Donald Trump, can you hear Ghazala Khan now?

"I'd like to hear his wife say something."

That was Donald Trump's vile response (snippetted by Maureen Dowd)  to the riveting on-stage appearance at the Democratic convention of Khizr and Ghazala Khan, parents of an army captain, Humayun Khan, who sacrificed his life in 2004 to protect his men and Iraqi civilians from a car bomb.  Mrs. Khan stood silently beside her husband while he questioned Trump's understanding of the Constitution and fitness to be president.

Trump elaborated in an interview on ABC this morning: "If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn't allowed to have anything to say. You tell me."

Well, it turns out that Mrs. Khan did say something -- last night, on Lawrence O'Donnell. Twelve years after her son's death, she expressed unbearable grief with an extraordinary eloquence that seems born of long years of endless interior replay.  James Fallows provides the segment (and the appropriate denunciation of Trump's barbarity) here.  Mrs. Khan speaks first at 2:35.*

Here is a transcription of the crux, but you have to hear it. Her short narrative hinges on two words, hero and son, in point/counterpoint:

Edward Snowden, rhetorician?

Edward Snowden turned the NSA's tools against it -- or, depending on your point of view, ultimately in service to it. He also knows how to turn a phrase inside out to assert a moral contrast -- or else, his ACLU lawyer (Ben Wizner?) does, or the two in concert do.  This little barb in today's NYT front-pager* about how Snowden caught his documents caught my eye:

David Brooks' lazy free market fantasy

Before publishing a disingenuous parable setting up false categories of free-market versus activist government reform, David Brooks should have had a chance to read a cautionary tale of failed health care reform that appeared on the very same Times op-ed page as his own column.

Brooks spins out the reform approaches of "Mr. Bentham" (Obama Democrat) and "Mr. Hume" (free market conservative, vaguely reminiscent of Bush). Presumably these are avatars of nineteenth century reformer Jeremy Bentham and philosopher David Hume, though the affiliations are too tenuous to be worth parsing.

Mr. Bentham is a type AAA superwonk with a solution to everything; Mr. Hume is a lazy skeptic who recognizes his limitations. While Brooks takes a few swipes at "Hume," his sympathies clearly rest with him.

Mr. Bentham comes up with the Baucus bill for health care reform and the Waxman-Markey energy bill; Mr. Hume proposes in both cases to let the market work its magic. Here he is on health care:

“Why don’t we just set up insurance exchanges with, say, 12 different competing policies? We’ll let everybody choose a policy, and we’ll let people keep any money they save. That way they can set off a decentralized cascade of reform, instead of putting all the responsibility on us here.”

Yeah, why don't we just. It's really easy to estblish robust competition benefiting consumers among for-profit health insurers, and every market has twelve competitors ripe for recruitment. That's where column B, an op-ed by the former chairman of the Texas Insurance Purchasing Alliance, Cappy McGarr, offers an appropos reality check.

McGarr chronicles the failure of Texas' effort in the early nineties to establish a health insurance exchange for small businesses--a failure he blames largely on neglect from Governor George W. Bush (the quasi-model, ironically, for Brooks' "Mr. Hume," with imagery borrowed from Maureen Dowd's Boy King columns). The exchange died, according to McGarr, for want of either a public option or strict rules to prevent insurers from cherry-picking small corporate customers outside the exchange:

Most important, though, our exchange failed not because it wasn’t needed, and not because the concept wasn’t sound, but because it never attained a large enough market share to exert significant clout in the Texas insurance market. Private insurance companies, which could offer small-business policies both inside and outside the exchange, cherry-picked relentlessly, signing up all the small businesses with generally healthy employees and offloading the bad risks — companies with older or sicker employees — onto the exchange. For the insurance companies, this made business sense. But as a result, our exchange was overwhelmed with people who had high health care costs, and too few healthy people to share the risk. The premiums we offered rose significantly. Insurance on the exchange was no longer a bargain, and employers began backing away. Insurance companies, too, began leaving the alliance.

The Texas exchange failed, in other words, for want of the very types of provisions that Brooks lampoons in the Baucus bill: "He’d design a set of insurance policy regulations to make sure everybody gets uniform care"( along with various crucial experimental measures to restrict overtreatment and overbilling that Brooks does not criticize in detail).

Brooks recognizes on some level that free market fundamentalism has failed. His Mr. Hume "never could very accurately predict how the market was going to move." But he holds reflexively to his contempt for good-faith efforts to create market conditions in which health insurance competition can flourish. He won't recognize, as Paul Starr has shown, that the Baucus bill -- and indeed, all the Democratic health care bills pending in both chambers -- are comprised entirely of ideas proposed by Republicans over the past four decades. He won't consider, with Jonathan Cohn, whether an exchange minus a public option might work with strict regulation of private insurers. He hasn't engaged the tough questions driving the debate -- for example, whether the Wyden amendment opening the exchanges to all employees might foster real competition, or whether co-ops might work, or how to bend the cost curve if he doesn't like the efforts to do so that he implicitly lampoons in the Baucus bill. He prefers, with his own Mr. Hume, to whine and fantasize easy answers.

It ain't so, MoDo: Palin never changed

Fecklessly following up an apparent free association about how how journalists "drive the people we write about crazy", Maureen Dowd imagines a prelapsarian Sarah Palin, "serene" and"tough"... "before she became unhinged by fame and her fixation with her reviews":

The same McCain advisers who later turned against Palin were impressed with her at first, when she earned adjectives like unruffled, self-confident, tough-minded and self-assured.

From Bill Ayers to Reverend Wright, “Sarahcuda” was ready to bite, telling rallies, “The heels are on, the gloves are off.”

But by the end, after Tina Fey, Katie Couric and the shopping spree, Palin had lost confidence. She became erratic.

MoDo is maxed out on movies mythologizing magical transformations. From her first appearance on the public stage in Wasilla in the early 90s, Palin has always been a paranoid, vindictive, backstabbing, demagogic, ignorant meglomaniac.

P.S. "the gloves are off" is a dog whistle to torture enthusiasts.

Down girl, down! Dowd sics herself on Wall Street

Oh dear. Maureen Dowd's gone demagogue, as she occasionally does when her rhetorical weaponry is set loose in a target-rich environment.

On Wednesday she unloosed a fearsome smart-bomb barrage against banking mogul excess. Today, she carpet-bombed Wall Street. Making money from money "must unhinge you." Those who awarded bonuses should be prosecuted, the money disgorged.

Reality check:

1) Done right, allocating capital efficiently is as important as making good widgets. You don't get good new widgets made without the capital. The problem was regulation gone awry (or AWOL), not the existence of people whose function is to make money from money. Like lawyers, they're unpopular but useful. You could argue that poor regulation made the field so lucrative that there's too many of them, but that's different.*

2) Dowd quotes Barney Frank without comment: "Paulson let the cat out of the bag...and it can't be gotten back." Frank's right. You can't claw back, let alone prosecute, unless someone broke a law. TARP was riddle with holes. The Obama Administration and Congress can fix the second half but not siphon back what's been pissed away.

3) Dowd ridicules Rudolph Giuliani for saying that cutting Wall Street bonuses would mean less spending in restaurants and stores. Restaurants, schmestraurants. The bonuses constitute a huge chunk of New York's decimated tax base.

There's a balance to be struck with regard to bonuses. They're more than half of a lot of financial people's yearly compensation, they're supposed to be based on the money you make, and some people did make money for their firms. Yes, TARP should radically limit them, particularly for those with 7-figure compensation and more. More to the point, as first Raghuram Rajan* and then Martin Wolf (hardly a pair of flaming radicals) wrote in the FT a year ago, the bulk of bonus money should be tied to long term performance -- locked up for up to 10 years and clawed back if today's bets wreak mass destruction tomorrow. But the whole system can't be obliterated at a stroke.

*As an index investor, I find them only indirectly useful, as there'd be no indexes without paid professional investors vainly trying to beat them.

**Former chief economist, IMF

Obambi's bounce

American voters have been trained for gladiatorial combat. But maybe Obama really is changing our politics.

After the first Obama-McCain debate, Maureen Dowd, who's striven in her rough way for a year and more to buck up "Obambi" with Testosterone shots, complained:

Given the past week, the debate should have been a cinch for Obama. But, just as in the primaries, he willfully refuses to accept what debates are about. It’s not a lecture hall; it’s a joust. It’s not how cerebral you are. It’s how visceral you are. You need memorable, sharp, forceful and witty lines...We’re left waiting for a knockout debate.

In the ensuing debates, Obama never did get "visceral." But a new Times/CBS poll suggests that he may have got more electoral lift from the debates than any candidate since Reagan. In polls taken before and after the debates, the Times reports:

As voters have gotten to know Senator Barack Obama, they have warmed up to him, with more than half, 53 percent, now saying they have a favorable impression of him and 33 percent saying they have an unfavorable view. But as voters have gotten to know Senator John McCain, they have not warmed, with only 36 percent of voters saying they view him favorably while 45 percent view him unfavorably....the percentage of those who hold a favorable opinion of Mr. Obama is up 10 points since last month...In contrast, favorable opinion of Mr. McCain remained stable, and unfavorable opinion rose to 45 percent now from 35 percent in September.

Success and failure have many fathers. But there's this:

Among the voters who said their opinion of Mr. Obama had improved, many cited his debate performance, saying they liked his calm demeanor and the way he had handled the attacks on him from the McCain campaign.

A soft answer may not turn away wrath. But combined with impressive policy exposition--and some measured, focused policy attacks--it seems to have won votes.

Hillary Gets Motherly II

Hillary’s close-out in the Austin debate could be her pre-New Hampshire tear-up moment squared. I believe it struck a deep chord, what perhaps is and should be Hillary’s dominant campaign chord: her bid to nurture the nation, to be mother of us all.

If Hillary were a man, her governing philosophy would be dubbed paternalistic. She wants government to take care of us. When Obama says “yes we can,” that “we” is fruit of his bottom-up political trajectory: he began public life as an organizer. Hillary’s “we” is a royal “we,” a Queen Mother “we.” In her stump speeches a while back, and in her Super Tuesday speech, she fused herself with the Statue of Liberty as provider of refuge for the downtrodden:

We must continue to be a nation that strives always to give each of our children a better future, a nation of optimists who believe our best days are yet to come, a nation of idealists, holding fast to our deepest values, that we are all created equal, that we all deserve to fulfill our God given potential, that we are destined for progress together.

It's the ideal inscribed on the base of the Statute of Liberty in this great city that has overlooked our harbor through wars and depression and the dark days of September 11, the words we all know that give voice to America's embrace -- "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free" -- a constant reminder that here in America, we face our challenges and we embrace all of our people.

So today we say with one voice -- give us the child who wants to learn, give us the people in need of work, give us the veterans who need our care. We say give us this economy to rebuild and this war to end. Give us this nation to heal, this world to lead, this moment to seize.

The tear-up moment in New Hampshire tapped into this self image, albeit with a strong tincture, as Maureen Dowd was pleased to highlight, of self-regard or self pity: it’s hard, but I keep trucking because I want so badly to do so much for so many. The Austin peroration started in the same vein –

But people often ask me, how do you do it, you know, how do you keep going…

But it packed a much more concentrated maternal clinch—perhaps because the object of her care was less abstract. Here, the stand-in for all of us was not the huddled masses at Liberty’s base but the “Intrepid” wounded warriors home from Iraq:

….with all of the challenges that I've had, they are nothing compared to what I see happening in the lives of Americans every single day.

You know, a few months ago I was honored to be asked, along with Senator McCain, as the only two elected officials to speak at the opening of the Intrepid Center at Brooke Medical Center in San Antonio, a center designed to take care of and provide rehabilitation for our brave young men and women who have been injured in war. And I remember sitting up there and watching them come in: those who could walk were walking; those who had lost limbs were trying with great courage to get themselves in without the help of others; some were in wheelchairs and some were on gurneys. And the speaker representing these wounded warriors had had most of his face disfigured by the results of fire from a roadside bomb.

You know, the hits I've taken in life are nothing compared to what goes on every single day in the lives of people across our country. And I resolved at a very young age that I'd been blessed, and that I was called by my faith and by my upbringing to do what I could to give others the same opportunities and blessings that I took for granted. That's what gets me up in the morning. That's what motivates me in this campaign.

Rereading this gave me chills --even as I weighed how calculated it might be. (Seeing it live didn't.) I don’t pretend I can read the tangle of motivations powering Hillary – or for that matter, the motives of anyone else with the odd mixture of megalomania and humility that makes it possible to mount a credible run for the Presidency. But here --Obama supporter that I am -- I’m willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. She does want to bind up the nation’s wounds, and she thinks there’s something in her little black surgeon’s bag for everyone. (The link with the 71 year-old McCain casts an odd Mom-and-Pop-gazing-down sidelight on Obama.)

The final sentences in Hillary's Austin peroration cast the nation as an extended friends and family circle:

And you know, whatever happens, we're going to be fine. You know, we have strong support from our families and our friends. I just hope that we'll be able to say the same thing about the American people, and that's what this election should be about. Thanks.

My wife points out to me that Hillary here adapts an Edwards line (and the alchemy casts an interesting light on the plagiarism debate). Edwards said in several debates about himself and his opponents: we’re fine, we’ll be fine. There was a two-Americas bite to this: “we,” the wealthy and privileged candidates, will be fine because we have money and government-supplied healthcare. Hillary softens this: she and Obama will be fine because of their personal networks. Then there’s a segue: surely she’s not suggesting that the American people have weak friends-and-family ties, or that this election is about strengthening them. She’s sliding from the personal safety net to the governmental. And that segue is her governing philosophy. It takes a village. Thanks.