Where Did The Messiah's Magic Go?

Moynihan goes to D.C. A review of his letters to three presidents etc.(See 1 below.)
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Obama's enemy/'pinata' list is quite extensive. (See 2 below.)
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Ahmadinejad's visit to Lebanon deemed a flop. (See 3 below.)
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Hard for Arabs to cope with the reality of Israel. (See 4 below.)
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Obama has concluded that the trouble with America is that we are frightened and thus unable to think clearly.

Obama continues hurting his own cause by his arrogance and preachiness. (See 5 and
5a below.)

Where did the messiah's magic go? (See 5b below.)
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The recovery ain't necessarily so. This is why Fed is worried. (See 6 below.)
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Obamascare would have killed Marcus Welby's practice. (See 7 below.)
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Dick
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------1) The Professor Goes to Washington
By DAVID BROOKS

A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary
Edited by Steven R. Weisman
Illustrated. 705 pp. PublicAffairs. $35


Sometime in the late 1980s, I had lunch with Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The drug war was a hot topic of conversation, and at the start of the lunch I asked him how he thought it was going. To answer the question fully, he said, would require a little historical background.

He proceeded to launch off on a fascinating survey of government efforts to control behavior and illegal substances, beginning with classical Greece. By the time our meal was over and Moynihan had to head off to another appointment, I think we were up to the 18th century, though it could have been the 16th. It was a great lunch, although it didn’t help much with the newspaper article I was trying to write about the drug war.

That encounter did, however, raise the core question about Moynihan: Was he a scholar or a senator or some odd hybrid of the two?

The answer, of course, is that he was a hybrid — in that respect, but also in many others. He had the outlook of a poor, ­working-class boy, but was also a sophisticated Harvard intellectual. He was a liberal, but was suspicious of upper-middle-class liberals. He was an idealistic reformer, but also a conservative skeptic. He was a figure of the 18th-century Enlightenment, filled with grand thoughts and amateur enthusiasms, but he was also a mid-20th-century professional and policy expert, ensconced in some of his epoch’s most bitter conflicts.

Like a relic from another era, Moynihan, for much of his public life, wrote long, substantive letters. These were neither gossipy notes nor dishy character sketches. Though a skilled writer, Moynihan didn’t have a literary mind. He was in the Oval Office shortly after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and his description of the scene there was terse and uninformative. Instead, his letters recorded the evolving intellectual adventure of a restless mind. Moynihan explored the grand themes of history and tried to understand the times in the most ambitious of ways: the cultural implications of the shift from the industrial to the post-industrial society, the disaffection of the intellectual class, the foreign policy implications of ethnic tension in a post-Communist world.

Those letters have now been collected by a team led by Steven R. Weisman, once a colleague at The New York Times before he moved to the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The letters make for absorbing reading because Moynihan’s grand ideas were always driven by his own internal tensions. It was as if he were writing an intensely personal memoir but phrasing his discoveries in the language of Samuel Huntington.

Moynihan was born in 1927 and grew up poor. His father abandoned the family when the son was 10. “Both my mother and father — they let me down badly,” he wrote later. “The interesting thing is that I have almost no memory of Dad — and no emotions — on the other hand I find thru the years this enormous emotional attachment to Father substitutes.”

Moynihan became an adviser to a series of powerful elected leaders: Gov. Averell Harriman in New York, followed by Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. His official title in these administrations didn’t matter much. He became the Big Thinker Without Portfolio, writing his bosses long, sweeping memos — part flattery, part social science — on the historical moment and their potential place in it.

During the Kennedy and Johnson years, university liberals were increasinly at odds with white ethnics, the cops and working-class populations in Chicago, Brooklyn and South Boston. Moynihan, the hybrid, had a foot in both camps. In books, in magazines and in policy papers, he addressed the educated class, but from his own hardscrabble Irish-American perspective. In 1965, for example, many well-­educated reformers were optimistic about the war on poverty. Moynihan saw clouds looming: “Negroes today are a grievously injured people who in fair and equal competition will by and large lose out,” he wrote in a memo for Johnson.

The problems were caused not merely by white racism, he argued, but also weak family structure. “Probably not much more than a third of Negro youth reach 18 having lived all their lives with both parents,” Moynihan pointed out. “The breakdown of the Negro family is the principal cause of all the problems of delinquency, crime, school dropouts, unemployment and poverty which are bankrupting our cities.”

Views like these — expressed in the so-called Moynihan Report, a detailed analysis he prepared for Johnson in 1965 — unleashed a wave of fury. Wounded by accusations that he was a racist despite his passionate interest in the dire costs of poverty and racial injustice, Moynihan was touched by the few liberals who stood up to defend him. No one “has ever offered me more understanding when I so terribly needed to be understood,” he wrote to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, one of his champions,

Moynihan grew increasingly alarmed as he watched the Democratic Party become more defined by the salon liberalism of the Upper West Side. In the summer of 1968, he wrote a draft of a letter to Ted Kennedy, apparently never sent, in which he pleaded with Kennedy to stay true to the middle-class Irish his slain brother Robert seemed to have moved away from. The working class, he wrote, “were Bob’s people before he got religion, they have been abandoned, and our politics are very much the worst for it.”

Moynihan opposed the Vietnam War even while serving in administrations that waged it, but he became appalled by the effect late-’60s radicalism was having on the professoriate. “The elite intelligentsia of the country are turning against the country — in science, in politics, in the fundaments of patriotism. How can we not pay for this?” he wrote in a memo to Richard Nixon in 1969.

When Moynihan returned to Harvard in 1971 he found pervasive intellectual decay. “My impression of our graduating class this year was of persons who had apparently scarcely had an adult conversation in their full four years.”

The problem was that liberals were no longer willing to test their own assumptions. “The liberal project began to fail when it began to lie,” he remarked in 1991. When, for instance, the sociologist James Coleman wrote a tough-minded analysis on educational opportunity for The Public Interest, the policy journal Moynihan was closely identified with, the “response was that said social scientists and their craven lackeys were objective right-wing deviationists.”

During the Nixon years, Moynihan was propelled by the tension between his academic side and his practical policy-maker side. His memos to Nixon were brilliant (he was always at his best in times of greatest flux, whether 1968 or 1989). Moreover, his relationship with Nixon was fascinating. He seemed to regard him as part fellow intellectual, part thug.

He urged Nixon to lead an administration of “Tory men with Liberal principles” — a characteristically hybrid formulation, this time blending opposed ideologies. He asked Nixon to establish bold national minimum standards for welfare, so that every family would be guaranteed a base level of support. He deplored the rise of the New Left and the adversary culture of the intellectuals, and urged Nixon to meet and reconcile with moderate members of the peace movement: “It would seem most important to de-escalate the rhetoric of crisis about the internal state of the society,” he wrote at one point. “Cease attacking,” he pleaded, at another, to Vice President Spiro Agnew.

He also wrote a series of memos explaining why Vietnam was a domestic and foreign catastrophe. He became a strong internal critic of Agnew, and from his perch as ambassador to India, he was appalled by Watergate.

In May of 1973, he wrote a long, heartfelt letter to his Harvard colleague Nathan Glazer justifying his decision to get involved with the Nixon crowd in the first place. “When a conservative government came in and seemed sensitive to the fooleries of its predecessors, we were too grateful by half, and altogether too willing to supply arguments. We were willing to be used.”

After Nixon, and after his ambassadorship, Moynihan was again betwixt and between. Saul Bellow, Edward Shils and others at the University of Chicago offered him the opportunity to become a full-time academic. He didn’t think he was up to it. “I am not their equal,” Moynihan wrote in his journal (excerpts are included in this book). “Were I to settle among them they would find it out, and while they would never in the least way suggest that they had come to realize this, I would know they had and that would make it a waste for everyone.”

In a letter to Jeanne Kirkpatrick, he described his decision to run for the Senate, in 1976, in the most casual terms: “The choice was between taking a nap and commencing a long, lovely summer or getting on the shuttle for New York and announcing for the Senate. It was, as the Duke said of the Battle of Waterloo, ‘a damn close run thing.’ By an internal vote of 51 to 49, I got on the shuttle.”

His letters while in the Senate are not so interesting as the preceding ones. He never really describes the culture of the Senate, the back and forth, the collision of personalities. He became much more self-referential, as senators do, and much more interested in defending his ­reputation.

He did, however, retain his enthusiasms. From first to last, Moynihan threw himself into causes. As a young man, he was fervent about traffic safety — guiding a young Ralph Nader. All his life he was interested in the built environment, from creating a performing arts center in Washington to reviving Pennsylvania Avenue, one of his signature achievements.

In the Senate, he championed social security reform. He thought bullet control was more sensible than gun control. He wanted to eliminate the C.I.A. He fought with the Clintons over health care reform, and other things.

He put his hyper-intellectual cap back on in the late 1980s, with the fall of Communism. He had predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union as early as 1979 (all those years spent studying ethnic conflicts and failed economic development projects were not in vain). As the Berlin Wall came down, he began to rethink the world in the most sweeping terms. He decided that that moment was a once-in-a-generation opportunity to establish global rule of law. Needless to say, that project didn’t come to anything. But his letters on the subject still make for fascinating reading.

This whole collection has been put together with superb care. While writing this review, I’ve been cursing Weisman’s introduction for its mastery in highlighting all the crucial points about Moynihan’s life. It is hard to write anything about this book that doesn’t merely repeat that fine essay. Weisman has also written superb contextual paragraphs between the letters, so even people unfamiliar with Moynihan’s career will be able to follow along easily.

Moynihan contained different tendencies that were often in tension with one another. This state of affairs energized him. It made him hard to classify and unfit for the partisan warfare he saw rising as his career came to its end.

He remains an exemplar for those who find that their lives and views don’t fit neatly into a partisan camp, a guiding model for hybrids past and future.
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2)Obama enemies list


•The wealthy, unless they're Dem Donors.

•Cops, especially from Cambridge, who tried to save a Black Hahvad professor's home.

•The Military-can't vote without the ballots sent overseas. Is there an AG in this government who will enforce the law?

•Sarah Palin.

•Whites who are victims of campaign crimes by blacks.

•Those who believe that "tolerating" terrorist strikes on US soil is intolerable.

•Those who recognize the war on terror is against radical Muslims and those who support them.

•Conservatives, but especially, conservative blacks.

•Those who believe that the Ground Zero Mosque is a middle finger raised to America and those murdered on 9/11.

•Glenn Beck.

•Those who say Obamacare will kill the best medical system in the world.

•The Supreme Court, who voted to keep our right to free speech in a recent case, called out by Obama at the last State of the Union Address.

•Those who agree with Governor Brewer and the State of Arizona in their quest to save their state from an invasion of illegal immigrants.

•All non-minorities in the southwest.

•Rush Limbaugh.

•Those who believe Israel has a right to live in peace and security.


•Those who believe Britain is a valued ally, not to be insulted by a personal grudge based on Kenyan politics.

•George W. Bush.

•Those who believe our Commander-in-Chief shouldn't be out apologizing to the world in foreign, often hostile countries.

•Fox News.

•The United States Chamber of Commerce.

•Those who believe that we should be able to drill for our own energy resources and not give aid to foreign countries to drill wells twice as deep as the BP leaker.

•Those who believe man-made global warming is a scam.

•Tea Partiers.

•Those who believe the government shouldn't take over banks, car companies, student loans and media.

•Republicans, except for RINOS

and I would add anyone who disagrees with his policies.
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3) Lebanese leaders made sure the Ahmadinejad-Hizballah show was a flop


Despite Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's efforts to ham up his groundbreaking visit to Lebanon last week, military sources quote Western and Arab observers as summing it up as a dud and a shambles. Lebanese leaders clamped down on his performance in the South on Thursday, Oct. 10, and spoiled his plan for a grand display of hostile power opposite Israel.

That day, after receiving a University of Beirut honorary doctorate, the visitor was tackled over lunch by Lebanese President Michel Suleiman and chief of staff Gen. Jean Qahwaji who demanded that he rearrange his South Lebanon itinerary.

The original plan was for Ahmadinejad, with Hizballah chief Hassan Nasrallah beside him, to drive down the coast to the south past cheering and waving crowds. The Hizballah leader was to be the co-star of the event and their cavalcade's security escort entrusted to armed Hizballah men and Iranian Revolutionary Guards instead of Lebanese military soldiers.

In the event, Suleiman and Gen. Qahwaji insisted on cutting Hizballah out of any security tasks and the national army be exclusively responsible for his safety throughout the visit.

This decision set off furious arguments, with Nasrallah threatening to torpedo the entire event if he was not permitted to accompany Ahmadinejad on his tour of the Lebanese-Israel border.

The visitor finally bowed to his hosts' demand. As a result, Ahmadiinejad's trip South started late Thursday afternoon and had to be rushed through the two hours remaining before nightfall. The triumphal coastal drive was called off and the Iranian president carried to Bin Jbeil in S. Lebanon, some two kilometers from the Israeli border, by a Lebanese army helicopter. The troops refused to let Nasrallah climb aboard the chopper and he was left behind.

So furious was the Hizballah chief at being thrown off the helicopter and left out of the high point of his boss's visit that he ordered his top commanders to boycott the ceremonial welcome for Ahmadinejad at Bin Jbeil. They were therefore conspicuous by their absence. By the time the speech was over, the light was fading and the Lebanese officers accompanying Ahmadinejad told him that the helicopter flight in the dark to his next stop at Maroun a-Ras, right on the border, was too risky to undertake so late.

Ahmadinejad had to give up his ultimate provocation of reviewing the battlefields of the 2006 Israel-Hizballah war within the sight of Israel and standing alongside the golden replica of Al Aqsa in Jerusalem which Hizballah had constructed in his honor.

In this way, the Lebanese president and chief of staff managed to keep the Iranian president away from the border with Israel and staging the confrontational poses to which his visit had been building up.

At the time, the delay in Ahmadinejad's arrival in the South was explained as caused by his effort to persuade Prime Minister Saad Hariri to dismantle the UN tribunal and so avoid having Hizballah officials indicted for complicity in the murder of his father Rafiq Hariri five years ago.

The subject never arose between them, our sources report. The Lebanese prime minister was already packing ready to fly to Riyadh and report to King Abdullah on the Ahmadinejad visit which the Saudis deeply resented.

The following Sunday, Oct. 17, Middle East sources disclose that Jeffrey Feltman, US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, arrived in Beirut for a brief stop. He had been instructed to assess the damage Ahmadinejad's visit had wrought to US interests in the country and report back to President Barack Obama.
The American official was informed that the Iranian president had opted for giving his visit a Lebanese national character rather than reflecting Hizballah factional interests. The report he brought back to Washington was therefore favorable. Neither Ahmadinejad nor Nasrallah had obtained any of their objectives from the event.
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4)The undeniable Jewish state
By Jeff Jacoby


Is Israel a Jewish state?

Is the pope Catholic?

Nothing about Israel could be more self-evident than its Jewishness. As Poland is the national state of the Polish people and Japan is the national state of the Japanese people, so Israel is the national state of the Jewish people. The UN's 1947 resolution on partitioning Palestine contains no fewer than 30 references to the "Jewish state" whose creation it was authorizing; 25 years earlier, the League of Nations had been similarly straightforward in mandating "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." When Israel came into existence on May 15, 1948, its Jewish identity was the first detail reported. The New York Times's front-page story began: "The Jewish state, the world's newest sovereignty, to be known as the State of Israel, came into being in Palestine at midnight upon termination of the British mandate."

Today, half the planet's Jews live in that state, many of them refugees from anti-Semitic repression and violence elsewhere. In a world with more than 20 Arab states and 55 Muslim countries, the existence of a single small Jewish state should be unobjectionable. "Israel is a sovereign state, and the historic homeland of the Jewish people," President Barack Obama told the UN General Assembly last month. By now that should be a truism, no more controversial than calling Italy the sovereign homeland of the Italian people.

And yet to Israel's enemies, Jewish sovereignty is as intolerable today as it was in 1948, when five Arab armies invaded the newborn Jewish state, vowing "a war of extermination and a momentous massacre." Endless rounds of talks and countless invocations of the "peace process" have not changed the underlying reality of the Arab-Israeli conflict, which is not about settlements or borders or Jerusalem or the rights of Palestinians. The root of the hostility is the refusal to recognize the immutable right of the Jewish people to a sovereign state in its historic homeland. Until that changes, no lasting peace is possible.

That is why the Israeli government is correct to insist that the Palestinian Authority publicly recognize Israel as the Jewish state. It is the critical litmus test. "Palestinian nationalism was based on driving all Israelis out," Edward Said told an interviewer in 1999, and the best evidence that most Palestinians are still intent on eliminating Israel is the vehemence with which even supposed "moderates" like Mahmoud Abbas will not -- or dare not -- acknowledge Israel's Jewishness as a legitimate fact of life. "What is a 'Jewish state?'" Abbas ranted on Palestinian TV. "You can call yourselves whatever you want, but I will not accept it. . . . You can call yourselves the Zionist Republic, the Hebrew, the National, the Socialist [Republic]. Call it whatever you like. I don't care."

There are those who argue that Israel cannot be both a Jewish state and a democracy. When Israel's parliament decided last week to require new non-Jewish citizens to take an oath of allegiance to Israel as a "Jewish and democratic" state, some people bristled. "The phrase itself is an oxymoron," one reader wrote to the Boston Globe. "How can a state openly favor one ethnic group over all others and declare itself to be democratic?"

But there is no conflict at all between Israel's Jewish identity and its democratic values. Indeed, the UN's 1947 partition resolution not only called for subdividing Palestine into "independent Arab and Jewish states," it explicitly required each of them to "draft a democratic constitution" and to elect a government "by universal suffrage and by secret ballot." The Jews complied. The Arabs launched a war.

Many of the world's democracies have official state religions. Think of Britain, whose monarch is the supreme governor of the Church of England; or of Greece, whose constitution singles out the Eastern Orthodox Church as the country's "prevailing religion." The linking of national character with religion is a commonplace. Israel stands out only because its religion is Judaism, not Christianity, Islam, or Hinduism.

Nor is democracy incompatible with ethnic or national distinctiveness. Ireland waives its usual citizenship requirements for applicants of Irish descent. Bulgaria's constitution grants the right to "acquire Bulgarian citizenship through a facilitated procedure" to any "person of Bulgarian origin." It is not oxymoronic to describe Ireland as "Irish and democratic" or Bulgaria as "Bulgarian and democratic." Israel's flourishing little Jewish democracy is no oxymoron either.

It is something different: a beacon of decency in a dangerous and hate-filled neighborhood. If the enemies of the Jewish state could only shed their malice, what an Eden that neighborhood could become.
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5)What's the Matter With America?

President Obama's false consciousness theory of economic worries

In his 2004 bestseller "What's the Matter with Kansas?," our former columnist Thomas Frank argued that social conservatism is a form of "working class" false consciousness and that blue-collar voters ignored their own economic interests by declining to support Democrats. Now President Obama is picking up the theme, albeit with a twist.

"And so part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now, and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time, is because we're hard-wired not to always think clearly when we're scared," Mr. Obama told an audience of well-heeled liberal donors at a Boston-area fundraiser over the weekend. The country's anti-Democratic mood, he said, was the result of "having gone through this trauma."

Mr. Obama meant the 2008 financial panic and recession, not two years of liberal governance. But it's telling that the President is blaming the lousy economy that he was elected to fix for his party's electoral predicament. Democrats blamed John Kerry's 2004 defeat on the culture war, and now they're pre-emptively blaming November on the false consciousness of economic worries. They might as well be asking, "What's the matter with America?"



5a)Morning Jay: Obama's Dime Store Sociology.
By JAY COST


President Barack Obama said Americans' "fear and frustration" is to blame for an intense midterm election cycle that threatens to derail the Democratic agenda.

"Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we're hardwired not to always think clearly when we're scared,” Obama said Saturday evening in remarks at a small Democratic fundraiser Saturday evening. “And the country's scared.”

Not the first time we’ve heard comments like this. Remember these comments about the Israeli people?

During the interview Wednesday, when confronted with the anxiety that some Israelis feel toward him, Obama said that "some of it may just be the fact that my middle name is Hussein, and that creates suspicion."

And who could forget this shot at the bitter clingers of small town Pennsylvania?

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

This kind of dime store sociological explanation is pretty common for the president, despite the fact that it landed him in hot water back in the spring of 2008. These comments have three traits in common.

(a) He doesn’t really know what he’s talking about. Obama might seem like a sociological expert, but he really just plays one on television. For instance, explaining the cultural conservatism of small town Pennsylvania as an artifact of economic decline sounds extremely ill-informed to anybody with at least passing familiarity of the subject.

(b) Hardships generate a false consciousness that always seems to manifest itself as irrational opposition to...Obama. As far as Obama is concerned, the fact that the country is disappointed with his performance is not a sign that he hasn’t done what he promised, but that the country is not thinking clearly.

(c) He turns fellow citizens into sociological subjects. It is one thing for a professor doing a study to treat other human beings as subjects; it’s another for the president of the United States to do it. There is a condescending, anti-republican quality to these statements. Rather than take opposition at face value – President Obama locates the hidden causes behind it, causes that his fellow citizens do not even understand themselves.


This is a terribly bad habit of President Obama's. It comes across as arrogant and condescending, and it doesn’t do a thing to help persuade people.


5b)Obamas at Ohio State: Searching for Missing Magic of 2008
By Walter Shapiro

Taking the stage to nostalgic chants of "Yes, we can," the best campaigner in the Democratic Party not named Bill Clinton made her 2010 political big-stage debut Sunday night on the Ohio State campus. After Michelle Obama evoked gauzy memories of the 2008 campaign ("Tell me, Ohio, are you as fired up as you were two years ago?"), the president of the United States spoke as well, using twin Teleprompters.

There was little news embedded in the president's words unless you care that Obama offered Ohio State condolences on its stunning Saturday night football defeat against Wisconsin. Or that, according to Ohio State campus police, the crowd was charitably estimated at 35,000. There were the familiar 2010 tropes, like his automotive attack line on the Republicans, "It's as if they drove America's car into the ditch." Once again, Obama warned about the implications of hidden corporate campaign spending because of a recent Supreme Court decision: "This isn't a threat to the Democrats, it's a threat to our democracy."

But chroniclers of the pageant of democracy that is the down-and-dirty 2010 campaign may be tempted to over-hype the importance of the Obamas' buy-one-get-one-free campus rally. What happens in the Columbus media market tends to stay in the Columbus media market. In Cincinnati, for example, where incumbent Democratic U.S. Rep. Steve Driehaus is facing a daunting re-election campaign, I asked him about the spillover effects of Obama's appearance on his race. It was as if I were inquiring about how a presidential visit to the University of Wisconsin (where Obama held his first Big Ten campus rally last month) might shape Driehaus' campaign. "If Obama came to Cincinnati it would be different," said Driehaus. "But Columbus is 100 miles away. It doesn't matter."

Comments like these reflect the reality that political enthusiasm like an inexpensive country wine does not travel. Greg Schultz, the Ohio director for Organizing for America, the Democratic Party's offshoot from the 2008 Obama campaign, says, "Ohio is such a complicated state in which to campaign, it's so regionalized." This problem is not a reflection of any distaste for Obama or – more important Michelle Obama – among the strands of the Democratic mosaic. "If Michelle Obama comes to Cincinnati and makes a plea about how her husband has been treated, every woman in this city and every woman in the black community would kill themselves with enthusiasm," was the hyperbolic prediction of Alicia Reece, an African-American Democratic state representative from central Cincinnati.

But even in Columbus and surrounding Franklin County, mobilizing the Democratic base remains tricky. Three-term Columbus Mayor Michael Coleman spent Sunday morning making the rounds of four black churches. "In each of the churches, " he said in an interview, "I asked how many of them had voted in 2008. And 99 percent of them raised their hands. Then I asked how many of them had voted early this year. Eighty to eighty-five percent said they had not voted." By the end of his pulpit appearances, in the mayor's telling, almost all of the church-goers were pledging to vote this year. As Coleman put it optimistically, "The president's campaigning here today will light a fire under them."

Well, maybe. Facing an up-against-the-wall political environment, the Democrats may have no choice but to fantasize about the armies of 2008 miraculously reappearing on the battlefield. As Ohio Democratic strategist Greg Haas explains, "It takes a long time to change people's minds. But it takes only one news story for the alarm bells to go off – and to awake a sleeping giant to turn out to vote."

But in a larger sense, the entire rally at Ohio State was all about Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland's re-election race, in which he trails former GOP Congressman John Kasich by a potentially surmountable single-digit margin in recent polls. Doomed Senate candidate Lee Fisher, the current lieutenant governor, is discussed in hushed funereal tones when Ohio Democrats bother to remember that he is running for the seat held by the retiring George Voinovich. There was, for example, minimal applause when Fisher waved as he mounted the platform as an Obama warm-up speaker.

Columbus-based first-term House Democrat Mary Jo Kilroy, who also spoke briefly at the rally, is the only congressional incumbent in a geographic position to benefit from any Obama-fueled increase in turnout. But Kilroy, like Driehaus in Cincinnati, is no longer on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's lifeboat list and she headed into October with one-sixth the available campaign funds of her GOP challenger Steve Stivers.

But Strickland is the centerpiece of Democratic turnout efforts in central Ohio. The reason is obvious: Anyone wonder why Obama has made 11 presidential trips to Ohio, the state where the 2004 election was lost for the Democrats? As Strickland put it bluntly, introducing the president and first lady, "Let's get ready for 2012 by sending Democrats back to Columbus and Washington this year." That is why Obama and Strickland, who enthusiastically backed Hillary Clinton during the 2008 Ohio primary, are locked in such a tight embrace. As Mike Brown, a campaign adviser to the Columbus mayor puts it, "The question is whether we can get 2 percent more turnout for Strickland than in a normal gubernatorial year. That's the Obama piece."

Yet watching the faces in the crowd at the Ohio State rally and listening to the chatter afterward as the largely student audience wandered toward the restaurants and bars on High Street, I had a sense that the Obama piece was still missing in action. But that is not to write off the Democrats' chances, especially those of Strickland, in Ohio. After all, this may be a year in which elections are won by following legendary Buckeye coach Woody Hayes' non-dramatic grind-the-down strategy of "three yards and a cloud of dust."
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6)Production in U.S. Unexpectedly Falls for First Time in a Year
By Courtney Schlisserman and Bob Willis


Production in the U.S. unexpectedly dropped in September for the first time in more than a year, showing the industry that led the economy out of the recession is cooling. Output at factories, mines and utilities fell 0.2 percent, the first decline since the recession ended in June 2009, figures from the Federal Reserve showed today. Bloomberg's Betty Liu and Michael McKee report. (Source: Bloomberg)
Production in the U.S. unexpectedly dropped in September for the first time in more than a year, evidence of the slowdown in growth that is concerning some Federal Reserve policy makers.

Output at factories, mines and utilities fell 0.2 percent, the first decline since the recession ended in June 2009, according to figures from the Fed today. Another report showed builders were less pessimistic than projected this month.

Slackening production means it will take longer for the economy to make a dent in the excess capacity that is containing prices and prompting Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke to consider additional monetary stimulus. Improving demand from overseas and gains in business investment indicate orders at manufacturers like Alcoa Inc. will not weaken much more.

“It’s just not the kind of pace we need to create jobs and make inroads into reducing unused capacity and reduce unemployment,” said John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics LLC in New York. “It is encouraging to see a little more optimism on the housing side, which might mean the sector is starting to stabilize.”

Confidence among U.S. homebuilders rose in October to the highest level in four months, a sign residential construction is steadying near record lows, a report from the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo also showed today.

The group’s confidence index increased to 16, exceeding the most optimistic forecast in a Bloomberg News survey, from 13 in September. Readings less than 50 mean more respondents said conditions were poor than good.

Shares Rise

Stocks rose, buoyed by earnings at Citigroup Inc. that exceeded analysts’ estimates as reserves for loan losses fell, and Treasuries securities also climbed. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index increased 0.2 percent to 1,178.69 at 11:52 a.m. in New York. The yield on the benchmark 10-year note, which moves inversely to prices, fell to 2.50 percent from 2.56 percent late on Oct. 15.

Another report today showed global demand for U.S. stocks, bonds and other financial assets rose in August as investors bought Treasuries in anticipation of Fed monetary easing. Net buying of long-term instruments totaled $128.7 billion in August compared with net buying of $61.2 billion in July, according to data from the Treasury Department.

Economists forecast production would increase 0.2 percent, according to the median of 63 projections in a Bloomberg News survey. Estimates ranged from a decrease of 0.3 percent to a gain of 0.4 percent. The drop followed an unrevised 0.2 percent gain in August.

Production Breakdown

Factory production also decreased 0.2 percent, the first drop since June, reflecting a 0.9 percent fall in consumer durables, like appliances and furniture. Output of motor vehicles and technology equipment, including computers and semiconductors, rose. The latter signals business investment in new equipment was still growing.

Capacity utilization, which measures the amount of a plant in use, decreased to 74.7 percent last month from 74.8 percent in August. The gauge averaged 80 percent over the past 20 years, showing there’s enough spare plant equipment and space to prevent bottlenecks that would lead prices higher.

Bernanke and his colleagues at the policy-making Federal Open Market Committee are considering ways they can further stimulate the economy after lowering interest rates almost to zero and purchasing $1.7 trillion of securities. Bernanke last week said the economy may need more stimulus because inflation was too low and unemployment was too high.

Fed Outlook

“There remains lots of unused capacity and, with output slowing in the quarter, we can see these data providing more support among some members of the FOMC for QE2,” Ryding said in a note to clients, referring to a second round of quantitative easing or large-scale asset purchases.

General Electric Co.’s Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Immelt said there is “slow recovery in a few areas,” during a call with analysts last week after the world’s biggest producer of power-plant turbines reported third-quarter sales that missed analysts estimates. “The environment continues to get better.”

Foreign demand may help sustain growth. Exports rose 0.2 percent in August to the highest level in two years, Commerce Department figures showed last week.

New York-based Alcoa, the largest U.S. aluminum producer, reported profit that beat analysts’ estimates and said sales abroad are climbing.

Demand Overseas

“In countries such as China, Brazil, India and Russia, more and more people are moving into the middle class, driving demand,” Chief Executive Officer Klaus Kleinfeld said in a statement on Oct. 7.

Reports last week suggested manufacturing will continue to support the recovery and that consumer spending in gaining speed.

The New York Fed’s October general economic index rose to the highest level in four months. Retail sales for September beat forecasts, prompting economists at Morgan Stanley in New York to boost their projection for third-quarter consumer spending.

In advance of the pickup in spending, businesses increased inventories in each of the first eight months of 2010, according to figures from the Commerce Department. Additional gains will probably be determined by the pace of household purchases.
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7)Killing Marcus Welby
How ObamaCare stifles private practices
By SCOTT GOTTLIEB

If ObamaCare really called for the creation of "death panels," the first victim of these in vented tribunals would have been Marcus Welby MD, the character in the hit 1960s television show that followed the daily dramas of a small-town family doctor.

The health legislation doesn't call on government tribunals to euthanize seniors, as some fanciful critics claim, but the bill does kill off private-practice medicine.

ObamaCare envisions that doctors will fold their private offices to become salaried hospital employees, making it easier for the federal government to regulate them and centrally manage the costly medical services they prescribe. To get this control, ObamaCare creates "Accountable Care Organizations," which are basically hospitals coupled with local doctor networks that the hospital owns.


ABC PHOTO
Welby: Family doctor would find himself a hospital employee under prez's health law.
Under ObamaCare, an ACO is supposed to take "accountability" for local Medicare patients, who in turn get most care from providers working inside the ACO's network. To encourage efficiency and cost-cutting, an ACO can share in the savings it achieves from more closely managing its assigned pool of patients. The idea is to give doctors a financial incentive to better coordinate care and reduce their use of costly medical services.

The ACO concept was coined in 2006 by the same Dartmouth health researchers who famously found that higher Medicare spending doesn't correlate with better medical outcomes. Their data was controversial. Some experts refuted the findings. Even so, it became the intellectual foundation for ObamaCare's vision of "bending the cost curve" -- that you can improve medical outcomes by cutting Medicare spending. The ACOs have become Washington's most fashionable vehicle for pursuing that prophecy.

In many ways, the ACO concept builds on the 1990s approach to "capitation," in which health-maintenance organizations gave doctors a lump sum to care for a group of patients. This arrangement put a financial onus on doctors to cut costs. The concept lowered spending but was unpopular with patients, leading to a backlash against managed care.

Even if the Obama team dresses up the same concepts in a new acronym, their regulatory impulse to tightly manage how these organizations operate tilts the ACOs into the hands of hospitals. It forces doctors to sell their medical practices to these networks if the physicians want to maintain what they're paid by Medicare.

Obama's health-care czar, Nancy Ann DeParle, laid bare this financial coercion. Writing recently in the "Annals of Internal Medicine," she said that "the economic forces put in motion by [the Obama health-care plan] are likely to lead to vertical organization of providers and accelerate physician employment by hospitals and aggregation into larger physician groups." Physicians, she said, "that accept the challenge will be rewarded in the future payment system" as ObamaCare "reforms" how doctors are paid under Medicare.

The Obama plan contains other economic forces that will drive such "vertical integration" in which doctors become employees of hospitals and health plans. For one, under ObamaCare, health plans will see their revenue (premiums) and costs (medical benefits) largely fixed by government regulation. So the only way health plans can improve their profits is by cheapening the product that they provide, in other words, holding down the cost of the health coverage that they offer.

In turn, the only way to cheapen health coverage is to control the medical services consumers can access. The only way to tightly control the use of medical services is to exert more leverage over the doctors who order the tests and treatments. That means health plans will need to maintain tight networks of providers to exert more control over doctors -- or else own the physicians outright. So expect to see health plans doing their own "vertical integration" -- buying out medical practices, just like hospitals are doing.

According to a recent survey of health executives, 74 percent said their hospitals or health systems plan to employ more physicians over the next 3 years, and 61 percent plan to acquire medical groups. The doctor-recruitment firm Merritt Hawkins said that 45 percent of physician job searches last year were for direct employment of a doctor by a hospital, up from 23 percent in 2005.

In 2005, more than two-thirds of medical practices were doctor-owned, a share that was largely constant for many years. By next year, the share of practices owned by physicians will probably drop below 40 percent, according to data from the Medical Group Management Association. Hospitals or health plans will own the balance of doctor practices.

So the next time you see your doctor, it may be far from home, in an office park built by your nearest hospital. Thanks to ObamaCare, Marcus Welby is taking down his shingle. He's becoming an employee of General Hospital.

Scott Gottlieb, a physician and American Enterprise Institute resident fellow, is a partner in a firm that invests in health-care companies.
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