Photo illo: Ed Johnson.

Having won a (temporary) victory in our now-endless budget battle, President Obama is now free to pursue the agenda that he’s laid out for his second term. As gleaned from various statements and media interviews, this includes: securing our withdrawal from Afghanistan, passing immigration reform, doing something about global climate change, doing something about gun control, “stabilizing” and “growing” the economy, fixing our infrastructure, making us energy independent and, of course, education.

Sorry, that sound you just heard was America’s head hitting the desk.

Mr. Obama could not possibly have put forward these proposals in any more obscure a manner, or with any less eloquence or passion. The president’s disdain for practical politics is already legend; his general disposition now seems to be devolving into somnambulism. Surely, no Democratic president since Grover Cleveland—and very few presidents, period—has staked out a less ambitious agenda for his second term. The stuff on the list that sounds good will never get done, and the rest doesn’t much matter.

Immigration reform is the one possible exception, as Republicans belatedly realize their party is demographically doomed if they don’t start catering to more than aged white American males.

Afghanistan is already history, an unpopular war in a dreadful place. Our exit will be messy no matter how it’s finessed, and the locals will immediately revert to their second-favorite occupation, killing each other.

Infrastructure repair is a fine idea, and a badly needed one. It’s dead-on-arrival with House Republicans, due to its “second stimulus” appearance. Don’t take the Tappan Zee.

Education reform is the mashed potatoes of politics, a meaningless mass that always looks good on the plate. “A better economy” is the big fat pat of butter you plop in the middle of the mashed potatoes. Gun control of any kind will be blocked by the right wing in Congress. President Obama was never able to summon much passion for the subject, and every day the horrors of Sandy Hook recede further into the blur of a dozen previous such atrocities.

Mr. Obama did some marginally good things about climate change in his first term—a high-speed rail line here, higher mileage standards for Detroit there—but overall, he’s never displayed much enthusiasm on this subject, either. For starters, doing anything about the climate will run smack into his stated desire for “energy independence,” which is now defined as a full-throttle, stunningly irresponsible orgy of deep-water oil drilling, fracking and—oh yeah, my favorite—“clean coal.” The president barely mentioned global warming during the campaign. He then set a speed record in cutting the throat of his own “priority” by citing the lack of any will to make the “tough political choices” necessary to save the world, claiming that “I’m pretty certain” no consensus exists in Washington on the subject, and adding—just in case we didn’t get the point—that “This one’s hard.”

Ah, so it is. Seems not so long ago that we had a president who told us, “We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

No more. Mr. Obama is not formally a part of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), but over the last four years, he has proven himself to be a de facto member of that runaway conservative caucus, filling his cabinet with veterans from the administration of the last DLC president, Bill Clinton, who’ve been filling his mind with their ideas. And like them, he has served mostly as a manager of decline, of America’s retreat from what it was and what it can be in the world.

Ever since the Civil War, the Republicans have been the truly radical party in America, the Democrats the conciliators. For better or worse, Republicans have embraced or fomented ideas—abolition, suffrage, Social Darwinism, laissez-faire economics, progressivism, prohibition, modern conservatism—that have challenged and divided the country, and pushed it into brave new worlds.

Democrats have generally tried to reconcile and explain Americans to each other. Sometimes this has been a really bad idea—such as trying to appease Southern slave owners, or later the Klan—while often it has meant accepting immigrants, or co-opting and bringing into the political mainstream ideas like populism, civil rights, the labor movement, feminism and gay rights.

The rise of the DLC—whose ideas now dominate the leadership of the Democratic party, if not its rank and file—represented something else altogether, a capitulation to the basic premises of Reaganism, the latest radical Republican idea.

As a result, both parties have now presided over a generation-long decline of the middle and working classes—something unprecedented in American history. Since the start of the 1980s, income and living standards for most Americans have declined, wages have lagged far behind rises in productivity, the public sector and workers’ rights have been steadily whittled away, and the disparity between the very wealthy and the rest of us has reverted to 1920s levels. The industrial base has been increasingly converted to a finance-based economy, which has led to a regular series of debilitating financial crashes—the savings and loan debacle, the tech boom bust, the market meltdown of 2008—that have further squandered our national wealth.

The Democrats have proven to be the most scrupulous stewards of this new shrinking America—shrinking not just in economic size but in vision and ambition—as Reaganism itself has proven to be a hollow gong and Republicans’ latest bold radical ideas have blasted off into the la-la lands of Ayn Rand, creationism and government by the gun, for the gun, of the gun. The traveling freak show the party trotted out for last year’s presidential primaries was probably enough right there to turn much of the country back to Obama, and understandably so.

Yet the Republican accusation hurled at the president throughout the campaign (inchoate and misdirected though it often was) that he was merely presiding over decline held some validity.

Mr. Obama and his DLC allies see no real role for either a working class or a public sector in the America of the future. It’s why their meat is financial crises and complex fiscal “bargains.” As President Obama has also repeatedly signaled, some of the things he’s willing to trim to achieve “economic stability” in these negotiations are Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits—likely with the idea of, someday, privatizing them altogether.

Obama & Co. pride themselves on being “pragmatists” in making such deals, and have no patience for outsider movements of any kind, even those peopled mostly by their own constituents.

Stopping climate change is, for them, pie-in-the-sky stuff, because it doesn’t have the votes. But like many people who pride themselves on their practicality, Mr. Obama can’t see the forest for the toppled trees. The $60 billion or so our local representatives are now trying to squeeze out of Congress is intended to patch up exactly one storm. It’s also a year’s worth of the new tax revenues the administration just had such a struggle squeezing out of the rich. So much for climate change’s irrelevance to the future.

When it comes to America, you might as well try to do the hard thing.

editorial@observer.com

Photo illustration: Ed Johnson

“One day, whole tribe falls off cliff.”

—Chief Wild Eagle, Hekawi Indians

Wow, that was a close one, wasn’t it?  We just missed going over that fiscal cliff!

Or did we? Technically, we walked right off it, with no compromise on the budget officially voted on and signed into law before the end of 2012.

But then, that was an intrinsic part of this whole tortured endgame. By letting the old George W. Bush income tax rates expire with the old year—and replacing them with new rates—both parties have now magically changed what is really a $620 billion tax hike over the next ten years into a mind-boggling $3.9 trillion tax cut.  Hurrah!  The magic of politics.

Barring some mad tea party revolt in the Republican-controlled House, the great budget compromise will be completed shortly and signed by President Obama. (The Constitution, a document Republicans claim to consider sacred and insist must be followed literally, specifies that the budget is supposed to originate in the House. But apparently such principles didn’t hold up to the greater need for John Boehner to hang on to his speakership.)

The deal reached in Washington has its flaws and its bright spots—such as the fact that unemployment benefits will be extended for another year, thereby aiding those Americans in most desperate need of help. In any case, it will no doubt be hailed as a sign that we can all get along, and calm the markets until the next manufactured crisis—the need to extend the debt limit—which won’t occur until ... next month.

Lost in all this maneuvering is any rigorous analysis of why it’s so imperative that we conclude a long-term agreement to reduce the deficit right now, while we’re still crawling out of a devastating recession.

Thomas Friedman at The New York Times has been insisting forever that any budget deal should be a “grand bargain,” in which we cut Social Security and Medicare benefits, then use the money both to pay down the deficit and to invest heavily in infrastructure and technological research. He likes to call this “eating our vegetables,” or “taking our medicine,” and insists it will lay the foundation for a new era of American prosperity. The trouble is that it’s hard to see exactly how even roads and a new tech boom will help impoverished seniors desperate for health care. And, oh yeah, there’s the little problem that Republicans are insisting that any new revenue go toward reducing the deficit, period.

N. Gregory Mankiw, senior economic advisor to both W. and Mitt, warned us in the Times this weekend that “At some point, investors at home and abroad will start questioning our ability to service our debts without creating steep inflation.”

My goodness! When will this happen?

Well, Mr. Mankiw admits, “It’s hard to say precisely when ... and even whether it will strike in this president’s term or the next.” But don’t worry: “when it does [happen], it won’t be pretty. The United States will find itself at the brink of an unprecedented fiscal crisis.”

Deficit pimps Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, skipping between comic YouTube videos and $40,000-a-pop speeches, titled their risibly portentous report on the subject “The Moment of Truth,” and insist in its preamble that “Deep down, every American knows we face a moment of truth once again.”

See that? Who needs reason or logic? If you’re a true American, you’ll know it in your heart. And have no doubt: “The problem is real. The solution will be painful. There is no easy way out. Everything must be on the table. Washingtonmust lead.”

What Messrs. Bowles and Simpson want is actually another cliché, the full “burn this village to save it” solution: $2.9 trillion in spending cuts and $2.6 trillion in tax increases of one sort or another over the next 10 years.

The alternative? You heard it all through the presidential campaign: “The contagion of debt that began in Greece and continues to sweep through Europe shows us clearly that no country is immune. If the U.S. does not put its house in order, the reckoning will be sure and the devastation severe.”

Right—because the United States is just like Greece, a poor nation of 10 million people that doesn’t control its own currency.

A better model might be another debt-swept European nation. That’s doughty old England, still clinging to the pound and coming off more than 30 years of just the sort of Thatcherite and New Labour economics so widely admired in the American media.

The U.K. plunged into an even steeper recession than we had, at almost the same moment and for much the same reasons: a burst housing bubble leading to a major financial crisis. By 2010, it had also pretty much matched our own sluggish recovery, the U.K.’s economy growing slowly but surely.

But about the same time “The Moment of Truth” came out, the U.K.’s Conservative-led government actually imposed the ruthless austerity program that Messrs. Simpson and Bowles advocated. This included massive social welfare cuts, the slashing of nearly all government departments by at least 25 percent, wage freezes for the remaining public employees and a wide array of tax increases.

All of this succeeded—in immediately plunging the nation into a double-dip recession. As the Boston Globe reported Sunday, Britain’s unemployment rate surpassed our own last October; it is now 60 percent above what it was at the start of the first “dip” back in 2008, and shows no signs of slowing. The country is devastated, with families mobbing its food banks.

“It’s a hard road, but we are getting there,” insisted George Osborne, the hard-right British chancellor of the exchequer. “Britain is on the right track—and turning back now would be a disaster.”

But this statement is as bizarre as Mr. Mankiw’s contention that we must inflict more human suffering now, out of fear that it might occur sometime before 2017—or maybe after. Economics is a function of time as well as money, not some theoretical quest. Years of mass unemployment and neglected public investment can never truly be recovered, either in shattered personal lives or the life of a nation. They mean emptied bank accounts, foreclosed houses, foregone opportunities, rusting job skills, despair and rage.

“Austerity” only makes it more difficult—if not impossible—to climb out of a recession. In the end, it’s difficult not to see all this rhetoric of pain and hard roads and vegetable-eating and heartfelt truths as anything but what Dick Cheney once trashed conservation as: “a sign of personal virtue, but not a sufficient basis for sound ... policy.”

None of these commentators or economists or public officials will experience any actual pain from anything they’re proposing, nor will anyone they know. In the meantime, neither they, nor President Obama, nor the Republicans offer us even an acknowledgement of the central matter at hand throughout the Western world: how do you keep enormous, mass-consumer economies afloat while simultaneously eradicating their industrial bases, shrinking their public sectors, depressing wages and subsidizing the most irresponsible financial institutions in modern history?

“What a wonder is a gun!
What a versatile invention!
First of all, when you’ve a gun—
Everybody pays attention.”

—Stephen Sondheim, Assassins

Last year I had the opportunity to review Candice Millard’s excellent history of the Garfield assassination, Destiny of the Republic. President Garfield’s killer, Charles J. Guiteau, has generally been characterized as “a disgruntled office-seeker,” but as Millard makes clear, he was barking mad. His own family was terrified of him and had been for years, but it proved impossible to find him any effective mental health care.

Finding a cheap handgun in the nation’s capital, on the other hand, proved very easy. One murdered president later, attention was paid.

That was 131 years ago. Little has changed. Getting effective, affordable mental health care is nearly as difficult for many Americans as it was in Garfield’s time, while guns are more ubiquitous and deadly than ever.

Nor will the situation change any time soon, regardless of the terrible tragedy at Newtown. A popular sentiment has arisen that this time it will be different, that at long last we can “start a conversation” about gun violence in the United States.

But gun owners and manufacturers, the National Rifle Association (NRA) and most of the Republican party have already had that conversation. Their conclusion was that they like guns, all sorts of guns, with as few restrictions on their purchase or lethality as possible.

Republican legislators have had their conversation. They’ve spent the last couple years passing legislation that allows individuals to carry guns on trains and in national parks, in our schools and our churches, and in our bars—thereby accelerating an arms race of fear and paranoia.

Republican congressman Louie Gohmert of Texas has had this conversation. He’s been on television fervently wishing that the principal at Sandy Hook Elementary School had had her own automatic weapon, locked and loaded and ready to blow the head off the bad guy.

Fox commentator Mike Huckabee’s had this conversation. He concluded that “we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools become a place of carnage?”

The town of Newtown’s had this conversation. Some residents tried to regulate the growing tendency of their neighbors to fire automatic weapons at propane tanks and targets loaded with Tannerite—a mixture of ammonium nitrate and aluminum powder—until they blew up, resulting in shocks large enough to shake nearby houses.

Newtown’s saner citizens wanted to at least ensure that these homemade target ranges were moved away from other people’s homes, but something called the National Shooting Sports Foundation insisted that there was a greater danger of people being injured in swimming accidents, and that “No safety concerns exist.” As one local woman put it, “Teach your kids to hunt, you will never have to hunt your kids.”

“If you’re good old boys like we are, they are exciting,” one Scott Ostrosky said of his personal blowin’-up-things-real-good range. Mr. Ostrosky insisted, “Guns are why we’re free in this country, and people lose sight of that when tragedies like this happen. A gun didn’t kill all those children, a disturbed man killed all those children.”

And most pertinently, the family of Adam Lanza, the Connecticut shooter, had that conversation. The late Nancy Lanza, his mother and first victim, was reportedly a gun obsessive who kept some three or four or five rapid-
firing weapons in her house and enjoyed taking her boys to the shooting range. She told a friend that “she liked the single-mindedness of shooting.”

Nancy Lanza was also waiting for the end of the world, as a survival fetishist who belonged to the “Doomsday Preppers” movement, and, according to her former sister-in-law Marsha Lanza, had turned her home “into a fortress,” where she was stockpiling not only guns but food. It is perhaps ironic that in preparing for doomsday, Nancy helped hasten it not only for her neighbors but for herself.Her outlook may have accounted for Adam Lanza’s possession of ammunition that, according to the chief medical examiner of Connecticut, was “designed in such a fashion [that] the energy is deposited in the tissue so the bullet stays in”—and does as much damage as possible.

Not that Marsha Lanza finds anything particularly wrong with this: “Just pray for peace. Do I think gun laws need to be changed? No. It’s the person that does the killing, not the gun.”

So far, the Lanza family has been much more reticent about Adam Lanza’s mental illness, unwilling or unable to say that they knew anything was wrong with him. Marsha Lanza did recall that Nancy “had issues with [the local] school[s],” and ended up at least partially home-schooling her son.

“If he had needed consulting, she would have gotten it,” added Marsha. “Nancy wasn’t one to deny reality.”

But friends and neighbors have reported a son who rarely seemed to go outside, and a home that was almost never opened to others. The media has reported in its own ignorance that Adam had Asperger’s syndrome—about as relevant to what happened last Friday as a corn is to a case of lung cancer.

So go on and have your conversation with these individuals. They are people who believe that a schoolteacher, taken by surprise, can always outdraw a practiced shooter, and that nothing bad will come from keeping her loaded automatics around a school full of young children.

They worship an almighty, all-merciful, omnipresent God—who will withdraw His grace from said school if the exact right incantation isn’t chanted in it every morning. They think guns don’t kill people, swimming kills people, and that guns aren’t responsible for mass murder, but that they are responsible for our freedom, and can save us from the zombies and the black helicopters come the post-apocalypse. They believe it is their constitutional right to set off deadly explosives until their neighbors’ homes spin on their foundations. They think they know better than teachers how to educate their children, and they don’t see how their children’s state of mind is anybody else’s business, even after they’ve committed atrocities.

They are people devoid of logic or maturity, who want what they want when they want it. They are supremely afraid of almost everything and everyone around them—and supremely confident of their invincibility as long as they have their finger on a trigger.

There are tens of millions of them, and they elected a majority of the House of Representatives and our state governments. They won’t be swayed, no matter how many tears President Obama sheds, nor how many eloquent eulogies he delivers. They won’t care if you hold a big march in Washington, or sign lots of Internet petitions. They will block whatever bill the president or Sen. Dianne Feinstein or Rep. Carolyn McCarthy proposes, and they will do their damnedest to end the political careers of anyone who supports such legislation.

They don’t want to have a conversation. They just want to shout slogans at you and wave their guns in your face until you go away. And they will keep doing that until all of us who consider ourselves “liberal” or “progressive,” or simply “opposed to having our neighbors blow up propane tanks in their backyards” form a political organization every bit as well-organized and tireless and determined as theirs, and vote their representatives out of office.

editorial@observer.com

Jeffrey D. Klein (Getty)

The millennium arrived sometime during the day of December 4, when New York State Senator Jeffrey D. Klein led his spanking new Independent Democratic Conference (IDC) over to the Republican side of the aisle.

Talk about the rapidly approaching Mayan apocalypse! Mr. Klein, a Bronx Democrat, assures us that he and four fellow Democrats will soon pass much of the liberal agenda in New York…by keeping majority leader Dean G. Skelos and his fellow Republicans in charge.

“Working with the governor and our colleague, I know that we will pass some major progressive reforms, such as an increase to the minimum wage, a reform of stop-and-frisk and serious campaign finance reform,” Mr. Klein told The New York Times, while posing heroically between old campaign posters for both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John Vliet Lindsay.

Yes, and the lion shall lie down with the lamb—though as Woody Allen added, the lamb won’t get much sleep.

Under their power-sharing arrangement, the Republicans and the IDC are supposed to have “joint and equal authority,” with Mr. Klein and Mr. Skelos alternating as temporary president of the state senate. It’s an arrangement being touted by many as a means of finally breaking Albany’s perpetual gridlock, which dates back to approximately 1540.

Syracuse Mayor Stephanie A. Miner, recently installed as Democratic state co-chairwoman by Governor Andrew Cuomo, claimed that she saw the new arrangement as “a pathway out of dysfunction,” while Mr. Cuomo himself, allegedly a Democrat, reacted by proclaiming that he was willing to work with anyone, and that, “I don’t get hung up on politics.”

Well, sure. Why get all hung up over, y’know, politics, when you’re a governor?

This now marks the second time in four years that voters have made history by handing all three branches of the state government over to one party—only to see the Democrats punt their power away. The nonpartisan millennium was originally heralded just after the 2008 elections, when the party took control of the senate for the first time since 1964. But rather than trying to enact any of the social justice legislation they had been advocating for decades, Democrats decided to fight over who was in charge. Employing reformist rhetoric similar to what we’re hearing now, the “gang of four” Democratic senators from the city—Pedro Espada, Jr., Rev. Ruben Diaz, Sr., Carl Kruger, and Hiram Montserrate—broke away from the party and threatened to make their own deal with Republicans.

In fact, the gang of four’s attempted coup might best be described as “a pathway out of jail.” For the most part, it failed. Even by Albany standards, “the four amigos,” as Rev. Diaz prefers to call them, set new lows in sleaze, corruption, and general hate-mongering. Mr. Montserrate was expelled from the senate after being convicted of a nauseating assault on his girlfriend. Mr. Kruger—a closeted gay man who voted against gay marriage—got seven years in the state pen for accepting over $1 million in bribes. Mr. Espada awaits sentencing after pleading guilty to swiping nearly half a million dollars in Medicaid funds intended for his chain of health-care clinics, a feat accomplished by viciously ripping off patients and employees alike.

Only Mr. Diaz—a man who once made a speech on the senate floor calling Americans worse than Hitler for allowing abortions—remains in office and unindicted.

The renegade legislators spent months trying to sell their allegiances to the highest bidder, while further masking their true goals under the rhetoric of ethnic grievance. The four amigos claimed that Latinos would be shut out of leadership in Albany if the traditional “three men in a room” that decide everything there consisted of the senate Democratic leader, Malcolm Smith, who happened to be black; state assembly speaker Sheldon Silver, and then-governor David Paterson. In the end, they went back to the Democrats after replacing Mr. Smith with Senator John Sampson…who is also black.

Disgusted voters swept the Republicans back into power in 2010—only to sweep them out once more. And now the race card is being played again, as Rev. Al Sharpton has entered the fray—oh, joy—to claim that African Americans will be disenfranchised if Mr. Klein joins Mssrs. Skelos, Silver, and Cuomo as the fourth man in the room.

Mr. Klein and the three other white senators in his IDC promptly went out and cynically added to their ranks…Malcolm Smith, who has been openly pondering a run for mayor on the Republican line. This undermined any claims they might have had to being real reformers, as the ethically porous Mr. Smith has been investigated for his role in trying to steer a massive state contract for a “racino” at the Aqueduct Racetrack to a favored bidder.

The Big A is proving to be the black hole of New York politics, sucking in and crushing all who approach it. Also under investigation for bid-fixing at Aqueduct has been…John Sampson. The racino debacle put the final nail in the coffin of David Paterson’s disastrous governorship, and nearly capsized longtime Queens powerbroker and former congressman Rev. Floyd Flake. Gov. Cuomo’s attempt to replace the whole racino idea with a huge convention center/gambling complex—a complex that would be developed and run by one of his major campaign donors—has already proved a risible flop.

It’s no coincidence that so many of our leading pols have found themselves irresistibly drawn to the assorted Aqueduct scams. Gambling is not a growth industry. It’s a cancer, one that feeds addiction and funnels billions of dollars from the poor, the lonely, and the desperate to a wealthy few. It’s the sort of brain-dead idea that—in an age of technological wonders—is all the insulated deal-makers who run the state of New York can come up with for our future.

Mr. Klein’s nonpartisan posturing won’t cut through that insulation, only add more layers than Bob Vila. You can rest assured that his supposed liberal agenda will never see the light of day in Albany without a conservative quid pro quo—a racino here, a little fracking there, etc. A system where party labels and platforms and promises mean absolutely nothing—where there is, in essence, one big party—is one that will usher in a politics of meaninglessness, where corruption is free to flourish as never before and democracy is a cynical charade.

Or as the Rev. Ruben Diaz posted on his website last week, “Diaz to IDC: you’ve vindicated the ‘Four Amigos.’ ”

Photo illustration by Ed Johnson.

The conventional wisdom insists that President Obama has all the leverage right now over the Republicans in their negotiation for a “grand bargain” to close the budget deficit. Bolstered by his smashing election victory, gains by the Democrats in both houses of Congress and a changing popular mood, this would seem like the ideal moment to forge a deal largely on the president’s terms—one that would raise federal income tax rates on the wealthiest Americans while cutting spending and “reforming” Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Proof of Mr. Obama’s upper hand is seen in the dropping stock of anti-tax zealot (and forced-abortion apologist) Grover Norquist. One after another, Republicans even in deep red states have been forswearing their previous oaths to Mr. Norquist never to vote for any tax increase. Surely, the president—renowned “Zen master,” and player of “three-dimensional chess”—hovers on the brink of another improbable victory, one that will secure his historical legacy. Right?

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact it’s Mr. Obama, not the Republicans, who is caught between a rock and a hard place. To hit our tenuously recovering economy right now with tax increases (even on the very wealthiest) and massive cuts in federal spending is a terrible idea. It could easily push us into a “double-dip” recession. To cut entitlement benefits and push back the age at which Americans can retire—possibly all the way to 69—will also be economically disastrous, not to mention unspeakably cruel and a grotesque betrayal of the president’s own base. It could split the Democratic party beyond repair.

The Republican leadership surely must understand this. What’s more, they have the “fiscal cliff” at their back—the bill they passed during the budget crisis they manufactured last year that mandates severe, automatic, across-the-board spending cuts if no bargain on the deficit is reached. This would likely dip us back into recession as well, and probably set off chaos in the financial markets.

It is widely thought that going over the fiscal cliff will rebound worst against the Republicans, since they will be seen as more intransigent than ever. But what do they care? The one branch of the federal government controlled by the GOP is the House, where nearly all their members hold safe seats in deeply conservative districts. They can probably weather the national outrage against diving off the “cliff” even if it does mean another recession, and they know it.

So, if President Obama fails to reach an agreement on the deficit, he’ll probably set off a worldwide financial panic, and plunge the country back into recession. If he does reach an agreement, he’ll likely alienate most of his own party ... and plunge the country back into recession.

The various, “outside-the-box” alternatives now being offered are no more appealing. House Speaker John Boehner and other leading Republicans have been floating the idea of raising additional tax revenue by closing loopholes instead of increasing rates, so they can kinda sorta say they didn’t really raise taxes.

But closing all the loopholes in existence won’t raise enough revenue. If this approach ever becomes law, it should be called “The Washington Lobbyists Full-Employment Act.” Essentially, this was the idea behind the big Reagan tax reform compromise of 1986: income tax rates were lowered and simplified, in return for eliminating most exemptions. But as the last quarter-century has proved, there’s nothing easier for a lobbyist to do than slip a loophole back into the tax code a little down the line.

Most professional economists would prefer a “tax on consumption” rather than income, through either a national sales tax or a value-added tax at various stages of production.

I can never understand why this is such a great idea, since any capitalist economy is driven by consumption, whereas great accumulated wealth gives people an inherent—and often unfair—advantage. Shouldn’t we be trying to encourage people to make as much money as they can ... then even out the results a little, so that those who have made more can’t use that added income to, say, buy lobbyists and economists to espouse policies in their interests?

On a more practical level, any sort of sales or consumption tax ought to be entitled, “The Mafia Restoration Act.” That’s because of the thousands of industrious citizens who will purchase cargo vans and start actively driving goods in from Canada to sell on the black market if any such tax is ever passed. (Full disclosure: I, too, intend to buy a truck and start shipping goods in from Canada if this happens.)

So where does that leave us? What should a true Zen master do when faced with this menu of unsavory choices?

He should fold.

That’s right. President Obama should offer to give in and support extending the Bush tax cuts for another year, if—and this is a mighty big “if”—the Republicans agree to abolish the fiscal cliff.

Getting an extension of the payroll tax suspension and unemployment payments would also be a good idea, but this one concession is imperative: get rid of the cliff.

Think about it. With the economy showing sure signs of recovery at last, President Obama will only be in a better position a year from now. As Europe insists on sticking to its own austerity programs and China’s economy continues to slow, we will likely be in a post-World War II situation—the only promising investment opportunity left standing. International capital will pour in, accelerating our recovery and starting to shrink the deficit “naturally.”

A year from now, with the economy humming along at last, there would also be no fiscal cliff, no need to slash benefits for seniors or make them die in harness. If Republicans don’t want to accept his budget terms, the president can simply let the Bush tax cuts expire at last.

This scenario would mean higher taxes for the middle- and working classes, which is not ideal. But they will be much better able to afford them during an economic boom. Meanwhile, the rich will at last be forced to pay the extortionate federal income tax rate of 39 percent they labored under during the Clinton years. And all of these new payments will at least continue to ratchet down the debt, appeasing the deficit hand-wringers without the need to punish the elderly and the indigent.

This is what a president who is really a Zen master—instead of, say, a diffident individual always willing to accept the conventional political and economic wisdom—would do. Which is President Obama? We’ll soon find out.

Its subject is the Middle East because, well, that’s where peace and goodwill go to die. The Middle East is always the center of our most heartfelt holiday wishes, because it’s the one place on earth where the idea that we might all come to love one another is truly hopeless.

Think about it. Who else is fighting anymore? The Cold War ended more than 20 years ago. It’s not coming back, even if John McCain and Mitt Romney, for whatever mysterious reasons, would like to revive it. Northern Ireland is quiet as a pub on Sunday morning. Eight hundred years of conflict, finito. Even the FARC, down in Colombia, seems to be making peace overtures—a 50-year civil war, coming to an end.

Nor are there many good prospects for future conflicts. People talk about a military showdown between the United States and China. Right, the greatest trading partners in the history of the world are going to go to war with each other. And sure, there’s always a bloody civil war, or two or three, in Africa, which, apparently, we don’t much care about because they’re black people and they don’t have any natural resources that we need that urgently. And even those fights seem to be losing steam.

Nope, pretty much the whole of human conflict has been reduced to that broad swath of civilization extending from northern Africa across the Fertile Crescent and over the Himalayas. That is, almost everywhere Islamic nations abut other cultures, but especially at the epicenter, between Israel and the Palestinian Territories.

Already this holiday season, we’ve been treated to the now-perennial sight of dead Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip being carried through the streets, and frightened Israeli children huddling in bomb shelters. It’s been the usual tit-for-tat maneuvering that has come to pass for Realpolitik in that part of the world. Hamas lobs a few hundred missiles into Israel, which counters with bombings and drone strikes. A cease-fire is arranged, a body count taken, and both sides and their allies hurry to total up the political points won and lost: who suffered the most, who was the most intemperate, who looked worse in the eyes of the world. There’s as much spin involved as there is in the wake of a presidential debate, with each side’s spokespeople rushing to get out their interpretation.

What doesn’t seem seriously disputed now is that it is all primarily for domestic consumption. Neither side expects the other to give up or go away anytime soon, or over the next few decades, or ever. Instead, there is a terrible kind of symbiosis here.

Hamas fires hundreds of missiles willy-nilly into a civilian population, then hides behind its own people to ensure maximum Palestinian civilian casualties as well—surely one of the most reprehensible tactics in human history. The justification for decades of Palestinian terrorism has usually been that they lacked the military hardware to fight the IDF directly, but given missiles by the smuggled truckload, the targets remain the same, i.e., anybody. In fact, for decades the Palestinians and their allies have basically claimed the right to kill just about anyone, anywhere in the world, in order to force attention to their cause. But, Palestinian terrorism has usually served a much narrower political purpose: to drown out more moderate voices, pre-empt competing radicals and draw the material support of Arabian royalty looking to appease their own Islamists by contributing a few more millions to the cause.

For Israel, as The New York Times’s analysis spelled out this Sunday, the latest attacks leave Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government feeling “very comfortable,” after Mr. Netanyahu’s extremely uncomfortable and embarrassing effort to influence our presidential election. Hamas’s actions give Israel an almost free hand in the West Bank, while the government’s thuggish foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has already denounced the Palestinian Authority’s bid for observer state status at the United Nations as “diplomatic terrorism,” and even threatened to collapse the Authority in retaliation. Such a turn of events can only please Mr. Netanyahu’s Christian fundamentalist backers in this country, who care so deeply for the state of Israel that they expect it to disappear any day now in a bloody apocalypse that kills half of all the Jews in the world and convinces the other half to convert to Christianity.

Looking at this sorry mess of opportunism, one can only conclude that the last, most violent area on earth is being done in by ... the religions it has spawned. Or rather, by those strands of dogmatic, fundamentalist religion promoted by a handful of leaders in all camps who likely don’t even believe much of what they say themselves anymore, but feel it necessary to keep the most vicious and ignorant of their supporters nestled into suicide vests and settlements.

I don’t mean to be cynical. I remain convinced that all faiths convinced that God commands their own immediate occupation of the Holy Land can come together for a greater cause. I know, I’ve seen it happen. It was captured in a wire service photograph I used to keep on my refrigerator.

There, assembled behind a table as if at the Last Supper, were the high holy men of nearly all the major faiths represented in Jerusalem: Jewish, Muslim, Protestant, Catholic, Greek Orthodox, etc. They were all done up in their most impressive garb. One of them, I remember, was wearing something that looked like a giant coonskin cap on his head. Another was arrayed in an outfit that resembled a Klan hood.

What had they all come together to do? Denounce a planned gay pride march.

That’s right, folks. After five thousand years of killing one another in the name of God, the one thing what they could all agree on was that homosexuality is an abomination.

Don’t expect the parade of dead or terrified children to stop any time soon.

And God bless us, every one.

Illo by Ed Johnson

Peer under the tent flap of our splendid new civic order, and you’re guaranteed to see a disturbing sight: all the same failed policies of the past, lovingly preserved in formaldehyde.

That’s what I got from Amy Nicholson’s thoroughly enjoyable, thoroughly enraging new documentary, Zipper: Coney Island’s Last Wild Ride, which won a special jury prize last week at DOC NYC, New York’s Documentary Film Festival and is currently making the festival rounds. Ms. Nicholson was generous enough to open her film with a quote from me about the destruction of the old Coney, though I have no other association with the production.

What she and I do share is a deep resentment over what has been done to this iconic New York neighborhood under the guise of “improving” it. Ms. Nicholson’s movie centers around the travails of Eddie Miranda, operator of a single Coney ride, the “Zipper,” a carnival perennial that was one of some 42 profitable small businesses shuttered recently by the city’s developer partners after 38 years of operation. Much of Zipper involves the very human story of Mr. Miranda, his workers, and other small-time carnies as they face the end of an era, but the larger forces at play kept dragging Ms. Nicholson—a self-described political naïf—into the looking-glass world of New York development.

Just what will happen now to Coney is anybody’s guess, following its submersion in the storm surge caused by Hurricane Sandy. But the plan for the area that the city aided and abetted is a depressingly familiar “razzle,” as the local parlance goes. Much of the area was bought up by a developer with the Dickensian moniker Joe Sitt, an impish character who specializes in acquiring properties, clearing them of tenants, then holding them in limbo until the authorities change the zoning of his parcels, greatly enhancing their value.

The razzle here is that, almost from the start, the city was playing along. Mr. Sitt was paid off at $14 million an acre, more than 10 times what his lots were originally worth—a price that approached that of top Manhattan street frontage. The city let itself be “forced” into reducing the designated amusement zone on Coney from 60 acres to just over nine, and into provisions that will likely allow future developers to erect 30 separate 30-story condominium towers on the island.

The waste of public money is appalling in a city that regularly claims it must lay off teachers and close firehouses. But the greater crime here is the vision of New York that our public and private leaders have come to internalize: that the city should be just like everyplace else.

The directors of this scam were, as usual, unelected and unaccountable: City Planning Director Amanda Burden; Lynn B. Kelly, president of the Coney Island Development Corporation, now called the Alliance for Coney Island; Bob Lieber, the longtime Lehman Brothers real estate investment banker turned former deputy mayor. In what has become standard operating procedure, they sold the idea to the media, at least, with fantastical, computer-generated images of a new Coney that had absolutely nothing to do with any real plans.

Like all those who would lead us to hell, Ms. Burden, Ms. Kelly, Mr. Lieber and company were armed with earnest good intentions. They seem to have honestly believed they were helping the area by making it a future destination for any number of chain stores and restaurants.

Ms. Nicholson, in her ingenuousness, managed to solicit from Mr. Sitt, and from Coney-area City Councilman Domenic Recchia, a cascade of brand names that Coney “needs” in order to be made whole: Dave & Busters, Williams-Sonoma, Build-a-Bear, Ripley’s Believe It or Not, Howie’s Game Shack, Cold Stone Creamery, The NBA Store, Barnes & Noble, Applebee’s, TGI Friday’s, The Gap, Duane Reade.

“Does everything have to be a brand?” Ms. Nicholson lamented in a phone interview. The director is no revolutionary, but in her day job she works as an advertising art director and very much understands the value of brands. “Coney Island is the antithesis of all those things,” she added.

And as such, it had come to work very well as an amusement area again in its own ragged, enduring way—a place that offered all the anarchic spirit of the 1970s with almost noneof the crime. Coney served up a unique array of cheap, family-friendly entertainments, from minor-league baseball to the aquarium, the beach to the Cyclone, Nathan’s Famous to Dick Zigun’s geek shows to ... the Zipper. The Parks Department’s own figures showed beach attendance rising from 1.9 million in the summer of 2000 to a peak of 15.6 million by 2006.

Coney Island was working. But it didn’t have a Dave and Busters, you see, or a Howie’s Game Shack, so working people who poured their whole lives into the place had to go. Mr. Miranda works in private security in Florida, and the ride was shipped to Honduras.

We’ve been here before. Coney once had a vibrant, year-round community and a business district along Mermaid Avenue to go with it. Both were largely annihilated by another of Robert Moses’s daft schemes. But hey: 50, 60 years later, here’s the government to help us again.

The Alliance for Coney Island is something of a spinoff of the city’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC), another of the largely unaccountable “public” authorities that Moses pioneered. Backing it is the perennially tunnel-visioned coterie of developers and their construction-union allies, who would tear down the old Penn Station all over again if they had the chance.

Riding herd on them, supposedly, is our elected city council, which to judge from their campaign literature is composed almost exclusively of lifelong community activists. Yet these ceaseless doers of good deeds, supposedly born of the 1960s grassroots tradition, voted 42-2 to okay the gentrification of Coney Island. Why? Because it’s the council’s habit never to interfere with any member’s pet project, and Councilman Recchia wanted this done.

We can only be glad, I guess, that it wasn’t his pleasure to tear down the Verrazano Bridge. All three of these “progressive” traditions—the independent public authority, the “run the government like a business” movement exemplified by our billionaire mayor and the grassroots activism—got their starts many years ago challenging the choking corruption of the old political machines. But when it came to sustaining one of the city’s most iconic neighborhoods—and the working people who kept it alive—they behaved as rancidly as the worst old Tammany Hall hacks. And all in the service of a vision that Brooklyn might one day be as bland and sterile as any suburban mall!

Now Sandy has changed everything. Good luck getting flood insurance now for all those planned condo towers. But no matter what becomes of Coney Island, our leaders go on mindlessly turning New York into a city that none of the rest of us, rich or poor, condo-owner or carny operator, really wants.

editorial@observer.com

Kevin Baker's 1999 novel Dreamlandwas set in turn-of-the-century Coney Island.  

Photo Illustration Ed Johnson

So now that the election is done at last, we can get down to the hard work of striking a “grand bargain” on the budget by cutting spending and raising taxes, and thus avoid the looming “fiscal cliff.”

Any bargain will be a bad bargain, of course. Not so long ago, any moderately bright schoolchild could have told you that you never slash spending or raise taxes when the economy is still slowly emerging from a steep recession. As if the object lesson of the 1930s isn’t enough, we have the ongoing suicide of the European Union to confirm that “austerity” is just one more misguided attempt to apply the same rules that might work for a middle-class household to the course of nations.

It’s not working there, and it won’t work here.

But until Europe collapses completely, China’s slowing economy grinds to a complete halt, and all the “fiscal cliff” metaphors are inevitably replaced by unremitting references to “a perfect economic storm,” our nation’s leaders are bound and determined to continue with this madness. Since the campaign is finally over and our leaders are now reverting to habit—completely ignoring what the rest of us want—all we can offer is this feeble challenge:

The next media pundit who calls for shared sacrifice must describe in detail just what he or she is prepared to give up.

And it has to be a real sacrifice.

The idea that Thomas Friedman might see his federal tax rate go up a few percentage points does not equate with a sanitation worker or Walmart clerk having to clock in for another four years before they can claim Social Security. David Brooks, say, losing a favorite deduction isn’t the same as a retired waitress in her 80s seeing her Medicare slashed.

Right now, “shared sacrifice” means that many wealthy, powerful people share the opinion that the rest of us should sacrifice.

Mr. Friedman, for instance, calls every few minutes or so for President Obama to “endorse the Bowles-Simpson plan” for closing the budget gap. In fact, it’s a stretch to say that any such “plan” even exists. The Bowles-Simpson committee that Mr. Obama set up never actually managed to reach an agreement. Instead, the two committee chairmen, former Clinton chief of staff Erskine Bowles, a North Carolina Democrat, and former Republican senator and professional loose-cannon Alan Simpson of Wyoming came up with a plan between them that they trumpeted—with the help of a fawning media—as a great, bipartisan accomplishment.

It is, instead, a prescription for hunting down every last remaining vestige of the middle class in this country and beating it to death with a stick.

Under the Bowles-Simpson plan to reduce the deficit, the top federal income tax rate would be dropped to 24 percent, the top corporate rate would be cut from 35 percent to 26 percent, and almost all deductions would be eliminated, including those for home mortgage interest, and employer health-care plans. Meanwhile, military pensions, student loan subsidies, Medicare and Social Security would be slashed, while other revenue would come from new, regressive levies such as a 15 percent increase on gas taxes. By the way, if the notion of putting a crazy old, obnoxious right-wing coot and Bill Clinton’s chief fund-raiser at Morgan Stanley in charge of a committee to make the very richest people in America still infinitely richer while at the same time ripping open the underbellies of working people in this country from stem to stern seems like a puzzling idea coming from the great avatar of hope and change, you’re onto something.

It’s another of the truly idiotic notions President Obama misguidedly backed on the advice of all those old Clinton economic advisers he ran against in 2008—and promptly hired back in 2009. It’s likely to work out as well as their other determinations, such as the prediction that unemployment would drop so fast we didn’t need to go any bigger on the stimulus, and that the housing market would turn around in no time.

The idea that we must “reform” entitlements derives partlyfrom the observation that many people are living longer nowadays. That’s true enough overall, but not for most men and women toiling in blue-collar professions, who will be forced to work even longer at jobs that exact a terrible physical toll. For that matter, the extra time for all of us comes at the end of life, which we’re more and more likely to spend in an oxygen tent or a state of dementia.

What’s more, forcing people to work more years, especially amid a dismal labor market, is like squeezing a tube of toothpaste in the middle, and squeezing it hard. It means either that many more people just out of college won’t be able to get jobs right away, or—even worse—that many more people will be laid off in their mid-60s, and forced to somehow scramble to keep hearth and home together until they can qualify for their (much-reduced) Social Security and Medicare.

Besides being appallingly cruel to working people, and destructive to the general economy, what’s wrong with this scenario? Oh, yeah: it will endanger everyone. You really want that fireman with the double knee replacement coming to save you from the flames? How ’bout hitching a ride with that bus driver with the cataracts and the heart condition?

The grand bargain is in fact a grand and arbitrary cancellation of the social covenant that’s brought this country unprecedented prosperity and social justice over the last 80 years, and it’s being pressed by a small coterie of wealthy, overwhelmingly white men who will themselves contribute about the equivalent of a working person’s laundry money for the week.

No one voted for it, and not even most political activists understand fully what it means or how likely it is to pass. An informal survey I took of a dozen, random delegates at the Democratic convention found that not a one of them thought this was or should be a priority for a second Obama term—it’s just not on their radar. (As for Republican die-hards, they didn’t plan on this either—instead, it’s safe to say, most heard whatever Mitt Romney was espousing at any given time as simply, “I will take away stuff welfare mothers in New York are getting and don’t deserve.”)

Are there better ways—once the recession is fully in the rearview mirror—to eventually balance the budget? Sure, and I’ll get to some of them in the weeks ahead.

But first, I’d love to hear the specifics from all the Grand Bargainers: just what do you intend to sacrifice?

Photo illustration: Ed Johnson

The great thing about living in New York used to be that you didn’t have to give a damn about the natural world.

Sadly, those days seem to be gone. Even in my neighborhood, which was lucky enough to be high and relatively dry, things began to resemble a zombie movie by last Wednesday. With nowhere to go and nothing to do, hordes of Upper West Siders staggered about the sidewalks, searching for brunch instead of brains: “Rrrrrr ... smoked fish ... rrr ... hollandaise!”

Now, it seems, we’re all ready to give ourselves a big pat on the back for how we weathered the storm.

Not so fast. Yes, the firemen, cops and emergency workers deserve all the gratitude their weary bones can carry. Yes, plenty of average New Yorkers helped their friends and neighbors.

But as for the institutional response, public or private ... Sorry, but 85 dead and counting, over $60 billion in damages, a subway system still not fully operational a week after it shut down, massive blackouts throughout the region, days of gas-line fistfights and raging fires in Queens just doesn’t add up to a good response. (Note to ConEd: when a piece of equipment that’s absolutely vital to keeping the lights on blows up in the first hours of a storm everyone was predicting for days ... you’re not doing your job.).

New York has been under assault, human or otherwise, pretty continually for almost 20 years now. And yet the response of our leaders remains basically reactive.

Yes, it’s nice that FEMA is now run by people with detectable brain patterns, and that Gov. Cuomo and Mayor Bloomberg have become staunch believers in climate change. But more needs to be done—much more. And it is probably up to us to do it.

IT’S NOT THAT NO ONE could see this coming. Scientists have been talking about global warming for a generation now. The dean of the city’s investigative reporters, Wayne Barrett, warned five years ago that Bloomberg deputy Dan Doctoroff was deliberately and grossly minimizing the possible effects of hurricanes and rising sea levels in putting together the administration’s much-vaunted blueprint for the future, PlaNYC.

Nonetheless, the Bloomberg administration did all it could to promote massive new developments in nearly every part of the city that ended up underwater last week: the West Side of Manhattan, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, the Queens riverfront, Red Hook, the Rockaways. And plenty more is coming. Remember watching the flood waters sweep over Coney Island? Thanks to an elaborate masquerade the city played with developers, Coney was rezoned two years ago to allow the development of 30 30-story buildings. That’s enough luxury condos to spark a financial crisis as well as an environmental one.

And while global warming is new, New York has been bedeviled by similar weather patterns throughout its history. In the past, we generally managed to learn something from them. The question is if we’ll do so again.

Back near the end of the last Little Ice Age, fierce winds off the Atlantic frequently combined with cold fronts from Canada to batter the city. The “hard winter” of 1779-1780 brought snowdrifts 18 feet deep and a record low temperature of 16 degrees below zero, and froze the harbor solid for five consecutive weeks. New Yorkers adjusted by harvesting the waterways for ice to get them through the summer, and turning them into roadways to get out of town. In the winter of 1821, they even set up makeshift taverns on the Hudson to attract the foot traffic crossing to Jersey.

In March of 1888, a cold front combined with—surprise, surprise—heavy winds off the ocean to suddenly turn a warm spring rain into a howling snowstorm. “The Blizzard of ’88”—or as it was known at the time, “The Great White Hurricane”—became shorthand for natural disaster. In the city, some 40 inches of snow fell, and severe flooding and conflagrations swept New York. The fires alone caused $25 million worth of damage, or more than $600 million in today’s money.

When temperatures dropped to 6 degrees—the coldest ever recorded here in March—the region came to a standstill. New York’s vast webs of telegraph and telephone wires were encased in ice and its many elevated railroads ground to a halt. More than 200 New Yorkers died, some of them freezing to death in the street.

In response, the city began to bury its wires, cables and trains, and professionalized its street-cleaning department. But today, the city’s underground is more vulnerable than ever.

So what to do?

The good news is that many very smart people have already spent a good deal of time thinking about this. Some of their ideas were all over last Sunday’s New York Times, ranging from gigantic, high-tech solutions—vast barriers or gates to seal off much of the city at key chokepoints—to incredibly inventive, low-tech solutions, such as “absorptive streets,” or natural barriers of marshes and oyster beds.

The bad news is that they require leadership and money to be implemented. Neither is likely to come from Washington anytime soon. So we’ll have to do it ourselves. A special tax on, say, stock transactions, or luxury items, or the very highest incomes might raise enough cash—though the usual suspects are likely to balk at a tax for even such an urgent and worthy purpose.

So here’s another idea. Once upon a time, when no government would shell out the money for a pediment on which to place the Statue of Liberty, a newspaper started a campaign to raise the money through thousands of individual donations. In exchange for donations of as little as a penny, Joseph Pulitzer would print their names in the pages of the New York World.

Maybe some newspaper today could start the “Keep Lady Liberty’s Head Above Water Fund,” dedicated to not only preserving our city and region, but also to making it the hub of global climate research and solutions. (Then again, maybe someone else should take this on, given how busy newspapers are trying to keep their own heads above water.)

Our local universities could be persuaded to open new climate change centers, in exchange for the vast amounts of land and legal support we’ve given them lately. Abandoned or underused facilities, such as the Brooklyn Navy Yard or Governor’s Island or the Kingsbridge Armory could be devoted to this purpose. The unemployed could find work building these wondrous new projects. The Bloomberg administration could finally find a reason for its third term.

Of course, simply getting their names in the paperwould hardly suffice for people today. The enterprise I have in mind would operate as an investment fund. As the new technologies, devices and clean energy solutions we produce are put into place around the world—as they surely would be—each investor would get a return on his dollar, once the city’s safety is secured.

New York has been reacting to storms for almost four centuries now. It’s time we got ahead of the next one.

Photo illustration: Ed Johnson

“... you have no sense of responsibility toward anyone or anything. And that is a tragedy in a man and a disaster in a president.” —Gore Vidal, The Best Man

I never much cared for Gore Vidal, and I don’t like quoting him. He was an anti-Semite and a cynic whose sniggering contrarianism extended to expressing sympathy for Timothy McVeigh, the butcher of Oklahoma City. I find his popularity among so many people on the left today appalling. (His books are perfectly fine. There just aren’t any people in them, save for himself.)

But the climactic lines above from his play, The Best Man—directed at his thinly veiled Nixon stand-in, “Joe Cantwell”—seem tailor-made for this year’s Republican presidential nominee.

There is no love lost here for Barack Obama. Over the last four years, I’ve probably written more harsh words about the president than the most perfervid Weekly Standard hack.

But for this country to elect Willard Mitt Romney and his sidekick, Kid Damien, would be for us to surrender every last remaining shred of our self-respect as free citizens in a functioning democracy.

Mr. Romney’s reversals since his days as governor of Massachusetts way back in 2006 have been well documented. In less than six years, beginning at the age of 60, he has gone from being pro-gay rights to wanting an anti-gay-marriage amendment enshrined in the Constitution; from an advocate of choice to a firm believer that abortion is murder; from an ecological watchdog to a man who thinks climate change is a punch line.

During his time on the road with the Republican party’s traveling Klown Kollege this spring, he not only renounced pretty much everything he actually did in public office, but also stood placidly by while audiences of the faithful booed a gay American soldier, and applauded the idea that a man without health insurance should be left to die on the streets. During a private fund-raiser with major party contributors around the same time, he famously opined that nearly half the American public was “victims and dependents.”

As the general election campaign kicked into gear, the lies and obfuscations came faster and thicker than ever.

For the record, Mr. Romney was never poor, not even in college, when he had to eat tuna fish. He was never even not rich.

As a young man, he backed our intervention in the war in Vietnam, and even demonstrated in favor of it. But he never served, using six years of deferments to finish his education instead and to proselytize for the Mormon Church in the south of France.

He never started “a small business,” in any generally recognized sense of the term, or made it into a going concern. What he did was start a leveraged buyout shop, capitalized at the get-go with $37 million in funds from his daddy’s friends—then made an even greater fortune buying up, reorganizing, and sometimes melting down and dissolving businesses other people started.

He refused to release most of his tax returns, perhaps because he didn’t want anyone to see how little he paid on them, perhaps because he was embarrassed that, while running for governor of Massachusetts, he claimed residency in Utah in order to save a small amount in state taxes.

When it came to the issues, he had no difficulty telling national debate audiences that he could balance the budget and make the deficit disappear while giving everyone massive tax cuts and doubling military spending. That he would retain all the most popular benefits of “Obamacare” while eliminating any of the taxes necessary to pay for them. That his plan to replace Medicare with a voucher program was not a voucher program. That our Navy is not as strong as it was in 1916, and that our Air Force is not what it was in 1947. That Mr. Obama is an Arab-appeasing weakling who has betrayed our allies in Israel and Poland, that our real enemy is still Russia, and that he will commence a trade war with China on Day One of his administration.

It has become the standard boilerplate to say that Mr. Romney, like all our presidential nominees, is “a good man.” But that’s not true either. I’m not talking about how he treats his wife or his sons, or whether he tips well in restaurants. In public life, which is all we know, and all we can truly know about him, his has been a thoroughly dishonorable record, devoid of any principle or consistency.

Some observers see in this changeability a wily pragmatism. What I see is democracy’s worst nightmare: a clever man willing at every turn to choose his own momentary advantage over the long-term needs of his country—at a time when those needs, when the choices we must make, are more critical than ever.

To win election, this infinitely malleable individual has put himself in the hands of a rigidly ideological party. He has surrounded himself with many of the most venal and fanatical people in American politics today: Karl Rove, Robert Bork, John Bolton, Ralph Reed. Not to mention a corrupt hatemonger like John Sununu, or his leading economics adviser, Glenn “Give It Your Best Shot” Hubbard, so deftly exposed peddling his intellectual integrity in the documentary Inside Job. Mr. Romney swore a solemn oath to Grover Norquist long before he ever swore one to the Constitution.

In order to appease these people and enhance his own immediate prospects, Mr. Romney appears willing to throw millions of the aged and the needy into poverty, blow an irreparable hole in the deficit, start a catastrophic war and recklessly accelerate the climatic shifts that are already changing our world. Whatever one thinks of Mr. Obama’s thin agenda—and I don’t feel it’s sufficient for the challenges facing us—it has to be said that Mr. Romney doesn’t even have a plan. What he has is the political equivalent of that old Times Square staple, a three-card monte game mounted on an old cardboard box, ready to be kicked into the gutter at the first sign that the jig is up, the cash of the bewildered suckers disappearing with the faceless grifter as he vanishes effortlessly back into the crowd.