Deitch's posthumous show of Dennis Hopper's photographs and paintings has opened at Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and it's "hit the ground with more pre-awareness than a teen vampire sequel," writes Artnet, in an early rave.

In a near-record use of the word "star" in a sentence, Tiff Chalmers writes that it's "a star-powered art show by an art-star and star-artist[Hopper], curated by an artist-director [Julian Schnabel], presided over by the new art-star-Svengali of a revivifying art institution [Deitch] whose hip wing is named for a star-maker [David Geffen], in a town full of artists and stars." [George Clooney, et. al.] The show is "visionary and charming," Chalmers concludes.

New Yorkers can take some comfort in the fact that they could have caught Tony Shafrazi's terrific Hopper show last year.

The museum prepares for all the flak that may come it's way from naysayers who would question treating the actor like an artist by smartly titling the show "Double Standard: Dennis Hopper."

Lending money to dubious risks is hardly something invented in the past 10 or 15 years. Until recently, however, the rule was that high risks paid high interest rates. The payday loan industry operates on that basis, as do the gangsters who lend to people gambling on sporting events. For that class of borrowers failure to pay may also entail knee-capping or finger-smashing.

Knee-capping, however, does not necessarily get a gangster/borrower his money back. Such lenders draw a line at proven deadbeats. They are denied loans.

Thus, in a crude way, the nether regions of the credit system have been self-regulating. It does not take government regulation for some people to figure out that if you cannot afford the interest, don’t borrow the money; or, conversely, if the applicant looks like a really bad risk, regardless of the interest, don’t make the loan. Proper assessment of risk ensures that the guys with the baseball bats, or the slightly more respectable payday lenders, do not suffer fatal financial bubbles.

In our case, the simple set of relationships obtaining in the netherworld of credit has been disrupted over the years. The first disruption, and least important, was setting price controls on money via the usury laws. Controls on the price of money—that is, interest—are easily evaded but they foster a climate of dishonesty, black marketeering and forms of bookkeeping that defeat transparency. It is surprising that Hillary Clinton, with her oft-boasted experience, did not understand what she was advocating when she came out in favor of putting a cap or price controls on mortgage interest rates.

The disruption of self-regulation in borrowing and lending in the upper world of finance begins with the government policy of promoting low interest rates. The rates were not forced down by promulgating price control rules but by making money cheap, by, in effect, printing a lot of it. The connection between high interest rates and high risk was broken. When self-regulation is working, only good risks get low rates; now everybody got them.

Both political parties were content. The business people backing the Republicans were having trouble counting the money, it was coming in so fast. The Democrats were seeing a jump in the standard of living of their lower-income constituents. In the past few years, low-interest, no-down-payment financing had come close to being a substitute for public or subsidized housing. The difference was, as few cared to say out loud, that sooner or later the new homeowners would have to pay for their nice new homes.

The old system of self-regulation roughly worked because of self-interest. Bankers did not want to get stung by making bad loans. The new system of low interest rates might have gone on working—sort of—if the self-regulatory arrangement had been buttressed or replaced by public regulation. But regulating is no fun and nobody wanted to do it, and so it did not get done.

Anyway, thanks to low interest and the Fed printing press, everybody was swimming in cheap money. In short order avarice coupled with idiotic optimism made businesspeople stop doing their job, which is to understand the risks of each and every transaction. Instead, they proceeded apace, believing that higher prices would cover any problems.

The higher prices depended on the Fed keeping the country awash with money so that mortgages could be kept current by refinancing houses adjudged to be worth more by the hour. The moderation that supply and demand normally imposes was vitiated in a gold rush frenzy.

What was happening in real estate was happening in cars and retail sales, thanks to the banks’ credit card divisions. There also interest rates were decoupled from risk and credit was extended to anybody with a pulse. College kids and doddering ancients living on Social Security were offered credit cards. Instead of the banks and the bond packagers who bought the credit card debt doing their job, which consisted of saying no to credit-unworthy applicants, the banks lobbied through Congress new, tough strictures in the borrower bankruptcy law.

You might have thought that Alan Greenspan, who spent his days at the Fed staring at the green numbers on his monitors, would have taken action. He could see how much people were making, how much they were spending and how much they were owing. He could see that they were borrowing more than they could pay back.

Mr. Greenspan and his successor, Ben Bernanke, had to know that sooner or later the Chinese would not or could not continue to supply the money to cover the difference between American incomes and American debt obligations. They had to know an essentially unstable system would have to crash.

To much applause, although not from some of the more cynical Wall Street traders, Mr. Bernanke rushed in with a money hose to pour water into every hole he could find. As he did so, a sluggish Congress and a torpid president bestirred themselves to come forth with financial paddles to regulate the economy’s arrhythmia. This is the “stimulation package.”

The package will put a few hundred bucks into many hands who certainly can use them, but it leaves the question of what happens to the trillion or two of debt unaddressed. The package also offers savings and even some tax rebates to businesses that speed up capital investments. All very nice but hardly decisive.

If the worthies believe that the stimulus package will carry us back to the status quo ante, they are in the fourth or final stage of delirium. We cannot return to spending more than we make to hold onto our prosperity. We have run out of credit.

If the bunch in business, politics and media who run the country don’t get it, we are in for a new world of pain.

That was normal, meaning that the Obama family was experiencing what tens of millions of American families experience: Two jobs and still feeling the financial pressure of not quite bringing in enough to make it. The Obamas got out of their financial bind when, as he says, he made big money on his book and was elected to the Senate. He knows that he is no longer normal. Nevertheless, his normal days are not so long ago that he has forgotten how the end of the month can be a family money crisis.

You may be sure that not a few of his auditors sit in meeting halls and gyms listening to him in near rapture while they count on their fingers how many years it must be since Hillary was normal. It was 32 years ago that her husband was elected governor of Arkansas and the Clinton family left off being normal to begin their crawl higher up on the hog and the social scale. It’s been 20 years or so since her friends were not billionaires or movie stars.

It’s been a long time away from normal for John Edwards. He has made very many millions as a liability lawyer suing very large commercial enterprises on behalf of very small plaintiffs. In a time when there are no unions and most governmental entities are indifferent to our personal plights, Mr. Edwards and his ilk are often our only and last resort, but that does not make his occupation tasty.

Mr. Edwards says he has been battling against the T. rex corporations, but we remember that he got rich at it, and we wonder what his clients got. Then again, the candidate’s parents, South Carolina textile mill hands, appear at his rallies. They are the real McCoy, sitting there with labor-stained faces. The fact that he brings them and talks about their lives of low pay and hard work is an indicator that John Edwards has not, as they say in the South, “got above his raisin’.”

You do not get the impression that the Republican candidates, Mike Huckabee excepted, would have the wildest idea what Mr. Obama is talking about when he is discussing five years away from normal. John McCain, a fine and brave man deserving much respect, is the son of an admiral who was the son of an admiral. The McCains did good, but they are not normal and never were.

Fred Thompson comes from workaday beginnings, but he kissed normal goodbye many years ago. As for Rudy Giuliani, you have the impression that for him, those who live in Normal Land are potential marks, persons waiting to be taken by the clients he serves through the dubious medium of Giuliani Partners LLC, the enterprise through which he has pocketed millions. Mitt Romney is strictly a silver-spoon boy.

Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee would understand what Mr. Obama’s normal means. Mr. Paul grew up on the family dairy farm in Pennsylvania, the son of a man whose schooling stopped at the eighth grade. He worked to put himself through college and medical school, ultimately becoming an OB-GYN, but as a libertarian he has embraced a political philosophy that deifies government impotency, so his sympathies avail us nothing.

Mr. Huckabee’s father was a fireman and a mechanic and his mother was a clerk at the gas company, so he grew up in a two-income family, and you cannot do that without knowing exactly what normal means. If that were not enough, he graduated from Ouachita Baptist University, which fact tells you plenty about where Mr. Huckabee hails from.

But there is a difference between understanding and sympathizing with those who live normal lives, and figuring out what to do about it. Other than decrying the gradual impingement of ever harsher necessities on our families, what do we do?

The Republican answer is to cut taxes, but there comes a point when tax-cutting doesn’t cut it anymore.

A lot of analytical approaches reveal what’s killing middle-class families. They pay too much for shelter, medical care, child care, transportation and education. Another way of expressing the problem is to say that many middle-class parents work too hard and too long, and they do not get paid enough for their efforts.

The minimum wage is supposed to address low compensation but it does not. For less-skilled workers, possibly the best thing we can do is stop illegal immigration. Within a few years, that would force up wages, and with that would come the most gawdawful screams from New York to California as everything from Big Macs to housecleaning shot up in price.

One way around this set of facts would be a significant child allowance, one large enough to enable and even entice one middle-class parent in each household to stay home. That’s normal in France, but it is abnormal here.

Many other abnormal ideas abound for helping the middle classes, but will even an Obamian-like upheaval for change make enacting any of them more likely? Let’s hope so, or we can put our faith in the old remedies—cut taxes, outlaw gay marriage, encourage abortion or don’t, pray in the schools or don’t. Follow this formula and we’ll have a change, all right, but we’ll have a new normal that we are going to like less than the one we already have.

“The fierce urgency of now” is the phrase Mr. Obama uses to plead and demand that changes, long delayed and never made, be done. They never will be by politicians too long in office, and too rich and too comfortable to understand what living normal means.

Bhutto’s death marks the most sobering setback for the U.S. policy elite because it points up the absence of any coherent policy in the critical majority-Muslim nation, now the third-leading recipient of U.S. military aid, behind Israel and Egypt.

Ever since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, the Bush White House has let American policy chime in unison with the interests of Pakistan’s strongman leader Pervez Musharraf—whom candidate George W. Bush famously failed to name in a 2000 campaign pop quiz on world affairs shortly after Musharraf came to power in a bloodless coup. Indeed, the upcoming January Pakistan election—which may be delayed several weeks as Bhutto’s son and widower succeed her as joint leaders of the Pakistan Peoples Party—marked the first significant U.S. deviation from its no-strings-attached commitment to shoring up General Musharraf’s increasingly authoritarian regime. State Department representatives let General Musharraf know that he would be expected to minimize tampering with this month’s Pakistani presidential ballot—which even in the best of times falls significantly short of “free and fair” status—while also relinquishing his leadership position in the always influential Pakistani military.

These were modest policy departures. But even so, observers of the region note, it was a tough sell to White House hardliners.

“The decision to try to be the broker of a deal between Benazir and Pervez was a divisive question in the White House,” says Bruce Riedel, a 30-year C.I.A. veteran who served as a South Asian national security adviser to the administrations of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and now is a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. “The National Security Council and the vice president’s office had to be convinced under a lot of pressure to come around to this, and I suspect that their hearts were never fully in it.”

One stark measure of this lassitude was the clear alarm sounded by a pair of suicide-bomb attacks on pro-Bhutto crowds greeting the opposition candidate as she headed to the Karachi airport after a major rally in support of her candidacy. After the attack—which claimed the lives of more than 140 Pakistanis—Texas Democratic Representative Shelia Jackson Lee, who co-chairs the House Pakistan caucus, wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice imploring the United States to pursue more active security measures in concert with the United Nations to ensure the safety of Bhutto, General Musharraf and other Pakistani political leaders. Senators Joseph Biden, Patrick Leahy and Joseph Lieberman sent a similar letter directly to General Musharraf—a legislative overture that wouldn’t be necessary if a more robust White House commitment to the security of Bhutto and other candidates were in place.

“Over the last two or three months, we’ve been crying ourselves hoarse to the United States and Musharraf to provide Madame Bhutto with more security,” says a U.S. representative of the P.P.P. who requested anonymity due to Pakistan’s volatile political state. “There were intimidation and harassment happening every night. In the middle of the night, I’d get an e-mail from one of her rallies saying there was full security on hand—and then, a few hours later, I’d hear that all the security was gone. These harassment tactics had been going on for months—and for God’s sake, this is a former prime minister we’re talking about.”

One can only hope that General Musharraf and his U.S. backers will step up security measures as Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, and son, Bilawal Zardari, succeed to the P.P.P. leadership for the coming elections.

“The chance that this wasn’t going to happen at some point was small,” said Patrick Lang, former head of Middle East and South Asian intelligence for the Defense Intelligence Agency. “Pakistan is a killing place. It was created out of an unstable mixture of people united by their varying ferocity over Islam.

“A great danger for Musharraf now comes from the fact that we insist that he be something—and that Pakistan be something—that they both are not,” Mr. Lang said. “I heard that idiot [Chris] Matthews say on his show the other night that the majority of Pakistanis are both moderate and secular. If we’re going to squeeze Musharraf hard to be something he isn’t, and can’t be, his position becomes ever more fragile. And an army coup or a successful assassination of Musharraf becomes, I think, a real possibility.”

While not all observers share Mr. Lang’s fatalism, there’s a growing sense that the country’s long-standing history of corruption and political violence may be veering past the point of no return.

“There never used to be any suicide bombings in Pakistan,” said the P.P.P. representative. “Yes, there’s been political violence, but it’s never been at this level, ever.”

Nor is the Pakistani Army—the source of General Musharraf’s now-waning legitimacy—immune from the spread of Islamist terrorism. Pakistan’s elite Inter-Services Intelligence have long collaborated with Taliban and Al Qaeda forces—the Taliban, indeed, owes its institutional origins to the I.S.I.’s early care and feeding. And now regular troops are starting to bow to the influence of extremists.

“What we’re seeing in the Pakistani army is unprecedented levels of desertion,” said Mr. Riedel. “You’ve got whole groups of Pakistani troops surrendering en masse when they come into contact with Taliban and Islamist forces.

“Pakistan is becoming a failed state,” Mr. Riedel said, “though it’s not yet there. A lot of the blame for that lies with the Pakistanis, but George W. Bush can’t escape some of that responsibility. We’ve been standing by this dictator for so long who has undermined civil society and supported extremists that we’ve left ourselves with few other choices.” As a result, he says, “the two most unpopular people in Pakistan today are General Musharraf and President Bush.”

That doesn’t exactly bode well for Bush’s successor, especially given the now lavish scale of American aid to the Musharraf regime—much of it scarcely tied to the fight against Islamic extremism. The United States “has been giving money for developing targets for the Pakistani Air Force and the Navy,” the P.P.P. representative says. “Well, the last time I looked, Al Qaeda had no air force or navy.”

Such lax oversight is all too characteristic, the representative says, of a White House seeking largely to wish away its own policy dilemmas and contradictions. “On the one hand, the U.S. says, ‘We don’t want to meddle ourselves in another country’s internal politics.’ But at the same time, they’ve sent this regime $10 billion over the past eight years. If you’ve bought the leverage, then why aren’t you using it?”

The Democrats now masterminding the 110th Congress, after all, stunned observers last November by sweeping into majorities in both the House and Senate on vows to end the dismal U.S. engagement in Iraq and bring desperately needed honesty and transparency to government. Little more than a year later, Nancy Pelosi’s House and Harry Reid’s Senate have, after much righteous huffing and puffing, rolled over on all the White House’s war-funding measures, failing to approve any timeline for a troop withdrawal from Iraq. The latest Congressional timeline appeared under the magisterial title, “The Orderly and Responsible Iraq Redeployment Appropriations Act.” But after the House passed it, the Senate proved neither orderly nor responsible enough to defeat a cloture motion. So after entertaining more than a dozen legislative proposals for exit strategies and timelines, the Democratic 110th has functioned in exactly the same fashion as its Republican predecessors—the only difference being that the G.O.P. majorities moved war-funding measures with the alacrity of short-order cooks, whereas Ms. Pelosi’s Democrats seem to favor the slow food movement.

By her own admission, Ms. Pelosi underestimated how deeply her Republican colleagues were invested in the continued occupation of Iraq. At a recent press conference, the speaker marveled that they hadn’t “shared the view of so many of our people that we needed a new direction in Iraq”; that in fact Republicans “like” the war, politically speaking—and so she’s reluctantly concluded “that this is not just George Bush’s war. This is the war of Republicans in Congress.”
As is typical of Beltway news cycles, Ms. Pelosi’s comments sparked a meaningless furor over the idea of her loyal opposition liking the war. And so—fortunately for her—she had to issue a mild clarification, permitting the whole thing to blow over before anyone gave much thought to how dunderheaded the substance of this appraisal was. Surely no other recent speaker assumed, coming into power, that the majority party would automatically win consent from the new minority party solely on the grounds that “so many of our people” would nudge them that way. How had Ms. Pelosi been occupying herself in 2002, when Karl Rove’s campaign machine used the mythic threat of a WMD-armed Iraq to cruise to historic pickups in a midterm cycle? Had she napped through the gruesome 9/11 mournography of the G.O.P.’s 2004 New York convention?

Of course “this is the war of Republicans in Congress”; it’s how many of them managed to hang on to their jobs. Expecting that dynamic to magically change based on the ’06 midterm results is tantamount to making the voters do the Democratic leadership’s job. Apparently, Ms. Pelosi thinks that the shiny ’06 mandate functions as a get-out-of-conference card that will spare them the hard work of arm-twisting and deal-brokering to win some progress toward a pullout—and facing up to the hard political consequences of getting an actual troop withdrawal on track. Even Dick Cheney, who for all his executive branch blood lust remains a close student of House power plays, recently told a trio of interviewers from the Politico that he’d been astonished at the failure of the Democrats to wield any “big stick” in the Iraq funding battles. “I’m frankly surprised at why, after all of the efforts they’ve made to try to hook up various provisions on Iraq to the spending bill, they’ve been unsuccessful.”

Meanwhile, as major party leaders have been professing all this surprise at each other, the all-too-familiar appropriations on the Hill grind on as they always have. Yes, Congress did enact ballyhooed new disclosure rules to bring more of the grisly practice of earmarking—i.e., the last-minute introduction of parochial spending projects likely to enhance an incumbent lawmaker’s reelection prospects into the parliamentary clusterfuck known as the appropriations process. But that’s done nothing to slow the brisk trade in earmarking—especially for appropriations subcommittee lords such as Pennsylvania Democrat Jack Murtha and Democrats who narrowly took seats from the G.O.P. side last cycle. As my CQ colleague Jonathan Allen has reported, the Appropriations Committee fielded more than 33,000 earmarks request from lawmakers this year. But even Congress can only sluice so much pork into awaiting home-district barrels; the Appropriations Committee only summoned the scratch for one-fifth of this year’s earmark requests. When the House Appropriations chairman made the impolitic suggestion of meeting the White House’s proposed discretionary spending cap of $933 billion by simply pulling the plug on all pending earmarks, he was all but hooted off the stage—by Congressional leaders of both parties. Indeed, just as the appropriations melee was heaving into its final phase, the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell—a lawmaker who’s never met an industry PAC or special-interest boondoggle he didn’t adore—was already airing campaign ads in his home state of Kentucky touting his prowess in pulling down some $200 million in earmarks.

Mr. McConnell’s chief enforcer, the outgoing minority whip, Trent Lott, tried a bit more subtly to depict Obey’s proposal as an affront to singing-senator-style chamber decorum. “All it would do is make people mad and delay everything,” Mr. Lott pouted. And Ms. Pelosi is falling incoherently into line as it seems only she can. As Congress prepared on Monday to hit most every item on the White House’s wish list—including a likely Senate amendment for $70 billion in unconditional war funding, the speaker burbled that the appropriations package “will meet the standards we talked about, which is the president’s number, our priorities.” In other words: Whatever, we got the system juiced for the next election cycle, and put off any real fiscal reckonings into the next fiscal year.
And they say that bipartisanship is dead?

The television and movie writers strike has not been much of a help either. Though the strikers may have good and sufficient reason to walk out on their jobs, the way they did it came through on television as some kind of celebrity lark being pulled off by overpaid people feeling indignant that their cushy life is not cushy enough. In fact, as just noted, the writers may have a real case, but they did not present it well, and as a result, unionism took it on the chops yet one more time.

As if that were not enough, the generous coverage of the French transportation strike has also reinforced the opinion that unions exist to defend the entrenched privilege of a few lucky workers. The issues in the French strike make it appear, perhaps correctly, that the striking unions are fighting to retain such bennies as full and permanent retirement at age 50. This is coming at a time when all of American automobile workers have just suffered cuts in their compensation of a third or more, and that is with a union.

Americans are bombarded by anti-union messages, explicit and implicit, about as often as we are hit with TV pizza ads. One of our two major political parties is openly dedicated to the destruction of all trade unionism, while the other sells out unions whenever the mob of K Street corruptionists passes out the bribes.

Unions are such public institutions that when they go wrong, which they did often enough in the past, everybody sees it. They are unlike the banks, hedge funds and Wall Street brokerage houses, which get away with murder and are exposed only when something like the subprime disaster threatens to destroy the finances of hundreds of thousands of ordinary working people.

John L. Lewis, who was to the labor movement of the 1930’s what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, was to the civil rights movement of the 1960’s, is supposed to have said that a bad union is better than no union. For practical purposes, we have been living the past 40 years in a near-no-union society. During these past two generations, each year has seen more employees or workers of whatever stripe and occupation limp on with less and less representation.

One view of how that has worked out for us is provided by Elizabeth Warren, a professor of law at Harvard University. This is how Professor Warren describes the, ahem, progress of the past 40 years:

“In the second half of the 20th century, the single most important economic thing that happened is that millions of mothers poured back into the workforce, and that’s the only thing that kept family income rising. Starting in about 1970, a fully employed male’s wages completely flattened out, and in fact, a fully employed male today, on average, median, earns about $800 less than his dad earned a generation ago. … Wages flatten for men and the family does better only if they can put two people on the workforce, and the norm switches from a one-earner family to a two-earner family, for those who are lucky enough to have it. Now if that were the only thing that’s happened, you’d think we should be richer. We should have more savings; we should have very little debt. But expenses in the same 30-year period far outstripped what the families are spending, and I’m not talking about consumer price index.

“Here’s the division. I want to compare a mom, dad and two kids today with a mom, dad and two kids 30 years ago, when you started a family in 1971, as I did. What happens on spending? Start with the consumption. This is what everyone [supposes], again, in the popular media, why are people in trouble: too many GameBoys, too many iPods, too many $200 sneakers. In fact, families today, adjusted for inflation, spend less on clothing; less on food, including eating out; less on furniture; less on appliances, than they spent a generation ago. Where they spend more is for [a] three-bedroom, one-bath house. The median family is spending 80 percent more on mortgage payments, adjusted for inflation, than they spent a generation ago. They’re spending about 75 percent more for health insurance than they spent a generation ago. … They’re paying for child care, which of course, they didn’t a generation ago.”

Professor Warren also points out that when one paycheck supported a family, there was a built-in safety net in case of illness or unemployment or some other urgent domestic need: The stay-at-home parent could temporarily take a job. Now, if there is a sudden financial jolt, it is a disaster for the family. The changes that she describes occurred simultaneously with the enfeeblement of organized labor. With the near demise of organized labor, it was not as though the great number of employees had exchanged the old representation for something different and better. They exchanged the old representation for precisely nothing.

The churches and “faith-based” organizations that put up a perpetual wall of sound bemoaning the weakening of family life do not address these questions, which have a hell of a lot more to do with fracturing the nuclear family than gay marriage.

There are no end of others lamenting what’s happening to the middle classes, but they offer little beside sympathy. You have amiable news celebs like Lou Dobbs on the case, but he has no program that might be of real help. You also have your Hillary Clintons, and they, too, are good at indignation without purpose, unless it is to get reelected.

If a reversal of direction is to come, it must be started by the affected themselves. The only way to do that is through collective action, which, by any name you wish to call it, means organizing unions.

You’d make coy campaign overtures to religious denominations that couldn’t officially endorse you. Point at the lurid God-baiting work of a liberal pop culture, a liberal media and a liberal university scene. Hotly denounce the activist courts, and their bids to treat abortion and euthanasia as counterculture party favors, while de-Christianizing the schools and the public square. Introduce symbolic variations as needed: NEA-funded blasphemies in the museums, gay marriage as mortal threat to civilization, secular tolerance as coddling of “Islamofascists,” the special Congressional session on the Terri Schiavo case, the “war on Christmas,” etc.

Then, come election day, reel in the credulous ballots of evangelical voters, ignore most of their agenda while in office, only to rediscover it each fresh new election cycle. Repeat until you’ve achieved a near-permanent majority—or the rapture happens.

This time out, however, the procedure is much more dicey. The 2008 presidential field offers precious few viable standard-bearers for the religious right’s movement voters. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith is a huge obstacle for many evangelicals—a problem he hopes to dispel with a major speech on his faith later this week. And the mistress-chauffering, pro-choice, soft-on-gay-rights Rudy Giuliani is a nonstarter for most self-styled values voters, to put things mildly.

Hence former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee’s sudden lurch to the top of the polls in Iowa—a state so rife with conservative Christian voters that it went to certifiable lunatic Pat Robertson in the 1988 caucus season.

Recent polling in New Hampshire shows him closing fast on longtime Granite State poll leader Mr. Romney. And Huckabee campaign hands are increasingly sanguine about his chances in South Carolina—the big, evangelically rich portal to the Southern phase of the primaries, and the subsequent Super Tuesday blowout.

“The conservative Christian voters in South Carolina weren’t initially all that interested in Huckabee,” recalls former G.O.P. Governor David Beasley, speaking from behind the wheel of his pickup as he toured the back reaches of his farm. “They were still sitting on the sidelines; a few made commitments to Romney and other candidates.”

But now that Mr. Huckabee’s gaining serious ground, he says, “they see a candidate who shares their views, and they’ve moving over to him lock, stock and barrel.”

It’s true that Mr. Romney has long since locked up many of the state’s conservative consultants—“the good, the bad and the filthy” in Mr. Beasley’s estimation. But thanks to a wildly popular Web-based Chuck Norris endorsement and generally sympathetic media coverage of the campaign, “the governor’s message is now resonating through the Internet and the normal channels of the Christian political community,” Mr. Beasley says.

Like a growing number of evangelical leaders, Mr. Huckabee’s disposed to accept the idea—still bizarrely controversial on the right—that global warming stems from human activity, together with the corollary view that humans should play some role in reversing it. He’s a vocal critic of mandatory minimum drug sentencing, and other excesses of a “revenge-based corrections system.” He hasn’t revised that position rightward, even though his own Arkansas record has given him (or, more accurately, his opponents) a Willie Horton-style poster boy for soft-on-crime charges, convicted rapist Wayne DuMond.

And even though Mr. Huckabee is increasingly talking like a Tancredo-like immigration bully in the primaries, he also leavens that stand with McCain-style reminders that immigrants shouldn’t be punished for their honest aspirations—let alone see their children demonized for their parents’ alleged trespasses. He’s opposed President Bush’s veto of the Democratic Congress’s expanded State Children’s Health Insurance Program, and even called for an investigation of Mr. Bush and other senior White House officials based on Scott McClellan’s reported revelations that false information about the Valerie Plame case originated from the White House’s very highest echelons.

But where Mr. Huckabee appears to pose the greatest discomfort for the Republican establishment is on economic grounds. He is given to denouncing globalization’s hardships on the campaign stump, and raised taxes 21 times in Little Rock (while also, he’s quick to point out, cutting them more than 90 times)—lifting the state out of a deficit and into a surplus in the bargain. That record has earned him the undying enmity of the antitax Club for Growth; the libertarian Cato Institute has given him a “D” grade based on his Arkansas fiscal record.

Still, the party’s business wing can’t launch a preemptive anti-Huckabee strike because it, too, is largely decoupled from the old G.O.P. governing coalition.

Grover Norquist, who as head of Americans for Tax Reform is the de facto policy pope of the supply-side right, has pointedly refrained from joining in on the anti-Huckabee assaults mounted by the Club for Growth and allied columnists like Robert Novak and Jonah Goldberg. Mr. Norquist recently told David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network that he looked kindly upon Mr. Huckabee’s centerpiece tax reform—institution of the national retail “fair tax”—even though the plan is sketchy, likely regressive and scarcely the vehicle to overpower and replace the I.R.S., as Mr. Huckabee claims it to be.

True, Mr. Huckabee has been more accommodating of Mr. Norquist than the group he likes to call “the Club for Greed”—he’s lately signed on to the ATR pledge to introduce no new tax increases from the White House. But it’s at least as striking that Mr. Norquist—best known for his pledge to shrink the state until it could be drowned in a bathtub—seems barely to blanch at a recidivist tax hiker like Mr. Huckabee. That could well mean that the reigning orthodoxies in the G.O.P. coalition are poised to switch places.

“As long as you could depend on the big shots in the Christian right to drink the Kool-Aid on taxes and all the rest of it, did you really give a shit about abortion?” says Mark Silk, author of the landmark study Spiritual Politics and professor of religion and public life at Trinity College. “There’s been some chatter from the left on the shifting field” on the Republican side, Mr. Silk continues. “They say, ‘Well, this proves all along that it’s the money guys in the G.O.P. coalition who control the thing.’ But I think that deeply fails to understand the nature of the Republican coalition. Yeah, there are the money guys, but then there are the people who have the votes. You’re not talking about symmetrical coalition partners.” Put another way: Should Mike Huckabee continue gaining ground in this unsettled primary season, the disenchanted evangelical set could be dispensing a whole new brand of Koo
l-Aid.

Brian Williams started the bear-baiting with a question designed both to embarrass Barack Obama and get a rise out of Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, Tim Russert cast himself as a political Jerry Springer, posing questions that had no other purpose than to get these politicians fighting each other as they do in those daytime television spectacles. Mr. Russert left the viewer with the impression that he believes he should be running for president. His intention was plain. He was to be the superior one, the poised person with the correct answers while the candidates were made to look like a clutch of clumsy, ox-brained tangle-foots.

Mr. Russert has found a safe way to be a bully and to embarrass those who do not have the protection afforded by the role of journalist. This is not a case of media bias. Mr. Russert has no discernible political leaning. What we are looking at is a case of egotism, of self-dramatization, of the hammy display of a prancing public personality.

Here is another example of Tim Russert abandoning the role of debate moderator for that of Crusader Rabbit or Tribune of the People:

“Senator Clinton, I’d like to follow up, because in terms of your experience as first lady, in order to give the American people an opportunity to make a judgment about your experience, would you allow the National Archives to release the documents about your communications with the president, the advice you gave? Because, as you well know, President Clinton has asked the National Archives not to do anything until 2012.”

Mrs. Clinton tried to defend herself against this berserk moderator by saying, “… Now, all of the records, as far as I know, about what we did with health care, those are already available. Others are becoming available. And I think that, you know, the archives will continue to move as rapidly as its circumstances and processes demand.”

But can Mr. Russert drop it? No. He followed up with another question. This conduct might have some place in a press conference where follow-up, combative questions are employed, although usually without eliciting much information. This was not a press conference. It was a debate. By tradition, debate moderators confine themselves to enforcing the rules of the debate and otherwise keep their traps shut.

Under no rules of debate conduct is moderator allowed to mock and make fun of one of the debaters. And other than to make Dennis Kucinich a butt of laughter there could have been no other reason for Mr. Russert asking the following question:

“Congressman Kucinich, I want to move to a different area, because this is a serious question. The godmother of your daughter, Shirley MacLaine, writes in her new book that you sighted a UFO over her home in Washington State, that you found the encounter extremely moving, that it was a ‘triangular craft, silent and hovering,’ that you ‘felt a connection to your heart and heard directions in your mind.’

Now, did you see a UFO?”

To which one can only ask, “And, Mr. Russert, did you feel like the wiseass you are when you posed that question to Mr. Kucinich?” The congressman, mistaken or not in his beliefs, is a thoughtful, passionate, incorruptible and brave man. Well, Mr. Cheap Shot Artist, you got your laugh.

As opposed to Mr. Russert, moderator Brian Williams played the role of village idiot. Get a load of this from Mr. Williams: “A question for Senator Dodd. A question to you alone, Senator, about this intersection of environment and sacrifice. So many people have been saddened by the pictures these past few days from Southern California. There are reports that major cities in the state of Georgia are threatened with running out of drinking water in a matter of days. Are you truly prepared to lead, on a national scale, the kind of sacrifice it would require where it intersects with the environment?”

How is someone running for office to answer that question? Would he or she reply, no, I am not prepared to lead, at least not “on a national scale,” whatever the hell that means?

If there were any doubt that Mr. Williams has naught but three dried seeds between his ears, it is swept away by this question: “Let’s talk about life on earth. Senator Clinton, Lance Armstrong called here today with a question. He made the point, as he often has, [that][ 3,000 people, roughly, killed on 9/11; roughly $1 trillion spent in the years since. About that many people die of cancer every two days. He wanted us to ask any of you: Are you willing to be the president, or are you willing to pledge to be the president, that knocks cancer down from its status as number-one killer of Americans under the age of 85?”

First open the envelope, extract the paper and then read, “No, I am not willing to be the president who knocks cancer down. I am for cancer. People are living too long. Elect me and I promise you a shorter, more painful life.”

Well, now we know where Mr. Williams and Mr. Russert get their questions. They get them from bicycle riders, the best known of which is a man often accused of having cheated to win his races.

Political debates are good and necessary but they should be debates, not performance opportunities for news celebrities, and there should be no questioning by anybody, whether journalists, political scientists or academics. Let there be one topic selected and one only for each debate, and rules agreed on as to how long and how often the debaters talk, with one moderator whose task it is to ensure the debate rules are followed.

The present format is a disservice to the voting public and the candidates. Enough is enough.

The report appeared to be unadulterated horseshit, ultimately disavowed by the Hillary team. But not before it triggered a content-free round of snipes and counterinsinuations from the Obama and Clinton campaigns, each eager to display their campaigning prowess. Mr. Obama indignantly decried the “Swift Boat” tactics of the alleged smear; Clinton operatives snidely retorted that the Illinois senator lacked the “experience” necessary to shut down a systematic attack operation.

The authors of the Federalist Papers didn’t include the tireless shilling of rapid-response narratives of the campaign itself among the ideal leadership qualifications for the national executive. But all the nonsignifying sound and fury over the nonscandal underlines one theme of this primary cycle: the extreme caution of Democratic campaigning, which has turned the Democratic party into a virtual assembly line of conservative political impulses. Of course, they remain to the left of the G.O.P. But for several election cycles now, they have campaigned out of defensive crouches, even when ostensibly on the attack—a trend that seems to be taking earlier and deeper root, paradoxically, in an election season where the party looks to possess every tactical advantage over the once-powerful G.O.P.

The party’s “been moving in that direction for some time,” says Marc Landy, a Boston College political scientist and co-author of the study Presidential Greatness with Sidney M. Milkis. “I think you see it in 1996, when [Bill] Clinton framed the campaign around protecting the entitlements. Whatever the question put to him, his answer was always, ‘I will not touch Medicare.’ Then in 2000, you have Gore and the lockbox. And in ’04, the Kerry campaign wasn’t really about anything, but it continued in the same vein—the idea that the Democrats will protect against conservative raids on entitlements.

“I find it extremely hard to say what they’re for,” Mr. Landy said. “I think if you really pressed it, they are affirming that the thing a liberal Democrat believes is that we can all express ourselves. We’re not all really going to make pornography—some of us will be ballet dancers, some are poets and what have you.” In this minimalist view of a liberal good society, “obviously the greatest evil is censorship,” he says. “Beyond that, in foreign policy, say, the goal is again defensive: if we can keep people safe in the sense that they’re not killed overseas. I think that for a certain number of liberals, all that really matters is to be secure.” This outlook, he suggests, reflects the shifting socioeconomic profile of the party’s power brokers: “Our traditional view of the Democratic party is that it’s still something formed around a set of issues and organizations, from the labor movement, say. But that represents a deeply declining part of the workforce. Now the party is the lawyer’s party—and the party of Hollywood and high-tech millionaires.”

Indeed, all three of the candidates in the Iowa top tier—Ms. Clinton, Mr. Obama and Mr. Edwards—are attorneys, and all are plugged into entertainment and tech donor networks. But that’s largely the party’s institutional leadership profile. Some Democratic observers see a growing split between those cautious strategists and base voters, who may opt for roads less traveled, scripts less mercilessly flogged, once victory seems inevitable.

“If you can have buyer’s remorse before you’ve bought something, that’s going to set in as we move in toward the last six weeks toward the caucus,” says Terry Michael, the former Democratic National Committee spokesman who now heads the Washington Center for Politics and Journalism. Citing polls that show Mr. Obama opening a slight lead over Hillary among self-described likely caucus voters, Mr. Michael theorizes that they “show a ceiling for the extremely well-known product of Hillary Clinton, and probably a floor for Obama.”

The dynamic, he continues, is something of a reverse image of the conditions that moved Mr. Kerry to the front of the Iowa pack in 2004: “Then you had the D.C. establishment not wanting the inevitable nominee—Dean—and deciding, ‘All right, we want someone who’s one of us.’ In this case they have much of the Washington establishment in the Hillary inevitability camp. But that’s what I mean by buyers’ remorse—the revolt against the conventional wisdom, within both the party and the press establishment.”

But for either Mr. Obama or Mr. Edwards to capitalize on that trend, they have to show less caution. “There’s no need to play it safe at this point,” Mr. Michael said. “If Obama finds his voice on the war, I think people are going to stop and ask, ‘Do we really want four more years of the Bush-Clinton clans, who have dominated our politics for the last 28 years?’”

The Edwards camp, at least, is pushing those kinds of messages hard.

“There’s no question that in American politics, in both parties but especially ours in recent years, there’s been a premium placed on caution and stability on the boat,” says one adviser to the campaign. “They don’t want anyone making waves. That’s frankly the reason that you see so much Washington and media cynicism with regard to Edwards, and why they’re not picking up more differences.

“All the candidates now are saying they’re for change; the question is how do they approach bringing about the change?”

Which is, in part, why the Edwards team is continuing to hammer at the image of the front-runner as a “corporate Democrat” and other themes in the old economic populist mode of Democratic campaigns past. “You know, if you keep making the critiques, the critiques will stick,” the adviser says. “Here’s how you know Hillary’s panicking about Iowa—she went on the air with this trust ad, with a paid ad that is countering an attack that no one’s made.”

Evidently some kind of convergence of the real economy and the other one occurred recently when it was announced that a frightened group of the nation’s largest banks met in Washington to create a $100 billion safety net to be used to keep funds holding subprime mortgage bonds from tanking. The money, it would appear, will be used to buy the bonds at above open-market prices in hopes that by doing so their value will go back to pre-panic levels.

This is a desperate move. Something like it has been successfully used before when a major hedge fund got itself in trouble and threatened to knock over the financial dominoes Wall Street strives to keep upright and profitable. That occasion, the demise of Long Term Capital Management, was, though huge, small potatoes compared to what the world of excessively high finance is grappling with now.

That is why the Washington meeting was convened by the Treasury Department, and why the Brits are urging their banks to join in the effort. If it should fail, and the price of these various subprime bonds and bond funds collapse for good, the money borrowed to buy them will have to be repaid by selling other securities, thus possibly setting off a landslide. Triggering a rout of such proportions could bring the Wall Street economy and the “real” economy together with a sickening thud. What it might do to the value of millions of people’s 401(k)’s is a conjecture best left for another time.

The number and value of the loans is eye-popping. Between 2004 and 2006, the period when the housing market reached the top of its frenzy, financial institutions issued mortgages whose combined value is or was $1.5 trillion. Last year alone high-rate mortgages—as subprimes are sometimes called—comprised almost 30 percent of all mortgages.

In the coming months $650 billion worth of adjustable rate mortgages will see rates reset drastically upward, and what effect that will have on home buyers, developers and financial institutions is unknown.

When subprime mortgages became a topic of conversation, they were presented to the public as yet one more affliction suffered by low-income minority people. A “them not us” kind of thing that would hurt only those living in trashy little developments that, to the naked eye, are scarcely better than trailer parks.

The Wall Street Journal decided to test this premise and found it does not hold water. The Journal discovered that while “the concentration of high-rate loans is higher in poorer communities, the numbers show that high-rate lending also rose sharply in middle-class and wealthier communities.”

As the mess gets messier, everybody is starting to blame everybody else. At the top of the heap is Robert Rubin, who is getting mud pies and ice balls tossed at him for the first time in his public life. The former treasury secretary is being paid in the vicinity of $30 million per year to be the chairman and resident wise man at Citigroup, which is taking losses in the multibillions for its part in the subprime disaster.

Those mortgage brokers who have not yet gone out of business are being savaged for cheating, deceptive practices and high-hogging it at the expense of simple, honest American Dreamers, although some of them are getting it in the neck for being too stupid or too lazy or too greedy to read what they sign.

As foreclosure rates are reported to be doubling in some parts of the country, what some people might call vultures are moving in. The best publicized is investment banker/shrewd operator John Paulson, who has been shorting securities or bonds backed by high-interest, subprime mortgages. Without going into the mechanics of short sales, the crux of it is that the lower the price of such bonds drops, the more money Mr. Paulson will make.

Short sellers of anything from wheat to stocks are generally disliked and looked upon as close to criminals, although what they do is not against the law. But there is something about making money off of falling prices that drives people nuts. They are being driven even nuttier by Mr. Paulson, who is backing a bill in Congress that would give relief to homeowners faced with a jump in their mortgage payments owing to their interest rates going up.

Mr. Paulson’s bill would modify the recently passed bankruptcy act, which all but wiped out any relief for debtors. If passed over the dead bodies of the banking industry, the modification would give judges the power to lower the mortgage payments of despairing homeowners. It would also knock the stuffings out of the value of real-estate-backed bonds, which would be good for Mr. Paulson but highly ungood for Citi and Robert Rubin.

Passing or not passing the bill will give the legislators a choice of which disaster is worse, allowing defaulting homeowners to be evicted, or letting the bonds drop in value, thereby endangering the retirement savings of yet other millions, not to mention the additional real possibility of the stock market taking a major swoon.

The underlying economic system that has brought us to this pretty pass grows crazier by the year. What they call “growth” depends on people spending money they do not have. The mere mention of the possibility of American consumers cutting back on purchasing sends the stock markets around the globe into a tizzy as predictions of recession are heard.

Thus we must buy, buy, buy or the country will slip into a recession. But if we keep on buying, we are headed for bankruptcy. Unless, of course, that evil hour is postponed by a banker coming along to refinance the loans we are unable to pay with a larger loan we cannot pay.

You may well ask, how long can this go on? It has gone on for a long time and—who knows—we have been wiggling and worming out of these crises for years, so with a little adept bookkeeping and a lot of imagination, the end may not yet be near.