same rights under the law that straight women and men enjoy, it seems OK, for just a day, to celebrate, sit back, and reflect on how far we have come.

Mark Levine, a talk radio host in Washington, DC and a Fellow with the Truman National Security Project, formerly served as Legislative Counsel for openly gay Congressman Barney Frank.

We're throwing our usual format away today, because this was a momentous and historic week in American politics, and we thought it needed the entire column to address. Call it an extended rant, rather than talking points. There are two parts to this rant. The first is positive. The second is negative. Then, I (hopefully) change it all back to positive at the end.

Most Impressive

We've had to create a new award today, because our usual Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week doesn't even begin to cover it. Instead, we award President Barack Hussein Obama our first-ever Most Impressive Democrat (On This Issue) In My Lifetime award. We fully expect the MID(OTI)IML award to be a rare one indeed. If the column is still around to issue a second one, we'd actually be (pleasantly) surprised. You'll notice, however, that we did think ahead, as the careful wording means that Obama himself could win a second MID(OTI)IML, if he'd just pick another issue on which to be so downright impressive, in the future. In addition to the big award, we've got several Bravo! honorable mentions to individually hand out, as well.

Bravo! to Vice President Joseph Robinette Biden Junior for his part in this historic week. Biden either (depending on which you believe) "got out in front of his skis" on the gay marriage issue in an interview last Sunday, or was the advance man for the rollout of a new presidential policy. Whichever version you're a fan of, Biden did indeed play a crucial role in this drama, and deserves credit for doing so. Arne Duncan had a part to play as well, but Biden was the guy who got the ball rolling.

Joe Biden said one thing during his interview that I found fascinating, because it is something I've personally believed for years. Biden was making the broader point that America and American culture had changed, when it came to the subject of being gay. Biden said:

I take a look at when things really begin to change, is when the social culture changes. I think Will and Grace probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody's ever done so far. And I think -- people fear that which is different. Now they're beginning to understand.

Biden's comment about Will and Grace is what resonated with me, because I've been saying similar things for years now. American culture -- television and movies in particular -- had a lot to do with the growing acceptance of being gay in America. Gays used to be a caricature in pop culture, when they were even acknowledged at all. Think Three's Company, for instance. But soon after, Hollywood and corporate broadcasting began to have their own very slow evolution. Billy Crystal was a gay character on Soap. Two decades later, gay characters began popping up on shows like Roseanne, Friends, Melrose Place and even All My Children. Then Ellen DeGeneres "came out" on Ellen. Soon after, Will and Grace opened the floodgates, which led to gay characters appearing even on hard-bitten cop shows like NYPD Blue. In the movie world, the turning point was likely the moving drama Philadelphia, with Tom Hanks playing the sympathetic lead role of a gay man with AIDS. All of these cultural references probably did more to "mainstream" acceptance of gay people into the American culture than anything else. Biden was right about Will and Grace, and he had the grace to say so, beautifully. Today, it's a rare sitcom or drama that doesn't have a gay character. That's a big change, and a big evolution, and it has changed the conversation in America -- especially with young people -- more than anything else. So Bravo, Joe!

Bravo! to Obama's re-election team. Politically, this week was handled perfectly. Last Friday, some rather weak economic numbers were released. Mitt Romney had planned to use this issue to bludgeon Obama all week long. Guess what? It didn't happen. Obama, instead, was in the spotlight this week, looking good. Romney was pushed off to the side, and pushed off message, and wound up the week trying to defend being a bully in high school. That is a good week for the Obama political camp. The more the subject of gay marriage is talked about, the more mean-spirited and intolerant the Republican position looks. Obama, in the political media parlance, "won the week" and he won it big time. That's a clear victory for the political wonks, and they deserve credit for how smooth this entire rollout truly was. Well done, Obama team!

And our final Bravo! goes to none other than Barack Obama himself. If you take the president at his word, he has struggled with this issue for a long time. Obama is no different than a lot of Americans in this respect. Gay rights have not just appeared on the American scene overnight -- millions and millions of minds had to be changed for their now-growing acceptance. People who either hated gays, feared gays, were disgusted with the whole gay concept, or largely indifferent and uncaring on the issue have all moved solidly into the pro-gay rights camp -- most of them, for the remainder of their lives. It is a major realignment of thought, but once it happens, almost nobody turns back to what they believed previously. Barack Obama has not been hostile to gay rights up until this point, but he personally believed that gay marriage was a step too far. There are millions of Americans who think exactly the same thing -- including millions of Democrats and others who voted for Obama last time around.

Obama, if you take his words at face value, completed this evolution this year in two ways: asking himself how he would have voted as a state senator if a gay marriage law was being passed in his state, and seeing the entire issue through the eyes of his daughters. He saw the arc of history, and he saw which was the side of right and equality and justice for all. He overcame his religious beliefs to see the issue differently, as one of civil rights. These are momentous changes in the way any human being sees his or her world. They are not to be belittled, because (as I said) millions of other Americans are traveling the same exact path, and not all of them are precisely where the gay rights people are, or even where the president now is.

In a word, President Obama is showing leadership on the issue. Now, there are those who disagree with that statement, which we'll get to in a moment. But the President of the United States of America just used his "bully pulpit" to speak out on an issue that no president has ever done before in such a fashion. This is history-making stuff, folks. This is what presidents like to refer to as "legacy" stuff. One hundred years from now, schoolchildren will read about this week in their schoolbooks. It is momentous.

For showing such leadership, for leading in the right direction, and for completing his evolution on the issue of gay marriage, President Obama not only deserves accolades and cheers, he also earns the first-ever Most Impressive Democrat (On This Issue) In My Lifetime award. Bravo, indeed, Mister President!

Most Disappointing

This section really should be labeled with a word that I can't remember where I heard first ("Dear Abby" springs to mind, but that just can't be right...). It is a one-word term for a sentiment which I simply must apply to many belittlers of Obama this past week: Qwitchyerbitchin'!

Seriously, it seemed like President Obama didn't get the worst criticism of his announcement from the far right this past week, but rather from his own base. This is exasperating in a number of ways, so we've got a number of Qwitchyerbitchin' awards to hand out. If you feel like this is going to be too annoying to read, then I wouldn't blame you if you just skipped the rest of this article. But you have been warned. Nobody's ox is going to be spared, in this gore-fest.

Qwitchyerbitchin' to everyone on the Democratic side who use the gay marriage issue as a litmus test. Seriously, just stop, OK? The most ironic part of this week, to me, was the tut-tutting which happened after Senator Richard Lugar was "primaried" out of office by a Tea Party challenger. Tears were shed, handkerchiefs were clutched, woe-is-us choruses filled the airwaves over how the Republicans could possibly force out of their party an impressive politician because he simply wasn't pure enough. If you can't see where I'm going with this by now, you need to have your irony-meter adjusted down at the shop.

People who feel perfectly fine expressing dismay that the Republican Party has such fierce litmus tests for office then also feel perfectly fine turning around and flatly stating that anyone who doesn't fully believe in gay marriage equality is simply unfit for office, and will "never get my vote." Putting down Republicans for not having a "big tent" party is stupid if you are arguing for the same thing on your side of the aisle.

I welcome Democrats who are not fully behind gay marriage. My hopes for them are that they will evolve eventually. If a politician votes the way I would vote on every other issue, then this is simply not a disqualifier for me, personally. I realize others feel differently -- there are one-issue voters on all sorts of things. But choose one or the other. If you're for litmus tests and party purity and "small tent" politics, then please don't comment on the Republicans being more efficient in their own purity drive.

Qwitchyerbitchin' anyone who is a leader on gay rights who said anything slightly snarky about Obama's decision this week. You folks need a wake-up call, seriously. President Obama has done more for the gay rights activists than he has done for pretty much any other Democratic activist group you can name. You guys have been in the driver's seat for awhile, now. Here is a quick, and incomplete, list of the other Democratic core constituencies for whom Obama has done precious little or even moved backwards: Labor, African-Americans, Hispanics, the medical marijuana community, civil liberties activists, abortion rights activists, voting rights activists, the single-payer legions, the government-option horde, the anti-Wall Streeters, the end-the-Bush-tax-cuts majority, and a good argument could also be made for the anti-war crowd. There are a whole lot of Democrats -- many of whom feel just as strongly about their issue as you do -- who have gotten very little, nothing, or an outright slap in the face from President Obama in return for their support. They -- most of them -- are still going to turn out to vote for President Obama's second term. Most of them are hoping that Obama will "see the light" on their issue and have the same sort of epiphany we just witnessed this week on gay marriage -- especially in a second term where he won't face the pressures of re-election.

But the fact remains -- in terms of specific legislation, in terms of how he has used his Justice Department, in terms of actually overturning bigoted legislation from the past -- Barack Obama is going to go down in history as the man who did more for gay rights than any other president -- and I even include most future presidents in that estimation. If Bill Clinton was the first "black president" than Barack Obama is going to be the first "gay president."

Qwitchyerbitchin', on whether Obama "went far enough" or not. Obama is not King. He cannot change everything, overnight. He's going to disappoint you on some facet in some way. But ask yourselves -- everyone who is parsing his statement and belittling how timid his stance now is -- would you rather have a president to convince to move even further on your issue who does support the concept of gay marriage (in any fashion), or would you rather have a president who had never made the news Obama just made? Which do you think will be easier to advance your cause? You just won an enormous victory, and all the rest of your future victories are going to be a whale of a lot easier because of what just took place.

Now, this sort of feeling can easily deteriorate into rank jealousy, among the Democratic groups who have not seen Obama's strong support or dramatic movement for their various issues. But seriously, gay rights activists, almost all of the rest of the Democratic Party is right next to you, cheering whenever Barack Obama moves America closer to a place where being gay will be as little remarkable as having green eyes, or being left handed. But you'll have to excuse us, because sometimes the ones outside the debate are the ones cheering loudest. We look over at the gay rights activists next to us in the midst of our cheering, and we see you standing there with your arms crossed, grumbling. We've never gotten to cheer in such a fashion on our single issue (whatever it may be), and it is truly bizarre not to hear you cheering along with us. So qwitchyerbitchin' and join in the celebration. Give the man one week of cheering, and then you can return to pushing as hard as possible to advance your cause in whatever way you see fit. We'll be trying to convince Obama to move on our issues, too, but at least give the man some credit during his moment in the sunshine.

Qwitchyerbitchin' to all the people dissecting the politics of Obama's announcement. We must, in all honesty, include ourselves in this category, to show how eminently fair-handed these rants can be. Ahem.

Political wonks are fascinating creatures (once again, including myself), aren't they? The entire universe is seen through the glass of politics, darkly. Nothing happens -- no leaf falls -- without us putting a massive political spin on it (before it even hits the ground). We fall all over each other to parse how many black votes Obama will lose, versus how big the enthusiasm will be among the youth, to what it will mean for him in the swing states, to watching the polling with eagle's eyes to see if it quivers. The rest of America (quite rightly) gets pretty sick of this sort of thing, since it really is geared towards a very particular audience -- other wonks.

Is Obama's leadership on gay marriage "good politics" for him, or "bad politics" for him? Well, you know what, we'll have plenty of time to discuss that sort of thing in the weeks and months to come. We should all just sit back, take a deep breath, and (once again) allow Obama his moment in the sun. If it turns out to be bad for Obama politically, then it is even more important that we acknowledge his leadership now. Leaders lead, and sometimes not everyone follows. That is the price of leadership -- being willing to take that gamble, and accept that risk. If it turns out Obama does gain support for his move, then we've all got plenty of time later to sneer at the cynical politics that went into his decision. For now, just get off the political high horse and stand next to everyone else in the crowd who is loudly cheering what Obama just did. Sometimes it's more important to cheer than it is to offer our sage thoughts on why each person is (or is not) cheering. Again, speaking for and to myself: "Get over ourselves, eh?" Obama just did something historic. History will remember what he said this week, not what we say, which should introduce a little humility into our writings -- humility which is in very short supply, at times.

Qwitchyerbitchin', in a similar vein, to those who are riding the cynical horse. Did Obama "evolve" just for more campaign donations? Oh, please. Obama's not going to be short of money later this year. He really won't be. Sure, there are plenty of gay rights donors. But you know what? That should spur every other activist group to action. If you're cynical enough to believe that absolutely everything in politics boils down to the money, then go out and raise millions of dollars for your cause! If it's "pay to play" then get your own leverage with the president. You want Obama to pay more attention to you than to the gay activists? Well, since we're atop the cynical pony, then pony up or qwitchyerbitchin'!

Qwitchyerbitchin' to all the people who know -- really know -- exactly what went on inside Obama's brain. These people are ignoring what Obama is saying (again, to my embarrassment, this includes me, as well). Maybe Obama is a Machiavellian multidimensional chess player, and none of what was said in the past week was anything short of sheer calculated politics. Maybe -- to put it another way -- Obama is just flat-out lying about his own personal journey in this regard, and the whole thing has been politics from Day One.

Isn't it odd that those who are arguing this point of view are falling into the trap of arguing exactly what Obama's political enemies have argued from the beginning? Righties -- for approximately the past four years -- have told everyone who would listen to "ignore what Obama's actually saying, here's what he's really saying." This is the same logic that came up with the supposed "Obama apology tour" (in which he never actually apologized for anything), and even birtherism. Obama's just a big fat liar, and we have the omniscient viewpoint of what is really going on in Obama's head. It's interesting to note (irony alert!) that these same folks are the ones who are, this week, arguing that Obama should be taken at his word and that the whole thing was just Joe Biden and gay donors pushing the president into his position, instead of what Obama is actually saying.

Give the guy a break. Take him at his word. He has personally and religiously struggled with this issue. He did not come to his views overnight, and he is a human being. How can anyone get indignant over something that we are projecting on Obama, when we haven't the tiniest shred of evidence for such analysis? Respect the ability of all people to make up their own minds. Respect the fact that everyone who disagrees about gay marriage is not merely some caricature bigot. The entire American public is "evolving" on this issue, and such things don't happen overnight. Reach out to those struggling with the issue with love and help them to walk the path to where you are. Don't belittle them for being further behind than you, and don't call them names and scream at them. Barack Obama walks a path many are walking, and all on that path should be given the basic respect for their opinions, no matter where on that path they currently are. In other words, qwitchyerbitchin', folks.

Change we can believe in

Now that we've got all of that off our chest (pause for a cry of "Tell us how you really feel, Chris!" from the peanut gallery), let's get back on a little more positive note, to wrap things up.

It's rare when you see history being made. It's even rarer when you see history being made, and it is the good kind of history. And it's even rarer still to know when it happens just how historic it truly will become. That was the past week.

This is the "change you can believe in" that millions upon millions of Americans voted for when they voted for Barack Obama. This isn't the only change we voted for, and a lot of change that some of us voted for simply hasn't happened. But that's OK for now, because this was indeed the biggest change we've ever seen from Obama. This was a momentous week for Obama, and for America. This is the sort of inspirational thing a lot of Democrats have been looking for. Sure, Obama changing his own personal views doesn't change any laws overnight. Sure, it doesn't go far enough. Sure, politics was involved.

None of that should really matter, at this precise moment in time. None of it is going to matter in that long arc of history. President Obama just announced to the country that discrimination against gay marriage was, in his opinion, wrong. He took a stand for equality. He took political risks for doing so. He showed leadership. He showed strength that even people who disagree with him on gay marriage will respect, as a politician and as a human being. He showed his love for his daughters, and his hope that they grow up in a world where they can continue to treat their friends with two mommies or two daddies as no big deal at all.

And that, my friends, is change I can believe in.

 

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George Will, Washington Post
Bill Hewlett and David Packard, tinkering in a California garage, began what became Hewlett-Packard. Steve Jobs and a friend built a computer in the California garage that became Apple’s birthplace. Bill Cook had no garage, so he launched Cook Medical in a spare bedroom in an apartment in this university town. Half a century ago, in flight from Chicago’s winters, he settled here and began making cardiovascular catheters and other medical instruments. One thing led to another, as things have a way of doing when the government stays out of the way, and although Cook died...

The Truth-o-Meter says: False | Barack Obama says government job losses on his watch are unprecedented

In a May 8, 2012, speech on the economy in Albany, N.Y., President Barack Obama sought to put the nation’s economic challenges on his watch in historical context. He especially sought to explain how hard it’s been to increase the national employment level when governments have been hemorrhaging jobs. These job losses, he suggested, have weighed down the comparatively healthy private-sector job-creation statistics. "It's worth noting, by the way -- this is just a little aside -- after there was a recession under Ronald Reagan, government employment went way up," Obama said. "It went up after the ...

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Even having good health insurance is no guarantee of getting the best health care. Ashlie Hubbard learned this the hard way after the birth of her daughter, who has special needs.

Hubbard and her family are covered by the health plan her husband, Jason, receives from his job as a tractor-trailer salesman. It's good insurance for the rest of the family but falls short for Emma, 6, who was born with brain abnormalities. Emma has cognitive disabilities, needs help breathing, uses a wheelchair and a feeding tube and requires round-the-clock care. The family's health insurance offers limited coverage for Emma's physical therapy and home aide visits but doesn't cover nursing care. What's more, when Jason's employer switched health insurance plans, the family lost access to the only pediatric pulmonologist they trusted, Ashlie said.

"It's a big old mess, if you ask me," said Ashlie, who lives near Memphis in Arlington, Tenn. Health care may have gotten more advanced during her lifetime, but it's also gotten more expensive, and visits to the doctor have become harder to come by, she said. Ashlie and her husband worry about bankruptcy, because their daughter will need special care for the rest of her life. "I feel like we're kind of stuck," she said.

Ashlie Hubbard and her family are among the millions of Americans having a harder and harder time getting health care services whether they have health insurance or not. The situation will only worsen if health care reform were repealed or scaled back, according to a new study by the Urban Institute.

Between 2000 and 2010, more working-age adults reported they had no regular source of medical care, hadn't seen a doctor or a dentist within a year, had unmet medical and dental needs and went without health care because of cost, Genevieve Kenney and others at the Urban Institute report in an article published in the journal Health Affairs Monday. The uninsured had it the worst.

The health care reform law President Barack Obama enacted two years ago can't solve all the problems with access to health care, the study says, but it can address one of the biggest: the tens of millions of Americans who have no health insurance. More than 30 million people who would otherwise be uninsured are projected to gain coverage through a subsidized private health insurance marketplace or Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.

The law is in jeopardy: Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney has vowed to repeal the law if elected and the Supreme Court is expected to rule on its constitutionality by the end of next month. "If the key coverage provisions in the bill are ruled unconstitutional or repealed, projections indicate that the numbers of uninsured people will grow," Kenney and her colleagues wrote. "Given what we observed over the past decade, we would be likely to see further deterioration in access to care for all adults -- uninsured and insured alike."

Health care spending increased tenfold between 1980 and 2011, when it reached $2.6 trillion and accounted for 17.6 percent of the U.S. economy. All that spending isn't bringing Americans the best care in the world, either. Rising costs are making health insurance unaffordable for more and more people and the ranks of the uninsured will soon surpass 50 million. Fewer employers are providing health insurance to their workers and, when they do, premiums are higher and benefits more meager.

Those statistics tell a sad story about a health care system that's failing many Americans, and the Urban Institute report illustrates the consequences. "Access declined for adults in every category, but the most dramatic declines occurred among the uninsured," the study says.

The researchers analyzed survey data to determine Americans' access to health care based on several criteria: having a usual source of care, like a primary care doctor; having visited a doctor and a dentist within a year of being polled; seeking care in a hospital emergency room; reporting an unmet medical or dental need; and delaying necessary health care because of cost or other reasons.

In each of these areas, American adults said they were worse off in 2010 than in 2000, the study shows. Children fared better under most of these measures, which the researchers attribute to increases in health insurance coverage for kids, including an expansion of the federal-state Children's Health Insurance Program that Obama enacted in 2009. The study doesn't include people over 65 years old because Medicare provides near-universal coverage to the elderly.

More than one in five adults had an unmet medical need in 2010, almost 20 percent hadn't seen a doctor within a year, and more than 60 percent hadn't seen a dentist. The proportion of people who went without health care because of cost increased from 8.8 percent in 2000 to 13.7 percent a decade later. Even Americans with health insurance reported poorer access to medical and dental care and said they went without health care they needed because of cost, the report says.

"By 2010, the access picture looked fairly bleak for many uninsured adults," according to the report. Forty-eight percent of the uninsured had seen a doctor within a year, a decrease from 54.5 percent 10 years earlier. Almost one-third of the uninsured didn't get medical care they needed because of cost in 2010, compared to 25.3 percent in 2000.

Disclosure: A co-author of the Urban Institute report, Stephen Zuckerman, is married to Huffington Post reporter Andrea Stone

Photo by Flickr user Alex E. Proimos

Paul Waldman, American Prospect
Karl Rove's signature contribution to campaign politics was the insight that the most effective way to defeat an opponent was not to attack his greatest weakness, but to attack his greatest strength. (There's some vivid detail from Joshua Green's classic 2004 article on Rove's history as a campaigner. Sample: Your client's opponent volunteers to help abused children? Spread rumors that he's a pedophile!) There's no doubt that at the moment, Mitt Romney's greatest strength is the idea that as a successful businessman, he will do a good job stewarding the...

The Truth-o-Meter says: Half-True | Mitt Romney says creating 500,000 net jobs a month is historically 'normal'

With the economy struggling to recover from the last recession, the monthly job reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics have become key opportunities for both parties to spin the results to their advantage. And right on cue, the release of the most recent statistics on May 4, 2012 -- showing a gain of 115,000 jobs over the previous month -- prompted politicians and their allies to pounce. Shortly after the numbers for April 2012 were released, Mitt Romney went on Fox News to offer commentary. He told Fox & Friends co-host Gretchen ...

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James Piereson, The American Spectator
When the Soviet empire collapsed 25 years ago, many believed that the battle for liberty and limited government had been won. It was only a matter of time, they thought, until America's centrally planned welfare state would give way to a more rational system based upon competition and citizen choice in areas such as education, health care, and retirement planning. They were wrong. Government has continued to grow at all levels in the United States since the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall came down, consuming more resources, imposing ever more burdensome regulations on business, and...

The American way of war has been turning many of our own soldiers into criminal killers and desecraters, and does great harm to our overall spiritual health. The wars we have chosen to fight in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, different as they are, have all given rise to what can best be called an "atrocity-producing situation." Sergeant Robert Bales' rampage in which he randomly murdered 17 Afghan civilians, at least 9 of them children, is only the most recent example.

Yes, atrocities occur in all wars, but in a certain kind of war they can become almost inseparable from everyday combat. By atrocity-producing situation I mean an environment so structured, militarily and psychologically, that an average person entering it, no better or worse than you or me, could be capable of committing atrocities. The military structure includes a counterinsurgency war in a distant, alien environment, against a nonwhite adversary, where it becomes extremely difficult to differentiate combatants from civilians. Add to that the uneasy psychological responses of occupiers or invaders, combinations of fear, helplessness, angry grief in response to the death of buddies, and hunger for an enemy who will "stand up and fight."

What can readily result is indiscriminate rage toward all of the nonwhite people one is ostensibly defending, toward every Vietnamese, Iraqi, or Afghan. Sgt. Bales' four combat deployments, along with other personal factors, could have made him especially prone to atrocity, but his behavior most basically reflects the war he was fighting, the atrocity-producing situation prevailing in Afghanistan.

Hence the overall pattern of shocking incidents: repeated killings of civilians, Marines urinating on Taliban bodies, the burning of Korans, the defiling of insurgents' remains as photographed by participants. A readiness for atrocity was observed by Neil Shea, a journalist embedded with American soldiers in Afghanistan. One of them told him that "this is where I come to do fucked-up things," words Shea heard "in many variations, from many American combat troops." Men could be aware that such behavior helped the enemy and could even express cynical pleasure in "recruiting for the Taliban." American soldiers in Afghanistan, as in Vietnam and Iraq, could thus become both victims and executioners, the two roles that Albert Camus wisely warned us to never take on.

Some have compared Sgt. Bales' rampage with the much larger My Lai massacre of 1968, the slaughter by an American company of some 500 civilians in a small Vietnamese village over the course of a single morning. In both cases there occurred a gradual brutalization of American soldiers, which included the swapping of stories among them about the grotesquely violent things one would do to any Vietnamese or Afghan one encountered. Shea heard a soldier refer to a sergeant who told his men to "kill everything," and then himself add: "You know what? Fuck these people," feelings all too reminiscent of those expressed at My Lai.

My Lai became a defining event of the Vietnam War and Sgt. Bales' killings could well become the same for Afghanistan. With both incidents Americans were subjected to grotesque accounts of slaughter of civilians that could epitomize a war they had already come to oppose and give decisive impetus to that opposition.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, visibly upset by American misbehavior in Afghanistan, recently declared: "This is not who we are and it's certainly not what we represent when it comes to the great majority of men and women in uniform." But, I would add, it is what we become when fighting wars structured for atrocity.

We've been involved militarily in Afghanistan for 10 years, long enough for someone born when the war began to be now in the fifth grade. Can we not, however belatedly, draw wisdom from the kind of war we have been fighting there, and have also fought in Iraq and Vietnam? It's time for us to confront and renounce this American way of war.

David Maraniss, Vanity Fair
Barack Obama transferred from Occidental College to Columbia University in 1981, his junior year. Although he left Los Angeles with enough ambitious propulsion to carry him into a more active period, he instead receded into the most existentialist stretch of his life. As he put it himself dec­ades later during an interview in the Oval Office, “I was leading a very ascetic existence, way too serious for my own good.” In most outward ways, compared with what had come before, his life in New York was a minimalist one, without the sprawling cast of characters that had...

Israel's former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says it is "definitely not" time to attack Iran. Former Mossad Chief Meir Dagan and former Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin similarly caution against Netenyahu's impulse for military action. Sixty-three percent of Israelis oppose a unilateral strike on Iran.

What do these voices of restraint know that western hawks, and much of the American public, don't seem to comprehend? Perhaps that Iran is not nearly the threat its enemies have made it out to be.

In the decade since Bush's "axis of evil" speech, neocons have called for war with Iran. They have portrayed Iran as a nuclear threat. The propaganda has been effective. A poll two years ago found that 71 percent of Americans believed Iran already had nukes.

Yet American and international authorities never claim such a thing. The International Atomic Energy Agency has consistently verified the "non-diversion" of Iran's nuclear resources from civilian to military use. In 2007, the National Intelligence Estimate under Bush concluded Iran was not pursuing nukes. President Obama's Director of National Intelligence agreed with these findings in 2009. Just this year, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said unambiguously that Iran has neither been working on nuclear weapons nor shows any intention of building them.

Just as 70 percent of Americans polled once thought Saddam was behind 9/11, though Bush never made this claim, a strikingly similar percentage of Americans believe Iran has nuclear weapons even though neither Bush nor Obama ever said so.

Not that our leaders have gone out of their way to quell the hysteria. In 2009, Obama made a huge deal about Iran's fledgling nuclear facility at Qom. Far from being caught red-handed, Iran had just begun constructing the facility and had reported their activities accordingly. At the time of this scandal, it was not much more than a "hole in the mountain," according to an IAEA official.

Iran, as a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (unlike Israel), retains the authority to pursue civilian nuclear power. Its enrichment of uranium, now at 20 percent, has been legal and consistent with medical demands for the product. Iran has also expressed a willingness to negotiate this if it can meet these needs another way. However, even at 20 percent Iran's production is well below the approximately 95 percent purity needed for nuclear weapons. Many experts think Iran wants the capacity to "break out" and build nukes, but that would likely take years.

Some argue that oil-rich Iran has no need for nuclear energy, but any additional boost in resources is not wasted merely because the nation has other avenues of energy. The United States surely does not refrain from one source because it has others. Iran wants more independence like many other nations, having relied in recent years on importing refined gasoline.

We also hear that Iran seeks Israel's violent destruction. Many cast the Iranian state as a reincarnation of the Third Reich, run by a mad and genocidal president. But Ahmadinejad is not the true "head of state" in Iran, concerning issues of war. The Supreme Leader is the one who ultimately controls foreign policy, the military, and the nuclear program.

Ahmadinejad is often misquoted as saying he wants to "wipe Israel off the map" -- a mistranslation into an English of an idiom that has many believing that he seeks to "exterminate the Israelis." Rather, a more accurate translation is that he desires to "see the Israeli government erased" -- which is also the way American Cold Warriors talked about the Soviet Union. Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor has conceded this contextual nuance recently in an interview with Al Jazeera:

"They didn't say 'we'll wipe it out', you are right -- but [that] it will not survive, it is a cancerous tumor; it should be removed."

Indeed, Iran has its share of anti-Semitic hardliners. The last thing we should want is to enhance their influence by seeming to threaten the liberal spirit of the vast Iranian youth. Fear of war from the outside is the best way to unite and harden Iranian nationalism, which would ruin the chances for lasting reform.

Despite the ugly history of U.S.-Iranian relations since 1953, Iranians have shown remarkable sympathy for America's culture and people, including in the candlelight vigils that flooded Tehran in response to the 9/11 attacks. Normal Israelis and normal Iranians also have nothing to fear from one another.

We must ask: Among the United States, Israel, and Iran, which has been belligerent? The United States has tightened sanctions on Iran, which hurt civilians in the name of undercutting the regime. Has the U.S. supported covert ops in Iran? Perhaps. Israel surely has -- including support for the fanatical Jundallah suicide bombers, which it attempted to blame on the CIA.

The neocons accused Iran of supporting insurgents in Iraq, although this is dubious at best. Yet, what we do know is that Iran has regarded the Sunni radicals in Iraq, like it views al Qaeda, as its enemies, and indeed reached out to its Shia coreligionists in Iraq to encourage a ceasefire with U.S. troops.

The Israeli state wants war, despite its people's wishes. Obama claims to want peace, even as he tightens the sanctions -- an act classically regarded a war maneuver. The presumptive Republican presidential candidate has promised to be even more extreme.

Both Israel and the United States have considerable nuclear weapons stockpiles. Iran has none. The U.S. conducts war policies that are widely unpopular among its own people. The Obama administration has provided bunker-busters to Israel, presumably for attacking Iran. In the last decade, both Israel and the United States have engaged in invasions of other countries. The Persians have not launched a conventional war in centuries.

There is much to despise about the Iranian government. Like most Muslim states, it is theocratic and thoroughly illiberal. But if we are searching for an aggressive nuclear regime, determined to wage war despite standards of constitutional restraint, democratic principles, and international law, we have two possible candidates that fit the bill. Iran is not one of them.

[From Motherboard]: Understanding how things work in order to make them work better is the basic hacker ethos, and Douglas Rushkoff has applied it to his broader discussion of the way the culture and politics of the many are driven by the interests of the few. Between his landmark Frontline documentary The Merchants of Cool to his recent book Life Inc., Rushkoff has indexed the risks that capitalism and corporate influence pose to democratic society. Or, to extend the metaphor, he's sought to show how we the users routinely get screwed by an "operating system" that's over 500 years old.

"We're leveraged in so many ways, it's like, our economy is leveraged to produce more than it can in order for it to survive," he says. "It's leveraged to grow. Human beings are financially leveraged now. So how do you roll that back and say, well, you know, 'this is it'?" Or, rather, "How do you get the good of a zombie apocalypse without the zombies? That's sort of what I'm trying to help people with."

Enter Occupy. Rushkoff has watched the movement with cautious optimism, penning editorials on CNN and organizing November's Contact Con, a powwow of net roots activists and open source hackers working to foster new civic-minded apps and hardware. To include prizes, Rushkoff enlisted the help of Pepsi, which ultimately granted $10,000 to the Free Network Foundation, the hackers profiled in "Free the Network," our recent documentary.

Rushkoff answered questions on Reddit.

Read more at Motherboard.

George Will, Washington Post
Around noon on Saturday, Nov. 23, 1963, almost exactly 24 hours after the assassination in Dallas, while the president’s casket lay in the East Room of the White House, Arthur Schlesinger, John Kennedy’s kept historian, convened a lunch at Washington’s Occidental restaurant with some other administration liberals. Their purpose was to discuss how to deny the 1964 Democratic presidential nomination to the new incumbent, Lyndon Johnson, and instead run a ticket of Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Sen. Hubert Humphrey.

This week, Newt Gingrich announced that he'd be dropping out of the presidential race next week -- thoughtfully softening the blow to America by giving us all time to come to terms with it. And President Obama slow jammed the news with Jimmy Fallon -- a move that was way, way cooler than his much slower moves to address the student debt crisis affecting millions of college students and grads, including many who went door-to-door and to the polls for him in '08 and helped get him elected. And two weeks before Mother's Day, I want to invite you to join the community initiative to send Mother's Day wishes to Trayvon Martin's mom, Sybrina Fulton. Beyond the political and racial issues surrounding this case, it's important to remember that this is, first and foremost, about a mother who has lost her child and will be facing her first Mother's Day without him. Learn more about it on HuffPost BlackVoices.

Add your voice to the conversation on Twitter: twitter.com/ariannahuff

At the White House Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday night, President Barack Obama joked that Hillary Clinton "won't stop drunk-texting me from Cartagena."

"Despite many obstacles, much has changed during my time in office," the president said at the annual event. "Four years ago, I was locked in a brutal primary battle with Hillary Clinton. Four years later she won't stop drunk-texting me from Cartegana."

Earlier this month, Clinton was captured on camera drinking a beer in Cartagena, Colombia, where she traveled to attend the Summit of the Americas. It was just before the trip that a striking photo of the secretary of state texting aboard a military C-17 plane on her way to Libya gave way to "Texts from Hillary" -- an Internet meme sensation.

Click here to check out "Texts from Hillary." Below, a photo of Clinton in Cartagena, Colombia.

Mark Barabak, LA Times
Is President Obama trying to wedge his way to a second term? The economy will doubtless be the overriding issue in November's presidential contest, and Obama is hardly ignoring it. But a successful candidate appeals to all sorts of voters harboring all sorts of concerns, and the president and his backers appear to be using a pair of wedge issues to target two groups, Latinos and women, with messages grounded more in emotionalism than economics.

In the 11 years since she held one of the highest positions in American government as secretary of state, Madeleine Albright has been a professor, Democratic campaigner, grandmother and founder of an international business consulting firm. And she's authored books on national politics, foreign relations and her famous collection of brooches and pins.

It was only recently that Albright, who turns 75 next month, said she had the time and courage to explore her own complicated past. An Episcopalian who was raised Catholic, she discovered at age 59 -- via reporting by a Washington Post journalist and during the vetting process to serve in President Bill Clinton's administration -- that she was born to Jewish parents. She also found out that more than a dozen of her family members died in the Holocaust, including three grandparents in concentration camps. Her father, a former Czech diplomat, and her mother never told her the family secret.

In "Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948," released this week, Albright digs through a trove untouched documents that her parents left behind, visits her childhood neighborhoods in the Czech Republic and retraces the steps her family, which moved from London and back before relocating to Denver, took in the tumultuous time surrounding World War II. The book, part historical narrative, part personal story, explores how political leaders and families make moral decisions and live with the consequences.

Albright, who calls herself a "peripatetic Episcopalian" and attends church near her farm in Hillsborough, Va., and close to her home in Washington, D.C.'s Georgetown neighborhood, visited the HuffPost Religion staff in New York this week to discuss her book, her ancestry and her spirituality. Questions and responses have been edited for brevity and clarity.

Why write this book now?

I did not have time. The way I describe this, it is like being asked to represent your country in a marathon and just as you are start to running, somebody gives you a heavy package and says unwrap it while you run. Here I was trying to become the first woman secretary of state and all of a sudden all this devastating kind of information came. So I sent my brother and sister to the Czech Republic to look at all this. ... But even though I went back in '97 and went to Terezin, I didn't have time to do the kind of in-depth research until this book.

Is there anything left to discover about your identity? Is there something you are still yearning for?

The only thing I am yearning for is that I wish my parents were alive so we could really talk about this. ... In my case, (identity) was always was complicated because of this business of being a naturalized citizen, of coming here as one thing -- a Czechoslovak -- and becoming American. When people ask me me what the most important thing in my life is, it's becoming American, hands-down.

I'm very proud of my Czechoslovak background, but my identity the way I describe it now: I am an American, I am a mother, I am a grandmother, I am a Democrat, I came from Jewish heritage, I was a Roman Catholic, I am a practicing Episcopalian, I am somebody who is devoted to human rights, I am somebody who believes in an international community and I can't separate those things. ... I can trace these various parts as having a profound influence on me in one form or another.

Considering your family history and that your daughter married into a Jewish family, what is it about Jewish traditions that you identify with?

My youngest grandson is just studying for his bar mitzvah. We have been talking about the various Jewish traditions, the appreciation for history, for family, for humanity, for education. This year, Passover and Easter were around the same time, so I went to a Passover seder with one of my friends, Rabbi David Saperstein ... and on Easter Sunday, I went to Harper's Ferry for Easter sunrise service, which was an ecumenical service. Putting all the stories together, what it makes me think is the extent to which people have a need to believe ... the idea that while we may be divided according to various religions, what is interesting is the similarities of the stories, of people yearning for something and being saved and having the hope of having a better life.

Also, the whole aspect of charity and forgiveness and generosity -- these are common in all religions as far as I can tell. It's interesting, I was always the most most religious member of my family. ... Even as a little girl, I played priest. I really find there is a comfort in religion and it doesn't matter which of the various traditions, it's a similar aspect. ... The thing that makes me the saddest is the divisions created by religion when it should be the opposite. ... I look for the common threads rather than the divisive ones.

Part of your book is about the moral decisions that were made by people, including your family, during World War II. Did the process of writing this book make you rethink decisions you have made?

I think a lot of the decisions I made were good decisions. A lot of decisions were made for me. Do I have any regrets? I think I made the right choices. I'm trying to analyze how much me is a reflection of how I was brought up. ... I'm grateful to be alive, I mean if it hadn't been for my parents having gotten me out (of Czechoslovakia), I certainly would be dead. ... A lot of what motivates me has to do with paying back. I know it may sound hokey, but it really is an important part of what makes me tick.

A thing I regret is that we weren't able to move faster on Yugoslavia. A thing I'm glad we did is Kosovo. The hard part is whether in order to stop ethnic cleansing, do you use air power with the idea that you might be killing innocent people along the way? Is it appropriate to decide that you are going to sacrifice one person's life in order to save another's? Those are very hard decisions that have to be made.

During the Kosovo War, one of the things I did was to hold daily conference calls with the other foreign ministers of NATO. We had the British, the French, the Germans, the Italians and me on the phone. The Italian foreign minister said 'Why don't we pause the bombing because it's Easter?' And the German official said, 'Why would we pause to honor one religion while we kill the people of another religion?' I thought it was one of the most amazing statements in terms of the commonness of identity and the importance of making the right moral decisions.

John Steele Gordon, Commentary
It is often said that the definition of the word gaffe in Washington-speak is when someone accidentally tells the truth. Al Armendariz, the EPA administrator for Texas and surrounding states, certainly made a gaffe when he said in a speech in 2010, that the best way to enforce environmental laws was to crucify a few oil companies so that the rest will fall in line. He noted that the Romans used this technique when they conquered a new town, crucifying the first five people they could get their hands on so that the place would be very easy to manage for the next few years. (I expect that that...

Paul Krugman, New York Times
This was the month the confidence fairy died.For the past two years most policy makers in Europe and many politicians and pundits in America have been in thrall to a destructive economic doctrine. According to this doctrine, governments should respond to a severely depressed economy not the way the textbooks say they should "” by spending more to offset falling private demand "” but with fiscal austerity, slashing spending in an effort to balance their budgets.

The markets have steadied a bit after their loss of nerve on Monday. But you can't help feeling that it is a bit like a climber, sliding down a glacier to his inevitable doom, who breaks his fall for a while on a crumbling ledge that soon will give way.

Things in Euroland have taken a bad turn for the worse - and it's the politics, stupid. It is not just the uncertainty about the second round of French presidential elections on 6 May. François Hollande, the Socialist leader, will probably win, because it will be easier for him than for Nicolas Sarkozy to pick up votes from those whose candidates were knocked out in the first round. But the energetic Sarko should never be underestimated. He is pitching his campaign hard to gain votes from the hard Right supporters of Marine Le Pen. Herein lies the problem for the euro and for Germany.

It almost doesn't matter who wins the election. The fiscal compact agreed in principle by 25 out of 27 European leaders in January - "a kind of German straitjacket for the fiscally wayward", to quote Stephen King, group chief economist of HSBC - is Angela Merkel's pride and joy, her answer to all the eurozone's difficulties. Typically, like the euro itself, it has been designed to make everyone more like Germany. Hollande has already made it a plank of his campaign to renegotiate the compact. Meanwhile, as Sarkozy moves ever rightwards, striking a strongly nationalist tone (and risking the estrangement of centrist voters), he puts himself increasingly at odds with a compact designed to create greater fiscal union on German terms. If Sarko wins, it is hard to see how Merkozy, never the warmest of unions, can simply pick up where they left off.

This is very bad news for Berlin; and could mean uncertain French intentions continuing long after the elections. Might the fiscal compact be derailed altogether? Given the collapse of the Dutch coalition government as well, this is a real possibility. The Netherlands is no flaky Mediterranean economy, but, with Germany, one of the most solid citizens of the eurozone.

Yet, it has been hit by a strain of euro-contagion. This has nothing to do with debt mountains, deficits or default. The contagion is political and it is this. People are simply not prepared to wear the German hair shirt any longer. The demands of austerity have gone beyond what societies and parliamentary democracies will tolerate. There is a direct link between riots in Madrid, a collapsing coalition in the Netherlands and the deep unpopularity of the whole European project.

For all the crises and endless euro-summits the moment of truth for Europe has not yet arrived.

But it is discernible in the intolerable tension between economics and politics, a tension that has already exploded in Greece, Italy, the Iberian states and now the Netherlands, with France on the brink. The danger in this lies not just in economic dislocation; but in a loss of faith in democracy itself as a system of government that can deliver prosperity, stability and security. In his brilliant The Dark Continent, a history of Europe in the 20th century, Mark Mazower argues that it was by no means inevitable that parliamentary democracy would defeat dictatorship.

Today, it is by no means inevitable that people, widely disillusioned with the political classes and battered by austerity, will retain their affection for democracy and not look for salvation in different and less savoury forms of government.