But even afterward, one top financial job was left conspicuously unfilled—namely, the role of Economic Surrogate in Chief.

A good economic statesman—somebody who can crunch budget projections by day and give good TV by night—can be hard to find. It’s a lesson that’s been driven home in Washington in recent months: when the secretary of the Treasury steps in front of the cameras, he's getting the White House on  Saturday Night Live, and not in a good way.

Perhaps this explains why Mr. Obama has himself spent so much time just doing it himself. But it can't go on forever.

“The president has a lot bigger agenda than responding to why industrials were down or tech stocks were up,” syndicated columnist and PBS NewsHour commentator Mark Shields recently told The Observer. “He can’t be Erin Burnett, explaining every twist and turn in the markets. But given the gravity of the situation and the lack of alternatives, in too many instances, that has become what the president has had to do.”

“Tim Geithner, when he talks publicly, the markets tank,” CNN's Anderson Cooper said, trying to goose a passel of political pundits on the evening of March 24, after a prime-time press conference where the president explained his economic policy. “And, you know, Larry Summers is maybe great behind closed doors, but, you know, he's not about to get a cable news show.”

In response, Democratic strategist Paul Begala defended the president’s roster of surrogates, giving shout-outs to Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel; head of the Council of Economic Advisors, Christina Romer; the OMB chief, Peter Orszag; and Vice President Joe Biden.

“There are many horses in the stable, but there's only one Secretariat, O.K.?” said Mr. Begala. “There's no one like him. I will become worried in a year or so if they continue this pace.”

“He is the Secretariat of his administration,” said political consultant and adviser-to-many-presidents David Gergen. “But you don't want to work out Secretariat and put him in a race every day. You need to bring other horses to the track.”

Right. So who is up to being ridden hard and put away wet by the cable-news jockeys?

“Ideally you’d have a figure with credibility, authority, a strong track record and the political skills for the job,” Mr. Shields of PBS told The Observer. “Somebody like a James Baker or a George Mitchell. There isn’t anybody like that right now.”

“It’s obvious that Geithner’s rollout has been painfully public and publicly painful,” he added. “The debut was unfortunate. There was a certain deer in the headlights look.”

Mr. Shields said he admired the statesmanship of Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman, who now serves on the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. But recent reports have suggested that Mr. Volcker remains somewhat at odds with the president’s inner circle of economic advisers, making him an unlikely candidate for the role.

In the meantime, Mr. Shields advised a trial-and-error approach toward the development of credible surrogates. “Part of the problem is that you have to try people and see what the reaction is,” said Mr. Shields.

David Chalian, the political director of ABC News, preached patience. With time, he told The Observer, the president will stand down and the economic surrogates will stand up.

“The strategy is clear: in these first hundred days of heavy lifting, you go with your best communicator and that’s the president,” said Mr. Chalian. “My guess is you might not see that in your second hundred days. You might see the surrogates more often.”

“But when you’re at 64 percent approval, you’re a pretty popular guy,” he added. “You’re only doing your agenda good by being out there. The country clearly likes him and wants to hear from him.”

Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, pointed out that historically, the quantitatively minded economic gurus who rise to the top of the financial bureaucracy in Washington have often been better at projecting budget estimates than projecting confidence and charisma on live TV.

“I don’t think Robert Rubin ever reached a broad audience,” said Mr. Sabato. “He may have been respected at Wall Street at the time. But these people speak a different language. They speak the language of finance for the elites.”

“Nobody is ever going to connect with Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard,” he added. “Just ask the Harvard faculty. O.K.? He’s a bright guy. He’s better than Geithner on TV. But he doesn’t speak in people’s language. Geithner’s incapable of it.”

The current jumpiness in the markets arguably makes the already tricky job of clearly distilling the White House’s economic policies for a general audience that much more difficult.

Jeff Greenfield, senior political correspondent for CBS News, said that the current crop of would-be economic spokespersons face a particularly hazardous learning curve.

“One guy who worked high up in the Clinton administration once told me that if they didn’t say the exact right formula about the dollar that the markets would think, ‘They’re walking away from the dollar, they’re not confident’—and that would spook the markets,” said Mr. Greenfield. “Now, you’re dealing with this small pesky matter of a potential worldwide economic disaster.”

“No matter how good any surrogate would be, when it comes to a matter like trying to reassure the public and convince them that you know how to get us out of this mess, the president is indispensable,” he added.  “There’s too big of a gap between the president and everybody else.”

Nicolle Wallace, the former director of communications for the White House under George W. Bush, told The Observer that finding good surrogates is always a challenge, and success can be fleeting.

During the first term of Mr. Bush’s presidency, she pointed out, the administration was flush with top officials—including Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell—who could speak credibly on the hot topic of the day: national security issues.

“And the inverse proved true in the second term,” Ms. Wallace wrote via email, “when a lack of completely credible messengers on the war—and, later, the economy—crippled our ability to speak over the grumbling from members of our own party, at times.”

But that’s a problem for a second term; Mr. Obama is not there yet.

“I do think that they have not yet developed a set of voices on economic policy, in particular, that can generate confidence,” Mr. Gergen concluded on CNN. “They do need more economic spokesmen."

Certainly, Mr. Obama’s delivery of the passage in question was pretty much identical, as the video evidence now available on YouTube clearly shows. So why isn’t it being treated with the same gravity?

There are many important differences between the Biden example and the Obama allegations. For instance, Mr. Biden appropriated a deeply personal and highly specific passage from Neil Kinnock, who was then the leader of Britain’s Labour Party. Mr. Kinnock had spoken about being the first in his family to attend college, invoking his Welsh parents and grandparents, who slaved away in coal mines but who also “taught me to sing and play and recite and write poetry.”

Mr. Biden, in turn, praised his own nonexistent coal-mining relatives from Pennsylvania—“people who read poetry and wrote poetry and taught me how to sing verse,” he said, one of several nearly identical characterizations he borrowed from Mr. Kinnock.

Mr. Obama did not claim any of Mr. Patrick’s biographical details as his own. He simply recited a few lines that—according to both men—Mr. Patrick had encouraged him to add to his speech. In effect, Mr. Patrick played the role of speechwriter, and only for a few sentences. Mr. Biden, by contrast, never consulted with (or even met) Mr. Kinnock before taking his lines.

The biggest difference is this: When John Sasso—the chief strategist for Mr. Biden’s chief rival, Michael Dukakis—caught wind of the ’87 episode, he knew he had a winner and he proceeded accordingly. That meant that he said nothing to the press or even to his candidate, and instead saw to it that the incriminating video evidence was leaked to the media. The evidence was so clear-cut that no spinning was required. (Of course, this strategy ultimately cost Mr. Sasso his job with Mr. Dukakis—but it succeeded in driving Mr. Biden from the race.)

Hillary Clinton’s campaign, though, addressed the Obama speech situation in the press through Howard Wolfson, and they have pushed the story aggressively. The fact that it needs selling at all is an indication that this is a very different story than Mr. Biden’s.

The Delaware Senator, who was first elected when M*A*S*H was a brand new series, actually announced his plans to run ahead of everyone else—in June 2005—but the head start has done him no good: He can’t raise money, can’t move his poll numbers, and can’t break his way into the Hillary-Barack-and-John storylines that define the media’s coverage of the Democratic race.

But every time the Democratic eight gather for yet another debate, it is Mr. Biden who takes the scraps of free television time he’s afforded and turns in the most consistently presidential performance of any candidate from either party.

He was at it again Sunday, when ABC’s George Stephanopoulos took his turn quizzing the Democrats in Des Moines.

As all of the moderators before him have done, Mr. Stephanopoulos dutifully focused his most pointed questions and follow-ups on the big names, trying to create public conflict between them. And as usual, the instant press analysis afterwards played up the clashing—or lack thereof, as the case was on Sunday—of the front-runners.

But once again, it was Mr. Biden who offered the most compelling presentation, in substance and style. Too often, he is rather curtly dismissed as a windbag, a not entirely unfounded criticism that ignores his innate knack for locking in and connecting with an audience—mixing deep policy knowledge with a quick wit and some of the flair of a good storyteller.

The best ingredients in Mr. Biden all seem to congeal when the subject turns foreign policy. Take his dust-up on Sunday with Bill Richardson over Mr. Richardson’s nakedly opportunistic—and entirely too easy, since as a Governor his musings are all theoretical—“plan” to withdraw every single U.S. troop from Iraq by this December. Mr. Richardson, rather than bothering with the pesky details, has sought to score points with his party’s base by staking out what it seemingly the clearest anti-war position among the six credible Democratic candidates.

Given the chance Sunday, Mr. Biden called him out.

“My reaction,” he said when he was asked about the December withdrawal idea, “is that it’s time to start leveling with the American people. This administration hasn’t been doing it for seven years. We should.”

If you began withdrawing forces now, Mr. Biden noted, it would take a minimum of one full year to drawn down completely—with the issue of the safety of civilians left in the green zone still unresolved. He also sketched out his plan for a loosely federated Iraq, with separate regions for Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, one of the themes of his campaign and an idea that, he noted, is gaining some traction in Washington.

In another answer on the same topic, Mr. Biden connected Iraq to the Balkan violence of the 1990s, arguing that the same concept of “separating the parties” had produced peace there. “If it ends with this country splintering, we will have for a generation our grandchildren engaged in a regional war that will be consequential far beyond—far beyond—Iraq,” he said.

There is so much to like about Mr. Biden in moments like this.

Of all of the candidates, he is easily the most respectful of the audience’s intelligence and maturity. He and Mr. Richardson are both steeped in foreign policy and can rightly claim to speak with authority on it, but Mr. Biden refuses to pander by offering a gimmick he knows could never actually work, the way Mr. Richardson does with his December withdrawal plan.

Mr. Biden also doesn’t water down his views on Iraq, even though he has known all along that they put him somewhat at odds with the Democratic base. Instead, he explains—with evident and refreshing passion—how he arrived at his views, assuming a certain level of foreign policy sophistication on the part of the audience. There is an inherent respect for the intellect of his audience—and his skeptics—in Mr. Biden’s presentation, a welcome contrast to the insulting manipulation often evident in Hillary Clinton’s canned evasions.

And when Mr. Biden delivers his message, there is more inflection in his voice than the other candidates’, and he always seems to match the right pace and pitch to the topic at hand. Despite his past verbal slip-ups, he is actually an outstanding television candidate, someone who knows how to show he has blood in his veins without being too hot.

Every debate, it seems, ends up producing an observation from some pundit, strictly as an afterthought, that Mr. Biden was actually the best candidate on stage. And since there’s still no sign that his campaign is catching on after more than a half-dozen high profile debates and forums so far, it’s hard to see how he can get much beyond this footnote status.

It’s a shame, but it looks like the only way Mr. Biden will make history when this campaign is over is as a curiosity: the candidate who won no delegates, but every debate.

Before the last presidential election, John Edwards voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq, then spent most of the actual campaign parrying attacks from antiwar outsider Howard Dean. This time around, Mr. Edwards has slipped into the role of perpetually incensed antiwar crusader, questioning the commitment of his competitors to the liberal ideals he has so unapologetically embraced.

Joe Biden’s campaign, for one, has taken note of the change. And they do not approve.

“I can’t guess at Senator Edwards’ motivation, and nor would I question it,” said Larry Rasky, senior communications director for the Biden campaign. “I just know that it seems pretty extreme and at times even irresponsible. It seems like he has decided to play Howard Dean in this election.”

Mr. Rasky also expressed doubt about the timing of Mr. Edwards’ recent attacks on the North American Free Trade Agreement, which the former Senator said was “written by insiders.”

“It’s not shocking that today we are at the A.F.L.-C.I.O. gathering and suddenly there is a story about Senator Edwards pushing hard for labor’s position on trade in the newspaper,” said Mr. Rasky. He was referring to a labor forum on the night of Aug. 7 in Chicago. “But I don’t think people are that easily fooled. Sooner or later they will look at your record. They look at the results you have achieved over the course of your career. Have you been consistent on their positions?”

He also said that Mr. Edwards’ efforts to outflank his competitors on the ideological left would harm the party’s chances in the general election. “Historically, my feeling is that Democrats have lost elections by pandering in the primary and being outpositioned in the general,” he said. “It seems to me that Senator Edwards is trying to take extreme positions to gain short-term advantage in the primary. That’s not a position that Senator Biden wants to find himself as the party’s nominee.”

And Mr. Rasky suggested that it was somewhat hypocritical for Mr. Edwards to set himself up as an advocate for the poor while earning enormous consulting fees and political contributions, as Mr. Edwards has, from his work with a hedge fund.

“You can’t take contributions and compensation from well-heeled money interests,” said Mr. Rasky, “and then expect to go on an anti-poverty campaign and not have people see through it.”

The analogy to the Dean campaign, if not the questioning of Mr. Edwards’ motives and timing, is hardly a stretch. Like Dr. Dean in 2004, Mr. Edwards has won plaudits from the party’s influential Netroots by railing ceaselessly against lobbyists, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies and of course, the “mainstream media.” (“They want to shut me up,” Mr. Edwards said recently, without specifying who “they” might be.)

He has hired as a senior strategist Joe Trippi, who is credited with masterminding the innovative, if ultimately unsuccessful, Dean campaign, and who has taken an increasingly prominent role in the Edwards campaign. And Mr. Edwards is on his way to becoming something of a folk hero among liberal bloggers and activists—receiving an enormous hand at Saturday’s Daily Kos convention when he said that his wife, Elizabeth, would be the White House blogger.

Colleen Murray, a spokeswoman for the Edwards campaign, responded angrily to Mr. Rasky’s remarks.

“It’s an insult to Governor Dean, millions of online activists, and all Democrats to suggest that fighting for universal health care, raising the minimum wage and ending the war in Iraq is ‘pandering’ or ‘irresponsible’ in any way, and Rasky should know better,” she said in an e-mail.

She pointed out that his position to renegotiate NAFTA but not scrap it completely is consistent with what he has argued in the past.

Ms. Murray also said, “Evidently, Larry Rasky, Senator Biden’s communications director, has left the building if he thinks the only people who can advocate for the poor are the poor themselves. John Edwards has been fortunate, and he will not apologize for that, but he has also dedicated his life to alleviating poverty in America, and no candidate in this race has fought harder on behalf of the 37 million Americans living in poverty. And I have no doubt Senator Biden would agree with that.”

But the job Mr. Biden may really be eyeing is that of Secretary of State.

It’s a post for which the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, whose foreign-policy conversance was on full display in the most recent Presidential debate, is impeccably qualified. Indeed, Mr. Biden and Richard Holbrooke supposedly constituted John Kerry’s short list for Secretary of State had the 2004 race turned out differently. And the workload under a new Democratic President in 2009 would be full of challenges and potential rewards, a chance to clean up the global diplomatic mess created by the current administration.

And Mr. Biden would have plenty of reasons to covet the job, which probably represents his final realistic chance at a securing a high-profile promotion from the Senate that would allow him to build a legacy outside of the world’s most exclusive club.

His White House bid is choking to death, starved of oxygen by the star power of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards and even the Al Gore guessing game. Newcomer candidates like Bill Richardson can dream of breaking into that top tier, theoretically, but Mr. Biden has probably been around the track too many times for the Democratic masses to give him a fresh look.

Nor can Mr. Biden plausibly position himself for the Vice Presidency. Yes, his international expertise would lend credibility to any ticket and his legislative savvy would make him an excellent liaison to Capitol Hill as V.P. But these days, the running-mate selection process is about maximizing the public-relations benefit of the announcement, and any Democratic nominee who taps Mr. Biden as his or her No. 2 would be sentenced to days of news stories about the Senator’s past brushes with plagiarism, résumé embellishment and the fragile language of racial politics. He simply wouldn’t be worth the trouble, especially since his foot-in-mouth tendencies would threaten to create further distractions as the campaign progressed.

But Secretary of State, first in line to the Presidency among Cabinet secretaries, is an appointed position, and Mr. Biden’s nomination would sail through the Senate confirmation process. And as a prospective appointee, the electoral liabilities that undermine him at the Presidential and Vice Presidential levels would be meaningless.

This isn’t to say that Mr. Biden’s Presidential campaign is a massive subterfuge—there are far less expensive, and potentially humbling, ways to pursue a Cabinet appointment, especially when the identity of the Democratic nominee is still far from clear.

But Mr. Biden, who once seemed uniquely willing to offer substantive criticism of the foreign policy views of his opponents, has been much more hesitant of late to give offense to the candidate most likely one day to be able to offer him a job.

When the Democratic field squared off for the first time on April 26, Mr. Biden pointedly shot down the idea that Mrs. Clinton would be weak in a general election, asserting that “whoever wishes for Hillary is making a big mistake on the Republican side.” When the debate ended, the MSNBC cameras caught Mr. Biden and Mrs. Clinton warmly embracing.

Then in last week’s second debate, Mr. Biden was given an opening to criticize Mrs. Clinton’s decision to vote against the supplemental Iraq funding bill that was passed and signed by President Bush. It was an abrupt and baldly political departure for Hillary, who had previously voted for such measures on the grounds that she didn’t want to shortchange American troops who are in harm’s way—an obvious ploy to avoid further grief from the anti-war left, and a thoroughly symbolic one, since the bill passed the Senate by 66 votes.

But given the chance to take the front-runner to task for any of this, Mr. Biden, the lone Democratic candidate to vote for the funding bill, sheepishly passed, saying of Mrs. Clinton (and Barack Obama, who cast the same vote as Hillary): “I don’t want to judge them. I mean, these are my friends. We have worked together. We’ve worked hard to try and end this war …. We’re busting our neck every single day. So I respect it.”

(Contrast this with what he said about Mrs. Clinton in an interview with The Observer in January, when he panned her general-election chances based on her unspectacular early poll numbers, and said that her proposal to slash funds for American-trained Iraqi forces would result in “nothing but disaster.”)

Mr. Biden’s new, deferential tone is not standard practice for a scrappy underdog looking to exploit any and every opening. It is, rather, the strategy of a political lifer who appreciates the wisdom of Buddy Cianci, the former Providence mayor who once cautioned that in politics “the toes you’re stepping on today may be connected to the ass you have to kiss tomorrow.”

Consider it a sign of the times: A senior Democrat calls for committing American troops to a new theater of conflict, and the news causes only the gentlest of ripples.

The Democrat in question was Senator Joe Biden, and the benighted land was Darfur.

 “I think it’s time to put force on the table and use it, and use it now,” Mr. Biden said at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last Wednesday.

Lest anyone miss the point, Mr. Biden added a few moments later: “If the President were asking me, I would use American force now. But that’s me.”

Those last three words, hovering somewhere between righteous anger and dry disappointment, pointed to what Mr. Biden and everyone else knows: The chances of imminent U.S. military action in Sudan are next to zero.

The reasons for that have less to do with the specifics of Darfur than with the way in which the invasion of Iraq has stretched America’s capabilities and undercut the entire rationale for Western intervention in far-off lands.

Mr. Biden argued at the hearing that a mere 2,500 troops on the ground could change the situation in Darfur beyond recognition. Over the past four years, anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 people have died as a result of fighting in the region.

Military intervention, Mr. Biden acknowledged, “will not solve the situation. But it will mean there will be 10, a hundred, 500, a thousand, 2,000, 5,000, 15,000 women who will not be raped, children who will not die, and people who will not just be murdered indiscriminately.”

It is a compelling, humane argument. But the administration and the bulk of the American public seem unlikely to be shifted by it.

Practicalities and realpolitik weigh against a U.S.-led intervention. The U.S. armed forces are at breaking point because of the demands of Iraq and Afghanistan. Pragmatists fear a backlash if the U.S. were to undertake military action in yet another predominantly Muslim nation.

And above all, Iraq is a mess. With the nation that was once supposed to represent a new flowering of democracy in the Middle East slipping ever deeper into blood-drenched chaos, the argument for American intervention anywhere else gets no traction—even somewhere like Darfur, where the context is utterly different.

Last November, Ken Adelman, an erstwhile member of the Defense Policy Board and one of the most vocal supporters of the push to remove Saddam Hussein, told Vanity Fair that “the idea of a tough foreign policy on behalf of morality, the idea of using our power for moral good in the world,” is dead for at least a generation. After Iraq, he said, “it’s not going to sell.”

To some political observers, Mr. Adelman’s neoconservatism is sufficient grounds to dismiss his views out of hand. But his central point—that American muscle can and should be used for good in the wider world—seemed very credible not so long ago.

Back in the 1990’s, American indifference seemed to breed greater perils than action. The horrors of Rwanda unfolded without impediment from Washington. By contrast, Bosnia and Kosovo provided a different template—one in which the concept of a humanitarian war did not seem like a contradiction in terms.

Since the invasion of Iraq turned sour, public support for forceful American involvement in world affairs has hemorrhaged.

A 2005 Pew Center poll found that 42 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that “the U.S. should mind its own business internationally, and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.” It was the highest figure in over 40 years of polling on that question.

In a 2006 German Marshall Fund poll, 64 percent of Republicans agreed that the U.S. should “help establish democracy in other countries,” but only 35 percent of Democrats shared that view.

Such a finding, Peter Beinart wrote in last week’s Time magazine, suggests that “grass-roots Democrats are not in a missionary mood.”

Nor are America’s traditional allies. Exulting in the midterm-election results last November, Simon Jenkins, a columnist with the left-of-center Guardian in London, expressed delight that “a wretched era of American intervention has come to an end.”

But when did this era begin? Did its wretchedness include the interventions that forced the Serbs to the negotiating table for the Dayton Accords, that stopped the mass murder of Kosovars, and that drove the Taliban from power in Afghanistan?

Do the apocalyptic death tolls in Rwanda and Darfur not provide grim proof of the wretchedness of inaction?

Three weeks after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, Prime Minister Tony Blair—a more articulate advocate of Western intervention than anyone in the Bush administration—addressed the British Labor Party’s national conference. In his speech, he urged his listeners not to turn from the idea of engagement with the world, but to push harder for change:

 “The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor from the deserts of Northern Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan: They too are our cause,” Mr. Blair said.

 “This is a moment to seize. The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.”

The pieces have settled now. Mr. Blair is expected to announce his resignation next month, his legacy wrecked by Iraq. Mr. Bush has fared little better.

The tragedy of Iraq doesn’t begin and end on the streets of Baghdad or Ramadi or Najaf. The manifold failures there have also doomed the possibility of meaningful Western intervention elsewhere anytime soon.

That is something that dictators will have cause to celebrate, and those they oppress will have cause to mourn, many times in the years ahead. 

The Big Three, along with Bill Richardson, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd and Dennis Kucinich, will engage in a conversation entirely dedicated to the subject of Iraq and co-hosted by MoveOn.Org. Air America will be streaming it live 7:00 p.m to 8:30 p.m. tonight.

Said newly minted radio mogul Mark Green in an email: "We expect an historic night in what promises to be a defining election."

--Jason Horowitz

Hillary is ahead in Joe Biden's home state.

Michael Cooper has more details about Eliot Spitzer's fight over health care spending and notes 1199 consultant Jennifer Cunningham's response: "We're not crybabies."

There's a small residency question about Eliot Spitzer's upstate economic czar.

Henry Stern liked Spitzer's presentation this morning, and thinks Spitzer has the potential for excellence.

The federal government will pay 75 percent of the cost to clean up areas buried in the record-breaking snowstorm.

Rock Hackshaw sort of quit blogging on Room 8, and complains that some people have no blog etiquette.

"It wouldn't be Philadelphia without one candidate throwing racial slurs at an opponent," notes Harry Siegel.

And above is Eliot Spitzer explaining how health care money ought to be spent.

-- Azi Paybarah

To the Editor:

Jason Horowitz’s article—about a man that I like in general and have a difficult time liking re specifics—was a bit disturbing [“Biden Unbound: Lays Into Clinton, Obama, Edwards,” Feb. 5]. On balance, I agree about the need to partition the ethnic communities, as the Balfour Agreement made by the English after World War I was a disaster from the get-go. In general, I believe the war must be wound down over the course of a year. If we were to leave immediately, or if we were to stay, the civil war would continue to become larger and more deadly. But a hasty removal from the deadly Bush folly would endanger our troops. How to stabilize the region is beyond anyone’s powers of deduction; President Bush has so deeply destabilized the Iraqi nation that it makes Pandora’s box looks like a carton full of teddy bears. Perhaps America will regain the high moral ground in 20 years, although global warming will have moved it well back from the shores of international commerce and politics.

Ed McClendon

Canyonville, Ore.

To the Editor:

I read Mr. Horowitz’s interview with Joe Biden. Based on that article alone, he has my vote. What he is suggesting we do in Iraq is what most of the sane and intelligent people I know have been suggesting for several years. The situation and solution is no different from parents who have children who can’t get along and are always fighting—you simply separate them until they can get along.

We also already have a terrific model for his plan: our own United States. Our country began as a group of independent states that were eventually bound together by a federal government. You could even argue that people choose to live in particular states or regions of the country based on their religion and political ideologies. Hooray for Senator Biden.

Donna Farrell

Moreno Valley, Calif.

Not Enough

To the Editor:

I agree with Joe Conason’s characterization of President Bush’s State of the Union proposals as paltry and essentially irrelevant [“Cynical Speech Highlights Sad State of the Union,” Jan. 29]. It’s time that we shift our focus to those in Washington who can cause positive change to occur in this country. The vote in November brought a new cadre to power in Congress.

The recent march in Washington was our cry for Congress to show some backbone. Symbolic votes and mild policy changes are not enough. Give us visionary ideas and proposals that will lead to true change in Iraq, and in our health-care and energy policies.

The country is in a mess, in many, many ways, and President Bush seems incapable of arriving at any solutions. Congress, this is a huge challenge and opportunity. What are you going to do about it?

Daria Siekhaus

Manhattan

Schooling the Mayor

To the Editor:

The argument that Mayoral control of public schools is the most effective way to provide a quality education for all students is called into question by the best evidence available [“Bloomberg Keeps Heat on Schools,” Editorial, Jan. 29].

Three of the five recipients to date of the Broad Prize for Urban Education, the national honor awarded annually since 2002 to the urban school district that has successfully narrowed the achievement gap among its students, have elected boards of education. These include Long Beach and Garden Grove, Calif., and Houston, Tex. Norfolk, Va., has an appointed board, but it is named by the City Council, preserving the more diverse representation that direct election by voters ensures. Only Boston, Mass., which was the latest winner after being a finalist for the past four years, has a school board appointed by the mayor.

Time will show that separating municipal functions from school functions avoids the conflicts that invariably arise between their respective interests.

Walt Gardner

Los Angeles