Via The New York Times

By PETER BAKER

On a busy afternoon in the West Wing late last month, President Barack Obama seemed relaxed and unhurried as he sat down in a newly reupholstered brown leather chair in the Oval Office. He had just returned from the East Room, where he signed the Small Business Jobs Act of 2010 ­— using eight pens so he could give away as many as possible. The act will be his administration’s last piece of significant economic legislation before voters deliver their verdict on his first two years in office. For all intents and purposes, the first chapter of Obama’s presidency has ended. On Election Day, the next chapter will begin.

As he welcomed me, I told him I liked what he had done with the place. Gone was George W. Bush’s yellow sunburst carpet (it says “optimistic person,” Bush would tell practically anyone who visited), and in its place was a much-derided earth-tone rug with inspirational quotations. The curved walls now had striped tan wallpaper, and the coffee table had been replaced by a walnut-and-mica table that, Obama noted, would resist stains from water glasses. The bust of Winston Churchill was replaced by one of Martin Luther King Jr. The couches were new. He told me he was happy with the redecorating of the office. “I know Arianna doesn’t like it,” he said lightly. “But I like taupe.”

If there was something incongruous about the president of the United States checking out reviews of his décor by Arianna Huffington, well, let’s face it, he has endured worse reviews lately. The president who muscled through Congress perhaps the most ambitious domestic agenda in a generation finds himself vilified by the right, castigated by the left and abandoned by the middle. He heads into the final stretch of the midterm campaign season facing likely repudiation, with voters preparing to give him a Congress that, even if Democrats maintain control, will almost certainly be less friendly to the president than the one he has spent the last two years mud wrestling.

While proud of his record, Obama has already begun thinking about what went wrong — and what he needs to do to change course for the next two years. He has spent what one aide called “a lot of time talking about Obama 2.0” with his new interim chief of staff, Pete Rouse, and his deputy chief of staff, Jim Messina. During our hour together, Obama told me he had no regrets about the broad direction of his presidency. But he did identify what he called “tactical lessons.” He let himself look too much like “the same old tax-and-spend liberal Democrat.” He realized too late that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects” when it comes to public works. Perhaps he should not have proposed tax breaks as part of his stimulus and instead “let the Republicans insist on the tax cuts” so it could be seen as a bipartisan compromise.

Most of all, he has learned that, for all his anti-Washington rhetoric, he has to play by Washington rules if he wants to win in Washington. It is not enough to be supremely sure that he is right if no one else agrees with him. “Given how much stuff was coming at us,” Obama told me, “we probably spent much more time trying to get the policy right than trying to get the politics right. There is probably a perverse pride in my administration — and I take responsibility for this; this was blowing from the top — that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who’s occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can’t be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion.”

That presumes that what he did was the right thing, a matter of considerable debate. The left thinks he did too little; the right too much. But what is striking about Obama’s self-diagnosis is that by his own rendering, the figure of inspiration from 2008 neglected the inspiration after his election. He didn’t stay connected to the people who put him in office in the first place. Instead, he simultaneously disappointed those who considered him the embodiment of a new progressive movement and those who expected him to reach across the aisle to usher in a postpartisan age. On the campaign trail lately, Obama has been confronted by disillusionment — the woman who was “exhausted” defending him, the mother whose son campaigned for him but was now looking for work. Even Shepard Fairey, the artist who made the iconic multihued “Hope” poster, says he’s losing hope.

Perhaps that should have come as no surprise. When Obama secured the Democratic nomination in June 2008, he told an admiring crowd that someday “we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth.”

I read that line to Obama and asked how his high-flying rhetoric sounded in these days of low-flying governance. “It sounds ambitious,” he agreed. “But you know what? We’ve made progress on each of those fronts.” He quoted Mario Cuomo’s line about campaigning in poetry and governing in prose. “But the prose and the poetry match up,” he said. “It would be very hard for people to look back and say, You know what, Obama didn’t do what he’s promised. I think they could say, On a bunch of fronts he still has an incomplete. But I keep a checklist of what we committed to doing, and we’ve probably accomplished 70 percent of the things that we talked about during the campaign. And I hope as long as I’m president, I’ve got a chance to work on the other 30 percent.”

But save the planet? If you promise to save the planet, might people think you would, you know, actually save the planet? He laughed, before shifting back to hope and inspiration. “I make no apologies for having set high expectations for myself and for the country, because I think we can meet those expectations,” he said. “Now, the one thing that I will say — which I anticipated and can be tough — is the fact that in a big, messy democracy like this, everything takes time. And we’re not a culture that’s built on patience.”

These days, Obama has been seeking guidance in presidential biographies. He is reading, among others, “The Clinton Tapes,” Taylor Branch’s account of his secret interviews with Bill Clinton during the eight years of his presidency. “I was looking over some chronicles of the Clinton years,” Obama told me, “and was reminded that in ’94 — when President Clinton’s poll numbers were lower than mine, and obviously the election ended up being bad for Democrats — unemployment was only 6.6 percent. And I don’t think anybody would suggest that Bill Clinton wasn’t a good communicator or was somebody who couldn’t connect with the American people or didn’t show empathy.”

In the fall of 1994, things were even better than Obama recalls: unemployment was in fact 5.6 percent. If the feel-your-pain president had trouble when the economy was not nearly as bad as it is now, with 9.6 percent unemployment, then maybe the issue for Obama is not that he is too cool or detached, as some pundits say. When the economy is bad, even the most talented of presidents suffer at the polls. “There is an anti-establishment mood,” Rahm Emanuel, the former Clinton aide who served as Obama’s first White House chief of staff, told me before he stepped down this month. “We just happen to be here when the music is stopping.”

It would be bad form for the president to anticipate an election result before it happens, but clearly Obama hopes that just as Clinton recovered from his party’s midterm shellacking in 1994 to win re-election two years later, so can he. There was something odd in hearing Obama invoke Clinton. Two years ago, Obama scorned the 42nd president, deriding the small-ball politics and triangulation maneuvers and comparing him unfavorably with Ronald Reagan. Running against Clinton’s wife, Obama was the anti-Clinton. Now he hopes, in a way, to be the second coming of Bill Clinton. Because, in the end, it’s better than being Jimmy Carter.

Last month, I made my way through the West Wing talking not only with Obama but also with nearly two dozen of his advisers — some of whom spoke with permission, others without — hoping to understand how the situation looks to them. The view from inside the administration starts with a basic mantra: Obama inherited the worst problems of any president in years. Or in generations. Or in American history. He prevented another Great Depression while putting in place the foundation for a more stable future. But it required him to do unpopular things that would inevitably cost him.

“He got here, and the expectations for what he could accomplish were very high and probably unrealistic,” Pete Rouse told me. Indeed, David Axelrod and David Plouffe, the masterminds of the 2008 presidential campaign, said they cautioned Obama after his victory to brace himself for a precipitous drop in his popularity given the severity of his challenges. “I told him at some point that at the end of ’10, his approval rating could be low- to mid-30s,” Plouffe told me.

Yet even if the White House saw it coming, this is an administration that feels shellshocked. Many officials worry, they say, that the best days of the Obama presidency are behind them. They talk about whether it is time to move on. While not in the 30s, Obama’s approval rating in surveys conducted by The New York Times and CBS News had fallen to 45 percent last month from 62 percent when he took office — just a point above where Clinton was before losing Congress in 1994 and three points above where Reagan was before the Republicans lost a couple dozen House seats in 1982. Joel Benenson, Obama’s pollster, pointed out that even at 45 percent, the president’s popularity eclipses that of Congress, the news media, the banks and other forces in American life. “We are in a time when the American public is highly suspect of any institution,” he said, “and President Obama still stands above that.” Obama’s team takes pride that he has fulfilled three of the five major promises he laid out as pillars of his “new foundation” in an April 2009 speech at Georgetown University — health care, education reform and financial reregulation. And they point to decisions to end the combat mission in Iraq while escalating the war in Afghanistan. “History will judge Obama that the first two years were very productive,” Rouse says.

But it is possible to win the inside game and lose the outside game. In their darkest moments, White House aides wonder aloud whether it is even possible for a modern president to succeed, no matter how many bills he signs. Everything seems to conspire against the idea: an implacable opposition with little if any real interest in collaboration, a news media saturated with triviality and conflict, a culture that demands solutions yesterday, a societal cynicism that holds leadership in low regard. Some White House aides who were ready to carve a new spot on Mount Rushmore for their boss two years ago privately concede now that he cannot be another Abraham Lincoln after all. In this environment, they have increasingly concluded, it may be that every modern president is going to be, at best, average.

“We’re all a lot more cynical now,” one aide told me. The easy answer is to blame the Republicans, and White House aides do that with exuberance. But they are also looking at their own misjudgments, the hubris that led them to think they really could defy the laws of politics. “It’s not that we believed our own press or press releases, but there was definitely a sense at the beginning that we could really change Washington,” another White House official told me. “ ‘Arrogance’ isn’t the right word, but we were overconfident.”

The biggest miscalculation in the minds of most Obama advisers was the assumption that he could bridge a polarized capital and forge genuinely bipartisan coalitions. While Republican leaders resolved to stand against Obama, his early efforts to woo the opposition also struck many as halfhearted. “If anybody thought the Republicans were just going to roll over, we were just terribly mistaken,” former Senator Tom Daschle, a mentor and an outside adviser to Obama, told me. “I’m not sure anybody really thought that, but I think we kind of hoped the Republicans would go away. And obviously they didn’t do that.”

Senator Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the upper chamber and Obama’s ally from Illinois, said the Republicans were to blame for the absence of bipartisanship. “I think his fate was sealed,” Durbin said. “Once the Republicans decided they would close ranks to defeat him, that just made it extremely difficult and dragged it out for a longer period of time. The American people have a limited attention span. Once you convince them there’s a problem, they want a solution.”

Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, though, is among the Democrats who grade Obama harshly for not being more nimble in the face of opposition. “B-plus, A-minus on substantive accomplishments,” he told me, “and a D-plus or C-minus on communication.” The health care legislation is “an incredible achievement” and the stimulus program was “absolutely, unqualifiedly, enormously successful,” in Rendell’s judgment, yet Obama allowed them to be tarnished by critics. “They lost the communications battle on both major initiatives, and they lost it early,” said Rendell, an ardent Hillary Clinton backer who later became an Obama supporter. “We didn’t use the president in either stimulus or health care until we had lost the spin battle.”

That’s a refrain heard inside the White House as well: it’s a communication problem. The first refuge of any politician in trouble is that it’s a communication problem, not a policy problem. If only I explained what I was doing better, the people would be more supportive. Which roughly translates to If only you people paid attention, you wouldn’t be kicking me upside the head. Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, laughed at the ever-ready assumption that all problems stem from poor communication. “I haven’t been at a policy-problem meeting in 20 months,” he noted.

The policy criticism of Obama can be confusing and deeply contradictory — he is a liberal zealot, in the view of the right; a weak accommodationist, in the view of the left. He is an anticapitalist socialist who is too cozy with Wall Street, a weak-on-defense apologist for America who adopted Bush’s unrelenting antiterror tactics at the expense of civil liberties.

“When he talked about being a transformational president, it was about restoring the faith of the American people in our governing institutions,” says Ken Duberstein, the former Reagan White House chief of staff who voted for Obama in 2008. “What we now know is that that did not work. If anything, people are even more dubious about all of our institutions, especially government. So to that extent, the transformational side has not worked. And frankly I would settle these days — forget about transformational, how about a transactional president, somebody people could do business with? It seems there’s an ideological rigidity that the American people did not sense.”

The other side would like more ideological rigidity. Norman Solomon, a leading progressive activist and the president of the Institute for Public Accuracy, said Obama has “totally blown this great opportunity” to reinvent America by being more aggressive on issues like a public health care option. Other liberals feel the same way about gays in the military or the prison at Guántanamo Bay. “It’s been so reflexive since he was elected, to just give ground and give ground,” Solomon told me. “If we don’t call him a wimp, which may be the wrong word, he just seems to be backpedaling.” Solomon added: “It makes people feel angry and perhaps used. People just feel like, Gee, we really believed in this guy, and his rhetoric is so different than the way he’s behaved in office.”

Pummeled from both sides, Obama clearly seems frustrated and, at times, defensive. At a Labor Day event in Milwaukee, he complained that the special interests treat him badly. “They’re not always happy with me,” he told supporters. “They talk about me like a dog — that’s not in my prepared remarks, but it’s true.”

The friendly fire may bother him even more. “Democrats just congenitally tend to see the glass as half empty,” Obama said at a fund-raiser in Greenwich, Conn., last month. “If we get an historic health care bill passed — oh, well, the public option wasn’t there. If you get the financial reform bill passed — then, well, I don’t know about this particular derivatives rule, I’m not sure that I’m satisfied with that. And, gosh, we haven’t yet brought about world peace. I thought that was going to happen quicker.”

Then again, it is Obama himself, and not just his supporters, who casts his presidency in grandiose terms. As he pleaded with Democrats for patience at another fund-raiser in Washington two weeks later: “It took time to free the slaves. It took time for women to get the vote. It took time for workers to get the right to organize.”

One morning around the 100-day mark in Obama’s administration, the president and his top aides gathered for their morning meeting in the Oval Office. As they waited for David Axelrod, who was running late, someone noted the coming milestone and asked Obama what surprised him most since taking office. “The number of people who don’t pay their taxes,” he answered sardonically.

From the start, Obama has been surprised by all sorts of challenges that have made it hard for him to govern — not just the big problems that he knew about, like the economy and the wars, but also the myriad little ones that hindered his progress, like one nominee after another brought down by unpaid taxes. Obama trusted his judgment and seemed to have assumed that impressive people in his own party must have a certain basic sense of integrity — and that impressive people in the other party must want to work with him.

Four of the five presidents previous to Obama were governors who came to Washington vowing to fix it, only to realize that Washington defies the easy, and often hollow, rhetoric of change. While Obama was a senator when he set off on the campaign trail, he made the same pledges and has encountered the same reality. “The story of the first two years is the inherent conflict between a guy who ran from outside to change Washington, gets here and the situation was even worse than we thought it was,” a senior aide told me. “Here’s a guy who ran as an outsider to change Washington who all of a sudden realized that just to deal with these issues, we were going to have to work with Washington to fix that.”

Obama does little to disguise his disdain for Washington and the conventions of modern politics. When he emerges from the Oval Office during the day, aides say, he sometimes pauses before the split-screen television in the outer reception area, soaks in the cable chatter, then shakes his head and walks away. “He’s still never gotten comfortable here,” a top White House official told me. He has little patience for what Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser, calls “the inevitable theatrics of Washington.”

But in politics, theater matters, whether it should or not, a lesson Obama keeps relearning, however grudgingly. His decision to redecorate the Oval Office was criticized as an unnecessary luxury in a time of austerity, no matter that it was paid for by private funds. On the campaign trail, he thought it was silly to wear a flag pin, as if that were a measure of his patriotism, until his refusal to wear a flag pin generated distracting criticism and one day he showed up wearing one. Likewise, he thought it was enough to pray in private while living in the White House, and then a poll showed that most Americans weren’t sure he’s Christian; sure enough, a few weeks later, he attended services at St. John’s Church across from Lafayette Square, photographers in tow.

Obama came to office with enormous faith in his own powers of persuasion. He seemed to believe he could overcome divisions if he just sat down with the world’s most recalcitrant figures — whether they be the mullahs in Tehran or the Republicans on Capitol Hill. As it turned out, the candidate who said he would be willing to meet in his first year with some of America’s enemies “without precondition” has met with none of them. And the president who in his State of the Union address this year promised to meet monthly with leaders of both parties in Congress ended up doing so just half as often.

He has yet to fully decide whether he is of Washington or apart from it. During the health care debate, Obama had Emanuel cut deals with the pharmaceutical industry, while Axelrod presented the president as above the old business as usual. “Perhaps we were naïve,” Axelrod told me. “First, he’s always had good relations across party lines. And secondly, I think he believed that in the midst of a crisis you could find partners on the other side of the aisle to help deal with it. I don’t think anyone here expected the degree of partisanship that we confronted.” Emanuel said Republicans adopted a strategy of poisoning the public well. “Part of what they were doing was not just making us grind it out,” he told me. “They were souring the country on the mood of the country.”

Still, Obama plays the partisan game as well. After months of quiet negotiations, some administration officials thought they were close to a package of new financial regulations with Republican support when, to their chagrin, the White House decided to use the issue to wage a high-profile and politically useful battle with Wall Street special interests. At that point, the chances for a deal across party lines collapsed, administration officials said, and Obama was left to rely almost entirely on Democratic votes.

Obama advisers who left the White House recently have been struck how different, and worse, things look from the outside. As he made a round of corporate job interviews after stepping down as White House budget director, Peter Orszag was stunned to discover how deep the gulf between the president and business had become. “I’d thought it was an 8, but it’s more like a 10,” he told me. “And rather than wasting time debating whether it’s legitimate,” he added, referring to his former colleagues, “the key is to recognize that it’s affecting what they do.”

Insulation is a curse of every president, but more than any president since Jimmy Carter, Obama comes across as an introvert, someone who finds extended contact with groups of people outside his immediate circle to be draining. He can rouse a stadium of 80,000 people, but that audience is an impersonal monolith; smaller group settings can be harder for him. Aides have learned that it can be good if he has a few moments after a big East Room event so he can gather his energy again. Unlike Clinton, who never met a rope line he did not want to work, Obama does not relish glad-handing. That’s what he has Vice President Joe Biden for. When Obama addressed the Business Roundtable this year, he left after his speech without much meet-and-greet, leaving his aides frustrated that he had done himself more harm than good. He is not much for chitchat. When he and I sat down, he started our session matter-of-factly: “All right,” he said, “fire away.”

By all accounts, Obama copes with his political troubles with equanimity. “Zen” is the word commonly used in the West Wing. That’s not to say he never loses his temper. He has been known to snap at aides when he feels overscheduled. He cuts off advisers who spout information straight from briefing papers with a testy “I’ve already read that.” He does not like it when aides veer out of their assigned lanes, yet they have learned to show up at meetings with an opinion, because he zeroes in on those who stay silent. He was subdued during the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, when he found himself largely powerless. Other presidents took refuge at Camp David, but Michelle Obama has told dinner guests that her husband does not care for it all that much, because he is an urban guy. He blows off steam on the White House basketball court. “Come on, man, you’ve got to make that shot,” he chides aides who play with him.

The most obvious sign of strain is in his hair. “He’ll probably be unhappy with me for saying, but I’ve noticed he’s gotten a little grayer,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates told me over the summer. “These kinds of decisions do that to people.” But the stress of the job remains mostly unspoken. “We usually will talk about writing the condolence letters,” Gates added. “But other than that, we don’t dwell on it.” If anything, Obama more often than not bucks up young members of his staff, reminding them that politics, like life, is full of cycles and they will someday be able to tell their children that they were part of something big.

While Clinton made late-night phone calls around Washington to vent or seek advice, Obama rarely reaches outside the tight group of advisers like Emanuel, Axelrod, Rouse, Messina, Plouffe, Gibbs and Jarrett, as well as a handful of personal friends. “He’s opaque even to us,” an aide told me. “Except maybe for a few people in the inner circle, he’s a closed book.” In part because of security, just 15 people have his BlackBerry e-mail address. On long Air Force One flights, he retreats to the conference room and plays spades for hours, maintaining a trash-talking contest all the while, with the same three aides: Reggie Love, his personal assistant; Marvin Nicholson, his trip director; and Pete Souza, his White House photographer. (When I asked if he had an iPad, Obama said, “I have an iReggie, who has my books, my newspapers, my music all in one place.”)

Jarrett attributes Obama’s equilibrium to his upbringing. “He’s really different,” she told me. “It’s rooted in his sense of self and how he grew up with a single mom, living at times on food stamps, working as a community organizer.” As Gibbs put it: “He has a remarkable way of focusing on the big picture and the longer term. It’s not to say that he’s immune from criticism. But he can categorize in his head the difference between what’s a setback, what’s a bump along the way and what’s just noise.”

There is certainly no shortage of noise. But as Obama gets back on the campaign trail, aides have noticed his old spirit again. He particularly enjoys the so-called backyard sessions on the lawns of supporters. “That’s the happiest I’ve seen him in a long time,” an aide said. After one, Obama told the aide, “This reminds me of Iowa on the bus.”

Nostalgia for the good old days of the campaign afflicts any White House in trouble. After all, those were the romantic moments when all was possible, when tens of thousands of people would gather in Grant Park to tear up over the promise of what will be. But in sober moments, Obama understands how selective the memories really are. “The mythology has emerged somehow that we ran this flawless campaign, I never made a mistake, that we were master communicators, everything worked in lock step,” he told me. “And somehow now, as president, things are messy and they don’t always work as planned and people are mad at us. That’s not how I look at stuff, because I remember what the campaign was like. And it was just as messy and just as difficult. And there were all sorts of moments when our supporters lost hope, and it looked like we weren’t going to win. And we’re going through that same period here.”

In covering the last three presidents, I have watched as each has been tested, albeit in very different circumstances — Clinton’s impeachment over false testimony under oath about an affair with a White House intern, Bush’s drive to begin a war that would drag on for years at enormous cost and Obama’s struggle to turn around the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. They are starkly variable crises, but some dynamics are familiar: presidents who live and die by polls insist they are not important when they fall; they argue that they are focused on principle, not politics, when it’s almost always a mixture of both; they acknowledge difficulties but say they will pass; they portray themselves as courageous when flying against public opinion; they complain that the news media distort the situation and fuel division; they blame their opponents for practicing the politics of destruction and obstruction.

Talking with Obama and his aides, it’s eerie to hear echoes of Clinton and Bush. Obama says the easy issues never make it to him, only the hard ones; Bush often said the same thing. Obama says our war with terrorists will never end in a surrender ceremony; Bush often said the same thing. Obama says he does not want to kick problems down the road; Bush often said the same thing. In the days leading up to the 1994 midterm elections, Clinton mocked Republicans for promising to balance the budget while cutting taxes, saying, “They’re not serious.” In our conversation, Obama used some variation of the phrase “they’re not serious” four times in referring to Republican budget plans.

That is not to say the three men are alike; indeed, they are vastly different. But putting ideology aside, Obama at times seems to be a cross between his two predecessors. Like Clinton, he digs into the intellectual underpinnings of a policy decision, studying briefing books and seeking a range of opinions. Some aides express frustration that he can leave decisions unresolved for too long. But like Bush, once he has made a decision, Obama rarely revisits it. And like Bush, he runs a pretty disciplined operation; he started our interview a half-hour ahead of schedule, just as Bush sometimes did. Clinton, on the other hand, still runs on Clinton Standard Time. Just a few weeks ago, he was more than six hours late for a scheduled interview with another journalist. One constant among all three: It took Clinton and Bush some time to really grow into the presidency, until they wore it comfortably.

As Obama looks to the experiences of Clinton and Reagan, who both rebounded from midterm debacles to win re-election, the lessons differ. In Reagan’s case, the House was already in Democratic hands, so during his first two years, he forged coalitions of Republicans and conservative Democrats. After the opposition was strengthened in the 1982 elections, that was no longer viable, and Reagan began working more with Democratic leaders. Clinton likewise changed course after the 1994 elections, emphasizing more incremental, piece-by-piece change rather than sweeping proposals and pursuing goals like welfare reform and balanced budgets when he could agree with Newt Gingrich’s new majority.

Clinton, though, was more instinctively centrist than Obama is, and his revival owed much to other factors, particularly his leadership after the Oklahoma City bombing and his budget standoff with Gingrich during the partial government shutdown. Some argue Obama might be better off with at least one Republican chamber so he too has a foil as Clinton did. But it is unclear if Obama is as agile a politician as Reagan or Clinton. “He’s no Bill Clinton when it comes to having the ability to move and to wiggle,” says Joe Gaylord, a top Gingrich adviser. “I find rigidity in Obama that comes from his life in liberalism.” Ken Duberstein likewise doubts Obama’s capacity for adjustment. “They’re much better at the art of campaigning than the art of governing,” he said.

Perhaps the more important historical pattern to consider is this one: The last four presidents who failed to win a second term were all challenged in their own party. Lyndon Johnson was driven out of the race in 1968 after nearly losing the New Hampshire primary to Eugene McCarthy. Gerald Ford fended off Reagan in 1976 but went on to lose the general election to Carter, who likewise had to beat a primary challenger four years later, Ted Kennedy, before falling to Reagan. And George H. W. Bush had to overcome Patrick Buchanan before losing to Clinton in 1992.

So it is a high priority for Obama to prevent any intraparty fight in 2012, and to date, despite the fire from the left, no serious challenger appears on the horizon. Putting Hillary Clinton in the cabinet may turn out to be one of Obama’s smartest moves, because it not only eliminated her as a would-be challenger, but it also should presumably squelch the will-she-or-won’t-she speculation that otherwise would have played out for months. (Instead, the guessing game has her replacing Biden on the ticket, however fanciful that might be.)

As the first African-American president, Obama is more aware than most of the limits of looking back. But he also has read enough presidential biographies to know he is not the first to encounter rocky times. “History never precisely repeats itself,” Obama told me. “But there is a pattern in American presidencies — at least modern presidencies. You come in with excitement and fanfare. The other party initially, having been beaten, says it wants to cooperate with you. You start implementing your program as you promised during the campaign. The other party pushes back very hard. It causes a lot of consternation and drama in Washington. People who are already cynical and skeptical about Washington generally look at it and say, This is the same old mess we’ve seen before. The president’s poll numbers drop. And you have to then sort of wrestle back the confidence of the people as the programs that you’ve put in place start bearing fruit.”

To better understand history, and his role in it, Obama invited a group of presidential scholars to dinner in May in the living quarters of the White House. Obama was curious about, among other things, the Tea Party movement. Were there precedents for this sort of backlash against the establishment? What sparked them and how did they shape American politics? The historians recalled the Know-Nothings in the 1850s, the Populists in the 1890s and Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930s. “He listened,” the historian H. W. Brands told me. “What he concluded, I don’t know.”

Obama’s conclusions are still being formed. He has learned that “Washington is even more broken than we thought,” as one aide put it. He has trusted his own judgment as he disregarded advisers who told him to scale back health care at various stages. And he has found that his vaunted speaking skills are not enough to change the dynamics of governance. “One of the lessons he has to learn is What is the best form of communication for him with the American people,” the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin told me. “He’s so good in front of an audience, and I get the sense that he needs the energy off the audience. And so speaking to television cameras doesn’t really do that.”

As we talked in the Oval Office, Obama acknowledged that the succession of so many costly initiatives, necessary as they may have been, wore on the public. “That accumulation of numbers on the TV screen night in and night out in those first six months I think deeply and legitimately troubled people,” he told me. “They started feeling like: Gosh, here we are tightening our belts, we’re cutting out restaurants, we’re cutting out our gym membership, in some cases we’re not buying new clothes for the kids. And here we’ve got these folks in Washington who just seem to be printing money and spending it like nobody’s business.

“And it reinforced the narrative that the Republicans wanted to promote anyway, which was Obama is not a different kind of Democrat — he’s the same old tax-and-spend liberal Democrat.”

Emanuel told me that the cascading crises in Obama’s early days exacted a lasting toll. “The seeds of his political difficulty today were planted in taking those steps,” he said. White House officials largely agree they should not have let the health care process drag out while waiting for Republican support that would never come. “It’s not what people felt they sent Barack Obama to Washington to do, to be legislator in chief,” a top adviser told me. “It lent itself to the perception that he wasn’t doing anything on the economy.” Plouffe agreed that guilt by association with Democratic lawmakers did not help. “When you swim in those waters, you’re going to be affected by that,” he said. “I do think he’s paid a political price, somewhat, for having to be tied to Congress.”

Still, for all the second-guessing, what you do not hear in the White House is much questioning of the basic elements of the program — Obama aides, liberal and moderate alike, reject complaints from the right that the stimulus did not help the economy or that health care expands government too much, as well as complaints from the left that he should have pushed for a bigger stimulus package or held out for a public health care option. “We asked for more stimulus than we ended up with,” Larry Summers, the outgoing national economics adviser, told me. “But we fought as hard as we could, and I believe we got as much as Congress was ever going to give us at that time.”

And they argue that any mistakes affected things only at the margins. “There’s all this talk in this town — if we had done energy before health care, if we had focused more on small business, if we had done an Oval on the economy instead of Iraq, we would be doing better,” Dan Pfeiffer, the communications director, says. “I don’t believe that. We could always do things differently, and there are plenty of things I wish I had back. But I don’t know they’d change the overall trend.”

Melody Barnes, the president’s domestic-policy adviser, says the biggest problem was that after eight years of Bush, Obama’s supporters were very eager to change everything right away. “The pent-up demand across every issue area — around science, around education, around health care, immigration, you name it — there was a lot of desire to finally get these things done,” she told me. “Every segment of the population had something that was very important to them that they really wanted to put over the finish line.”

Obama is preaching patience in an impatient age. One prominent Democratic lawmaker told me Obama’s problem is that he is not insecure — he always believes he is the smartest person in any room and never feels the sense of panic that makes a good politician run scared all the time, frenetically wooing lawmakers, power brokers, adversaries and voters as if the next election were a week away.

Instead, what you hear Obama aides talking about is that the system is “not on the level.” That’s a phrase commonly used around the West Wing — “it’s not on the level.” By that, they mean the Republicans, the news media, the lobbyists, the whole Washington culture is not serious about solving problems. The challenge, as they see it, is how to rise above a town that can obsess for a week on whether an obscure Agriculture Department official in Georgia should have been fired. At the same time, as Emanuel told me, “We have to play the game.”

As Brands, the historian, put it, “It’ll be really interesting to see if a president who is thinking long term can have an impact on a political system that is almost irredeemably short term in its perspective.”

“I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president.” So Obama told Diane Sawyer of ABC News last January at another low point, just after the Republican Scott Brown captured the Massachusetts Senate seat held for decades by Ted Kennedy, costing Democrats their filibuster-proof control of the upper chamber and jeopardizing the president’s health care plan.

It’s a good line, but it’s one of those things easier said in the first or second year of a presidency. By the third, it starts to become an actual choice. Forks in the road require a president to decide if he will advance ideas that will genuinely change the country even if deeply unpopular or if he will opt instead for a safer route that does not put re-election at risk. Obama aides like to argue that he has already demonstrated willingness to put aside politics by bailing out the banks and automakers, decisions that he saw as critical to preventing greater economic catastrophe (and that ultimately cost taxpayers far less than initially feared).

But would he jeopardize re-election absent an immediate crisis? The choice may confront him soon after the midterms when his bipartisan fiscal commission reports back by Dec. 1 with plans to tame the national deficit with a politically volatile menu of unpalatable options, like scaling back Medicare and Social Security while raising taxes. Obama also anticipates putting immigration reform, another divisive issue fraught with political danger, back on the table. “If the question is, Over the next two years do I take a pass on tough stuff,” he told me, “the answer is no.”

Obama’s aides say they will most likely set up their re-election campaign around next March, roughly the same as when Bush and Clinton incorporated their incumbent campaign operations. They are more optimistic about 2012 than they are about 2010, believing the Tea Party will re-elect Barack Obama by pulling the Republican nominee to the right. They doubt Sarah Palin will run and figure Mitt Romney cannot get the Republican nomination because he enacted his own health care program in Massachusetts. If they had to guess today, some in the White House say that Obama will find himself running against Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor.

With that campaign on the horizon, Obama asked Pete Rouse and Jim Messina to begin thinking about the next phase of his presidency, not just personnel but also priorities and message. Never mind that Rouse was among those who wanted to leave — for years, he has been saying he wanted out of politics but never says no to Obama. Indeed, when Rouse told colleagues he wanted to leave the White House by the end of this year, Messina bet him $400 that he would not. “We’ll see what happens,” Rouse told me when I asked about the bet last month. Then Obama made Rouse interim chief of staff. Rouse initially resisted moving into Rahm Emanuel’s corner suite until colleagues threatened to move his files for him. Messina jokes that Rouse will turn off the Oval Office lights after eight years and before assuming his new job, running Obama’s presidential library.

Rouse is managing a slow-motion White House shuffle. By year’s end, there will be a new chief of staff, a new national-economics adviser, a new budget director, a new chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and a new national-security adviser, among others. Axelrod and Messina expect to leave by spring to set up Obama’s re-election effort, and Plouffe will almost certainly come into the White House in a senior role.

“There are a lot of lessons learned in the last two years in terms of how we might improve internal communication, encourage greater accountability without discouraging individual initiative,” said one aide familiar with the discussions led by Rouse and Messina. Obama has been aggravated by friction among his advisers. “He’s a little frustrated with the internal dysfunction,” the aide said. “He doesn’t like confrontation.” But his initial choices to fill open slots have been drawn largely from his administration, suggesting more continuity than change.

Rouse and Messina see areas for possible bipartisan agreement, like reauthorizing the nation’s education laws to include reform measures favored by centrists and conservatives, passing long-pending trade pacts and possibly even producing scaled-back energy legislation. “You’ll hear more about exports and less about public spending,” a senior White House official said. “You’ll hear more about initiative and private sector and less about the Department of Energy. You’ll hear more about government as a financier and less about government as a hirer.”

Obama expressed optimism to me that he could make common cause with Republicans after the midterm elections. “It may be that regardless of what happens after this election, they feel more responsible,” he said, “either because they didn’t do as well as they anticipated, and so the strategy of just saying no to everything and sitting on the sidelines and throwing bombs didn’t work for them, or they did reasonably well, in which case the American people are going to be looking to them to offer serious proposals and work with me in a serious way.”

I asked if there were any Republicans he trusted enough to work with on economic issues. The first name he came up with was Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, who initially agreed to serve as Obama’s commerce secretary before changing his mind. But Gregg is retiring. The only other Republican named by Obama was Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin congressman who has put together a detailed if politically problematic blueprint for reducing federal spending. The two men are ideologically poles apart, but perhaps Obama sees a bit of himself in a young, substantive policy thinker.

Even if such an alliance emerges, though, the next two years will be mostly about cementing what Obama did in his first two years — and defending it against challenges in Congress and the courts. “Even if I had the exact same Congress, even if we don’t lose a seat in the Senate and we don’t lose a seat in the House, I think the rhythms of the next two years would inevitably be different from the rhythms of the first two years,” Obama told me. “There’s going to be a lot of work in this administration just doing things right and making sure that new laws are stood up in the ways they’re intended.”

As a senior adviser put it, “There’s going to be very little incentive for big things over the next two years unless there’s some sort of crisis.” Yet Obama and his aides still scorn Bill Clinton’s small-bore approach. “It’s fair to assume you’re not going to see school uniforms play a big role in the next two years,” Plouffe told me. “His view is you can’t spend two years playing four-corners.” Before he left, Emanuel told me: “I’m not of the view that you do nothing. I think you’ve got to have an agenda.”

But what sort of agenda? Not as sweeping and not as provocative, say some advisers. “It will have to be limited and focused on the things that are achievable and high priorities for the American people,” Dick Durbin told me. Tom Daschle said Obama would have to reach out to adversaries. “The lessons of the last two years are going to be critical,” he told me. “The key word is ‘inclusion.’ He’s got to find ways to be inclusive.”

Rendell thinks otherwise. “Don’t care so much about bipartisanship if the Republicans continue to refuse to cooperate,” he advised. “Do what you have to do. Fight back.” At the same time, he said, stop moaning about what he inherited: “After the election, I’d say no more pointing back, no more blaming the Bush administration. It’s O.K. to do that during the campaign and then stop. But to do it as much as we do it, it sounds like a broken record. And after two years, you own it.”

Obama will own it for another two years, or six if he can find his way forward. As an author, Obama appreciates the rhythms of a tumultuous story. But who is the protagonist, really? At bottom, this president is still a mystery to many Americans. During the campaign, he sold himself — or the idea of himself — more than any particular policy, and voters filled in the lines as they chose. He was, as he said at the time, the ultimate Rorschach test.

Now the lines are being filled in further. With each choice Obama makes, he further defines himself for better or worse in Americans’ minds. He says he knows where he is going and is gathering momentum despite the hurdles ahead. As he told a group of visitors during the week last spring that Congress passed health care and his administration reached agreement on an arms-control treaty with Russia, “I start slow, but I finish strong.”

He will have to, if the history he is writing is to turn out the way he prefers.

Video: Rep. Etheridge assaults student on street; Update: Video restored

posted at 9:30 am on June 14, 2010 by Ed Morrissey

Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernent:

Long Hot Summer Begins: Congressman Attacks Student

by Mike Flynn

Michelle Malkin:

Next on ‘When Congressmen Attack’ — Rep. Bob Etheridge (D-NC)

**Written by guest-blogger Doug Powers

Riehl World View:

Progressive Bob Etheridge (D-NC): The Ways And Means Of Student Beatdowns

By Dan Riehl

Wizbang:

Republican Congressman assaults college student

Posted by Rick

Published: June 14, 2010 – 10:26 AM

UPDATE:

The Washington Post

BTW, do you remember when the Washington Post used to be important?

I do. That was long ago.

Nowadays, it is the Mississippi of the Lame Stream Media.
(The New York Times, proudly being the Amazon)

Who TMZ’d Rep. Bob Etheridge?

“Last week Rep. Bob Etheridge (D-N.C.), who’s seen as a safe bet for re-election this year despite representing a somewhat conservative (Cook R+2) district, ran into two self-described students with video cameras outside of a fundraiser.”

After this fair and balanced lede, David Wiegel goes into the left-wing snark fair and balanced commentary of how unfair it is for a Liberal to get caught beating up somebody.

Didn’t “Dave” learn from the Rodney King incident?

Regardless of how grainy the video – when history is made – and recorded -
times change.

And from Raleigh – close to my former Home Town of Durham:

Congressman caught on camera in physical confrontation

And from Greensboro – just west of Durham:

Congressman loses his cool, acts like a fool

Doug Clark, Editorial Writer, apparently has a vision problem:

“Instead, he grabbed one by the wrist, then by the back of the neck while repeating, “Who are you?”

At least he didn’t start slapping.”

Er, uh Doug, the Congressman *did* start slapping.

It’s on the video.

And so the “kids” did not identify themselves – why do they have to?
They just asked a question.

“What do you think of the Obama agenda?”

How many Democrats do you think are going to lose their “jobs” because of their support for this agenda?

Let’s hope it’s at least 100.

And Doug, my name is Jan Risbergs Jr – just in case Congressman Etheridge slaps me or my camera.

Heading west from Greensboro, we arrive in Charlotte, a lovely city.
Will Asheville be next?
Does Fontana Village have a newspaper?

Video shows Rep. Etheridge grabbing videographer

So far (12:47pm) there are 230 Comments.

Citizen Journalism at its finest.
Both sides of the political spectrum are represented.

Bob was right.
The students were right.

What do you think is going to happen?

Well, before we head west to Fontana Village, where BTW I spent my first honeymoon in 1980
(The Blogging Handbook claims that personal information adds to the story)

Let’s visit Fox News

N.C. Congressman Under Fire for Physical Confrontation With Man in Washington

where their lede is:

“A North Carolina congressman is under fire after a video surfaced Monday showing him in a physical confrontation with a young man on a street in Washington.”

Will CNN agree that this is fair & balanced?

Well, here is their report – and they are first with the apology:

Etheridge apologizes for confrontation

(CNN) – Rep. Bob Etheridge apologized Monday for his physical confrontation with two young men who identified themselves as students and asked if the North Carolina Democrat “fully supports the Obama agenda.”

“I have seen the video posted on several blogs. I deeply and profoundly regret my reaction and I apologize to all involved. Throughout my many years of service to the people of North Carolina , I have always tried to treat people from all viewpoints with respect. No matter how intrusive and partisan our politics can become, this does not justify a poor response. I have and I will always work to promote a civil public discourse.”

Hey Bob! Wait just a minute -

“No matter how intrusive and partisan our politics can become,
this does not justify a poor response.”

Er, uh, do you realize that your political career just ended?

At least for 2010?

This is not 1998 – remember Michael Isikoff?

And speaking of Michael, do you remember when 13 people died because of a report that *this time* he had the courage to write. Yep, that pesky “Koran Story”:

Newsweek Retracts Koran-Desecration Story

from May 17, 2005.

There comes a time

When we need to make a show
For the world, the Web and CNN
There’s no people dying,
so the best that we can do
Is create the greatest bluff of all

We must go on pretending day by day
That in Gaza, there’s crisis, hunger and plague
Coz the billion bucks in aid won’t buy their basic needs
Like some cheese and missiles for the kids

We’ll make the world
Abandon reason
We’ll make them all believe that the Hamas
Is Momma Theresa
We are peaceful travelers
With guns and our own knives
The truth will never find its way to your TV

Ooooh, we’ll stab them at heart
They are soldiers, no one cares
We are small, and we took some pictures with doves
As Allah showed us, for facts there’s no demand
So we will always gain the upper hand

We’ll make the world
Abandon reason
We’ll make them all believe that the Hamas
Is Momma Theresa
We are peaceful travelers
we’re waving our own knives
The truth will never find its way to your TV

If Islam and terror brighten up your mood
But you worry that it may not look so good
Well well well well don’t you realize
You just gotta call yourself
An activist for peace and human aid

We’ll make the world
Abandon reason
We’ll make them all believe that the Hamas
Is Momma Theresa
We are peaceful travelers
We’re waving our own knives
The truth will never find its way to your TV

We con the world
We con the people
We’ll make them all believe the IDF is Jack the Ripper
We are peaceful travelers
We’re waving our own knives
The truth will never find its way to your TV
We con the world (Bruce: we con the world…)
We con the people (Bruce: we con the people…)
We’ll make them all believe the IDF is Jack the Ripper
We are peaceful travelers
We’re waving our own knives
The truth will never find its way to your TV
The truth will never find its way to your TV

From: John Rich’s Video Page

Citizen Gore – by Iowahawk

OPENING SEQUENCE

Camera slowly zooms in between the security fence of a huge seaside mansion looming over the storm-tossed Pacific. Dissolve to a melting arctic ice floe, on which sits a distraught polar bear. As the camera pans back, we see it is a snow globe held in a man’s hand, inside an opulent study paneled in Amazonian hardwood. Close-up of the man’s lips, which whisper “Seagate.” He drops the snow globe which crashes onto a priceless Persian rug in front of a roaring fireplace. In silhouette, a nurse enters the study and hurriedly covers his motionless body in a blanket. He expels one last mighty death fart, and is gone.

PROJECTOR

pfltttlttllpftll

NEWSREEL NARRATOR

NEWS on the MARCH! In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree. Today, almost as legendary, is California’s Montecito, the world’s largest private environmental pleasure ground. Here a private mountain was commission and successfully built! 500,000 trees, 70,000 tons of cement, and 14 acres of seal fur carpet are the ingredients of this regal domain. Painting, pictures, Oscar statues, the very stones from many another palace from Earth’s finest antiquities!  A collection so vast it can never be appraised. Enough for 100 eco-museums, the loot of the planet. Montecito’s livestock: the whales of the ocean, the fowl of the air, the beasts of the plain and jungle. A private Noah’s ark of the world’s rarest creatures awaiting the feasting table of Montecito’s lord and ruler! Like the Pharaoh, he leaves many stones to mark his grave. Since the pyramids, Montecito is the costliest monument man has built to… himself!

Here in last week was held 2041′s grandest and strangest funeral. Montecito’s land-lord was laid to rest, a potent figure of our century. America’s Kubla Khan — Albert Arnold Gore.

swirling newspapers from around the world announcing the death

From humble beginnings he rose to be the greatest eco-tycoon of this or any other generation. Gore’s empire in all its glory held dominion over 37 cable television networks and a vast carbon credit multilevel marketing syndicate. An empire upon an empire! Pulp mills! School DVD schemes! Factories! Ocean liners! Great forests were felled to produce his award-winning best sellers! An empire through which flowed an unending stream of climate warnings and revenue!

Famed in American legend is the origin of the Gore legend. Raised in a humble Georgetown penthouse, he was left the deed to a supposedly worthless abandoned Tennessee Senate seat. Instead it housed the famed 1992 Clinton lode. For 50 years thereafter, there was no American issue on which he took no stand, no microphone by which he would pass. He urge America to one war, and later condemned America’s participation in another. Oh, wait. That was the same war.

In politics, always a bridesmaid, never a bride. Gore, holder of vast opinion though he was, in all his life was never granted the oval office by the electors of his country. But Gore’s condescending sighs were once strong indeed, and once the prize seemed almost his. In 2000, the best elements of his party and the media behind him, the White House the next step in a lightning career. Then suddenly election day, and defeat. Shameful, ignominious defeat. Followed by chad counts. And more shameful defeat. And lawsuits. And even more defeat. And also more ignominy.

But from this ignominy would bloom his greatest triumph! Confined to a padded cell in a Florida insane asylum, Albert Arnold Gore would type out, by foot, the PowerPoint climate manifesto that would soon change the world: an Inconvenient Truth! A vast carbon trading empire was his, along with laurels from potentates and the greatest scientific minds of Hollywood!

Then, the great Global Warming collapse of 2010. Muckraking reporters from Gore’s rival, the Internet-Examiner, released the East Anglia emails dooming the carbon market. In the days following the crash, one Gore climate speech is canceled. And another. And yet more. He is laughed off the nation’s stage and retreats to the opulent solitude of Montecito. Alone in  his never-finished, already decaying pleasure palace, aloof, never visited, seldom photographed, an emperor left to direct his failing empire. Vainly attempting to sway the destinies of the planet that was no longer interested in his apocalyptic visions of drowning penguins.

Then, last week, as it must to all men, the Green Reaper came to visit Albert Arnold Gore. Only a few dignitaries were on hand for the funeral procession as the black Prius hearse bore its solemn burden to its final resting place — Laurie David’s compost heap.

NEWS! On the MARCH!

PROJECTOR

pfltttlttllpftll thip thip thip thip

camera pulls back, showing interior of dark screening room with news reporters

RAWLSTON

Well how do you like it boys?

THOMPSON

Well, 95 years of a man’s life is a lot to get in a ten minute reel.

REPORTER #2

It’s a good short, but what it needs is an angle. All we saw on that screen was Albert Arnold Gore is dead. It isn’t enough to tell us what a man did — we’ve got to tell them who he was.

THOMPSON

Wait a minute! What were Gore’s last words? ‘Seagate.’ Maybe he told us everything about himself on his deathbed. He was loved, and hated, and ignored as any man in his time. But when Albert Arnold Gore died, he said just one word: ‘Seagate.’ But who was she? He? It?

REPORTER #3

A racehorse he bet on that didn’t come in!

REPORTER #4

Some kind of trillion dollar UN scam to stop the ocean from rising?

RALSTON

Okay boys, I want you to get in touch with everybody who ever knew him! His boyhood manservant. His buddies from the Vietnam typing pool. The guys who spellchecked his PowerPoints. Those drunk stoner kids of his. Ask the Syphilis Museum to unfreeze Bill Clinton for a couple of hours so we can get him on the record!

THOMPSON

I’ll get right on it Mr. Ralston.

RALSTON

Good, good. ‘Seagate.’ It’ll probably be a very simple thing.

**********

Inside the cavernous foyer of Montecito, household staff and cigar-chomping workers in overalls are busy boxing and moving priceless paintings and statuary, golden calves and crystal penguins, the lavish accumulated inventory of Albert Arnold Gore’s life. The dimly lit scene is punctuated by a few flashbulbs, as a handful of reporters mingle on the sweeping stairway to ponder the meaning of it all, their hushed voices echoing off the Italianate marble. Among them is Thompson, who, after dozens of diary flashbacks and interviews with Gore’s friends and enemies, has been unable to unravel the mystery of ‘Seagate.’

BUTLER

How much do you think all this is worth, Mr. Thompson?

THOMPSON

Billions. For anybody who wants it.

WORKER

Another nude statue of Leonardo DiCaprio. 200,000 bucks. (whistles) That’s a lotta scratch for an actor without a head.

REPORTER #1 (reading inscription on vase)

“Welcome home from Copenhagen, Mr. Gore. From your devoted chimney sweeping staff.”

REPORTER #2 (reading a tag)

“Hanging chads, gift from the Palm Beach Democratic Party.”

REPORTER #3

He sure liked to collect things, didn’t he?

REPORTER #2

Anything and everything.

REPORTER #1

I wonder. You put all this stuff together — palaces, portraits,private jumbo jets, bronzed Burmese elephants — what would it spell?

THOMPSON

Albert Arnold Gore.

REPORTER #1

… or ‘Seagate’? How about it, Thompson. Did you ever find out what it means?

THOMPSON

No, not really.

REPORTER #2

I’ll bet if you could’ve found out what Seagate meant it would have explained everything, even the whole carbon credit scam.

THOMPSON

I don’t think so. Mr. Gore was a man who got everything he wanted and lost it, and couldn’t lose the things he didn’t want to be seen wanting. Maybe Seagate was something he couldn’t get rid of, or something he lost.  Like his mind. Anyway it wouldn’t have explained anything. No, I think Seagate is just a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. A missing piece. Wrapped in a gold leaf riddle. Inside a marble mystery. Out by the curb, locked inside a marble recycling bin.

REPORTER #3

Well, come on everybody, we’ll miss the next hover pod.

As the reporters leave, the camera pans over a seemingly endless array of boxes and artifacts; titanium Segways, Nobel Prizes, valued customer awards from Gulfstream Jet. Finally the camera comes to rest on a carboard box labeled ”MY SECRET PROJECTS 1990-2000.’ A worker picks it up and carts away to an incinerator in the basement.

As the worker tosses the contents into the fire, the camera slowly zooms in. Amid the flames, we see a  computer hard drive — a Seagate computer hard drive. As it is consumed, we see it is labeled with a piece of tape: ‘Invention of the Internet.’

THE END

By Jeffrey Lord on 4.27.10 @ 6:08AM

“I am Spartacus.”

It is one of the iconic lines from an iconic film.

Remember Spartacus? The 1960 Stanley Kubrick film based on a Howard Fast novel about a slave rebellion back in the glory days of Rome? Kirk Douglas — father of Michael — played the heroic slave leader Spartacus, his good friend Antonius played by Tony Curtis. In the signal moment from the film (said to be a slap at McCarthyism by the film’s blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo), re-captured slaves, back in chains, are offered leniency. They will not face crucifixion if they will but give up Spartacus, who sits in their midst unrecognizable to the Romans. Waiting for the answer is Spartacus’s foe, the Roman General Crassus, played by Laurence Olivier. After a moment of silence, as Spartacus is about to give himself up to be crucified, one by one the slaves stand and announce “I am Spartacus!” — signaling their willingness to share their compatriot’s fate. The scene epitomizes courage, a willingness to take a stand when the all-too-easy thing to do would be to simply say nothing and get off the hook.

One of the grim facts of war is that one never knows where and when these moments will present themselves. The question always is: when presented with this moment, what would you do?

Most probably, you will never know until the moment arrives.

The passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 were presented with just such a moment on the opening day of this war. One minute they were average Americans flying peacefully from Newark to San Francisco on a beautiful late summer day. The next they found themselves shockingly confronted with their Spartacus moment. Four hijackers had taken over their plane during what the Americans quickly learned from family cell phone calls was an all out attack on their country. The World Trade Center towers were in flames, soon to collapse. The Pentagon had just had a jet ram into it. The plane they were on — United 93 — was clearly headed back East to Washington — on target to destroy either the White House or the U.S. Capitol.

The fact that the story is history now doesn’t make it any easier to recall. The passengers, doubtless scared witless, decided to rebel. They would not be passive participants in the destruction of their country. One by one they stood up and said, in effect, “I am Spartacus.” Or, in the words of passenger Todd Beamer, “Let’s roll.” A horrific struggle raged, the plane went down in a farmer’s field in Pennsylvania. Every single passenger and hijacker died. The White House and the United States Capitol, not to mention an unimagined number of lives on the ground, were spared.

“I am Spartacus,” these people were saying to the rest of us. “I am Spartacus.”

Comes now the tale of South Park, the irreverent, edgy and sometime (sometime??) offensive cartoon created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The show is a staple of Comedy Central, where it regularly spends its air time, in the words of the New York Post, ridiculing “every sacred convention in the book, from major religions and celebrities to gays and the physically disabled.” Which is to say, making full use of the First Amendment right to free expression.

As all of America now knows, Parker and Stone decided to do their thing with Islam and Mohammed, having their characters trying to decide how to portray Mohammed without, well, actually showing him. Which, of course, is forbidden in Islam. This being a comedy show, The Prophet finally shows up in a bear costume.

And in the blink of an eye, a Spartacus moment began to evolve. Again according to the Post, “a New York-based Web site, Revolution Muslim…’warned’ Parker and Stone they would end up like Theo Van Gogh — the Dutch filmmaker killed in 2004 by an Islamic terrorist after he made a film dealing with abuse of Muslim women.”

Threatened now, Parker and Stone refused to back down. They prepared a response, inserted as part of the storyline in their next South Park episode. Kyle, the one Jewish kid in the mix (and modeled after co-creator Stone), was to have delivered a 35-second speech at show’s end warning of “fear and intimidation.” There was to be no mention of Mohammed.

And Comedy Central — Cowardly Central as the Post promptly dubbed the network — bleeped Kyle’s little talk out completely. Parker and Stone have a statement on their website, found here.

Which brings us to Jon Stewart.

He the Braveheart who has dared to battle — yes! Can you believe it!!!??? — Fox News! Stewart is so daring, don’t you know, so gutsy, so edgy he actually uses — OMG! — the F-bomb on the air! Wow! What a guy! How 1969! The New York Times, unsurprisingly quick to adore this kind of faux courage, responded with an adoring profile, calling this David of the Liberal Media “relentless” as he swings away at the Goliath Fox. Ooooooooo…look! He took on…Bernard Goldberg! Sarah Palin! What a guy! Dust off the next Profile in Courage Award, Caroline!

Then, out of the blue, Jon Stewart found himself in a situation that demanded not the faux courage to take on Fox News. This time, not unlike the passengers of United Flight 93, Stewart suddenly found himself staring his own Spartacus moment in the face. The real thing.

His response?

“It’s their right,” he said of Comedy Central in a verbal shrug of indifference. “We all serve at their pleasure.” In a monologue punctuated by yuks, he defended the network by saying, “The censorship was a decision Comedy Central made, I think as a way to protect our employees from what they believe was any harmful repercussions to them….but again they sign the checks.”

They sign the checks.

Now there’s a Spartacus moment. “Hey, Spartacus babe, we luv ya, big guy. What a ride that revolt thing, huh? Listen, Sparky, I can’t hang up on some cross somewhere. I’m doing the lion-in-the-arena thing next Friday. They tell me the place is sold out. So, well, you’re sweet. Really. But General Crassus over there signs the checks, capiche? And, hey, we gotta protect our guys, right? Ahhh, General Crassus? Spartacus is the guy with the dimple-in-the-chin thing going. Front row center.”

This Stewart response — not to mention the response from the Comedy Central suits themselves — is an unintentional snapshot into the mind of American liberalism. What to do about people who have committed mass murder in places like New York, Washington, Pennsylvania, Madrid, London, Bali, Baghdad, Mumbai, and Kabul — and that only for starters while they figure out how to get their hands on a nuclear bomb or biological and chemical weapons?

Just look sternly into the camera, wring your hands, and say to these misguided people what Jon Stewart said to Revolution Muslim: “Your type of hatred and intolerance — that’s the enemy.”

Take that Al Qaeda!

This is really quite remarkable, if in its own way quite predictable. Jon Stewart is by all accounts a nice guy, a talented guy, a smart guy. He has used The Daily Show to successfully carve out a niche as what his occasional Fox sparring partner Bill O’Reilly calls “a cornerstone of the liberal media in America.” God bless America and Stewart’s freedom.

Yet precisely because Stewart is viewed as the Lion of the Liberal Media, his wimpy response to an actual threat from a group presenting itself as just one more face of Islamic terror serves as a reminder of exactly why so many millions of Americans have come to mistrust President Obama or in fact any liberal when it comes to responding to America’s enemies. After all the touchy-feely Obama outreach to Iran — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad just continues to build his nuclear bombs anyway. Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry travel to Syria to make nice — but long range Scud missiles will go to Hezbollah anyway. And so on. Electing Obama was presented as the change that would make precisely this kind of threat to South Park go away. Oops.

There is nothing new here, really. Same thin soup, different bowl. Neville Chamberlain hosts The Daily Show.

The problem is that instead of American national security or that of the West, we are talking about a slightly different issue yet one still vitally connected to the larger whole.

American and Western culture — the good, the bad and the ugly of it over a few thousand centuries, from Plato to Parker and Shakespeare to Stone — can thrive only in an atmosphere of intellectual freedom. That freedom, as has been made abundantly clear since 9/11, is under full scale assault.

Whether it’s planes being rammed into buildings in the heart of the world’s financial center or the latest move in Somalia to ban music, intellectual freedom is under attack. The attackers may be organized, they may be unorganized. They may have billions at their disposal, they may have a box cutter. But make no mistake, they are obsessed with the same thing — achieving victory over the West and all it represents whatever the cost and however long it takes.

They do not care about the safety and security of Trey Parker and Matt Stone or Jon Stewart or Comedy Central or Fox or MSNBC or the best Jewish deli in Manhattan or the next cover girl for Sports Illustrated or any other production of Western culture. The objective is to kill the target of the moment — and oh by the way, wipe out the rest of us too. No tactic is too small, no weapon big enough.

Which is why the fact that someone as smart as Jon Stewart closes his eyes hoping his sudden Spartacus moment will just somehow go away is disturbing.

This isn’t going away. This is real. It has appeared countless times in human history, and it has reared its head once more. This time at Comedy Central, as unlikely as it might seem. Where the response was exactly the timelessly wrong answer.

The right answer is never to pretend that if you somehow were transported back in time, say to a house in Amsterdam in August of 1944 and the German Grüne Polizei were pounding at your door, you could get away with saying: “Hi. Fox News can %$#@@ themselves. You guys sign the checks. Seig Heil. Ann Frank is upstairs, third door to the right, the room behind the bookcase.”

The right answer would be, the right answer is always: I am Ann Frank.

I am Spartacus.

I am Trey Parker. I am Matt Stone.

I am Jon Stewart. And I quit.

Letter to the Editor

Jeffrey Lord is a former Reagan White House political director and author. He writes from Pennsylvania at jlpa1@aol.com.

The Terror Spectator

Fables of the Reconstruction

Paleoclimatology and the Art of Civilization Maintenance

Before jumping straight to the math stuff, let’s cover some preliminaries.

There is widespread acceptance of the fact that global temperatures rose to some extent in the latter part of the 20th Century, compared to various baseline periods from the 19th through early 20th Century. Let’s not quibble on that point. Whether that fact is worth losing sleep over really depends on how big of an increase it is was; 150 years is a nanosecond on the geological calendar, and a slight temperature rise over a century of two may not be any big whoop if similar (or bigger) increases have occurred the past. What’s needed is a long view — say, 1000 years or more.

That’s where paleoclimatology comes in. Paleoclimatology concerns itself with figuring out what climate was like in the past; e.g., “climate reconstructions.” For the really really distant past, say the Paleozoic Era, climate is inferred from geological records, rock formations, fossils and the like. For more recent past (say the last 1000 years), traditional methods of climate reconstruction used a combination of human historical records (European harvest dates, sea explorer notations of ice floes etc.), plant and animal records (tree rings, the northern geographic spread of plant and insect species), celestial data (e.g. sun spots), and other indicators. They weren’t at a high level of granularity or statistical sophistication, but the traditional reconstructions generally agreed there was a “Medieval Warm Period” between roughly 1000 and 1350 AD, followed by a “Little Ice Age” approximately from 1350 to 1950, from which we are now just emerging.

Over the last 20 years or so, paleoclimatology saw the emergence of a new paradigm in climate reconstruction that utilized relatively sophisticated statistical modeling and computer simulation. Among others, practitioners of the emerging approach included the now -famous Michael Mann, Keith Briffa, and Philip Jones. For sake of brevity I’ll call this group “Mann et al.”

The approach of Mann et al. resulted in temperature reconstructions that looked markedly different from the one previously estimated, and first receive widespread notice in a 1998 Mann paper that appeared in Nature. The new reconstruction estimated a relatively flat historical temperature series until the past hundred years, at which point it began rising dramatically, and accelerating around 1990. This is the celebrated “hockey stick” with which we are all familiar.

Wow! Science-y!

The consequences of this reconstruction are even more dramatic. If one subscribes to the older reconstruction, the recent increase in global temperatures are real but well within the range of temperatures seen over the past millenium (by some estimates Earth is still more than 1 degree cooler than during the Medieval Warm Period). For good or bad, our recent warming can be explained as the result of natural long term climate cycles. In this view, long term temperatures rise and fall, and have a fairly weak association with human population and CO2 production.

But… if the Mann et al. reconstructions are correct, recent temperatures are well beyond the range seen in over the past 1000 years. Foul play is assumed and the hunt is on for a culprit; a natural suspect is man made CO2, which has increased coincidental with temperatures. It’s a small part of overall global greenhouse gases (5.5% if you don’t include water vapor, 0.3% if you do), but maybe — just maybe — the atmosphere is in a delicate, wobbly, equilibrium balance. Even a small increase in human CO2 might push it past a catastrophic tipping point — a conclusion that is bolstered by the hockey stick. Therefore, as this view has it, our survival depends on massive and immediate reductions of human made CO2 emissions.

This is essentially the “settled science” that has been the basis for emergency carbon treaty fests like Kyoto and Copenhagen, and it’s hard to overstate the role that the research of Mann et al. has played in creating them. In the 2001 IPCC report the hockey stick was given a starring role and Mann was lead author of the chapter on observed climate change.

Given the enormous economic stakes involved, you might think the media would have some spent a little time explaining the models underlying the hockey stick. Ha! Silly you. Whether it was a matter of ideological sympathy or J-school stunted math skills, press coverage has generally stuck to the story that there’s an overwhelming scientific consensus supporting AGW. As proven by brainiac scientists with massive supercomputers running programs much too complex for you puny simian mind.

Au contraire! The climate reconstruction models used by Mann, et al. are relatively simple to derive, don’t take a lot of data points, and don’t require any special or expensive software. In fact, anybody with a decent PC can build a replica at home for free. Here’s how:

Stuff you’ll need

1. A computer. Which I assume you already have, because you’re reading this.

2. The illustrative spreadsheet, available as an Open Office Calc document here, or as a Microsoft Excel file here. Total size is about 1mb.

3. A spreadsheet program. I highly encourage you to use Sun’s Open Office suite and its included Calc spreadsheet — it’s free, very user friendly and similar to Excel, and it’s what I used to create the enclosed analysis. You can download and install Open Office here. You can do all of the examples in Excel too, but you’ll also need to download an additional add-on (see 4 below)

4. A spreadsheet add-in or macro for principal components analysis. Open Office Calc has a nice one called OOo Statistics which can be download and installed from here. This is the macro I used for the enclosed analysis. If you’re using Excel, you’ll have to find a similar Excel add-in or macro for principal components analysis. There are several commercial and free versions available.

Okay, ready? Now let’s start reconstructing. Open the illustrative spreadsheet and follow the bouncing ball.

Step 1: Get some instrumental global temperature data

On the first tab of the spreadsheet you’ll find an estimated Northern Hemisphere annual temperature series for the years 1856-2001, along with an associated graph. The source data here were copied from NOAA, and cited to Philip Jones from the University of East Anglia. The values are scaled as degrees celsius difference from the average in 1961-1990.

“A-ha! This is the garbage data that was…” Hold that thought, we’ll get to that later. Let’s assume for the time being that the temperature measures are valid; remember, the goal here is to roughly replicate the Mann et al. method of temperature reconstruction. Assuming the temperatures are valid, the series visually certainly seems to indicate a recent increase in Northern Hemisphere temperatures. But it only goes back around 150 years.(all subsequent pictures can be click-embiggened)

Step 2: get some high frequency proxy data

Although observed temperature measurements prior to 1850 are unavailable, there are a number of natural phenomena that are potentially related to global temperatures, and can be observed retrospectively over 1000 years through various means. Let’s call these “proxy variables” because they are theoretically related to temperature. Some proxies are “low frequency” or “low resolution” meaning they can only be measured in big, multi-year time chunks; for example atmospheric isotopes can be used to infer solar radiation going back more than 1000 years, but only in 5-20 year cycles. Other low frequency proxies include radiocarbon dating of animal or plant populations, and volcano eruptions.

By contrast, some proxy variable are “high frequency” or “high resolution,” meaning they can be measured a long time back at an annual level. Width and density of tree rings are an obvious example, as well as the presence of o-18 isotope in annually striated glacial ice cores. In principle this type of proxy variable is more useful in historic temperature reconstruction because they can be measured more precisely, more frequently, and in different places around the planet.

On the second tab in the spreadsheet are a candidate set of those proxy variables. I downloaded these data from Michael Mann’s Penn State website here, with column descriptions here; long description here.

The column headings in the spreadsheet (row 3) give a brief description of the proxy variables, all of which are either tree ring width, tree ring density, or glacier ice core o-18, and the series extends back to the year 1400 AD. I would have preferred to have used the 1000-year MXD (“Maximum Latewood Density”) proxy variables often used by Mann et al.  but the University of East Anglia site no longer allows downloads of it.

Step 3: Extract the principal components of the proxy variables

Huh what? “Principal components”?

Here’s the deal: now that we’ve got the temperature series and the proxy variables, a tenderfoot statistician is tempted to say, “hey — let’s fit a regression model to predict temperatures from the proxies.” Good intuition, but there are potential problems if the predictor variables (the proxies) are correlated with one another — e.g., imprecise coefficients and overfitting. (and if you’re wondering what a “regression model” is, don’t worry, we’re getting to that soon.)

One way of dealing with the problem of correlated predictors (and the one used by Mann et al.) is through the method of principal components, which “uncorrelates” the predictors by translating them into a new set of variables called principle components. Nothing nefarious about this, it’s a standard statistical technique. If you want further explanation, read the indent; otherwise skip ahead.

In a nutshell principal components analysis (PCA) works like this, in matrix notation:

P = Xw

X here represents a matrix of the original correlated predictor variables, with n rows and k columns (in our example, this is the proxy data).  P represents a matrix of the ‘principal components’ of X, which also has n rows and k columns, and w is a k-row, k-column matrix of weights that translates the original variables into the principle components. The values of w are derived through the method of singular value decomposition.

Unlike the original X data, all of the columns of P are all mutually uncorrelated with each other, and have a mean of 0. The columns of P are ordered, such that the first column has the highest variance, the second column the second highest variance, and so on. Because P is a simple linear transform of X, it contains all the original information in X. Because the columns of P are ordered in descending variance, PCA is often used for data reduction — when the low variance columns are discarded, P still maintains most of the original information in X in a smaller number of columns.

You can find the principal components of the 15 proxy variables on the third tab in the spreadsheet, which I obtained with Open Office’s OOo Stats macro. Starting in column P, there are 15 principal components for the years 1400 to 1980.

You can replicate my PCA by doing the following: go to the second spreadsheet tab, the one containing the proxy variables. From the OOo Stats menu, select “Multivariate Statistics” ==> “Principal Components.”

This will bring up the Principal Components dialog box. For “range” select the rows and columns containing the proxy data, along with the column header row 3 (range B3:P584 — do not use the year column).  For “Output” select “New Sheet” and give it a name in the text box. Now click “OK.”

Depending on the speed of your computer, this may take 2-10 minutes to complete, so go grab a beer. You may see a little warning box pop up with the message “warning: failing to converge,” but just click OK, it will eventually identify the correct principal components (I validated it against other stat software packages). The new principal components output sheet you named should be identical to the one provided.

Step 4: Inner merge the extracted principal components with the instrumental temperature data

Now that we’ve got the 1856-2001 observed temperature series (tab 1) and the 1400-1980 proxy variable principal components (tab 3), let’s match them up by common year. The initial match is in tab 4.

Note that for recent years (1981-2001) we have an observed temperature, but no proxy principle components; for years before 1856, we have proxy principle components but no observed temperature. Lets subset this down to only those years for which we have both temperature and principle components (1856-1980). That subset is on tab 5 of the spreadsheet.

Step 5: For the common years, fit a regression model between instrumental temperature and the proxy variables

Now this is where the analytical rubber meets the road, where we find a functional equation to link temperature to the proxy variables through the principal components. The approach of Mann et al. is to use multiple regression. A basic multiple regression equation looks like this:

Y_i = β₀ + β₁X_1i + β₂X_2i + … + β_kX_ki + ε_i

Where Y is some variable you want to explain / predict, [X₁ ... X_k ] are the variables you want to use as predictors, [β₀ ... β_k] are a set of coefficients, and ε is error. A regression analysis finds the values of [β₀ ... β_k] that minimize the squared error in prediction. In our example case of Mann-style temperature reconstruction,

Temperature_i = β₀ + β₁P_1i + β₂P_2i + … + β₁₅P_15i + ε_i

Where the P’s are the principal components. I ran this multiple regression, and the β coefficient estimates are on tab 6 of the spreadsheet, in the range C129:C144. In the above regression model β₁ is -0.01 (cell C129), β₁ is +0.05 (cell C130), and so on. The Y intercept value β₀ is -0.23 in cell C144.

If you want to replicate how I got these estimates, go to tab 5 of the spreadsheet, containing the matched temperature and proxy principle components data. Select the range containing the data (cells B3:Q128). Now from the OOo Stats menu select “Basic Statistics” ==> “Multiple Regression.”

This will bring up the multiple regression macro dialog box. Under “Output” click “New Sheet” and give it a name, then click “OK.”

This will bring up the regression model specification dialog box. One by one click the values “PC_1,” “PC_2,” etc. under “Model”and they are added in the regression model specification box below it.

Once the all of the PCs are added, click “Fit.” There will soon appear a new regression output worksheet tab with the name you specified, identical to the one included with the original spreadsheet.

Step 6: Evaluate how well the regression model fits the observed temperature data.

If the regression model we specified is any good, it ought to fit the temperature data where we know it. The predicted temperatures can be found by applying the estimated β coefficients to the proxy variable principle components…

Predicted Temperature_i = β₀ + β₁P_1i + β₂P_2i + … + β₁₅P_15i

The regression output computes this prediction for us; you can find it in the regression output tab in column Q. I merged the predictions with the actual temperature for 1856-1980 and put it in tab 7, along with a plot. The blue line is actual, the red line is the prediction from the model. It’s not perfect, but it tracks okay. The correlation between actual and predicted is .71. The squared correlation (r²) is .50, meaning 50% of the variation in actual 1856-1980 temperatures can be accounted for by the principal components (and by inference the original ice core and tree ring proxy variables).

Step 7: Apply the regression coefficients to the years before observed temperatures to reconstruct estimated temperatures

Now that we’ve (weakly) validated the regression model, we are finally at the point where we can compute a historical temperature reconstruction. Remember, in the years 1400 to 1855 we do not have any observed temperatures, but we do know the proxy variable principle components. For these years, we can also use the regression model:

Predicted Temperature_i = β₀ + β₁P_1i + β₂P_2i + … + β₁₅P_15i

Tab 8 of the spreadsheet shows the predicted values for each year from 1400 through 1980, in column C (highlighted in yellow). Predictions of 1981-2001 can’t be computed from the model because the proxy variable series stops at 1980. The formula in cell C23, i.e.

=MMULT(D23:R23; ‘Regression Results’.$C$129:$C$143) + ‘Regression Results’.$C$144

is equivalent to the temperature prediction equation above; it cross multiplies each principle component with its associated β coefficient, adds them up and finally adds in the β₀ intercept value. We can apply this formula to every year for which we have proxy data, which gives us a Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstruction all the way back to 1400 AD.

A time series graph of the reconstructed temperatures (red) overlaid with actual temperatures (blue) appears on tab 9 of the spreadsheet.

Voila, it sure does looks like that famous hockey stick — relatively flat for 500 years, then zooming up like a mo-fo right after MTV debuted. The one thing that is missing here is the error band (the grey zone around the hockey stick line way back up the post). That’s approximated by

Upper 95% confidence band = Predicted Temperature + 1.96 * stdev(ε)

Lower 95% confidence band = Predicted Temperature – 1.96 * stdev(ε)

where stdev(ε) = the standard deviation of the column labeled “residual” on tab 6.

Quick! Get us an NSF grant, stat!

Discussion

Again, all that math-y spreadsheet-y stuff above was not meant to perfectly replicate any specific study done by Mann et al.; those specific studies differ by the choice of instrumental temperature data set, the choice of proxy variables, whether series are smoothed with a filter (Fourier transform etc), and so on. My goal was to provide interested people with a hands-on DIY example of the basic statistical methodology underlying temperature reconstruction, at least as practiced by the leading lights of “Climate Science.”

If you’ve followed all this, it should also give you the important glossary terms that should help you decipher the Climategate emails and methodology discussions. For example “instrumental data” means observed temperature; “reconstructions” are the modeled temperatures from the past; “proxy” means the tree ring, ice core, etc. predictors; “PCs” mean the principal components.

Is there anything wrong with this methodology? Not in principle. In fact there’s a lot to recommend it. There’s a strong reason to believe that high resolution proxy variables like tree rings and ice core o-18 are related to temperature. At the very least it’s a more mathematically rigorous approach than the earlier methods for climate reconstruction, which is probably why the hockey stick / AGW conclusion received a lot of endorsements from academic High Society (including the American Statistical Association).

The devil, as they say is in the details. In each of the steps there is some leeway for, shall we say, intervention. The early criticisms of Mann et al.’s analyses were confined to relatively minor points about the presence of autocorrelated errors, linear specification, etc.  But a funny thing happened on the way to Copenhagen: a couple of Canadian researchers, McIntyre and McKitrick, found that when they ran simulations of “red noise” random principle components data into Mann’s reconstruction model, 99% of the time it produced the same hockey stick pattern. They attributed this to Mann’s method / time frame for selecting of principle components.

To illustrate the nature of that debate through the spreadsheet, try some of the following tests:

Run step 3 through step 7, but only use the proxy data up through 1960 instead of 1980.

Run step 5 through step 7, but only include the first 2 principle components in the regression.

Run step 3 through step 7, but delete the ice core data from the proxy set.

Run step 2 through step 7, but pick out a different proxy data set from NOAA.

Or combinations thereof. What you’ll find is that contrary to Mann’s assertion that the hockey stick is “robust,” you’ll find that the reconstructions tend to be sensitive to the data selection. M&M found, for example, that temperature reconstructions for the 1400s were higher or lower than today, depending on whether bristlecone pine tree rings were included in the proxies.

What the leaked emails reveal, among other things, is some of that bit of principal component sausage making. But more disturbing, they reveal that the actual data going into the reconstruction model — the instrumental temperature data and the proxy variables themselves — were rife for manipulation. In the laughable euphemism of Philip Jones, “value added homogenized data.” The data I provided here was the real, value added global temperature and proxy data, because Phil told me so.  Trust me!

In any case, I’m confident that the real truth will emerge soon, hopefully while Mike and Phil are enjoying their vacations. In the meantime have fun and stay warm.

From: The American Spectator

Media Matters

Biggest Story of 2009: The Rise of the Virtual Newsroom

By Jeffrey Lord on 12.1.09 @ 6:09AM

It was the biggest story of 2009.

If you doubt, ask ACORN. Or Van Jones. Or the So We Might See campaign. You won’t need Time magazine’s once clout-filled “Man of the Year” issue to figure it out, either. Just take a look back at the bestseller lists, the ratings of Fox News or simply turn on your local AM radio dial.

The single most important news event of 2009 was the emergence of The Virtual Newsroom. A newsroom run by a virtual army of conservative journalists famous and unknown, their individual and collective impact multiplied exponentially by millions of Internet users, radio listeners, readers and television viewers.

How did this happen? How does it work in practice?

First, perspective is needed here. Like other big news events, it didn’t happen overnight. There is history, lots of it.

In the afterglow of World War II, at the dawn of the Cold War, the ideology of American liberalism reigned supreme. What began at the beginning of the 20th century as the “progressive movement” — an ideology that believed government control in some fashion was The Answer to the everyday lives of Americans — was now riding herd.

Politically, on the one-to-ten scale, Communism was at a thousand. Beginning with the Soviet Union, entire nations had succumbed to the idea of state control of everything, run by the famous Marxist dictum of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” In America, adherents to the driving principle of government control were spread out along the scale below, from socialists like Norman Thomas at a ten to progressives like FDR Vice President Henry Wallace at a nine and on down the line, ending with the weakest strain of the germ as exemplified by liberal Republicans like the New York Governors Thomas E. Dewey and Nelson Rockefeller.

The “progressive disease” was slowly and not so slowly infecting everything it touched — the culture, education, religion, commerce and so on. It was “mainstreamed” — and nowhere else were its believers more prominent than in the American media. As fate would have it, the media itself was undergoing a transformation — technology relentlessly pushing it along in a fashion that in fact had nothing to do with the politics of the participants. The power of newspapers, magazines and books was growing as printing and distribution technology blossomed. Radio, coming on the scene in the 1920s, was reaching what would be thought of as a peak, quickly giving way not just to television but to network television.

And in each and every case, these events were being shaped by believers who self-identified somewhere on that one-to-ten scale of “progressivism.” It was, literally, one giant food chain of intellectual thought, with respectability unquestioningly bestowed on just about everyone of any note who believed — which meant just about everyone of note. The country could trade political parties in the White House from Truman to Eisenhower, while putting up losing presidential nominees like Dewey or Democrat Adlai Stevenson. It could send its kids to college, buy bestselling books, go to church, turn the television channel from CBS to NBC to, later, ABC — and without missing a beat be on the receiving end of some forms of the progressive message.

In retrospect, the opening shot of the media counter-revolution to all of this was the 1951 publication of one book — God and Man at Yale – by a precocious William F. Buckley, Jr. The book took on the startled establishment of Yale, portrayed by alumni Buckley as progressive politicians in the guise of educators. The book was an instant bestseller, setting Buckley at 26 firmly on the road to a hugely successful life as a founding father of conservative media. The book was followed by Buckley’s establishment of National Review magazine in 1955.

The conservative counter-revolution in the American media was on.

There isn’t space to detail all that brought us to this moment. In brief — the known events of the Great Society, the 1960s cultural revolution, the comeback of AM radio, the rise of the Internet, cable and satellite TV, Fox News. What we can focus on here is the effect — how all of this has salted out in the biggest story of 2009. The coming of age of the Virtual Newsroom and its convergence with the conservative movement.

Imagine, if you will, the traditional newsroom as it dominated the once-great metropolitan daily newspapers of America. A vast acreage of desks, in the modern era, separated into cubicles. Somewhere is the glassed-in office of the editor, and somewhere else, usually not on the same floor, the clubby and comfortable quarters of the publisher.

Now take this image and virtualize it. Add in the names and faces, the specific tasks of each. Most importantly, understand that just as with the original, physical version of a newsroom, the relationship of one person to the other, one task to the other and each person and task to the whole is essential to the success of the entire virtual enterprise.

So let’s tour the Virtual Newsroom.

This being the modern era, computers hum at every work station. The acreage required to accommodate everyone is simultaneously huge — mammoth — yet intimate. This is a virtual operation. To be “at your desk” requires only a computer, and while the story files in here, the journalist in question can in fact be anywhere, not unlike the old-fashioned idea of the trench-coated foreign correspondent on the line from 1930s Berlin or the hard-charging White House correspondent calling in from the Dallas, Texas of November 22, 1963.

In one corner are the newspaper people, still engaging in the ancient art form by writing the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal or putting together the New York Post or Washington Times. In another corner are the magazines — the one you are reading, The American Spectator – along with Buckley’s National Review, Human Events, the Weekly Standard and Commentary. Throughout are the columnists — my colleagues — who sift the work product of the rest of the room for investigation or commentary.

Just down the hall is talk radio row. This line of studios filled with hosts, producers and call-screeners is enormous, covering hundreds of shows from Maine to California. The man who almost single-handedly created this section of the newsroom has — but of course — a corner office. Everybody in the newsroom loves Rush. They know he’s in when cigar smoke is seen wafting out the door, the occasional NFL replay booming forth as he preps his way through his “stack of stuff.” His EIB studio adjoins his office, a glassed-in-front providing an inside-look for visitors as he sits before the golden microphone. The great thing about the Virtual Newsroom is the corner office concept. Everyone can have one if they wish. Sean Hannity has one, a football frequently arcing out onto the larger newsroom floor waiting for someone to toss it back. Donuts airlifted from someplace called Stan’s in California signal that Mark Levin is back there, along with the pin-up of the U.S. Constitution. Beck’s people are distinctive because they seem to be perpetually running out of chalk, giving new meaning to the phrase “let’s chalk this one up.” Laura Ingraham is frequently seen running out to run with pal Lucy, the music plugged in, eyes rolling as she catches an Obama image on a nearby monitor.

Moving along the room we enter TV Land, populated primarily by Fox News and Fox Business Channel personalities. CNN rented space for Lou Dobbs but recently gave it up. O’Reilly and Beck seem constitutionally unable to stop pranking each other, which has necessitated a rare disciplinary procedure of giving Bernard Goldberg his virtual office separating the two on occasion. Dennis Miller does not help the situation. Sean and Beck, doing double-duty with radio shows and TV shows, seem to live in the newsroom, both apparently having a huge time of sheer fun with the whole thing. Greta and Neil and Stuart Varney work their respective beats, although there is a ripple of amusement or two every time heads lift to the realization that Frank Rich is on Imus and hence Fox Business, yet again playing defense for the Times.

The rapidly expanding section of the Virtual Newsroom that has everyone buzzing is the Internet “desk.” Drudge is here, ditto Andrew Breitbart. There is much suspiciously timed coming and going to the virtual water cooler when Breitbart stars James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles are in. In real life people are always disappointed to see O’Keefe doesn’t wear the chinchilla fur to work and that Giles is, in fact, suitably dressed for the virtual workplace. What’s particularly interesting here is the size of this division. Job applications pour in hourly from conservative bloggers around the nation. The applications are stamped “hire now” by someone wearing a Harry Potter-style “invisibility cloak” and the virtual newsroom expands yet again. There is some speculation that the physical dimension of the newspapers will at some point vanish altogether and their offices just be folded into the Internet group. Time will tell.

Last but most importantly not least, is what we call the Boswell department. Named after England’s James Boswell, the famous 18th-century chronicler of The Life of Samuel Johnson, the Boswell’s are conservative authors. The real-time chroniclers of conservatism as it is or is not seen or applied today. Between them they take the time to illuminate the basics of conservative philosophy (Mark Levin in Liberty and Tyranny), the craziness of liberalism (Ann Coulter, most recently in Guilty ,Glenn Beck in Common Sense, Laura Ingraham in Power to the People), the historic attachment of progressivism to overripe if not outright totalitarian political thought (Jonah Goldberg in Liberal Fascism) or what the progressives running the government are up to now (Michelle Malkin in Culture of Corruption, Dick Morris in Catastrophe). The central function of each is the same. To educate, to remind, to explain, to illuminate for their Virtual Newsroom colleagues. This in turn keeps all of us in the Virtual Newsroom repeatedly attuned to the necessary ability to examine what we see in the world around us. To understand exactly what we are seeing, why we are seeing it, and most importantly why what we are seeing does or does not work.

SO HOW DOES all this work together? What is here that makes the Virtual Newsroom and its conservative occupants indisputably the biggest story of 2009?

Three stories.

Story One: Here you have two young conservative journalists, O’Keefe and Giles, possessed of a keen philosophical eye, a knowledge of technology (cameras, microphones videotape, the Internet) and a fat and inviting liberal fish in a barrel known as ACORN. Imagination conjured as to how they will approach their story — they go out and conduct their very-old style journalism investigation. Story in hand, Andrew Breitbart of Breitbart.tv in the Internet division takes the handoff. He sends a virtual memo to talk radio row’s Beck and Hannity. Who in turn are both Fox News stars. Five…four…three…two…one. Bang! Within a virtual instant, the Virtual Newsroom has just blown in the hull of the good ship ACORN, its stunned survivors racing around the deck of a political Titanic as Breitbart, O’Keefe and Giles are powered by the engines of the Virtual Newsroom. The full power of the Virtual Newsroom kicks in. Talk radio shows light up the call screeners screens. The newspaper and magazines kick in, in print and online. The lights are on in the Fox studios as the surging Fox audience gapes at a federally funded organization strategizing on prostitution. And…lights out for ACORN. Or more accurately, considerably damaged and suddenly congressionally unfunded. And the coverage from what’s left of the liberal mainstream media in all this? Next to zero.

Story Two: Van Jones has it made. From community organizer straight to the White House staff in the Obama era. Says Obama key aide Valerie Jarrett:

JARRETT: You guys know Van Jones? [Applause. Moderator injects: "This is his house apparently."]

JARRETT: Oooh. Van Jones, alright! So, Van Jones. We were so delighted to be able to recruit him into the White House. We were watching him, uh, really, he’s not that old, for as long as he’s been active out in Oakland. And all the creative ideas he has. And so now, we have captured that. And we have all that energy in the White House.

Alas for Mr. Jones, the Virtual Newsroom is at work. This is the 21st century, and not unlike millions of others, Mr. Jones has portions of his career on videotape. On the Internet. The blogger sleuths of the Virtual Newsroom are at work, from coast to coast. This time the info surfaces, speech by speech, piece of tape by piece of tape, painting a portrait of Van Jones — painted by Van Jones himself. A portrait recognized of the old progressivism highlighted so ably in book form by National Review‘s Jonah Goldberg in Liberal Fascism – the desire to take from one group seen as undeserving and unworthy of their creations and give it to others. A portrait made more vivid by the Virtual Newsroom discovery of a tie to the nuttiness of the “Truther” movement that believes George W. Bush secretly set up the attack on America. In the material flows. The Old Media, predictably if irrelevantly, ignores the story. Seamlessly now, racing around the Virtual Newsroom from Internet desk to the talk radio desk to the television, magazine and newspaper desks — Van Jones is quickly and unceremoniously out of his White House job.

Story Three: The So We Might See campaign “hate speech” campaign that pushes to get both Beck and CNN’s Lou Dobbs off the air. In this case, the story came from my desk at The American Spectator section of the Virtual Newsroom. After spending much time in the Internet division’s research library, the Spectator runs a series of my investigative columns involving seven major religious denominations and what appear to be an effort to silence Virtual Newsroom colleagues Limbaugh, Beck, O’Reilly, Dobbs and others. Paid for in part by left-wing billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Institute. Once up on the virtual screen of The American Spectator, customers of the Virtual Newsroom begin swamping the leaders of their faiths, furious at what is instantly seen as an attempt to silence free speech — and in a fashion a portion of the Virtual Newsroom itself. Backtracking begins. Three faiths change their mind, two dropping from the FCC petition, one out of the group altogether. The campaigns to Drop Dobbs and get Beck are removed from the So We Might See site. Who in the Virtual Newsroom was involved in this? The Internet desk, the magazine desk, talk radio row, and Lou Dobbs. Ironically, Dobbs left CNN the night of my appearance on his show, a fact that only highlights CNN’s inability to cope with the Virtual Newsroom. He is still, it should be said, over there in his studio on radio row.

What these three stories illustrate — and there are more, the health care fight being another — is that the Virtual Newsroom has arrived. It is populated by a cast of thousands — TV stars, radio broadcasters, Internet sites, columnists, investigators, people in pajamas — you name them, they are here. They have a philosophical underpinning for what they do — something seen in the response to Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny. They know exactly what to look for, as Breitbart, O’Keefe and Giles of the Internet division have shown. Most importantly, they know how to take a story — to alert their colleagues in the Virtual Newsroom — and then work the story across the newsroom from virtual or physical print to Internet to radio to television. To wit: from the cameras of Breitbart, O’Keefe and Giles to talk radio and the bright lights of Beck and Hannity. Or, from my computer to pages of The American Spectator to the set of Lou Dobbs. And so on, for every single colleague in the Virtual Newsroom who has a compelling story to tell.

What is particularly interesting here — and a key to the success of the entire Virtual Newsroom — is that the Virtual Newsroom itself is a living, breathing example of what Levin calls Adam Smith’s devotion to free markets as “spontaneous order.”

No one “has” to write or broadcast a particular story. It’s a free market in story ideas out there on the Virtual Newsroom floor. As a result, creativity reigns. A million different ideas float through the Virtual Newsroom on any given day, with the journalists in the room looking them over as if at some giant intellectual smorgasbord. What appeals to The American Spectator may not interest National Review. What turns on Breitbart may enthuse Beck but not Hannity. The curiosity of Michelle Malkin on an issue may not appeal to a Jed Babbin at Human Events. Launching Laura is not the same as ticking off Ann. What gets Rush’s adrenaline flowing…well…generally speaking Rush gets everybody’s adrenaline flowing.

The problem for American progressives today — be they the activists of ACORN, Van Jones, the So We Might See group or others — is that they are unaccustomed to finding themselves on the receiving end of this kind of attention from the journalists, commentators, investigators, talk radio hosts, television stars and authors of the Virtual Newsroom. It is safe to say that whatever else went on in the three stories listed here, the scoundrels at ACORN, Mr. Jones, and the So We Might See-ers were taken aback at the fact they — they! — were suddenly under the Virtual Newsroom microscope for their public activities. Accustomed to velvet-gloved treatment from their progressive buddies in the Old Media, they simply never factored the existence of the Virtual Newsroom into the equation.

Newsflash to progressives. The Virtual News room is here to stay. Not only is it not going away — in spite of whatever shenanigans may be going on behind the closed doors of the FCC — it is gaining in both size and strength.

And gaining in something else that simply terrifies progressive activists everywhere: the power to seriously influence events.

Which is why, when all is said and done by December 31, it is already clear that the story of the year in 2009 is not President Obama, health care, Iraq or even Tiger Woods.

The story of 2009 is the emergence of a new and powerful player increasingly dominating American politics, culture, education, religion and who knows what else.

That player is the media that is the Virtual Newsroom. And the conservatives who run it.

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Mainstream Media, ACORN, The Internet, Andrew Breitbart

Jeffrey Lord is a former Reagan White House political director and author. He writes from Pennsylvania at jlpa1@aol.com.