I didn’t find out what I wanted to know, but what I gained was better than what I had come to learn.

What I wanted to know was how an American white female could get inside a Bombay slum and come away with so much information, so many details, so many insights as Boo portrayed in her wonderful non-fiction book (that reads like a novel). How did she cross the cultural divide?

Could I trust that what she wrote would not turn out to be suspect in some ways, in the ways that say Greg Mortensen’s Three Cups of Tea has become?

On the second question, I was satisfied that what Boo portrayed is valid and will hold up to the scrutiny it is already undergoing. She talked about how she gathered information, something she calls ‘immersion journalism and document exploration.’ She used written notes, audio tape, video tape, pictures, and documents she secured by using India’s equivalence of Freedom of Information laws. Also, she said, she had (two ?) wonderful translators that made her job possible.

But, despite several good questions from the audience, Boo did not give us much information on how she actually went about gaining the confidence of the individuals she portrays. Nor did she give any details of her time in Annawandi or the other slums where she also spent time, other than to say her ‘research’ covered a period of three plus years (in addition to reporting she has done in the US on similar issues).

What Boo did say was that she purposely kept herself out of the story. She wanted to use every sentence to bring the reader as “close to the people who didn’t have a choice” about being there (as she did).

It was her intent, and she does it brilliantly I think, was to do more than simply report what life was like in Annawadi. She wanted to capture the the heart and soul of individuals, their hope as well as their despair, their morality, and their humanity.

And she wanted to document and put a face on the 60% of India that lives in poverty, despite the economic progress India has made in the past decade. She wanted to document how the government and society fail. How money meant for the poor doesn’t get there. How the larger society extorts money from the poor, who gets it and where it goes.

And she names names. She does not use made up names. Every person portrayed is done so with their real name. It is her belief, she told us, that transparency and accountability is crucial if there is any hope of creating possibilities for change.

Boo is a physically small woman who struggles with an autoimmune disease (she couldn’t sign books but stamped them last night), but what she has done is mammoth: she has told a story, the truth, about a world where “a decent life is a train that hasn’t hit” its inhabitants.

Katherine Boo and her Behind the Beautiful Forevers deserves to be widely read and widely discussed.

We have six predictions that came true (five if you count the one that two of you predicted): #2, 7, 10, 31, 32, 33.

We need seven of you to vote for which prediction you think is best. Which one should be declared the winner?

Leave you choice in the Comments section or email me (Samesty84@gmail.com). Please submit your vote by Mar. 15.

Prize: two tickets to a game in any stadium of the winner’s choosing for the 2012 season.

1. The Nats will sign Jose Reyes as a shortstop ending their leadoff futility.

2. Pujols to the Angels. (True)

3. Posada to the Marlins.

4. Ortiz to Baltimore.

5. Fielder to Boston,

6. Yankees don’t do a damn thing (though they need to replace AJ).

7. Big Papi stays in Boston. (True)

8. Prince Fielder heads to the Cubs.

9. Francona to the O’s.

10. Jose Reyes signs with the Marlins. (True)

11. Pujols re-signs with the Cardinals.

12. Sox hire Dave Sveum as manager and Gene Lamont as bench coach.

13. Sox re-sign Ortiz to 2 year deal. (One year so far)

14. The Nationals will win 95 games (Ed.- not in the winter, they won’t.)

15. Papelbon goes to the Phi…Oops (Ed.- happened before this prediction.)

16. Sevum is Sox manager.

17. Ortiz signs with Sox for two years. (See #13)

18. Sox keep Wake on board at least going into spring training.

19. Sox surprise us all by winning signing rights to Yu Darvish.

20. A Rod will start dating Kim Kardishian – helping her over her recently failed marriage (sad) and fueling his love for drama.

21. Unemployed NBA stars will purchase the LA Dodgers.

22. Pujols signs the biggest contract in baseball history.

23. Big Papi retires from baseball due to the continued pressures associated with the constant decline in the Red Sox fortunes. Boston to remain at bottom of the AL East through out the entire season. (Ed. – another person who couldn’t follow directions.)

24. Robinson Cano to hit a record number of Home Runs by the All Star Break, then reconsiders future in baseball due to Biggest Loser Personal Trainer offer. (Ed. – see note above.)

25. Bald Vinny to run for Mayor of New York. (No info yet, but we can hope)

26. The YYYYYYYYYYAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNKKKKEEEEEESSSSS!!! Win the World Series for a 28th time (no joke there Sox Fans!). (Ed. see above and above, etc.)

27. Orioles win the rights for and sign Yu Darvish.

28. Then they (Os) sign C.J. Wilson and Prince Fielder.

29. Brian Roberts recovers from concussion syndrome and returns to form. (Ed. – in the winter?)

30. The Orioles dominate the AL East, thus beginning the decline of the Evil Empire and the Sux. (Ed. – another contestant who can’t read instructions, probably a teacher or a principal.)

31. Ortiz stays in Boston. (True)

32. Francona becomes a commentator for ESPN instead of managing. (True)

33. The Red Sox lose their captain and do not sign Jason Varitek again. (True)

34. The Nationals sign C.J. Wilson.

35. A current major leaguer will come out of the closet?

-Lord Byron his satirical poem Don Juan, 1823

A book and a film for your consideration.

The book is non-fiction, tho I wished it were fiction.

The movie was fiction, based on a novel, and I kind of wished it were true.

The Book:

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

I think this type of writing is called ‘narrative nonfiction.’ The author is a former reporter, is currently a staff writer for The New Yorker, and has won a Pulitzer Prize. This is her first book.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers is about Annawadi, the settlement/slum just outside Mumbai‘s (Bombay) airport and its luxury hotels. It is the story of a handful of ‘residents’ of Annawadi and will give you a picture of India you do not know, even if you are well read and well traveled in India, as I thought I was.

Boo has marvelously used her three-four years of research, reporting from Annawadi and other Indian slums to give you a portrait of folks and what is occurring in this part of India today unlike the usual view of poverty and the underclass.

She focuses on three or four individuals and tells their stories. It reads like a novel, and you quickly become involved in various lives, hopes, dreams, struggles, and tragedies. It is a story about relationships, both tender and tragic.

It is also a story about the larger Indian society at a time of major change in the country and gives you insights into a hidden world, not only near the Mumbai airport but in the country at large.

Simply the best modern book on India I have read.

(Note: Katherine Boo will appear at DC’s Politics & Prose bookstore Tuesday, February 21 at 7 PM. I will update this posting after that event as I am fascinated at how she was able to get so far inside a world that is so different from her own.)

The Film:

The Hunter, from a novel by Julia Leigh

We saw this new, Australian film in our Sunday morning cinema club, which means it’s not in the theaters just yet. But when it comes out, try to find it.

The story is about Martin, some kind of mercenary, who has been sent to Tasmania to hunt for the elusive and possibly extinct Tasmanian tiger. It is not clear why he has been hired to undertake this mission, but apparently it has something to do with a biotech company wanting to know if this animal has sedating powers when it attacks and kills its prey.

The acting, Willem Dafoe as Martin, and many of the supporting actors and actresses, including two children, is terrific.

The scenery and cinematography, filmed in Tasmania, an Australian island 150 miles south of the mainland, is also superb.

And the story keeps you engaged throughout, including the final events.

I suspect I would never have seen this film had it not been shown in our cinema club, and my guess is that it will not be a major film. But if you are interested in good acting, a good story (not so far from the truth?), and wonderful photography of a land you probably do not know, look for The Hunter.

Hollywood East Cafe, now in Wheaton, MD, a few blocks away from their former location on University Blvd., has doubled their dim sum offerings from when they first opened their new restaurant, and the quality of what they offer seems better too. They now have some dumplings that I haven’t seen nor tasted anywhere else in the entire DC/Md/VA area. They’re simply terrific.

If you live in DC/MD area and have stood in line for Oriental East because you think they have the best dim sum this side of Virginia, check out Hollywood East. I suspect you will be pleased.

The bad news:

Ping Pong Dim Sum has opened their second restaurant, this one in Dupont Circle. It is as bad, perhaps even worse, if possible, than the one in Chinatown.

These two ‘faux’ dim sum factories largely serve dumplings made elsewhere, and when they are steamed, these frozen whatever they are, are not even bad versions of true dim sum.

Save your appetite and money for the real things.

That said, I’ve also stated clearly from the beginning of MillersTime that I was (and continue to be) hopeful that Barack Obama would be ‘the real deal,’ would be a terrific president.

This morning I read the article by James Fallows of The Atlantic Monthly which I have embedded below. It is, I believe, the best thing I’ve read to date on Obama and his presidency.

It is long and will take you minimally 30 minutes to read. Know that I don’t encourage you to spend that amount of time very often.

If you are among the third of the country that dislikes and disapproves of whatever President Obama does, then I doubt you will change your mind, tho I hope you will read it and let me know, respectfully, what you think.

If you are among those that have been disappointed but may be still hopeful about President Obama, then I think there is much here for you to consider.

But whatever your current view is of the President, there is much in this article that informs, explains, and teaches, not only about President Obama but about all presidents/presidencies.

Obama, Explained

Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press/Corbis Images

In the late 1990s, when his fellow University of Chicago professor Barack Obama had just run for the Illinois State Senate and long before a newly inaugurated President Obama named him to his Council of Economic Advisers, the economist Austan Goolsbee was on the most terrifying airplane trip of his life. He was traveling on Southwest Airlines from St. Louis back to Chicago’s Midway Airport. The plane got into a thunderstorm, and for a while many passengers thought they were doomed.

One jolt of turbulence was so strong that a flight attendant, not yet strapped in, hit her head on the airplane’s ceiling. After another sudden drop, the lights went out on one side of the cabin. The violent ups and downs kept getting worse. Two rows ahead of Goolsbee, a professional-looking woman in her 50s began wailing, “We’re going to die! We’re all going to die!” “Everyone was looking around and on the border of panic,” Goolsbee told me recently. “I was kind of wishing someone would start yelling, ‘No, we’re all not going to die!’”

At last the plane made it safely to Midway. As passengers filed off, Goolsbee spoke with a strapping young man who had been sitting, ashen but stoic and silent, in a window seat next to the woman whose nerves had broken. He was a high-school football player coming to Chicago on a college recruiting trip. “Quite a flight,” Goolsbee said to him. “This is my first time on an airplane,” the young man replied. “Are they always like that? I can see why people don’t like to fly.”

Goolsbee’s punch line to the story is that during his two years in Washington, “I was that kid.” He and his colleagues were trying to devise policies to cope with the worst worldwide economic crisis in living memory, in the most contentious political environment in nearly as long a time. He would ask himself, Is it always like this? He could see why people didn’t like politics and government.

But when I heard the story, my thoughts turned immediately in another direction. Goolsbee may have felt like that kid, but to most of the world, the more obvious comparison would be to the man who hired Goolsbee, Barack Obama. Four years after being sworn in as a freshman senator, occupying a position of executive authority for the first time in his life, Obama was, at age 47, instantly responsible for guiding the world’s superpower and its allies through an emergency that had left far more experienced leaders wailing the political and financial equivalent of “We’re all going to die!”

In office as during his campaign—indeed, through the entirety of his seven-plus years as a national figure since his keynote speech at the Democratic Convention in the summer of 2004—Obama has maintained his stoic, unflapped, “no drama” air. During the fall and winter of 2007, his campaign seemed to be getting nowhere against Hillary Clinton, who was then, to knowledgeable observers, the “inevitable” nominee. In 2008, John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate seemed to energize his campaign so much that, despite gathering signs of financial disaster under the incumbent Republicans, just after Labor Day the McCain-Palin team had opened up a lead over Obama and Joe Biden in several national polls. CBS News and an ABC–Washington Post poll had McCain up by 2 percentage points in early September, a week before the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy; a USA Today–Gallup poll that same week had him ahead by a shocking 10 points. But Obama and Biden stayed unrattled and on message, and two months later they won with a two-to-one landslide in the Electoral College and a 7-point margin in the popular vote. The earnestly devotional HOPE poster by Shepard Fairey was the official icon of the Obama campaign. But its edgier, unofficial counterpart, a Photoshopped Internet image that appeared as an antidote to the panic over polls and Palin, perfectly captured the candidate’s air of icy assurance. It showed a no-nonsense Obama looking straight at the camera, with the caption EVERYONE CHILL THE FUCK OUT, I GOT THIS!

The history is relevant because it shows how quickly impressions of strength or weakness can evaporate and become almost impossible to reimagine. Try to think back to when sophisticated people thought that Sarah Palin was the key to Republican victory, or when Obama’s every political instinct seemed inspired. I can attest personally to a now-startling fact behind Jimmy Carter’s rise to the presidency. When he met privately with editorial-board members and veteran political figures across the country in the early days of his campaign—people who had seen contenders come and go and were merciless in spotting frailties—the majority of them went away feeling that in Carter they had encountered a person of truly exceptional political insight and depth. (You might not believe me; I have the notes.) Is this how the Nobel Peace Prize committee’s choice of Obama as its laureate within nine months of his taking office will look as the years pass—the symbol of a “market top” in the world’s romanticism about Obama?

Whether things seem to be going very well or very badly around him—whether he is announcing the death of Osama bin Laden or his latest compromise in the face of Republican opposition in Congress—Obama always presents the same dispassionate face. Has he been so calm because he has understood so much about the path ahead of him, and has been so clever in the traps he has set for his rivals? Or has he been so calm because, like the high-school kid on the plane, he has been so innocently unaware of how dire the situation has truly been?

This is the central mystery of his performance as a candidate and a president. Has Obama in office been anything like the chess master he seemed in the campaign, whose placid veneer masked an ability to think 10 moves ahead, at which point his adversaries would belatedly recognize that they had lost long ago? Or has he been revealed as just a pawn—a guy who got lucky as a campaigner but is now pushed around by political opponents who outwit him and economic trends that overwhelm him?

The end of a president’s first term is an important time to ask these questions, and not just because of the obvious bearing on his fitness for reelection. Hard as it is to have any dispassionate discussion of a president’s performance during an election year, it will be even harder once the election is over. If a year from now Obama is settling in for a second term, a halo effect will extend back to everything he did during his first four years. His programs will be more effective in reality, since he will get that many more years to cement them in with follow-up measures, supportive appointments to federal agencies and the courts, and possible vetoes of any attempts at repeal. And, through the lens of history, they will seem more effective, since whatever he did in his first term will appear to have been part of an overall plan that was ratified through reelection. Yet if a year from now a just-beaten former President Obama is thinking about his memoirs and watching his former appointees blame one another, and him, for the loss, the very same combination of missteps and achievements will be viewed as a narrative leading inexorably to defeat. By saying, after a year in office, that he would rather be “a really good one-term” president than a “mediocre” president who served two terms, Obama was playing to the popular conceit that presidents should rise above such petty concerns as reelection. The reality, though, is that our judgment about “really good” and “mediocre” presidents is colored by how long they serve. A failure to win reelection places a “one-term loser” asterisk on even genuine accomplishments. Ask George H. W. Bush, victor in the Gulf War; ask Jimmy Carter, architect of the Camp David agreement.

Not knowing how the election will turn out, what can we say now? I’m not talking about how Obama looks to the roughly one-third of Americans who have been skeptical of him from the start—his highest approval rating was around 70 percent, just after he took office—nor about how he looks to the nearly comparable number who by the end of last year said they still had “strongly favorable” opinions of his performance. But for the seemingly huge number of people who sense that he has shrunk in office and that his administration has achieved less than it should or could have, and for scholars, historians, and political veterans who have matched it against presidencies of the past, is there an objective way to judge Obama’s competence and control?

Early this year, just after Obama dared the Republican-controlled House not to pass a payroll-tax-cut extension and then announced “recess appointments” for nominees who had been blocked by Senate filibuster, Samuel Popkin, a political scientist at UC San Diego, told me that this might be the beginning of a shrewd Truman-esque election-year plan. In his forthcoming book, The Candidate: What It Takes to Win—and Hold—the White House, he describes how in 1946 Truman, after suffering a midterm-election setback even worse than Clinton’s in 1994 or Obama’s in 2010, based the come-from-behind success of his reelection campaign on the refusal of a “do-nothing Congress” to work with him or address the country’s problems. Starting late last year, when he defied the House Republicans, Obama has seemed to follow Truman’s script. “What I’d love to know is whether this was all a careful long-term plan,” Popkin said of Obama’s evolution, “or whether they just lucked into it.”

Chess master, or pawn? That is the question I asked a variety of political figures last year, starting when the Obama administration was wrangling with Republicans in Congress to avoid a damaging default on the national debt. I spoke with current and past members of this administration, officials from previous administrations, current and past members of the Senate and the House, and some academics. Compared with the last two times a Democrat was in the White House—during Jimmy Carter’s administration in the late 1970s and Bill Clinton’s in the 1990s—I found Democrats much more careful about criticizing their own party’s president during an election year. It’s not that Democrats have become so much more disciplined, nor, obviously, that they have no complaints, but rather that they seem more worried about the risks of helping the other side. I asked someone who has been close to Obama if I could interview him about his experiences. He said, “I’m not going to say anything that might hurt during the campaign.” At the Capitol, I asked one prominent Democratic legislator what he had learned about Obama as a leader and a person that the general public did not know. He sat for nearly a full minute and then replied, “I would rather not say.” But other people I spoke with—from Congress and inside and outside the administration—volunteered sincere-seeming flattering accounts of the Obama they had observed in informal discussions and strategy sessions. Because of sensitivities on all sides, this article includes something our magazine tries hard to avoid: critical opinions in “blind quotes,” from people not willing to be named. In every case where I’ve used such a quote, it’s from a person I trust and who was in a position to observe the events being described.

Having seen a number of presidencies unfold, and some unravel, I am fully aware of how difficult it is to assess them in real time. What I feel I’ve learned about Obama is that he was unready for the presidency and temperamentally unsuited to it in many ways. Yet the conjunction of right-wing hostility to his programs and to his very presence in office, with left-wing disappointment in his economic record and despair about his apparent inability to fight Republicans on their own terms, led to an underappreciation of his skills and accomplishments—an underappreciation that is as pronounced as the overestimation in those heady early days. Unprepared, yes. Cool to the point of chilly, yes. For all his ability to inspire and motivate people en masse, for all his advertised emphasis on surrounding himself with a first-rate “team of rivals,” Obama appears to have been unsavvy in the FDR-like arts of getting the best from his immediate team and continuing to attract the best people to him.

Yet the test for presidents is not where they begin but how fast they learn and where they end up. Not even FDR was FDR at the start. The evidence is that Obama is learning, fast, to use the tools of office. Whether he is learning fast enough to have a chance to apply these skills in a second term—well, we’ll reconvene next year.

We judge presidents by the specific expectations they ask to be measured against: inspiration (Kennedy, Reagan, Obama), competence and experience (Eisenhower, the first George Bush), strategic cunning (Johnson, Nixon), integrity and personal probity (Carter), inclusiveness and empathy (Clinton), unshakable resolve (the second Bush). But eventually each is judged against his predecessors, a process that properly starts with a reminder that all begin their terms ill-equipped, in ways that hindsight tends to obscure.

The sobering realities of the modern White House are: All presidents are unsuited to office, and therefore all presidents fail in certain crucial aspects of the job. All betray their supporters and provoke bitter criticism from their own side at some point in their term. And all are mis-assessed while in office, for reasons that typically depend more on luck and historical accident than on factors within their control. These realities do not excuse Obama’s failings, but they do put his evolution in perspective.

Presidents fail because not to fail would require, in the age of modern communications and global responsibilities, a range of native talents and learned skills no real person has ever possessed. These include “smarts” in the normal sense—the analytical ability to cope with the stream of short- and long-term decisions that come at a president nonstop. (How serious is the latest provocation out of North Korea? What are the “out year” budget implications of a change in Medicaid repayment formulas?) A president needs rhetorical clarity and eloquence, so that he can explain to publics at home and around the world the intent behind his actions and—at least as important—so that everyone inside the administration understands his priorities clearly enough that he does not have to wade into every little policy fight to enforce his preferences.

A president needs empathy and emotional intelligence, so that he can prevail in political dealings with his own party and the opposition in Washington, and in face-to-face negotiations with foreign leaders, who otherwise will go away saying that this president is “weak” and that the country’s leadership role is suspect. He needs to be confident but not arrogant; open-minded but not a weather vane; resolute but still adaptable; historically minded but highly alert to the present; visionary but practical; personally disciplined but not a prig or martinet. He should be physically fit, disease-resistant, and capable of being fully alert at a moment’s notice when the phone rings at 3 a.m.—yet also able to sleep each night, despite unremitting tension and without chemical aids.

Ideally he would be self-aware enough that, in the center of a system that treats him as emperor-god, he could still recognize his own defects and try to offset them. The psychoanalyst Justin Frank has written Obama on the Couch as a follow-up to Bush on the Couch, examining the psychological roots of each president’s strengths and weaknesses in office. George W. Bush: eternally craving approval from his distant mother and more accomplished father (and finally surpassing him, solely in being reelected). Barack Obama: aloof and unconnected because of his absent father and his eternal status as outsider.

You can take this psychoanalytic approach seriously, or not. The significant fact is that an abnormal-psych study could be written on every president of the modern era except the one who never ran for national office, Gerald R. Ford, and possibly also the first George Bush. When I heard critical comments about Obama’s personal style, they usually started with this trait: his emotional distance from all but a handful of longtime friends and advisers.

A new president’s first term is usually an experiment in seeing which weak point will limit everything else he does. George W. Bush was disciplined and decisive but not sufficiently informed or inquisitive. Bill Clinton was informed and inquisitive but was nearly driven from office because he was not personally disciplined. George H. W. Bush was disciplined and informed but could not seem empathetic or visionary. Ronald Reagan was eloquent and decisive but less and less attentive to the analytic part of his job. You can take the list back a very long way. Many presidents who survive to a second term and thereby attain the ultimate in political success see their preexisting failings bear worse fruit. Impeachment for Bill Clinton, Iran-Contra for Ronald Reagan, impeachment and resignation for Richard Nixon, and so on. (The main contemporary exception has been George W. Bush, whose most controversial decisions and events all occurred during his first four years—from the invasion of Iraq to passage of the expensive Medicare Part D benefits to the outsized role of his vice president—and who in his second term tacked back from many of those policies.)

Another harsh reality of the modern presidency is one we conveniently forget when thinking about new presidents. Without exception, they betray their followers—and must do so, to stay in office and govern. In Obama’s case, this started with the forgiving approach to Wall Street and continued with his recommitment of troops to Afghanistan and extension of other Bush-era security policies.

However jarring, this is part of a historical norm. George W. Bush’s name was barely mentioned in the recent Republican primaries, because a party that professes concern about debt, deficit, and big bailouts cannot easily talk about what happened on his watch. Bill Clinton now reigns as the Democratic Party’s sun king and savior. But in office Clinton infuriated much of the constituency that had elected him, with his support for welfare reform, his perceived bungling of the effort to pass a national health-care plan, and the rise in his personal popularity that followed the Democrats’ historic loss of control in Congress. Just after Clinton was sworn in for his second term, this magazine published a cover story called “The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done.” It was by Peter Edelman, who had resigned as a senior administration official to protest the compromises Clinton made with Newt Gingrich’s Republicans in passing the welfare-reform bill. After Clinton left office, The Atlantic’s Jack Beatty wrote, “Listening to Bill Clinton—by turns, charming, shrewd, and wise—speak at the opening of his presidential library in Little Rock last week, brought home anew the gap between his gifts of brain, heart, and speech, and what he made of them as president. In this he compares unfavorably to George W. Bush.” Anything that bitter liberals have said about Barack Obama’s weakness and willingness to compromise was said more bitterly about the previous Democratic president.

The first George Bush agreed to raise taxes to balance the budget—and in so doing violated his “Read my lips!” promise to oppose all tax increases. This left conservatives feeling so betrayed that in his reelection campaign he faced first a strong primary challenge by Pat Buchanan and then the third-party candidacy of Ross Perot. Ronald Reagan spent the first year of his administration cutting taxes and the next seven agreeing to continued increases. Before him, Jimmy Carter so antagonized the left that its champion, Teddy Kennedy, waged a bitter primary fight against him and badly weakened him for the general election. You can take this list, too, as far back as you like.

To recognize this long history is not to defend any of the specific Obama-era policies that have most disappointed his original supporters. It is instead a reminder that every president takes infuriating steps away from “the base”—sometimes for reasons that look in retrospect like statesmanship (Nixon with China), strategic error (Johnson with Vietnam), or mere creation of political maneuvering room (Clinton’s “triangulation” after the Republican victories of 1994). It is easy to forget this in the exasperation that surrounds the incumbent of the moment. And this history is systematically forgotten every four years. After all, the question in each campaign is a different and simpler one. It is not “How many of his aspirations will this president fulfill, and what trade-offs must he make along the way?” but rather “Is he better or worse than that other person?”

There is one last certainty about assessing presidents, which is that their prospects for political survival and reelection are far more fluid and uncertain than we will think they were when we look back on them. With nearly 20 years’ hindsight, it is “obvious” to everyone that the Clinton administration’s “Hillarycare” plan was a political disaster. But when it was first presented to Congress, it was popular in opinion polls and was expected to pass. (Skeptical? In September 1993, just after the plan was unveiled, the veteran political analyst William Schneider wrote, “The reviews are in and the box office is terrific. President Clinton’s health care reform plan is a hit … The more people read and hear about the plan, the more they seem to like it.”) Two weeks after the plan’s release, the “Black Hawk Down” disaster occurred in Somalia, which led to the resignation of Clinton’s defense secretary and a cascade of problems for the administration. A year later, Newt Gingrich and his Republicans had taken control of the House, and the health-care-reform era was over for the Clintons. It is in comparison with the Clintons’ near-miss that Obama’s passage of a health-care bill—the first item of complaint by his critics—is considered such an achievement by veterans of other Democratic administrations.

Similarly, it is retrospectively obvious that Ronald Reagan was going to trounce Jimmy Carter. We know that he carried 44 states against Carter in 1980 and went on to a 49-state landslide against Walter Mondale four years later. But Carter—despite the American hostages in Iran, despite high gas prices and a bad economy, despite the primary challenge by Teddy Kennedy and the third-party challenge by John Anderson, despite everything—was neck-and-neck with Reagan, and ahead of him in some polls, until the last few days of the campaign.

Even at the time, it was obvious to everyone that Richard Nixon was going to trounce George McGovern in 1972. But less than six months before Election Day, Nixon felt uncertain enough to deploy the Watergate burglars to break into Democratic headquarters and try to gain an extra edge. George H. W. Bush, with an 89 percent approval rating just after the Gulf War, was so obviously headed toward reelection that he could barely take the callow Bill Clinton seriously. Four years later, with an Obama-esque 42 percent approval rating at the beginning of his reelection year, Clinton was obviously in trouble—but went on to an overwhelming win.

Whatever now seems obvious about Obama’s strengths and weaknesses, the future perception of his achievements and electoral fate will be subject to luck and to the adjustments he will make, or fail to make, in his own performance. This point too is obvious, except that the entire political-pundit industry rests on amnesia about its own long-failed record of looking ahead. Lawrence Summers, for two years the head of Obama’s economic council, made a similar argument about Obama’s health-care legislation. “If he is reelected, 40 years from now this will be like Medicare—an achievement that is part of the landscape and that people can’t imagine being without.” And if Obama should lose, Summers told me, and especially if conservative judges after his departure overturn some of its provisions, “then the health-care plan will be presented as a sign of ‘overreach’ and ‘hubris’ and the administration’s ‘inevitable’ failure.”

Obama was blessed by luck—and skill—in his campaign, but his administration had bad luck even before it began. “He ended up governing a country he never expected to govern,” Gary Hart, the former senator and presidential candidate, told me. “The crux of the Obama administration’s problems can be traced to October 2008,” with the accelerating financial collapse. “You have a president who in the last days of his campaign began to understand that he was going to have to make fundamental adjustments in everything he had intended. We’ll never know what an Obama presidency absent the economic catastrophe would have looked like.”

What have we learned about Barack Obama’s particular versions of the weaknesses every president brings to office? The diagnoses I heard, and have myself observed, fall into four main categories:

Inexperience: that Obama’s own lack of executive experience left him reliant on the instincts and institutional memory of others—and since so many of his appointees came from the Clinton administration, he was also vulnerable to ’90s-vintage groupthink among them. This was particularly true, as we’ll see, during his response to the economic crisis in his first year in office, and then during his showdowns with Congress after Tea Party–inspired Republicans regained control of the House.

Coldness: that what looks serene in public can seem distant and aloof in his private dealings and negotiations.

Complacency about talent: that the disciplined excellence he demands of himself—in physical fitness and appearance, in literary polish of his speeches, in unvarying control of his mood and public presentation—has not extended to demands for a comparably excellent supporting staff.

Symbolic mismatch: that Obama’s personal achievement in rising to the presidency betokened, for much of the electorate, far more sweeping ambitions for political change than Obama the incrementalist operator ever had in mind.

You could write a treatise on each of these, as scholars undoubtedly will. Here is the sort of material you would use in the discussion.

About inexperience: “The key to everything is that he was a first-term senator, and one who began running for the presidency in the second year of his first term,” Gary Hart told me. “Governors have better odds of becoming president, but the Senate can be an ideal place to meet … the new thinkers, hear about things and ideas that are over the horizon, and develop your own network of people you trust and will draw from. Because he began running so quickly, that is something he had little chance to do.”

Several people pointed out that Bill Clinton, though younger than Obama when he became president, had developed a network of advisers, friends, and thinkers through his nearly 12 years as a governor and a lifetime as a contact-maker across the United States and around the world. By the time Bill Clinton ran for the White House, thousands of people considered themselves FOBs, Friends of Bill. If you asked who his closest or “best” friend was, apart from Hillary, you would never get to the end of the answers. Obama had a much thinner array of Friends of Barack. When I asked associates and friends who his confidants were, apart from Michelle, the one name that kept recurring was Valerie Jarrett, a close friend of both Obamas in Chicago and a senior adviser in the White House, sometimes followed by his strategist David Axelrod. Because his own network of advisers was limited, and as part of the settlement of the bitter primary battle with Hillary, Obama inherited many of the Clintons’ contacts and team members.

“In any new administration … the 20-somethings who’d been working in the campaign … get the second- and third-layer staff jobs,” Hart said. “And for Obama, you had his immediate Chicago group. But the staff and policy positions—the Podestas [John Podesta, Clinton’s White House chief of staff who co-chaired Obama’s transition team] and Rahms [Rahm Emanuel, a Clinton White House adviser who became Obama’s first chief of staff], and in State, Defense, and the NSC—it was essentially a third Clinton term.”

Some such carryover is inevitable and healthy, since junior members of one administration are natural candidates for senior posts the next time their party comes to power. The difference many people stressed was Obama’s comparative lack of an offsetting team of his own, and the edge that gave to those whose instincts were developed in the Clinton era. “When I look at the first year,” one person told me, “I see people saying, ‘Here is what we tried to do in the ’90s, let’s try it again—and here is my Rolodex [sic!] of people to work the problem.’” A person who has worked closely with the White House staff said, “Early on, you had all these Clinton-era economist-technocrat types”—Lawrence Summers, Peter Orszag, Timothy Geithner, and the like. “The danger is that if one of them is making a mistake, everybody agrees, and they’re all making the same mistake.”

Another person, who has extensive national-level experience, said that the biggest surprise for any new president is the strain placed upon the “decision-making muscle,” since the choices that come upon him every day are precisely those the rest of the government has not been able to resolve. The question for someone whose only real executive training has been the management of his campaign is “how quickly that muscle will develop and improve”; as it is developing, the instincts and institutional memory of those around him inevitably have great effect. Obama frequently emphasizes how many troubles he faced as soon as he took office. The real problem, for an inexperienced president, is that he had to make so many big decisions so fast. How tough to get on Wall Street; how hard to push for extra stimulus; how much time to give Congress to mull health-care plans; how much to trust the Republicans to cooperate; how long to delay on energy and environmental plans—these are just some of the choices Obama had to make about domestic affairs.

With the clarity of hindsight, many of the choices look ill-considered, to say the least. He should have been harder on Wall Street, less patient about drafting of the health-care bill, more suspicious of Republican efforts to block his legislation and nominees. Plus, he should have made sure that Martha Coakley knew who Curt Schilling was! “I think they made a fundamental strategic error in presenting the health-care plan the way that they did,” Jim Webb, the Democratic senator from Virginia, told me. “They were so conscious of not presenting Congress with a 1,000-page fait accompli, which was the big complaint about the Clinton plan, that they farmed it out to five committees and let 7,000 pages of health-care plans percolate up.” Walter Mondale, the former vice president, made a similar point. “He had his honeymoon, but he took the position that he would let Congress work this all out. I think a president has got to be on legislators’ backs all the way through, or it won’t get done—or will be done in a way that involves all kinds of private packages on the Hill.”

These misjudgments were the result of his own inexperience—and his reliance on a staff whose own formative experiences were mainly from the Clinton years and who were refighting some of those battles under different circumstances. But through the past year, his “decision muscle” appears to have developed. He has continued to make big strategic calls—from authorizing the assault on Osama bin Laden to defying the Republicans over the payroll-tax holiday—and most have gone his way.

About coldness, the next item on the standard list of complaints: Politicians appeal to the left brain—ideas, interests—but at least as much to the emotions, hopes, and insecurities associated with the brain’s right side. Politics inside Washington also runs on countless small acts of flattery and social-favor exchange: Who gets tickets for the White House box at the Kennedy Center? Who will get a signed picture with the president to display on the office’s “brag wall”?

“President Obama’s extra-high intellectual capacity is simply not matched by his emotional capacity,” I was told by someone with long experience in the executive branch. “Surprisingly for someone who led such an inspirational campaign, he does not seem to have the ability to connect with people.” At the non-glorious but important retail level of politics, this leads to complaints by Democratic representatives and senators about having to ask for the small strokes to their vanity that matter so much, and that politicians as different as Bill Clinton or either of the George Bushes would administer instinctively. One senior fund-raiser, who considered himself beyond having any specific favors to ask of the administration, kept waiting for an invitation to visit the White House. Eventually he was invited for a briefing there, along with a number of others who had played supportive roles in the campaign. “The president walked in, he sat down in the front row of the briefing room, he listened along with everyone else, and then he walked out without speaking to anyone,” a person familiar with the event said. “People would just as soon have not been invited.” I heard variations of this story from legislators and others in the role of miffed supporter.

You hear this kind of griping about whoever is in the White House; and if you have the slightest introverted tendency yourself, you can sympathize with the desire not to be “on” and engaged with people who want your attention every instant of the day. Bill Clinton, of course, is not fully alive unless “on.” Like Clinton and unlike George W. Bush, Barack Obama is said to be a night owl. But in the wee hours, Clinton would be on the phone, playing cards with friends, gabbing about history and politics, or doing anything else that involved live human company. Obama is more likely to be spending time with papers or a book, or even to be online—prowling through the same blogs and news sites as the rest of us, which is somehow unnerving given a president’s otherwise total cocooning from the daily details of shopping, driving, waiting, in ordinary Americans’ lives.

It turns out that Obama is sufficiently aware of and sensitive about his Mr. Spock–like image to have called it the “biggest misconception” about him in a year-end interview with Barbara Walters on ABC in December. It was entirely wrong, he said, for the public to think of him as “being detached, or Spock-like, or very analytical. People who know me know that I am a softie. I mean, stuff can choke me up very easily. The challenge for me is that in this job … people want you to be very demonstrative in your emotions. And if you’re not sort of showing it in a very theatrical way, then somehow it doesn’t translate over the screen.”

Whatever he thinks his real emotional makeup might be, the challenge of “showing it,” and translating it over the screen, affects his ability to lead. As an explainer of ideas through rhetoric, Obama has few recent peers. And at least twice in the past four years, he has changed national opinion, and politically saved himself, through the emotional content of his words and presence. Once was in March 2008, when the media storm about his radical-sounding pastor, Jeremiah “God Damn America!” Wright, threatened to end his candidacy. Then Obama responded with his speech in Philadelphia about the meaning of race in America—which at least for a while, and for at least enough of the electorate to let him survive, made his mixed-race heritage a symbol not of threatening otherness but of the country’s true nature. Then, in January of last year, his party’s historic rout during the midterm elections had made Obama seem as shrunken and defeated a figure as Bill Clinton had seemed after his midterm losses 16 years before. But even his usual opponents hailed Obama’s speech in Tucson after the horrific shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords and others, for its sober but healing emotional power. One conservative blog, Power Line, said it was a “brilliant, spellbinding, and fitting speech”; John Podhoretz, a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, wrote in the New York Post that it was “beautiful and moving and powerful.” Politically, this is when Obama seemed to return to life after the midterm disaster.

Jimmy Carter, like Obama primarily a creature of the left brain, had no comparable moments of emotionally triumphant rhetoric. But elevated as they are, such moments are still exceptions to Obama’s mainly rational appeal. His natural register involves great issues of law and race—but not economics, and especially not economic struggle, which has turned out to be the commanding domestic issue of his time. Obama ran for office when the most urgent issues seemed to be war and peace, plus the moral basis of America’s standing in the world. He has ended up governing when the most urgent issue has been jobs-jobs-jobs, which, as a matter both of policy and of rhetorical connection, comes less naturally to him.

“Politics changes when people can’t pay for their home mortgages and can’t afford medical care and can’t send their kids to school,” Walter Mondale told me. “It is such a humiliating blow to be the head of a family and be unable to work and provide, that people don’t respond entirely rationally all the time. It can explode in politics in a hard-to-understand way.” Mondale said that until the midterm elections, Obama was seen—incorrectly, in Mondale’s view—as an “aloof and diffident president in the eyes of those who were suffering.” But he has now, Mondale thinks, changed his tone.

“The president,” another very experienced Democratic politician told me, “is the only person in the American system who represents all the people, and learning what you need to know to effectively represent all the people is really impossible to do with intellect alone. You have to understand, emotionally, what people are feeling and going through. You have to cut through whatever intellectual jargon is given you by your advisers and pollsters, and cut right to the core. We don’t see that in Obama. I have seen him try to synthesize it, but it comes across as synthetic.”

Complacency about talent? This is a wounding charge for any administration, and perhaps the most surprising thing to hear about one that has a former senator and presidential contender in one Cabinet post and a Nobel Prize–winning physicist in another, that attracted a prospective Republican presidential candidate to the most important overseas diplomatic assignment, and that at different stages has deployed the likes of David Petraeus, Robert Gates, and the late Richard Holbrooke. But here is a representative story, which I heard several times: Just before the midterm elections, which undid then-Representative Rahm Emanuel’s achievement of leading a Democratic takeover of the House in 2006, Emanuel announced that he was leaving as White House chief of staff to run for mayor of Chicago. Shortly after William Daley, himself the son and brother of Chicago mayors, succeeded Emanuel in the White House, he came to Obama with his initial report. You are reeling, he said—stating the obvious after the Republican surge. Part of the problem is that the team around you is not good enough. To raise your game, you have to surround yourself with the best people available. There have to be changes.

Obama thought about it, and reportedly called Daley back in a few days later. “I like my team,” he said. “I am comfortable with who I have around me. Just so there’s no miscommunication, I’m saying that I like this team.” (The White House declined to comment on the episode.)

“The people he is most ‘comfortable’ with have the same limits of experience he does,” a veteran political figure told me. “An emotional reliance on people who are good people, and smart, but simply not A-plus players—it’s a limit.” These discussions often revolve around the central role of Valerie Jarrett in the Obamas’ professional and social lives. Her supporters say that she is the one friend they can truly trust; her detractors say that her omnipresence illustrates the narrowness of the president’s contacts.

Again, if you have been around politics, you have heard complaints about every White House staff—this one is too quarrelsome, that one is too paranoid. The one I was part of, in the Carter administration, was called Dogpatch-like and incompetent in its time. Several people who spoke on the record, like Lawrence Summers, made the opposite case about Obama. “Some White House staffs are well organized and disciplined, but the president is distant,” he said. “Others have intense presidential involvement but also some chaos, with micromanagement and relitigation.” Obama’s operation, he said, has been distinctive. The Obama team, he said, “stands out for having both intense presidential involvement and reasonable organizational order.” Still, this was the minority view—and given the brilliance of Obama’s campaign and the rigor of his standards for himself, “a subpar collection of talent” is not the complaint I expected to hear.

And symbolic mismatch? On the night he was elected, as a rhetorical opening of his speech to the throngs in Grant Park, Obama said, “Change has come to America.” He was careful to add that his election was only the beginning, that there was hard work and disappointment and—though he didn’t use the word—compromise still ahead. But every presidential election seems at the time to signal a new era, and that night the success of a handsome young black intellectual inevitably aroused expectations of comparably dramatic changes in policies. “I get the importance of his own achievement, and I celebrate it, but it was the wrong thing to say,” a senior Democratic official told me. “He opened himself to the interpretation that the great struggle was over just by virtue of his being elected, that ‘change had come’ to America before he had spent a day in office.”

In an influential Atlantic cover story published before the election, called “Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters,” Andrew Sullivan argued that precisely because of who Obama was—not just of mixed race but of a new generation, one not doomed to endless trench warfare in the cultural struggles that began in the 1960s—his election would in itself be significant, apart from any policies he might enact. Except for his early and politically crucial opposition to the Iraq War—the choice that made him rather than Hillary Clinton the Democratic nominee—Obama’s policies placed him, if anything, to the right of Clinton and the rest of the Democratic field. For instance, he attacked Clinton’s health-care plan because it included an “individual mandate” to buy insurance. “If a mandate was the solution,” he said on CNN not long after her victory in the New Hampshire primary, “we can try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody to buy a house.”

No one remembered. A man who looked the way Obama did and ran on the platform of Hope necessarily faced expectations that would never have fallen on a President John Kerry, or Joe Biden, or Hillary Clinton. If Obama loses this year, inescapably he will be judged as a disappointment—not simply for having lost but for having governed in such a prosaic style after campaigning with such poetry. After Václav Havel’s death, late last year, TheNew York Times reported that he had met Obama shortly after Obama’s inauguration and given him a warning. “Limitless hope” projected onto a leader could be dangerous, Havel reportedly said, since “disappointment … could boil over into anger and resentment.” Obama told Havel that, as The Times put it, he was becoming “acutely aware” of the possibility.

Obama’s opponents will argue this year that he has been both incompetent and diabolically effective: too weak in defending the nation’s interests, and all too skillful in advancing his socialist agenda. The most disappointed of his former supporters may feel that the hopes he has dashed outweigh the achievements he has won. A year from now, we’ll all know what we think.

What I’ve concluded now is that Obama has shown the main trait we can hope for in a president—an ability to grow and adapt—and that the reason to oppose his reelection would be disagreement with his goals, not that he proved unable to rise to the job. As time has gone on, he has given increasing evidence that the skills he displayed in the campaign were not purely a fluke.

“Three of the most important things he has done are hardest to appreciate,” Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader and an early supporter of Obama’s presidential campaign, told me. Obama had named Daschle to head his health-care initiative as secretary of Health and Human Services, but Daschle withdrew in a controversy over his income-tax payments. He listed three of the achievements that I heard most often in talking with other Obama supporters.

The first is a negative accomplishment: avoiding an economic catastrophe even worse than the one the United States and the world have been through. Jim Webb, who was in the Senate when the Bush administration was requesting the first round of TARP “bailout” funds, said that he called economists he trusted for advice on what to do. “Every one of them said, ‘You have to do this’—vote for the funds,” he told me. “One of them told me, ‘These people need to be punished, but first you have to keep the system from going into cataclysmic default.’”

The second is what Daschle called “the dramatic improvement in the American image abroad.” The daily reports about American problems around the world, the crises in U.S. relations with Pakistan and a few other countries, the ongoing worldwide bull session about whether the U.S. is “in decline”—all of these things mask the broad and dramatic improvement in America’s “soft power” and international standing during Obama’s time. For instance: according to the Pew Global Attitudes Project, in 2008 the positive view of the United States in Germany was 31 percent, in France it was 42 percent, and in Japan it was 50 percent. Last year, it was 62 percent in Germany, 75 percent in France, and 85 percent in Japan (the dramatic improvement in Japan was partly in response to U.S. aid after the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident early in the year). These changes can make a real difference for American ideals and interests, but it is hard to mention them in American political debates without sounding “French.”

And finally, according to Daschle, the health-care bill that passed so narrowly and is so controversial will, especially if Obama is reelected, rank with Medicare in the list of legislative and social achievements by Democratic presidents. Yes, having helped plan the bill, Daschle is biased—as is Lawrence Summers, who argues that because of the health-care plan, “the historic debate will be whether the accomplishments of his first two years are the most substantial since Lyndon Johnson’s in 1965–66, or the most substantial since FDR’s in 1933–34.”

Other party grandees I spoke with, including Gary Hart and Walter Mondale, who had fought for the nomination that Mondale won in 1984, and Michael Dukakis, who won the nomination in 1988, emphasized how much Obama had accomplished given the economic hole he had to dig out of and the Republicans’ political strategy of simply trying to thwart him. Each had critiques and suggestions on the margin. Dukakis thought there could and should have been a stronger emphasis on public-service jobs—direct hiring of teachers, public-health workers, road builders—as part of an initial stimulus program. “In all the other recessions that I remember, public-service jobs were an important component of fighting unemployment,” he said. “I believe in giving people unemployment checks for half a year or even a year and helping in the course of their job search—and after that, if there simply are not a lot of jobs out there, you take the checks and turn them into jobs. But, for the Republicans these days, public-service jobs are Bolshevik policy”—a slight (but only slight) overstatement of the real Republican opposition to direct job creation through public projects. Mondale wished that Obama had been tougher on the banks and had started campaigning earlier against the Republican strategy of stonewalling his health-care proposals. Hart regretted that Obama had not tried harder to transform the Cold War military structure and contain the defense budget—areas of Hart’s expertise starting with his “defense reform” caucus in the 1980s—or moved more quickly toward disengagement from Iraq and Afghanistan. I would add my amazement at the administration’s lackadaisical approach to the crucial business of staffing the government. Three years in, Obama had left more vacancies on the federal bench, and used his recess-appointment power far less often, than any of his recent predecessors. Part of this reflected Republican determination to block his nominations; part, Obama’s decision not to fight.

So where can Obama claim to have shown mastery of the job? In foreign policy, where a president can carry out his own strategy, he has shown that he actually has a strategy to execute. And in management of the domestic economy, he has shown increasing command of the tools of office, in ways surprisingly prefigured by his temperamental opposite, Harry Truman.

Like any president, Obama has had his share of embarrassments and failures in foreign policy. U.S. relations with Israel are near one of their periodic lows and perhaps worse than that, with many people in Israel feeling that they can’t trust Obama, and much of the rest of the world viewing him as having been outmaneuvered by Netanyahu. Relations with Pakistan are worse; the situation in Afghanistan has been contained rather than solved; and then there is Iran. But through his first three years in office, Obama suffered no major international disasters or setbacks, and meanwhile managed surprising progress on many fronts at once. If you were making a list of what has gone right, or not gone as badly wrong as it could have on his watch, it would include:

• containing what could have been an open-ended commitment in Iraq;

• walking a tightrope in Afghanistan: avoiding criticism from the military for doing too little while also preparing a path for withdrawal;

• managing the troubled relationship with Pakistan—including in the aftermath of the Osama bin Laden raid;

• encouraging the Arab Spring events in general, without getting mired in the details of any of them;

• supporting the Europeans during their debt crisis, while keeping the United States somewhat insulated from it; and

• putting U.S. relations with China on a better footing than in many years, a task that has to be among the very most important for any president of the early 21st century.

This last item is one I watched unfold from the beginning of this administration, when I was still based in Beijing. Much like Nixon’s approach to China, I think it will eventually be studied for its skillful combination of hard and soft power, incentives and threats, urgency and patience, plus deliberate—and effective—misdirection. The details are significant:

As Obama began his term, official China was growing smug and prideful. The triumphant Beijing Olympics were just behind it; the American financial collapse symbolized the decline of a superpower and the world’s reliance on its new paymasters, the Chinese. Because of China’s heavy reliance on exports, its labor force was hit harder by the worldwide collapse of demand than that of any other major economy, but the Chinese pulled themselves out far more rapidly. Americans and Europeans dithered about applying stimulus; the Chinese went ahead and applied it, creating jobs for many millions of people and expanding the country’s physical infrastructure in the process.

By the time Obama made his state visit to Shanghai and Beijing, in November 2009, the press in both countries and the rest of the world was primed to present his usual low-key demeanor as servility. The Washington Post and The New York Times contrasted Obama’s supposed hat-in-hand manner with the bravado of Bill Clinton, who had mentioned the Tiananmen Square protests while standing next to President Jiang Zemin.

Yet even as Obama was politely listening to lectures about China’s new superiority, members of his administration were executing an elaborate pincer movement to reestablish American influence, real and perceived, among the growing economies of Asia. In practically every formal statement by U.S. officials, from President Obama to Secretaries Clinton, Geithner, and Gates, U.S. representatives hammered home a single message. The message was that America welcomed rather than feared China’s continued rise. This was directed at a widespread Chinese suspicion: that America would try to thwart China’s continued development because it viewed any increase in Chinese influence as a flat-out loss for the United States.

Many Chinese officials remained skeptical, but the reassurances set the stage for the next phase of the administration’s message: we welcome your rise, but we disagree on the following things—censorship, currency, and pollution, all matters that could be presented as containable items for discussion rather than as inherently threatening aspects of China’s ascent.

In the few months after Obama’s visit to China, some Chinese military and diplomatic officials began believing their own adulatory press clips. China entered its period of what was broadly described as overreach: challenging the Japanese, South Korean, Vietnamese, and Philippine navies with expanded claims of coming supremacy in the South China Sea and the broader Pacific; antagonizing trading partners from Russia to Burma to Australia with more-aggressive practices and claims. Through this period, the U.S. government was stitching up relations with every one of these countries. Part of the message was that with its inevitable extraction from the mire of Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States could reassert its presence in the fastest-growing economic region of the world; the other part was that, for all its excesses, the United States was an easier regional power to live with than the Chinese would be.

Two years after Obama’s “humiliating” visit to Shanghai and Beijing, U.S. relations with China were a mix of cooperation and tension, as they had been through the post-Nixon years. But American relations with most other nations in the region were better than since before the Iraq War. In a visit to Australia late in 2011, Obama startled the Chinese leadership but won compliments elsewhere with the announcement of a new permanent U.S. Marine presence in Darwin, on Australia’s northern coast.

The strategy was Sun Tzu–like in its patient pursuit of an objective: reestablishing American hard and soft power while presenting a smiling “We welcome your rise!” face to the Chinese. “It was as decisive a diplomatic victory as anyone is likely to see,” Walter Russell Mead, of Bard College, often a critic of the administration, wrote about the announcement of the Australian base. “In the field of foreign policy, this was a coming of age of the Obama administration and it was conceived and executed about as flawlessly as these things ever can be.”

In the realm of foreign policy, Barack Obama has learned what every modern president eventually does: despite the dangers, the emergencies, the intractable disagreements, and the life-and-death risks, international affairs naturally claim an ever-growing share of a president’s attention and enthusiasm. On the world stage, he represents an entire mighty country, not one perhaps-embattled party. International figures may be frustrating to deal with—Karzai, Ahmadinejad, Netanyahu in their different ways—but usually they can’t totally thwart or undermine him the way a Mitch McConnell or a Roger Ailes can. He can think big thoughts and announce big plans without seeing them immediately picked apart or ridiculed. And he can dare to devise a long-term strategy, like Obama’s with China, knowing that the tools for carrying it out—in the military, the diplomatic corps, the intelligence agencies, and the rest of the national-security apparatus—are within his line of command.

It is no wonder that the “national-security state” in all its aspects has continued to grow throughout the decades since the beginning of World War II. Defense budgets, intelligence and surveillance networks, private military contractors, irregular forms of war: these and other executive-branch tools of international power work like a ratchet. Some presidents rapidly increase them in times of emergency, as George W. Bush did after the 9/11 attacks. No president scales them back. Thus the imbalance continues to grow between international efforts, where a president has an ever greater array of tools and weapons, and the frustrating domestic arena. Despite having run on his opposition to the Iraq War and overseen the formal U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, Barack Obama has, if anything, expanded the range of executive military power, from his unilateral (and mainly successful) decision to intervene in Libya to his expansion of drone attacks.

Think of the contrast with domestic affairs, especially economic management. Here the “chess master” case for Obama is that things did not deteriorate as disastrously as they easily could have. The “pawn” argument is that he was too often the victim of events, a cunning opposition, and his own naïveté—and will survive politically, if he does, thanks mainly to the clumsiness and overreach of his Republican opposition.

The standard view of Obama’s failures in the closely intertwined domestic fields of economic management and political strategy involves this series of mistakes, with cumulatively worsening impact:

• His administration underestimated the severity of the economic crisis from the outset, and therefore

• it proposed too small an offsetting response, while promising too quick a recovery; and meanwhile

• it coddled the financiers who had created the crisis, being quick to cover their losses and very slow to impose any conditions or correctives; while

• it wasted precious “honeymoon” time humoring the congressional committees that dickered over a proposed health-care bill; and throughout this time

• it naively imagined that the congressional Republicans were interested mainly in compromise solutions, which dispirited the administration’s allies and gave Obama a reputation for prizing the appearance of being reasonable over the achievement of his economic goals; and even worse

• it was fatally slow to recognize the Republican strategy of blocking its appointments and filibustering bills—and even when it saw what was happening, it enabled that strategy, by refusing to fight for nominees who encountered resistance (Elizabeth Warren being only the most familiar name on a long list) and failing to fight the routine use of the filibuster, as its predecessors had. And as if all this were not enough, after the rout in the 2010 election

• it self-destructively adopted the Republican claim that the federal deficit was the most immediate threat to the country, even though cutting the budget in response to that threat would make the real emergencies of unemployment and recession worse. And, finally

• it created a disaster that nearly consumed it, by trusting the new congressional Republican majority, now that it had what Obama called “the responsibility to govern,” not to risk a showdown over raising the ceiling of federal borrowing last year.

The list could go on, with items elaborating two main concerns: that the president and his team didn’t know what they were getting into, and that they were always one move behind real-time events in the political combat of today’s Washington.

What is the possible contrary case? Someday, we may know how the president himself might answer that question. (The White House declined our repeated requests for an interview.) His reflections in public have tended to be anodyne laments about the failure of bipartisan spirit; he can’t possibly believe it’s that innocent. But those around him make the case that in addition to being very unlucky (in the circumstances he inherited) and very lucky (in the Republican field that chose to run against him), Obama also shaped his luck by being shrewd, in three significant ways. First, according to this view, he always kept his eye on what mattered most, namely avoiding another recession—and compromised and backtracked only when, in his assessment, the alternative would have been a greater economic risk. Next, he absorbed pummeling by Republicans not so much because he was weak or unsuspecting as because he recognized problems the over-reaching opposition was creating for itself, much as he had during the 2008 primaries (and much as Bill Clinton had in 1995). And finally, that while like all presidents he came in unprepared, he adjusted as fast as anyone could have expected and was increasingly in control of events as time went on. Obviously, these don’t add up to the hopes for a second Lincoln that some of his most fervent backers held four years ago. But I think they are plausible analyses on their own terms.

The first contention—that from beginning to end Obama has chosen the path he thought would minimize new shocks to the economy—accords with normal political logic, since the worst threat to a sitting president is exactly the kind of slowdown Obama has tried to avoid, with mixed results at best through his first three years. It also makes sense of an otherwise disparate pattern of decisions, starting with his administration’s apparent coddling of Wall Street in 2009. This early failure of accountability is the main theme of Ron Suskind’s Confidence Men, and virtually everyone I spoke with said that it created a substantive and symbolic problem the administration has never fully recovered from. Substantive, because of the “moral hazard” created by using public money to guarantee the bonuses and repay the losses of people who had been so recklessly destructive. Symbolic, for all the reasons that eventually came to a head with last year’s Occupy movement.

An official familiar with the administration’s economic policy told me: “The recapitalization of the banks was a good idea, and necessary. But we did not put enough conditions on [their] getting the money. Ultimately not being tougher with the guys that got the money is the thing that overthrows the government twice—in 2008 [in a reaction against Bush’s TARP plan] and again in 2010.”

Keeping the system going was the guideline during the early days of financial rescue, and again later during the argument over government shutdowns and the raising of the debt ceiling. During the initial rescue, Obama’s response was of course shaped by the technocrat circle that guided the effort. From their experience with Asian and Latin American financial panics during the Clinton era, the likes of Summers, Geithner, and Orszag understood that their task was akin to emergency-room medicine, or firefighting. They had to contain the emergency first, because otherwise there was no telling how dire the consequences could be, and worry about anything else later. “Larry, Tim, Peter—when they heard about restricting bonuses or compensation, they would think, These are people’s contracts, we can’t change their contracts,” a member of the executive branch said. “But really it was the idea that the problem was enormous, the economy is in big trouble, do we want to make enemies while we’re putting out the fire? Usually they opted for whatever they thought would keep the economy going.” This rings true about the mood in the middle of an emergency, and also about the cultural tone-deafness that can affect people who all come from the same rarefied world.

So too during the showdowns with Congress over keeping the government funded, or raising the debt ceiling to prevent a default on Treasury notes. After the Republicans gained control of the House in the 2010 midterms, the negotiating team on the administration side was heavy on Clinton-era veterans who had been through previous dealings with a Republican Congress. Gene Sperling, who succeeded Summers as head of the National Economic Council and had held the same job during the Clinton years, and Jacob Lew, who succeeded Peter Orszag at the Office of Management and Budget and then William Daley as chief of staff, had dealt with Speaker Newt Gingrich and his new Republican majority in the 1995 budget battle that led to a government shutdown. Jason Furman, now Sperling’s deputy at the NEC, was a young staff economist on Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers at about the same time.

As they tried to arrange budget agreements with Speaker John Boehner and his new majority, they seemed to be the last people in Washington to recognize how different the circumstances were. The 54 new Republican representatives who arrived with Newt Gingrich mainly owed their positions to him. Or they thought they did: Gingrich’s “Contract With America” had been the unified nationwide platform for the GOP surge that year. When Bill Clinton sat down to negotiate with him, a deal made with Gingrich was a deal that would stick.

But the Obama team got clearer and clearer signals—first in budget negotiations in the spring, then in votes on the debt ceiling in the summer, and then in the confrontation over the payroll-tax holiday just before Christmas—that Boehner was a leader without a following. The 63 Republican freshmen owed him nothing; many had run against Washington business-as-usual practices that included the GOP establishment. “The Tea Party didn’t want a deal,” Austan Goolsbee told me. “The world understood that default was crazy and would destroy the economy. But hitting the ceiling would force big parts of the government out of business. That’s what they wanted. They weren’t bluffing.”

If keeping the economy growing was so central for Obama, why was the initial stimulus “only” $800 billion? “The case is quite compelling that if more fiscal and monetary expansion had been done at the beginning, things would have been better,” Lawrence Summers told me late last year. “That is my reading of the economic evidence. My understanding of the judgment of political experts is that it wasn’t feasible to do.” Rahm Emanuel told me that within a month of Obama’s election, but still another month before he took office, “the respectable range for how much stimulus you would need jumped from $400 billion to $800 billion.” In retrospect it should have been larger—but, Emanuel says, “in the Congress and the opinion pages, the line between ‘prudent’ and ‘crazy spendthrift’ was $800 billion. A dollar less, and you were a statesman. A dollar more, you were irresponsible.” The three Republicans who voted for the stimulus bill—Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, and about-to-be-Democrat Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania—all complained that it was far too large, as did Jim Webb and many other Democrats.

The second, related argument is that Obama’s passive, even withdrawn-seeming stance as “the only adult in the room” has positioned him better for reelection—and thus for his best chance to lock in the gains he has made—than a more directly combative approach would have. Not until Obama writes his post-presidential sequel to Dreams From My Father, and perhaps not even then, will we know all the sources of his seeming horror of partisan conflict. His above-the-fray pose was certainly the key to his rise in the first place. I was in the arena in Boston when he declared in his 2004 convention speech, “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.” The house erupted in cheers, and America’s first black president could not have gone on to win had he struck a more strident or divisive tone.

But lines like that described an ideal, not an operational reality, and once Obama entered office, his opponents didn’t buy them. Late last year John Barrasso, a Republican senator from Wyoming, explained to me that his colleagues would have been “only too willing” to work with Obama, if he had not, in Barrasso’s view, “frozen us out” by listening only to Nancy Pelosi and the extreme-liberal base.

If Obama really thought that America had moved past partisan division, then he was too innocent for the job. But part of political leadership is being able to project a positive idealism that you know is at odds with the real world. I am ready to believe that Obama adopted this faux-harmonious tone, apart from its being his natural register, as a way to win the election, and as a marker for what he hoped America could become, and—crucially—that once in office, he maintained it as a sound position for himself as he moved toward reelection. Late last year, he also applied it with chess-master skill against the congressional Republicans, in daring them to let the widely popular payroll-tax cut expire at the start of an election year. They backed off, and when the dust settled, the Republicans found themselves at an unaccustomed political disadvantage. Having secured an agreement on government funding for the rest of the year, Obama had taken one of their favorite tools, the threat of a government shutdown, out of their hands through the campaign season. And after three years of seeming to shy from “partisan” rhetoric, he began linking the slate of GOP presidential contenders to the Tea Party–dominated Republican Congress, whose approval ratings were far worse than his own.

The payoff for Obama in a strategy of remaining Mr. Reasonable is the prospect of occupying the acceptable center, as the Tea Party spins the Republican Party off to the extreme. The risk is that even if the Republicans make themselves unpopular through filibuster and obstruction, they make Obama look weak—and that’s worse.

Obama’s future, and his effectiveness, depend on that balance, whose results we will see this year. My impression from recent evidence is that he has found his footing, and has come to understand how to use the constrained but still real powers of a president facing congressional opposition—just in time. The most enlightening document I found for assessing Obama’s recent moves turns out to be 66 years old.

This is a memorandum that James H. Rowe Jr., a Harvard-trained lawyer who had been Oliver Wendell Holmes’s last law clerk on the Supreme Court and after World War II was a young official at the Bureau of the Budget, wrote to President Harry Truman soon after the midterm elections of 1946. In that election, the Republicans gained 55 seats in the House and 12 in the Senate, to take control of both houses for the first time since before the New Deal. Truman was if anything less prepared, for more overwhelming responsibilities, than Obama was. Three months after he unexpectedly became president upon Franklin Roosevelt’s death, he had to decide on the use of atomic weapons whose very existence FDR had never let him know about. After that came management of post-war Europe and Asia. But the fundamentals of Truman’s political situation, as described in Rowe’s memo, are amazingly similar to those Obama now faces.

Rowe tells Truman that, with the Republican victory, he should be prepared for obstruction and nonstop partisan stalemate, not because of strategic mistakes on his side but because this is the basic nature of the American system. Anyone who thinks that American politics is more embattled “than ever,” as I am often tempted to, should read this memo (and Samuel Popkin’s exegesis of it, in The Candidate).

Rowe points out that when an opposing party holds Congress, it will always view weakening the president as its paramount goal. It will launch as many congressional investigations as possible, in hopes of finding scandal in an administration or at least distracting its appointees. It will block nominations and try to frustrate a president’s attempts to keep the executive branch operational. Its leaders will define “compromise” as the president’s accepting all of their demands and abandoning his own. If the leaders of Congress do finally strike a deal with the administration, a president should be wary. The “simple fact” about most deals with a congressional opposition, he writes, is that “they just won’t work under the American two-party system”:

For “cooperation” is a one-way street. The President can discipline the Executive Branch sufficiently by exercising his right to hire and fire; he can force it to cooperate. The Republican leaders may agree to have co-equal responsibility for executing the agreements reached on policy but they do not have co-equal power “to deliver” … [Congress] has no parliamentary discipline … for a very simple reason—Congressmen are not representatives of all the people; they represent only their own districts or sections and the particular pressure groups within those sections which are vital to them. No Congressional leader can commit his party because no commitments are binding upon the Members except those they may personally make to their own sections.

Negative discipline, of the kind that Mitch McConnell has exercised to keep Senate Republicans voting as a bloc against Obama’s proposals, is easier to maintain than positive discipline, of the kind Newt Gingrich wielded temporarily over his Republican majority. That is the exception. A president “should first of all accept the inevitability that formal cooperation is unworkable,” Rowe concludes. “Despite his sincere desire to cooperate, he should accept the verdict of the politicians, of history, and of the disinterested students of government.”

And so Rowe offers his recommendation. With legislative ambitions blocked, with many appointments left to languish, with rear-guard battles under way to uphold vetoes and fend off investigation, a president should resort to the only tool that is uniquely his: the ability to speak to all of the public. He should prepare the ground by sounding reasonable and conciliatory, in light of an unquenchable if unrealistic belief that parties should be able to get along. (“Public demand for bipartisan cooperation will probably continue. The realpolitik of the situation requires that there be some gestures toward cooperation.”) Then, with his bona fides established, the president can move into the next election, making a clear case for his side.

If Barack Obama loses this fall, he will forever seem a disappointment: a symbolically important but accidental figure who raised hopes he could not fulfill and met difficulties he did not know how to surmount. He meant to show the unity of America but only underscored its division. As a candidate, he symbolized transformation; in office, he applied incrementalism and demonstrated the limits of change. His most important achievement, helping forestall a second Great Depression, will be taken for granted or discounted in the dismay about the economic problems he did not solve. His main legislative accomplishment, the health-care bill, may well be overturned; his effect on America’s international standing will pass; his talk about bridging the partisan divide will seem one more sign of his fatal naïveté. If he is reelected, he will have a chance to solidify what he has accomplished and, more important, build on what he has learned. All of this is additional motivation, as if he needed any, for him to drive for reelection; none of it makes him any more palatable to those who oppose him and his goals.

And for those who supported him the first time, as I did? To me, the evidence suggests that given a second term, he would have a better chance of becoming the figure so many people imagined.

Whether he’ll be a flash in the pan or whether he’ll prove to be the phenom he has been for the last six Knick’s games, here’s a terrific article by someone who is well known (primarily?) for his work in the tech world.

Sports and good writing often go together:

Doc Searls Weblog

The Jeremy Lin story

Last night I listened to sports radio from ESPN, WFAN in New York, KNBR in San Francisco, and WEEI in Boston, as well as to KOVO here in Provo, Utah (where I’m hanging this week). One of the talkers put it best, saying something like this: “Let’s face it. There is no other story right now. Jeremy Lin is all we can talk about, because he’s too damned interesting.”

Tonight the saga continued. Jeremy Lin scored 27 points with 12 assists (and 8 turnovers) as the Knicks beat the Raptors in Toronto on a 3-point shot by — of course — Jeremy Lin. Also this: he made the winning shot with half a second on the clock. And that was after tying the game up a few seconds earlier with a drive to the basket in heavy traffic, drawing a foul, and making that shot too. Great stuff. Legendary, considering that he’s done it night after night, though a career that’s basically just six games long, so far.

So let’s pause to look at what makes a story:

1. A character. That is, a protagonist. Somebody you can identify with, because they’re interesting and unique. Ideally, they aren’t from Central Casting. And they have flaws as well as positive qualities.
2. A problem. That is, a challenge or a struggle that keeps you interested. (Turning the page, coming back for the next episode, whatever.)
3. Movement toward a resolution. That is, the clear sense that this is all going somewhere, no matter how bad things might be now, or how complicated the plot lines thicken and braid.

Jeremy Lin scores big on all three. Like all of us, he’s not typical. In his case, especially for basketball. He’s 6’3, but that’s about average for a point guard. He’s also skinny, not bulging with muscles, not covered in tatoos. He’s also Chinese, in the ethnic sense, though he’s an American kid who grew up in Palo Alto. You don’t find many Chinese (or even Asian) players in the NBA, or even at the college level. He’s also a devout Christian who is quick to thank God, though not so quick as Tim Tebow.

He also has a problem: until just a few games ago, he couldn’t get much respect.

While he was named Player of the Year by many for leading Paly High to the state championship as a Senior, and was first team all-state in California that same year, he wasn’t recruited by any major schools, or even many minor ones. He ended up going to Harvard, which doesn’t give athletic scholarships and where he played four solid years of ball before graduating with a degree in economics and a 3.1 GPA. He was first team all-Ivy, and got kudos from many coaches, including Connecticut’s Jim Calhoun (on whose team he dropped 30 points and grabbed 9 boards), but went undrafted by the NBA. After excelling in an NBA summer league, he found his way to the end of the bench for the Golden State Warriors, his home team growing up. They cut him. Then he surfaced at the Houston Rockets. They cut him too. Then the New York Knicks picked him up off waivers from Houston. They were ready to cut him too, but needed help from deep in the bench after their two starting stars couldn’t play.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, the rest is history. Lin played only 55 minutes in the Knicks’ first 23 games, most of which the team lost. Then he came off the bench in a game on February 4 — remember, this is just ten days ago — and scored 25 points with 5 boards and 7 assists. The Knicks won. The Knicks have gone undefeated since then, with Lin as their point guard. He’s scored more than 20 points in all of those games, and hit the winning shot in two of them. He also out-scored Kobe Bryant, with 38 points, in a game against the Lakers.

So it’s a triumphant story, but it’s not over. What keeps us tuned in and turning the pages is that we don’t know what will happen next. Is he really that good? Can he keep it up? If the answers to either of those questions is yes, how many other Jeremy Lins are out there, unrecognized?

We don’t know, and that keeps us interested too.

In my case, I’m interested in Jeremy Lin as a character because both my older kids went to Paly High when we lived in Palo Alto. My son and I probably played basketball on some of the same courts Jeremy played on later. I also watched Jeremy play when he was at Harvard. I remember one game where it was clear that Jeremy was the best player on the floor. But the next night we went to a Celtics game and couldn’t help comparing the two games. The difference was extreme. I couldn’t imagine any of the players I saw at the Harvard game playing in the NBA, Jeremy Lin included.

But here he is. I’ve watched some of his games, and it’s clear that he’s a solid point guard without a lot of flash, reminding me of Steve Nash, Derek Fisher and John Stockton in their primes. Good penetrator. Good shooter. Great at sharing the ball and running the floor. But I think there’s more going on than talent and style. Basketball, like all sports, is a head game. Skill isn’t enough. You’ve got to have your head straight. Wilt Chamberlain, one of the greatest players of all time, and the only one ever to score 100 points in a game (when there were no 3-point shots, not that he would have taken any), was a notoriously bad foul shooter. Yet in practice, I’ve read, Wilt was terrific at foul-shooting. He just choked in games. What I’m saying is that Jeremy Lin is a head-case in the positive sense: he’s broken through into a zone where his head is level and his emotions are positive. He believes in himself, and he believes in his team. He has the poise of a player who’s been a starter for ten years. The other players he makes look good include Bill Walker, Landry Fields, Jared Jeffries and Steve Novak, none of whom are big stars.

Can’t help loving it. The story is too good not to.

But I did read an article in this morning’s NYTimes that struck me as worthy of the day (and much more) and worth attaching.

See what you think:

February 13, 2012, 5:37 pm

Life’s Frailty, and the Gestures That Go a Long Way

Several years ago, my friend Jeffrey Zaslow sent me a chapter from a book he was writing about lifelong friendships among a group of women from Ames, Iowa. It was a powerful story about love and loss that moved me to tears.

With the draft pages still in my hands, I sat down with my daughter, a second-grader at the time, to talk about the importance of friendship. We talked about her girlfriends, why occasional fights didn’t matter and why she should always treasure her friends. It was a sweet moment, and I was grateful to Jeff for inspiring the conversation through his writing.

Later, I called him to tell him how much that single chapter had meant to my daughter and me. How, I asked him, had he managed to inject himself into this circle of women he had only recently met and so accurately depict the power of female friendship?

“I have a wife and three daughters,” he said, laughing, without missing a beat. “I’m quite comfortable being outnumbered by women.”

I thought about our conversation this weekend when I learned the terrible news that Jeff had died in a car accident on snowy roads on his way to his Detroit-area home, returning from a book-signing event in northern Michigan. “The Girls From Ames” became a best seller, and remains my favorite among the books he wrote. But many people know Jeff as co-author of “The Last Lecture,” with the Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch, who delivered that now famous lecture after learning he had pancreatic cancer.

Mr. Zaslow was also co-author of memoirs with Gabrielle Giffords, the congresswoman from Arizona who was recovering from a gunshot wound to the head, and Chesley B. Sullenberger III, the pilot who safely ditched a damaged airliner on the Hudson River in 2009. Despite the disparate subject matter, Mr. Zaslow noted that much of his writing centered on the theme of love, commitment and living in the moment.

“We don’t know what moment in our lives we’re going to be judged on; that’s true for all of us,” he said at a TED talk last year, explaining what he had learned from Captain Sullenberger. “We’ve got to be honorable, be moral; we’ve got to work our hardest.”

Despite his success as a memoir co-author, Jeff’s true labor of love was his latest book, “The Magic Room: A Story About the Love We Wish for Our Daughters.” Dedicated to his daughters, the book focused on a bridal shop in Fowler, Mich., as a way to tell a story of parents’ hopes and dreams.

Mr. Zaslow’s role as a father was a common theme in his work, one he loved to talk about. Once when a boy canceled plans to take his daughter to a homecoming dance, Mr. Zaslow said he thought to himself, “What can I do for my sad daughter?” He decided to embarrass the boy in front of millions by writing a Wall Street Journal column about the lessons parents should be teaching their sons.

“The lesson of the story — and of that night — is to teach your sons to be chivalrous, and your daughters not to take it,” he said in a 2009 interview. “My daughter was not thrilled. And the boy was not thrilled. But you know what? The next time you want to take my daughter to the dance, follow through.”

Jeff often said he honed his skills for listening and offering advice during a stint as an advice columnist, a role he won in a contest to replace Ann Landers. During his many public talks, Jeff told the story of a favorite letter from a man who wanted his girlfriend, Julie, to undergo breast augmentation.

“Julie deserves someone who loves her for who she is, not how she looks in a sweater,” Jeff wrote in his reply. “If you can’t do that for her, she won’t need implants anyway because she will already have a big boob in her life. You.”

In every conversation I had with Jeff and in much of his writing, he talked about how much he had learned about the frailty of life and the importance of never leaving important words unsaid.

At his TED talk last November, Jeff told the audience about a column of his that focused on the words “I love you.” It appeared two days before Valentine’s Day in 2004, and led with the story of a judge in Maywood, Ill., who often told his children that he loved them. One day in 1995, as his 18-year-old daughter was leaving the house, the judge called out to his daughter. “Kristin, remember I love you,” he said.

“I love you too, Dad,” the girl replied. That day, Kristin was killed in a car accident. It was a story that resonated with Jeff, and one he took to heart, always saying “I love you” to his wife and daughters before saying goodbye or hanging up the phone.

“All of us should say ‘I love you’ to the people we care about,” Jeff said. “We should do it because you never know. I got about 1,000 e-mails from readers saying they were going to tell their children they loved them.

“What I like about my job is sometimes I’m just writing about the obvious. By doing that, you can touch a lot of people and tell them things that will change their lives, even if it’s something simple.”

I was only one degree of separation away from one of Washington’s best French chefs, and I thought how much fun it would be to spend an entire day in the kitchen with him from the time he walked in in the morning until he left at night.

Alas, it was not to be as I was told he would not look kindly on such an intrusion. I promised to sit in a corner and not say a word, but that didn’t seem to make any difference.

Now, however, several years later, and thanks to the invitation of a long time friend, I am about to finish a six-week course in Indian cooking.  My retirement may not have given me an insight into French cooking, but I can make perfect basmati or jasmine rice three different ways; I have made an almond chicken korma with cauliflower (the cauliflower was my addition, a substitution because I didn’t have enough chicken), a dish good enough to be the pride of any restaurant; and I’m primed to make other meat and vegetarian dishes that will far surpass any Indian food ever made in our kitchen (except, perhaps, when our Madras/Chennai family are here).

We’ve always loved the many layers of taste that Indian cuisine offers. Cumin, cardamom, cinnamon, coriander, chili, ginger, cilantro leaves, mustard seeds, gram masala. You name it. We love it. But for some reason our dishes never resembled anything we had eaten in India or had been served in the best US/UK Indian restaurants.

Now, thanks to Edward Hamann and an Arlington Public Schools Adult Education course, the Millers will never be without good Indian food again.

Five of us have gathered with Ed the last five Fridays from 10 AM-1 PM (he also teaches the same course Wed. evenings from 7-10 PM, well past my awake time). Plus, we will take a Saturday excursion to one of the local Indian groceries stores, with our teacher leading us up and down the aisles, after we complete the sixth cooking session.

Mostly, the courses have involved Ed explaining the myriad ways that cooking and combining spices can transform almost anything into a delicious dish and then proceeding to do just that.  In our first session, we learned to make a Garam Masala, a spice blend that we’ve used throughout the course. We made a Raita, a yogurt salad with toasted cumin, a Murgh Masala, a wonderful chicken dish, and Dilliwale Moong Dal.

Then we sat down and ate it all.

For the next four weeks, we continued to mix, stir, chop, slice, dice, strain, sauté, ‘fry,’ bake, boil, toast, always ending with eating our/Ed’s creations.  Usually Ed would arrive an hour or so ahead of us and start the preparations. When we arrived, he would talk about the dishes we were going to prepare, what part of India they were from, how they differed from other dishes, what made them special, and, always, how to use spices.

Over the next four weeks we made Badaami Murgh Korma, chicken in almond sauce, Sada Pulao, a spice-fragrant basmati rice, Bhindi ki Sabji, a spicy pan-friend okra, Vindaloo, a Goan pork with vinegar, Farasbee chi Bhaji, green beans with spices and coconut, Gajarachi Koshimbir, shredded carrot salad with peanuts, Obla Chawal, perfect boiled basmati rice, Kurma, a south-Indian mixed vegetable curry, Puli Jhinga, shrimp with tamarind and coconut, Chitrannam, lemon-scented rice with cashew, Tandoori Murgh, tandoori-style chicken (in an ordinary oven), Murgh Makhani, butter chicken, Seekh Kabob, grilled ground lamb kabob, and Aam ki Lassi, a sweet mango yogurt drink.

And we still have one more class to go.

Initially, I thought the class was to be taught by an Indian woman and so was quite surprised when I walked in the first Friday to be greeted by an American male.  But any disappointment dissipated by the end of the first session. Ed’s knowledge of Indian cooking, from all over India, Indian culture, Indian history, and all things Indian gastronomic are fantastic.  There’s almost no question we ask that doesn’t result in us learning something entirely new about Indian cooking.

Ed’s great.

The six-week course cost each of us $185 (for non-resident seniors, cheaper for Arlington residents), and that includes all the food, all preparation items, and all we eat each Friday. That comes to $30.83 cents per week, and no charge for our upcoming Sat. trip to one of the Patel Brothers Indian grocery stores.

Worth it?

I’m signing up for Ed’s next course, two Friday (or Wed.) sessions on Indian vegetarian cooking, starting Feb 22 ($79).

If you’re interested in joining, call me or call 703-228-7200. Ed needs at least five ‘students’ for the two-session class to be a ‘go.’

Also, let me know if you want to be invited to any of the once-a-week Indian meals I will undertake once I have all the necessary spices.

But you’ll have to ‘act’ quickly as one of the performances ends Feb. 18 and the other ends Mar. 11.

First, Necessary Sacrifices at Ford’s Theatre, the one that ends Feb. 18.

This one is basically a two-person play focused on the three meetings between President Lincoln and Frederick Douglas. Based on historical documents*, it is the story of two visionaries, both from humble and brutal backgrounds, and how they came to respect and care about each other.

You need not be a Lincoln scholar nor an expert on the Civil War, slavery, or the 1860s to enjoy this production and to learn more than you probably already know about a part of our history and about these two men.

If you do have knowledge and background about this part of our history, I think you will find much to like in Necessary Sacrifices and suspect your knowledge of these two men will only deepen as a result of spending the evening with them.

Lincoln is played by David Selby and Douglas by Craig Wallace. Selby is not new to Lincoln and captures him well. Wallace’s portrayal of Douglas seemed less authentic to me (tho I readily admit my knowledge of Douglas is thin), or less powerful.

The evening is a good one, a mixture of art and history, and the setting of Ford’s Theatre adds to the evening.

(*Two of the three meetings between Lincoln and Douglas have been documented, and the evening we saw the production, Harvard historian John Stauffer, who has written Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Doughlas and Abraham Lincoln, told the audience, following the play, that what was represented on stage is largely historically accurate.)

You have a bit more time to see Red, John Logan’s play about the artist Mark Rothko.

I saw this play, though with different actors, in its Broadway production a year or two ago where it won the 2010 Tony award for Best Play of the Year.  You can see my thoughts about the play and that production Here.

Seeing it a second time only reinforced my feeling that “the play does what good theatre should do: it entertains; it makes you think; it teaches you; and it makes you want to know more about the subject(s).”

As in Necessary Sacrifices, you do not need to know (art) history nor much (anything) about Mark Rothko to enjoy the evening. And if you are knowledgeable about art, I suspect you will still appreciate the evening.

In this performance, the two leads, Edward Gero (Rothko) and Patrick Andrews (Ken), his hired assistant, are not as accomplished as Alfred Molina and Eddie Redmayne were in the London/NY production. But they are good enough.

Both Necessary Sacrifices and Red are largely built around dialogue between the two characters in each play. But both productions are easy to follow and are good theatre.

Addendum: I forgot to mention that Washington’s National Gallery of Art has on display (for a limited time) three of the paintings that Rothko produced and then refused to display at The Four Seasons restaurant in NYC Seagram’s building. These paintings, and where they should be housed, play an important role in Red.

Truck Day.

That not so inconsequential time when all the Red Sox Spring Training gear is loaded up at Fenway and leaves for Fort Myers.

Ah, I can feel the juices begin to flow again.

For those of you for whom these major events matter, here’s a list of significant baseball dates for 2012:

February 12, 2012

Voluntary report date for pitchers, catchers and injured players (Oakland and Seattle)

February 17, 2012

Oakland and Seattle full squads may report

February 19, 2012

Voluntary report date for pitchers, catchers and injured players (all other clubs)

February 24, 2012

Full squads may report (all other clubs)

Mandatory report date for all players on Oakland and Seattle

February 29, 2012

First exhibition game, Florida State University vs. Philadelphia Phillies, Clearwater, Fla.

March 2, 2012

First Spring Training game, Seattle Mariners vs. Oakland Athletics, Phoenix

Mandatory report date for all players on remaining clubs

March 11, 2012

Last date to renew Major League contracts

March 19, 2012

Last day to place a player on unconditional release waivers and pay 30 days termination pay instead of 45 days

Last date to assign an injured player to a Minor League club, if applicable

March 26, 2012

Earliest date that a club may backdate a placement on the Major League 15-day disabled list

March 28-29, 2012

Japan Opening Series 2012, Tokyo
Seattle Mariners vs. Oakland Athletics

April 4, 2012

Opening Night, St. Louis Cardinals at Miami Marlins

April 5, 2012

Opening Day

April 10, 2012

The first date that a player placed on the 15-day disabled list during Spring Training may be reinstated (if placed on or backdated to March 26)

April 14, 2012

First date that a player optioned during Spring Training may be recalled

April 15, 2012

Jackie Robinson Day

May 13, 2012

Mother’s Day

May 15, 2012

Earliest date that clubs may re-sign players that they unconditionally released between August 31, 2011, and March 31, 2012

May 18, 2012

Interleague Play begins

May 28, 2012

Memorial Day

Start of Closed Period for the 2012 First-Year Player Draft

June 4-6, 2012

First-Year Player Draft

June 16, 2012

First date that Clubs may trade an eligible free agent player who was signed after electing free agency

June 17, 2012

Father’s Day

July 2, 2012

First date to sign international players for the following season

July 4, 2012

Independence Day

July 8, 2012

Taco Bell All-Star Sunday, Kauffman Stadium, Kansas City
Futures Game, Legends & Celebrity Softball

July 9, 2012

Home Run Derby, Kauffman Stadium, Kansas City

July 10, 2012

83rd All-Star Game, Kauffman Stadium, Kansas City

July 13, 2012

5 p.m. ET, signing deadline for players selected in the First-Year Player Draft

July 16, 2012

Competitive Balance and Forfeited Pick Lottery

First date that assignable draft selections may be traded (through October 3, 2012)

July 22, 2012

Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony, Cooperstown, N.Y.

July 31, 2012

Non-waiver trade deadline, 4 p.m. ET

August 31, 2012

Waiver trade deadline. Postseason eligibility lists established at midnight ET

September 1, 2012

Active rosters increased from 25 to 40 players

September 11, 2012

September 11 Remembrance

October 3, 2012

End of 2012 MLB regular season

Immediately after the World Series

Eligible players become free agents

Sixth day after completion of World Series

First day that Major League and Minor League free agents may sign contracts with teams other than their former clubs

12th day after completion of World Series

Midnight ET, last date for a player to accept arbitration from former club

Le Havre ****1/2

You’ll have to look around to find this film, but if it’s playing in your area, it’s worth the effort to see it.

In a time when many films are filled with violence and bad guys (just watch the previews of coming movies), Le Havre offers something quite different: a film made up almost entirely of good people, a view of humanity that doesn’t make it to the screen too often.

It’s the story of what happens to a young African refugee who finds himself unexpectedly in the port of Le Havre and at the mercy of the city.

You may have to overcome the urge to say that this film is just fantasy or that it is just not realistic. But if you give yourself over to it and simply suspend disbelief  for 93 minutes, you can’t help but walk out with the feeling that there are still good folks in the world and that humanity lives.

Check it out.

(98% — Rotten Tomatoes)

The Salt of Life **1/2

We just saw this film yesterday in our Sunday Cinema Club, and my view is that you do not need to find this film once it come out commercially. However, know that my wife and friend (female), who also saw it, laughed a lot, seemed to like it, and thought it would be appreciated by women.

It’s an Italian film about a late-middle-aged, retired man and his fantasies about ‘snaring’ a young (any?), attractive girl/woman. This goes on for more than an hour and a half, and while there are definitely humorous scenes, this ‘newly’ retired middle-aged man thought it went on far too long.

(Update: 2/20/12 – Our cinema club gave this film a positive rating (good + excellent) of 45.9%, one of the lower ratings I ever remember a film receiving from this audience.)

A Separation *****

I wrote about this film previously, another one we saw in the Cinema Club.

It’s now out in the theaters, although you’ll have to search for it.  I put it at the top of my favorite films of 2011.

See it while it’s still around. And let me know what you think of it.

(99%  - Rotten Tomatoes)

(Our Cinema Club gave it a positive rating of 84.4)

And the Offer:

I’ve written often about our Sunday morning Cinema Club where at 10:30 on two Sunday mornings a month we see  a film that is not yet ‘out.’  The last three films we saw were The Artist, My Week with Marilyn, and A Separation,  all films that are now being touted as Best of …

Anyway, we will be away Sunday, Feb. 19, and so the first person who contacts me either by leaving a comment on this post, by email, phone, or in person, can have our two tickets for free.  Be in touch by the 13th at the latest.

You won’t know what you’re going to see when you walk (stumble?) into the theater, the Avalon at the DC/Md line, but you’re likely to see something good, and there is a discussion following the film. You are likely to see a foreign film during the winter, for some reason, seem to be largely foreign, independent films.

Might be an opportunity to see if you like the idea of joining the Cinema Club.

Ken Murray, MD, in How Doctor’s Die, writes:

“It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.”

He continues,” Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain, and dying alone. They’ve talked about this with their families. They want to be sure, when the time comes, that no heroic measures will happen…”

What made the article particularly relevant for me was the experience I had just gone through with my 93 ½ year old dad, who died July 4, 2011.

Brief background:

My dad (Sam) had been very clear with our family he did not want any medical extension of his life. He was clear he had lived a good and long life and was not afraid to die.  He repeatedly told us “there is a time to leave the party,” and in the last year or two, he said we needed to accept that the time had come for him.

“Of course,” we responded.  “We won’t do anything extraordinary to extend your life.”

Ah, and that’s where the issue got a bit sticky.

His health had been basically good. He had no heart issues, no cancer, no strokes, and, except for somewhat weak kidneys and an enlarged prostate, he had avoided the major life ‘killers.

Sam had fallen three or four years earlier, and although his leg had been ‘nailed’ back together, he became increasingly less mobile, moving from a cane to a scooter to a walker, and ultimately to a wheel chair over a period of three years. Gradually, he also became less able to enjoy those things that previously brought him great pleasure (reading, chess, computer, and music).

We caught urine infections, dehydration, and other ‘minor’ issues early, and he saw his internist once a month, and his other doctors as necessary. The result of this care was that we were extending his life, even though he was quite ready and accepting of dying.

Then, one day in June 2011, he became quite confused, and we suspected a urinary infection. So off to the ER we went, where the doctor said he did have an infection and was dehydrated. He also suggested we hospitalize Sam to stabilize him as he feared there were other indications of problems.

Sam objected, and we agreed to leave the ER with the understanding we’d return if the antibiotics did not cure the infection.

We got a call a few days later that the infection had spread to his blood, and the recommendation was we take further action.

We called his internist about what to do and had a truly amazing discussion. His doctor said that we were at a decision point. We could hospitalize Sam and, most likely, successfully deal with the current medical issues. Or, we could keep him where he was, make him as comfortable as possible (Hospice was involved at this point), and treat this as the ‘concluding event” in Sam’s life.

His internist said he knew Sam well, knew he wasn’t saying he wanted to die because of depression, delirium, etc., and knew Sam’s desire to ‘leave the party’ was a conscience, well thought out, and often expressed decision.

His doctor said he’d support either decision we made.

Hospice said Sam was in critical condition. His 24/7 caregiver encouraged us to discuss the situation with Sam and to listen to what he was saying. Our family was in agreement Sam should make the decision whether to return to the hospital or simply be made comfortable until his body shut down.

When we talked with Sam, he was quite clear. “I’m ready,” he said. “It’s OK. Let me go.”

So we did.  Three days later he took his last breath with family at his bedside and with a minimum of pain. With the help of his internist, we had finally understood that there had to be a “concluding event.” We were fortunate enough everyone was in agreement, and we could follow Sam’s desires.

So why this post?

Because, in addition to directing you to Dr. Murray’s article, I wanted to share with folks what I discovered. Plus, I hope some of you will share with MillersTime readers your discoveries from your experiences with end of life issues.  Obviously, no two situations are the same, and what follows is not meant to be advice for anyone.

For me, for us:

* How wonderful it was that we knew so clearly what Sam’s desires were.

* I discovered good, routine care often extends life, even when one is not meaning to extend that life.

* Our ability to have a 24/7 caregiver was immensely helpful to Sam and to all of us who were also taking care of him.

* How important it was for us to have family agreement about how we would handle the end of life events.

* How important it was to have a doctor who knew Sam, understood him, and was able to help us focus on Sam’s desires (as opposed to just keep Sam alive, with one more hospitalization).

* The concept of a ‘concluding event’ was important, once it was mentioned to us. We all hoped for (fantasized about) a smooth, painless passing in the middle of the night, which probably doesn’t happen very often.

* Hospice was particularly helpful, both in how we dealt with Sam’s end of life and also my mother’s end of life, three years earlier.

* That there is, as Sam so often said, “a time to leave the party,” and it is often difficult to know exactly when that time is and exactly what role family should play in that decision.

* For us, it was not possible to avoid playing a role in the ‘time to leave the party’ for Sam.

* Sometimes we mixed up our needs with Sam’s. But ultimately, it was Sam’s wishes that needed to be honored.

* Sam and Esty gave us a gift by having their wishes and all of their estate issues handled in advance.

So how did the 30 major league teams do (there are a few deals left to be made)?

In case you haven’t been paying attention, or have only been paying attention to your own team, Nick Cafardo of the Boston Globe gives a one paragraph summary of what each team did over the winter.

For What They’re Worth, the Winter Standings

No reply from Sally, but if you have one or thoughts about what Dave wrote, please feel free to add your thoughts in the Comments’ section.

David’s letter:

January 23, 2012

Dear Sally,

Your interview and obit of Joe Paterno were powerful acts of both reporting and compassion.

I graduated from Penn State in 1961 when Joe Paterno was freshman coach, and Rip Engles was head coach of the football team. I worked my way through school waiting on tables at the Nittany Lion Inn and occasionally waited the football training table. When the giant athletes my own age would see me coming through the swinging door with a large tray on my shoulder piled high with pint sized Dixie cups of ice cream, those hungry jocks would often come at me and snatch four or five cups a piece from the tray.

I’d go back to the kitchen and tell the chef I needed another tray full. He’d ask why.

“They grab the Dixie cups off my tray, four or five at a time, before I can even set the tray down. There’s nothing I can do to stop them.”

“Well, go back in there and tell them that they each get only one dessert.”

“If I told then the, they’d knock me on my butt. You go tell them.”

“Screw it. Give those apes some more ice cream. Take as much as you think they’ll eat. No sense our becoming homicide victims over a few gallons of ice cream.”

A few years later, when I returned to campus for homecoming weekend, I made a point to visit with the chef. I asked him if the football team was still savaging ice cream and acting like pigs. The chef said, “No. Since Joe Paterno became head coach, he’s turned those jocks into gentlemen. No names on the jerseys. No big mouth trash talk. No cocky, wise ass, trouble-making nonsense. Joe Pa’s taught them manners, dignity, responsibility, and gracious, self-sacrifice, team work, and honor. Those jocks are still hungry and often ask for second helpings — but they do so politiely and not like animals.”

Not only was the chef aware of coach Paterno’s influence and example. So too were hundreds of thousands of Penn Staters over the years and millions more who learned from the media about Jo Pa’s life philosophy.

What bothers me in all this uproar – and undoubtedly bothered the thousands of rioting Penn Staters a fw weeks ago – is that they knew that Joe Pa was indisuptedly a male Mother Teresa whose personal example, compassion , and moral authority rank him with the great warrior saints.

How many of the 3000 or more football players at Penn State that Paterno coached did he transform from potential bullies, potential thugs, potential alcoholics or junkies into self-disciplined gentleman?

And when Joe Paterno stands at the Pearly Gates, is it really like that his Maker is going to say,

“Coach, those hundreds of individual lost athlete lives you transformed into lifelong good men and the hundreds of thousands of Penn States and multitudes of others who character was appreciably shaped by you don’t amount to diddly squat. Instead of merely informing your boss, you should have called the cops and acted like a self-appointed prosecutor until Sandusky was hung by is neck. Accordingly, you are not welcome here. We’re sending you South.”

Not a chance.

Kindest regards,

Dave Stang,

Washington, DC

It wasn’t only that bloop single off Pedro in the 2003 that made me ‘hate’ him, tho that is still one of the more painful examples of what he could do to the Sox.

Jorge didn’t have as much talent as Derek, Mo, or ______ (put in any one you choose). You always (almost) knew what Mo would do to you in the 9th. And you knew that Jeter would always get on base when he needed to. You didn’t know how Jorge would beat you, but too often he did something to hurt you.

He had grit. Had he been on the Sox, he would have been one of the “Dirt Dogs.”

I can’t think of any better compliment to make about a ball player.

If you didn’t see his retirement announcement in its entirety yesterday, check it out below.

Tek, are you are there?

WaPo photo

Virtually every news source has articles about the death of Joe Paterno and opinion pieces about his legacy, about how he will be remembered, and, particularly, about how his handling of the Sandusky outrage has or has not affected how he will be judged.

Paterno only gave one reporter, Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post, an interview. He spoke to her from his house and his bedroom over a two-day period just before he died.

If you want to see what Paterno himself said, the two Jenkins’ articles (one came out just before he died and then second one came out today) are linked to below.”

If you only have time for one of them, perhaps read the one that was published today.

Jan. 23rd article: After a life of wins and losses, others will judge Paterno’s legacy.

Jan. 14th article: Joe Paterno’s last interview.

He is two weeks into his new show, Moyers & Company, and it is quite similar to his previous shows. He takes one or two guests for an hour and let’s them discuss what is happening in our society, in our system of government and politics.

I’ve embedded his second show below. It’s 56.47 minutes in length. He lets his guests (David Stockman and Gretchen Morgenson) talk. Neither Democrats nor Republicans are spared, as the show lays out how we have arrived at a system that is not so much broken as it is ‘fixed.’

If you’ve got the time and are interested in trying to understand what is happening in our political and governmental system, click on the link below. (Disclaimer: I didn’t know, until I watched it, that at the very end he suggests folks go to an interview with Ellen Miller).

Moyers & Company Show 102: On Crony Capitalism.

And if you are interested in watching/listening to his first show, you can get to it by going here.

Don’t tell her the following:

In the process of going through my clothes, I came across 33 Red Sox t-shirts (in various sizes) and 11 Red Sox caps/hats (including one signed by Roger Clemens when he was a Yunkee). And there are also a number of Sox windbreakers, sweat shirts, and jackets, which I didn’t bother to count (probably less than 10).

My dilemma, if it is one, is should I pare down this ‘collection’?

I am taking seven bags of used clothing to a local center, and if my wife was not away on a trip, she would no doubt insist that I give up some of the Sox paraphernalia too.

My first thought is to make a vow not to buy another Sox shirt, cap, or jacket, unless/until (?), of course, they win another World Series.

Any suggestions on how I should proceed?

Proponents of SOPA (Stop Online Privacy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) say the legislation is needed to preserve copyright infringement and to stop illegal downloading and other forms of web piracy.

Opponents say these laws, if enacted, could end the Internet as we know it.

Hyperbole?

Sure. But the issue(s) behind this controversy neither started with the introduction of these to bills nor will it end even if, as now seems likely, SOPA and PIPA are delayed, changed, defeated.

Clay Shirky, one of the smartest Internet guys around, lays out what he thinks the controversy is really all about. Take 10 minutes and listen to him. If you’re like me, you won’t understand all of it, but you’ll know more than you do now.

Click Here for Shirky’s TED talk if the video does not appear below.

The Rialto. The Bellevue. The National. The Orpheum. Keith’s. The Savoy. The Opera House. The Paramount. The Metropolitan.

If you grew up in Boston, and depending upon your age, then these names probably mean something to you.

They are just some of the ‘lavish palaces’ where folks use to line up to go to the movies.

There’s a new paperback book out about these movie palaces of Boston, about these theaters designed by great architects, and about a vanishing way of life. For some reason, it’s striking a chord with folks in the Boston area.

The name of the book is Boston’s Downtown Movie Palaces published by Arcadia in its “Images of America” series ($21.99, or $14.95 from Amazon), and the book is being considered for ‘Best Book About Boston.’ It’s been featured in the Boston Globe (Click Here), the Patriot Ledger (Click Here), on various Boston area TV programs, and the two authors will soon appear at the Boston Public Library “Author’s Night.”

And my cousin Ron Goodman is one of the two authors. Actually, he’s the photographer (Arthur Singer is the writer).

We always knew Ron would eventually do something worthwhile, tho we never thought it would take him 70+ years to do so.

Actually, he’s kind of a Renaissance guy, if that’s the right term. He acts in community theater, he has taught college for many years, he knows more about classical music than anyone I know, and almost as much about computers, he’s authored a number of books, he’s won awards for his photography, he can snow shoe, he rides his bike all over Boston, he is a docent for a Beacon Hill synagogue, is a good husband, brother, father, uncle, grandfather, dog owner, has been written up in the Boston papers and given awards for his reading to the blind, and those are just the things I happen to know about him.

All that aside, if you want to know what it use to be like to go to the movies in Boston (and probably other cities too), or if you want to recapture some of the movie days of old, check out his new book. Or at least the Boston Globe article.