Op-Ed Contributors: A Sensible Limit to the Mortgage Interest Deduction

THE tax deduction for mortgage interest may not quite be the "third rail" of politics that Social Security is, but politicians on both sides have long been afraid to touch it. So when Mitt Romney recently floated the idea of capping this deduction, Democrats pounced.

Here, after all, was Mr. Romney arguing to cut a long-favored tax benefit for middle-class homeowners — in the midst of a soft housing market, no less — so as to make up lost revenue from his proposed tax cuts that, critics say, disproportionately benefit the wealthy.

But while Mr. Romney's tax proposal over all may not be fair or sensible — or even mathematically logical — Democrats shouldn't be so quick to attack any change to the mortgage interest deduction. In doing that, they're depriving themselves of a potentially powerful tool for progressive governance, one that could greatly increase funding for affordable housing. In truth, the mortgage interest tax deduction benefits the rich far more than middle-income families. A 2012 study by the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that of federal tax expenditures for homeowners, more than half goes to households with annual incomes above $100,000, about twice the United States median.

Upper-income Americans take advantage of these policies to help them buy million-dollar homes, but there are relatively few federal housing dollars for extremely low-income families — and even fewer for those in the next tier up, who earn between $20,000 and $50,000 a year. Rather than preserve the mortgage-interest deduction as it is now, progressive politicians would do better to redirect the benefits we currently provide to America's wealthiest homeowners to supporting housing for struggling and moderate-income families.

Indeed, Mr. Romney's father, George W. Romney, adopted just such a position. As Richard Nixon's secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (H.U.D.), the elder Romney was an ardent advocate of aid to the poor.

In December 1972, he wrote Nixon to suggest a "staged reduction" in mortgage interest and property tax deductions. He thought savings should be shifted toward affordable housing. "At a minimum," he argued, "this would offset the impression that this budget is taking away from the poor to benefit the middle income and rich." Mitt Romney has a different view. The primary justification for his own willingness to consider capping mortgage deductions is to replace lost revenue from his proposed 20 percent across-the-board federal tax cut, a policy whose prime beneficiary would be upper-income households.

Fundamentally, the younger Mr. Romney has demonstrated no interest in promoting the cause of affordable housing once championed by his father. At a private fund-raiser this spring, Mr. Romney said H.U.D. "might not be around later" if he were elected president.

Though certain of the department's programs could be transferred elsewhere in the government, continued support requires presidential backing. Slashing H.U.D.'s programs would pull the plug on an essential lifeline for millions of Americans who are unable to afford the cost of market-rate housing. Today, that need is greater than it has been in years.

Since 2000, federal assistance to the poor through long-term subsidies of public housing and Housing Choice Vouchers (Section 8) has stagnated. A third program, the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, encourages the development of housing for working-class families, but the affordability of the apartments it covers is guaranteed only for a limited time.

Together, public housing and voucher programs serve roughly the same number of households as in 2000, even though the nation's population has grown by 33 million, or 12 percent, and the number of impoverished people has ballooned by 14 million, or 45 percent.

Today, the federal government spends about $40 billion annually on housing programs designed specifically for low-income households. Yet the mortgage interest deduction alone costs the Treasury some $80 billion a year. Almost $35 billion in housing aid goes to families with incomes above $200,000.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition (N.L.I.H.C.), working with Representative Keith Ellison, Democrat of Minnesota, and more than 350 organizations nationwide, suggests reforming the deduction by converting it to a credit, capping eligible mortgages at $500,000 and using the proceeds to finance the National Housing Trust Fund.

This is a good idea: it would increase the number of middle-income families qualified for homeowners' aid but reduce expenditures over all by cutting spending for the wealthy. Were about $30 billion in saved funds redirected to the poor, as the coalition proposes, federal funding for affordable housing could be almost doubled with no change in the deficit.

A governor named Romney once supported expanding access to affordable housing. The N.L.I.H.C.'s straightforward plan would do just that — without depriving most moderate- and middle-income families of a much-cherished tax break.

It's time to touch that third rail.

Yonah Freemark is a graduate student in city planning and transportation. Lawrence J. Vale is a professor of urban design and planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Op-Ed Columnist: The ‘I’ of the Storm

The dramatic homestretch ad for President Obama, running on every network and in all media markets, is a home run, devastating for Mitt Romney.

And, best of all, the president didn't have to pay for it, or even say, "I approve this message." It was a total gift — and from a Republican and top Romney surrogate.

Gov. Chris Christie, the fleece-wearing, order-barking Neptune of the Jersey Shore, was all over TV Tuesday, effusively praising the president for his luminous leadership on Hurricane Sandy, the same president he mocked last week at a Romney rally in Virginia as a naif groping to find "the light switch of leadership."

As Romney roams the Midwest and Florida struggling to stay relevant, miming coordinating storm response with G.O.P. governors and collecting canned goods to send East, his fair-weather pal Christie failed to give Mittens any disaster relief.

On ABC, CBS and NBC, Christie hailed Obama as "outstanding." On MSNBC, he said the president "has been all over this," and on CNN, he called Obama "incredibly supportive." The big guy even tweeted his thanks to the slender one.

Most astonishing of all, the New Jersey governor went on Fox News and spoke words rarely heard on that network: "I have to give the president great credit."

"I spoke to the president three times yesterday," Christie gushed. "He called me for the last time at midnight last night, asking what he could do."

Christie also extolled FEMA, even though Romney has said it is "immoral" to spend money on federal disaster relief when the deficit is so big.

"Fox & Friends" co-host Steve Doocy must have forgotten Christie's self-regarding keynote speech at Romney's convention, which had more "I" than "he" in it. Doocy asked Christie if there was "any possibility that Governor Romney may go to New Jersey to tour some of the damage with you?" The governor replied dismissively: "I have no idea, nor am I the least bit concerned or interested," adding: "If you think right now I give a damn about presidential politics, then you don't know me."

White House officials seemed a bit flummoxed by Christie's bearhug. "It's unnerving," one laughed, noting how odd it is that a Romney big gun might help break the stubborn tie in the electorate in Obama's favor.

They speculate that Christie, who always puts Christie first, has decided that it's better for his presidential ambitions to be a maverick blue-state governor with a Democratic chief executive exiting in 2016 than to have President Romney and Tea-Party Republicans in Congress pulling him over to the extreme right for the next eight years. He also knows he'll need a boatload of federal cash to make his state whole again.

Christie was in full "Sopranos"-at-the-shore mode in his blue fleece pullover. When Irene hit last year, he yelled at lingering frolickers, "Get the hell off the beach!" This time, the governor blistered the Atlantic City mayor for sending what he called "mixed messages" on evacuation orders and warned stranded residents: "We will not be able to come and help you until daylight tomorrow."

The president is still overcompensating for his first-debate pout, determined not to be a loser. He made a false start and erred on the side of politics, wasting a round-trip to Florida. He wanted to squeeze in one more rally before the storm, so he risked flying to Orlando Sunday night for a campaign event Monday morning with Bill Clinton. Told that Air Force One pilots said he needed to leave before the rally or he might get stuck outside Washington — where sun and palms would be an unfortunate backdrop — he went back to the White House.

Just about the only criticism the president got on his storm stewardship was, amazingly enough, from "Heck of a Job, Brownie" Michael Brown, the FEMA chief during Katrina, who naturally thought Obama acted too quickly and efficiently.

With Obama forced off the trail, Clinton and Joe Biden could fulfill their shared fantasy: to be the presidential candidate. In Youngstown, Ohio, the two "Last Hurrah" pols plunged into a thrilled throng to shake hands, pose for pictures, bounce babies and sign books. Biden employed his classic move of holding the cheeks of a delighted older woman, then reaching around her in a full body hug to grab the hands of a woman behind. As "Your Love Keeps Lifting Me Higher" blared, the prolix, snowy-haired pair scanned for anyone to schmooze or squeeze as the arena emptied out. The Big Dog lingered even longer than C-Span cameras.

Rather than campaigning, which he finds draining, the president was in the Oval calling a Republican to work things out. But this time, unlike with John Boehner at a fateful moment, a flattered Christie took Obama's calls. While Romney campaigns in Florida Wednesday, Christie and Obama plan to tour storm damage in New Jersey, a picture of bipartisanship, putting distressed people above dirt-slinging politics.

And that's a grand bargain for both of them.

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Op-Ed Columnist: The Minnesota Mirror

Josh Haner/The New York Times

Thomas L. Friedman

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I was debating whether to go to the Turkish-Syrian border this week or to visit my old high school in Minnesota. I decided to make the exotic foreign trip and go to Minnesota. I thought it might be useful to look at this election through the window of my hometown of St. Louis Park. I have not been disappointed. I found in this little suburb of 45,250 people outside of Minneapolis — which was memorialized in the movie, "A Serious Man," directed by the Coen brothers, who also hail from here — all the key trends impacting America.

For starters, there is the changing face of the town. We had two African-Americans among the 2,500 students at St. Louis Park High when I graduated in 1971, and everyone there was either Christian or Jewish. When I walked through the high school cafeteria on Monday, there were six teenage girls covered in colorful Muslim hijabs and the principal, Robert Metz, explained to me that "today we have more Muslim students than Jewish students." This is the byproduct of the huge influx of Somali refugees to Minnesota. Metz said my old high school, which now has open enrollment and competes for students from around Minneapolis, attracts young people both for its academic rigor and because they want to go to a richly diverse school that mirrors the world in which they'll be working. There are more than 30 languages spoken in the elementary school near my old house — exactly 29 more than when I lived here.

Mayor Jeffrey Jacobs of St. Louis Park notes that 85 percent of residents here today don't have kids in local public schools, yet they regularly vote to increase real estate taxes to improve these schools, because they understand that "you cannot cheapskate yourself to greatness" and "they see value for their money." But that attitude is no longer held statewide.

When I was growing up, my congressmen were liberal Republicans (there was no other kind in Minnesota back then) in a Democratic district. No one thought anything of it. Today my congressman here would be Keith Ellison, an African-American Muslim and one of the most liberal Democrats in the House, while liberal Republicans in Minnesota today are as rare as a two-headed moose. The State House and Senate Republican caucuses today are dominated by the Tea Party and libertarian followers of Ron Paul.

But here's what's telling. These G.O.P. hard-liners, while able to win their more conservative "exurbia" and rural districts, are not doing well when it comes to overall state politics. Minnesotans have not wanted to entrust them with the governorship or national Senate seats, which is another way of explaining why Mitt Romney only gained ground on Barack Obama when he started to market himself as a moderate ready to work with Democrats. Note to Mitt: Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat, is up for re-election here and leading her libertarian G.O.P. opponent by 43 percentage points in the latest Star Tribune/Mason-Dixon poll (65 to 22) and in one report this summer was found to have $5.4 million in campaign cash on hand while her opponent had $5,800. That is not a typo.

Note to President Obama: Klobuchar built that lead by combining a moderate liberalism with a pro-business, pro-jobs agenda and a pragmatic problem-solving approach. All of Klobuchar's campaign ads are positive, and many feature Republican business leaders explaining why they are voting for her. Most Minnesota voters "want their politicians to be problem-solvers, not ideologues," Klobuchar said to me. Senator Al Franken, who's also laser-focused on jobs, boasted to me that Minnesota is now "The Silicon Valley of windows," because of all the high-tech window manufacturers here. Franken, who's also a St. Louis Park native, added, "Minnesota wants its politicians to operate on principles, but if one of your principles is to never compromise, they don't want that."

Many business-oriented Republicans here are not only voting for Klobuchar but are giving her money, because they've become frustrated by the far-right lurch of the state G.O.P., explained Lawrence Jacobs, a politics expert at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. The state is home to many global companies that would accept some tax increases to build better infrastructure and schools in order to have better-educated workers. And the Republican-dominated Chamber of Commerce here is leading the charge for open immigration, so Minnesota can bring in more knowledge workers from India to enrich its work force.

"In Minnesota, for many years, we had a party structure that was dominated by leaders who wanted to win and problem-solve," said Jacobs. Now, he added, the State Republican Party is dominated by Tea Party and libertarian insurgents, not the business community, and their attitude is "we play for principles and if we lose so be it." So there is a fight here for the soul of the Republican Party. In the 1990s, centrist Democrats, led by Bill Clinton, brought their party back from a similar ideological ledge; they and the country and my home state are better for it. The Republicans have not had their "reformation," but it's brewing here in Minnesota, and I hope it goes national if Romney loses — and even more so if he wins.

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Editorial: Same-Sex on the Ballot in 4 States

The freedom to marry is a fundamental right that should not have to be won or defended at the ballot box. In fact, ballot initiatives are a bad way to write or rewrite laws of any kind. Unfortunately, that is the reality of American politics, which is why same-sex marriage measures on the Nov. 6 ballot in Maine, Washington, Maryland and Minnesota could turn out to be pivotal in the struggle for marriage equality.

Thanks to court rulings and legislative victories, same-sex marriage is now legal in six states and the District of Columbia, and polls show that a majority of Americans support the legalization of marriages for gay, lesbian and bisexual couples. But same-sex marriage has never won a ballot referendum.

The measure in Maine probably has the best chance of winning. Three years ago, Maine voters rejected a marriage-equality bill that had been approved by the State Legislature. But, instead of giving up, supporters of the freedom to marry went right back to knocking on doors, raising money, honing their arguments and organizing for a new vote this fall to legalize same-sex marriages.

Although recent polls of likely Maine voters are encouraging, the outcome is still far from certain. Historically, polls on such ballot tests have been misleading, and anti-marriage forces are waging a loud propaganda campaign. They are running television commercials suggesting that marriage-equality opponents would be unfairly "fired, sued, fined and punished" if the referendum passes, and that it is possible to treat gay and lesbian couples fairly while still excluding them from the right to marry. It would help if the state's two supposedly moderate Republican senators, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, who is retiring, would stand up against forces of intolerance within their party by publicly supporting the referendum.

In Washington State, voters will be deciding whether to let stand the authorization of same-sex marriage handily approved by the Legislature and signed into law by the state's Democratic governor, Christine Gregoire, in February. As in Maine, opponents of marriage equality are trying to make the fallacious argument that marriage equality would somehow harm heterosexual couples. They also insist that the domestic partnership scheme approved by voters in the state three years ago goes far enough.

The state's Roman Catholic leaders have played a vocal role in trying to turn out a big "no" vote by Catholic parishioners. But major corporate players in the Seattle area, including Microsoft, Amazon and Starbucks, are supporting the measure. That is an encouraging development for the future of the issue nationwide.

Same-sex marriage also stands a chance of prevailing in Maryland, where the same-sex marriage law was narrowly approved by both chambers of the Legislature and signed in March by the state's Democratic governor, Martin O'Malley. But the law was put off when opponents gathered sufficient signatures to toss the issue to a voter referendum.

If the law is approved by voters, the victory will owe much to the vigorous campaigning of Mr. O'Malley, the momentum created by President Obama's endorsement of marriage equality and efforts, including by the N.A.A.C.P., to bolster support among blacks, who make up nearly 30 percent of Maryland's residents.

The issue before Minnesota voters is whether to double-down on the state's existing law outlawing same-sex marriage by enshrining the antigay ban in the State Constitution. With polls showing a tight contest, it is hard to believe that a majority of Minnesotans would opt to place their state so sharply on the wrong side of fairness.

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Campaign Stops: The Polling Bias Debate

When the term "unskewed polls" entered the political lexicon this fall, courtesy of a conservative blogger convinced that national pollsters were missing a looming Romney landslide, there was a lot of talk about how the right's polling skepticism was ushering in a landscape in which every observer would become a Gallup unto himself, and even the basic shape of a political campaign would be up for angry partisan dispute.

Since then, the polls themselves have delivered us that very outcome – a final week where everyone can look at the numbers and credibly claim to see exactly what they hope to see.

A month ago, the polling numbers that supposedly needed to be unskewed all told more or less the same story: President Obama held a relatively comfortable national lead that roughly paralleled his lead in the crucial swing states. The pro-Romney polling skeptics were grasping at straws precisely because the election outcome seemed so easy to predict – not a rout, necessarily, but a convincing victory for the incumbent in the popular vote and the electoral college alike.

Today nothing is so clear. Since Mitt Romney's post-debate comeback leveled off in mid-October, the national polls have been remarkably consistent. Romney pulled ahead of the president in the RealClearPolitics national poll average on Oct. 9, and he has led, usually by less than a point, for all but three days since. That kind of margin is too narrow to make Romney a clear favorite, but it suggests a race that's a toss-up with a slight edge to the challenger.

The swing state numbers, though, suggest that the president is still headed for a narrow victory. He and Romney are tied in Virginia, a state that the Republican ticket almost certainly needs to win, and Obama has an edge in all the states – Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nevada – that the White House been relying on as its firewall against a Romney surge. These leads are narrow but relatively consistent: Like the national numbers, they've barely moved since mid-October.

There is nothing necessarily contradictory about these findings. As Americans who lived through the 2000 recount well know, it's possible to win the popular vote without winning the presidency, in which case the national polls and the state polls could both be vindicated. That reality alone probably justifies some of the current tilt toward Obama in prediction markets and election models like my colleague Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight blog. As Silver noted a few weeks ago, it means there are three ways that the state-national discrepancy can be resolved, and "two of the three hypotheses yield an Obama win."

But the electoral-popular split remains less likely than an outcome in which either the state or national polls are simply off the mark. It's interesting to imagine how a split might happen – presumably with Romney racking up larger-than-average margins in the South and overperforming among his fellow moderates in states like Connecticut and New Jersey – and it would vindicate the Obama campaign's strategy of spending heavily and early in the Midwest. It's still more probable, though, that the swing states will ultimately behave like swing states, and move with the country as a whole – in which case a significant number of pollsters will have consistently read either several states or the entire country wrong.

For would-be prognosticators this reality is vexing, but for partisans on both sides it's a gift. Liberals have been relying on the Silver model and others like it, which give priority to state polls for a variety of plausible historical reasons to stave off the anxiety that Mittmentum has induced. Conservatives have been building a credible counternarrative, arguing that the national polls showing Romney ahead offer a more accurate take on the final composition of the electorate than the more heavily Democratic samples showing up in state polls. And both sides can point to a host of confounding variables – early voting's impact on polls, the shifting composition of the independent vote, and now Hurricane Sandy – to buttress their case for how the election will turn out.

If this sounds like just another tedious case of spin against spin – well, it isn't, quite. First, the intellectual stakes are higher, because unlike our endless debates over the optimal health care policy or the wisest counterterrorism strategy, it will actually be settled, conclusively, only a week from now. (Well, barring a truly grisly recount, at least.) Some polls will be clearly right, and others will be clearly wrong; some analysts will be vindicated, and some will look overconfident or hackish. Obviously nobody's going to be hounded out of punditry if their predictions are mistaken, but we will at least be able to declare this particular argument settled, once and for all, in favor of liberals or conservatives.

So that's a good thing – and what's even better is that the endless arguments over polling data have actually ended up making this year's election seem more interesting and unpredictable, the motivations of voters more complex, and the act of voting more significant than in years when the polls are easy to interpret.

In this sense, the mere existence of this debate is good news for the democratic process. Almost everyone who follows politics lives for the "Dewey Defeats Truman" moments when pollsters get things wrong, because such moments vindicate the existence of actual elections, and the capacity of the public to surprise.

In most elections, the people predicting such a moment are just deceiving themselves, "unskewing" polls that weren't skewed to begin with in order to keep their hopes up and give their voters a reason to turn out.

But not so in 2012. Thanks to the closeness of the race and the divide between state and national polls, both Republicans and Democrats will head to the voting booth next week clutching something almost as precious as the franchise itself – a reason to believe.

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Op-Ed Contributor: An Oyster in the Storm

DOWN here at the end of Manhattan, on the border between evacuation zones B and C, I'm prepared, mostly. My bathtub is full of water, as is every container I own. My flashlights are battery-ed up, the pantry is crammed with canned goods and I even roasted a pork shoulder that I plan to gnaw on in the darkness if ConEd shuts down the power.

But as I confidently tick off all the things that Governor Andrew M. Cuomo recommends for my defense as Hurricane Sandy bears down on me, I find I'm desperately missing one thing.

I wish I had some oysters.

I'm not talking about oysters to eat — although a dozen would be nice to go with that leftover bottle of Champagne that I really should drink if the fridge goes off. I'm talking about the oysters that once protected New Yorkers from storm surges, a bivalve population that numbered in the trillions and that played a critical role in stabilizing the shoreline from Washington to Boston.

Crassostrea virginica, the American oyster, the same one that we eat on the half shell, is endemic to New York Harbor. Which isn't surprising: the best place for oysters is the margin between saltwater and freshwater, where river meets sea. Our harbor is chock-a-block with such places. Myriad rivers and streams, not just the Hudson and the East, but the Raritan, the Passaic, the Kill Van Kull, the Arthur Kill — the list goes on and on — flow into the upper and lower bay of the harbor, bringing nutrients from deep inland and distributing them throughout the water column.

Until European colonists arrived, oysters took advantage of the spectacular estuarine algae blooms that resulted from all these nutrients and built themselves a kingdom. Generation after generation of oyster larvae rooted themselves on layers of mature oyster shells for more than 7,000 years until enormous underwater reefs were built up around nearly every shore of greater New York.

Just as corals protect tropical islands, these oyster beds created undulation and contour on the harbor bottom that broke up wave action before it could pound the shore with its full force. Beds closer to shore clarified the water through their assiduous filtration (a single oyster can filter as much as 50 gallons of water a day); this allowed marsh grasses to grow, which in turn held the shores together with their extensive root structure.

But 400 years of poor behavior on the part of humans have ruined all that. As Mark Kurlansky details in his fine book "The Big Oyster," during their first 300 years on these shores colonists nearly ate the wild creatures out of existence. We mined the natural beds throughout the waterways of greater New York and burned them down for lime or crushed them up for road beds.

Once we'd hurled all that against the wild New York oyster, baymen switched to farming oysters. But soon New Yorkers ruined that too. Rudimentary sewer systems dumped typhoid- and cholera-carrying bacteria onto the beds of Jamaica Bay. Large industries dumped tons of pollutants like PCBs and heavy metals like chromium into the Hudson and Raritan Rivers, rendering shellfish from those beds inedible. By the late 1930s, oysters in New York and all the benefits they brought were finished.

Fortunately, the New York oyster is making something of a comeback. Ever since the Clean Water Act was passed in the 1970s, the harbor's waters have been getting cleaner, and there is now enough dissolved oxygen in our waterways to support oyster life. In the last 10 years, limited sets of natural oyster larvae occurred in several different waterways that make up the Greater New York Bight.

Alongside nature's efforts, a consortium of human-run organizations that include the Hudson River Foundation, New York-New Jersey Bay Keeper, the Harbor School and even the Army Corps of Engineers have worked together to put out a handful of test reefs throughout the Bight.

Yes, there have been some setbacks. New Jersey's state Department of Environmental Protection actually demanded that a test reef from the nearby bay at Keyport be removed for fear that people might poach those test oysters and eat them. But the program has persisted, even in New Jersey. In 2011 the Navy offered its pier at Naval Weapons Station Earle, near Sandy Hook, as a new place in New Jersey to get oysters going.

Will all of these attempts to get oysters back in New York City have any effect in defending us against Sandy? Surely not. The oyster kingdom is gone, and what we have now are a few struggling refugees just trying to get a foothold in their old territory.

But what is fairly certain is that storms like Sandy are going to grow stronger and more frequent, and our shorelines will become more vulnerable. For the present storm, all we could do was stock up on canned goods and fill up our bathtubs. But for the storms to come, we'd better start planting a lot more oysters.

Paul Greenberg, the author of "Four Fish," is writing a book about reviving local seafood.

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Editorial: A Big Storm Requires Big Government

Most Americans have never heard of the National Response Coordination Center, but they're lucky it exists on days of lethal winds and flood tides. The center is the war room of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, where officials gather to decide where rescuers should go, where drinking water should be shipped, and how to assist hospitals that have to evacuate.

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Disaster coordination is one of the most vital functions of "big government," which is why Mitt Romney wants to eliminate it. At a Republican primary debate last year, Mr. Romney was asked whether emergency management was a function that should be returned to the states. He not only agreed, he went further.

"Absolutely," he said. "Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that's the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that's even better." Mr. Romney not only believes that states acting independently can handle the response to a vast East Coast storm better than Washington, but that profit-making companies can do an even better job. He said it was "immoral" for the federal government to do all these things if it means increasing the debt.

It's an absurd notion, but it's fully in line with decades of Republican resistance to federal emergency planning. FEMA, created by President Jimmy Carter, was elevated to cabinet rank in the Bill Clinton administration, but was then demoted by President George W. Bush, who neglected it, subsumed it into the Department of Homeland Security, and placed it in the control of political hacks. The disaster of Hurricane Katrina was just waiting to happen.

The agency was put back in working order by President Obama, but ideology still blinds Republicans to its value. Many don't like the idea of free aid for poor people, or they think people should pay for their bad decisions, which this week includes living on the East Coast.

Over the last two years, Congressional Republicans have forced a 43 percent reduction in the primary FEMA grants that pay for disaster preparedness. Representatives Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor and other House Republicans have repeatedly tried to refuse FEMA's budget requests when disasters are more expensive than predicted, or have demanded that other valuable programs be cut to pay for them. The Ryan budget, which Mr. Romney praised as "an excellent piece of work," would result in severe cutbacks to the agency, as would the Republican-instigated sequester, which would cut disaster relief by 8.2 percent on top of earlier reductions.

Does Mr. Romney really believe that financially strapped states would do a better job than a properly functioning federal agency? Who would make decisions about where to send federal aid? Or perhaps there would be no federal aid, and every state would bear the burden of billions of dollars in damages. After Mr. Romney's 2011 remarks recirculated on Monday, his nervous campaign announced that he does not want to abolish FEMA, though he still believes states should be in charge of emergency management. Those in Hurricane Sandy's path are fortunate that, for now, that ideology has not replaced sound policy.

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Op-Ed Columnist: Is Mark Thompson the Right Man for the Job?

The position of chief executive of The New York Times Company is not the easiest to fill.

There are, to start with, the obvious business challenges: like all newspaper companies, the Times Company has struggled financially as the Internet has eroded its traditional revenue sources. Its third-quarter results, announced on Thursday, were typical: It reported a 9 percent drop in advertising revenues and an 85 percent decline in net income compared with the same period in 2011. Its battered stock price tumbled another 22 percent.

Then there is the Sulzberger family, which controls the Times Company. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., is both the company's chairman and the publisher of the flagship newspaper. Seven other family members work at The Times. No chief executive can expect to be able to make decisions independent of the Sulzbergers. The previous C.E.O., Janet Robinson, left abruptly in December, amid speculation that her relationship with Sulzberger had become strained.

So it was with no small relief that, after a lengthy search, Sulzberger announced in mid-August that Mark Thompson, the departing director general of the BBC, had agreed to take the job. Although the BBC has a radically different business model from The Times — it gets most of its money from an annual fee levied on every British television watcher — his tenure as the BBC's boss included an international expansion and strong digital growth, two areas where The Times could use his skills.

Thompson is scheduled to start his new job on Nov. 12. His nameplate is already on his office door. He is getting to know Times employees. Yet, since early October, all anybody has asked about Thompson are those two most damning of questions: what did he know, and when did he know it?

The questions are being asked, of course, in the wake of an enormous sexual abuse scandal that has engulfed the BBC. At its center is Jimmy Savile, who for three decades was one of the BBC's best-known personalities, his television shows aimed at the teenage set. He has also been accused of being an incorrigible pedophile; the number of young girls he is said to have molested could run into the hundreds. Although he stopped being a BBC regular in the mid-1990s, his enduring fame was such that when he died last fall, people in his hometown of Leeds lined the streets to mourn his passing.

Soon after his death, a BBC current affairs program called "Newsnight" began an investigation into Savile's sexual proclivities. Yet despite getting at least one woman on tape who said she had been molested by Savile, the piece was killed. Then, earlier this month, a BBC competitor, ITV, ran a devastating exposé of Savile. The ITV investigation raised subsequent questions about whether the BBC had covered up Savile's wrongdoing.

Plainly, the answer is yes. What is far less certain is how high the cover-up went. Thompson first said that he never heard the rumors about Savile, and that he didn't learn about the "Newsnight" program until after it was canceled. Given the byzantine nature of the BBC bureaucracy, these are plausible denials.

Here is where it gets a little less plausible. Thompson now says that at a cocktail party last December, a BBC reporter said to him, "You must be worried about the 'Newsnight' investigation into Jimmy Savile." Soon thereafter, Thompson asked his underlings about the investigation and was told that it had been killed — for journalistic reasons. He claims to have inquired no further, not even to ask what the investigation was about.

A few months later, the news broke in the British press that the BBC had, as The Daily Mail put it in a headline, "shelved Jimmy Savile sex abuse investigation 'to protect its own reputation.' " Given the seriousness of sexual abuse allegations — look at what it did to Penn State — you would think that Thompson and his underlings would immediately want to get to the bottom of it. But, again, they did nothing. Thompson winds up appearing willfully ignorant, and it makes you wonder what kind of an organization the BBC was when Thompson was running it — and what kind of leader he was. It also makes you wonder what kind of chief executive he'd be at The Times.

Arthur Sulzberger is in a difficult spot. He believes strongly that he's got the executive he needs to lead The Times to the promised land of healthy profits again. Although he declined to be interviewed for this column, he appears to have accepted Thompson's insistence that he knew nothing about the explosive allegations that became public literally 50 days after he accepted the Times job. Sulzberger is backing his man unreservedly.

For the sake of Times employees — not to mention the readers who want to see a vibrant New York Times Company — let's hope his faith in Thompson is warranted. Otherwise, the BBC won't be the only organization being asked tough questions about its judgment.

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Op-Ed Columnist: The Upside of Opportunism

Let's try to imagine what the world would look like if President Obama is re-elected.

Washington over the next four years would probably look much as it has over the last two: Obama running the White House, Republicans controlling the House and Democrats managing the Senate. We'd have had a long slog of an election before a change-hungry electorate, and we'd end up with pretty much the same cast of characters as before.

Obama would probably try to enact the agenda he laid out most clearly in his recent interview with The Des Moines Register:

Obama said he would try to recreate the Obama-Boehner budget deal of two summers ago, with $2.50 of spending cuts for every $1 in tax increases. Then he'd try immigration reform. Then he'd cut corporate tax rates as part of corporate reform. Then he'd "weed out" unnecessary regulations. All the while, he would implement Obamacare and increase funds for infrastructure. This is a moderate and sensible agenda.

The first order of business would be the budget deal, averting the so-called fiscal cliff. Obama would first go to Republicans in the Senate and say, "Look, we're stuck with each other. Let's cut a deal for the sake of the country." He would easily find 10 Republican senators willing to go along with a version of a Grand Bargain.

Then Obama would go to the House. He'd ask Eric Cantor, the majority leader, if there were votes for such a deal. The answer would probably be no. Republican House members still have more to fear from a primary challenge from the right than from a general election challenge from the left. Obama is tremendously unpopular in their districts. By running such a negative presidential campaign, Obama has won no mandate for a Grand Bargain. Obama himself is not going to suddenly turn into a master legislative craftsman on the order of Lyndon Johnson.

There'd probably be a barrage of recriminations from all sides. The left and right would be consumed with ire and accusations. Legislators would work out some set of fudges and gimmicks to kick the fiscal can down the road.

The ensuing bitterness would doom any hopes for bipartisan immigration reform. The rest of the Obama second term would be about reasonably small things: some new infrastructure programs; more math and science teachers; implementing Obamacare; mounting debt; a president increasingly turning to foreign affairs in search of legacy projects.

If you're a liberal Democratic, this is an acceptable outcome. Your party spent 80 years building the current welfare state. This outcome extends it.

Now let's try to imagine the world if Mitt Romney were to win. Republicans would begin with the premise that the status quo is unsustainable. The mounting debt is ruinous. The byzantine tax and regulatory regimes are stifling innovation and growth.

Republicans would like to take the reform agenda that Republican governors have pursued in places like Indiana and take it to the national level: structural entitlement reform; fundamental tax reform. These reforms wouldn't make government unrecognizable (we'd probably end up spending 21 percent of G.D.P. in Washington instead of about 24 percent), but they do represent a substantial shift to the right.

At the same time, Romney would probably be faced with a Democratic Senate. He would also observe the core lesson of this campaign: conservatism loses; moderation wins. Romney's prospects began to look decent only when he shifted to the center. A President Romney would look at the way Tea Party extremism had cost the G.O.P. Senate seats in Delaware and Nevada — and possibly Missouri and Indiana.

To get re-elected in a country with a rising minority population and a shrinking Republican coalition, Romney's shape-shifting nature would induce him to govern as a center-right moderate. To get his tax and entitlement reforms through the Democratic Senate, Romney would have to make some serious concessions: increase taxes on the rich as part of an overall reform; abandon the most draconian spending cuts in Paul Ryan's budget; reduce the size of his lavish tax-cut promises.

As President Romney made these concessions, conservatives would be in uproar. Talk-radio hosts would be the ones accusing him of Romneysia, forgetting all the promises he made in the primary season. There'd probably be a primary challenge from the right in 2016.

But Republicans in Congress would probably go along. They wouldn't want to destroy a Republican president. Romney would champion enough conservative reforms to allow some Republicans to justify their votes.

The bottom line is this: If Obama wins, we'll probably get small-bore stasis; if Romney wins, we're more likely to get bipartisan reform. Romney is more of a flexible flip-flopper than Obama. He has more influence over the most intransigent element in the Washington equation House Republicans. He's more likely to get big stuff done.

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Op-Ed Columnist: Sandy the Soothsayer

If you've watched whole sections of your home sail away, been stranded in a shelter or can't make contact with a loved one whose safety isn't certain, it's probably unsettling at best — and galling at worst — to hear Sandy referred to as an "October surprise," on a par with a bimbo eruption or corruption scandal, wreaking havoc on the presidential race above all else.

But there's no solipsism like political solipsism, and this election has addled people like few I've witnessed, with even the most peripheral developments and random polls scrutinized to smithereens for their outcome-auguring significance. Why should weather be exempt from such hyperventilation?

This week will be remembered as one when meteorology and punditry became strange bedfellows and a measure of perspective was gone with the wind.

I've read that Sandy will diminish the impact of homestretch advertising, because people whose electricity is out cannot watch TV.

I've also read that Sandy will intensify the impact of homestretch advertising, because people whose electricity is not out are raptly monitoring local stations, where such advertising is concentrated.

It has been opined that Sandy could hurt President Obama, disrupting early voting and depressing turnout. It has been opined that Sandy could help President Obama, affording him the opportunity to look presidential as he marshals federal resources and directs the emergency aid effort.

The wind-lashed tree outside my window is bending to the left, an omen clearly in the president's favor. But if I were looking at it from the building across the yard, it would be tilting right, an obvious nod for Mitt Romney.

Someone somewhere has no doubt produced a chart that breaks down storm categories and their electoral consequences.

Blizzards: pro-Romney. Snow evokes winter. Romney rescued the Winter Olympics. And one of his nicknames — Mittens — is an icy, slushy, flaky one.

Tsunamis: also pro-Romney. They affect coastlines, where cosmopolitan types cluster, and thus divert liberals' attention from the contest at hand, granting more power to the folks living in the flyover.

Tornados: pro-Obama. They distract the folks in the flyover, and are also known as twisters, which remind voters everywhere of Romney's pretzel of disparate positions over the course of his political career or, for that matter, the last five minutes.

And hurricanes?

From the Mother Jones Web site I learned that "all other things being equal, the incumbent party does less well when it's too wet or too dry," as opposed to when it's just right. This was the assessment of Larry Bartels, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University who has apparently made a study of this.

But how does the incumbent party do when the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars? Who, pray tell, is making a study of that?

President Obama suspended campaigning in order to man command central in Washington. This meant that a rally in Orlando, Fla., that he was supposed to do with Bill Clinton had to be headlined by Clinton alone. The former president, needless to say, was devastated.

Joe Biden detoured from New Hampshire to Ohio, which is also where Clinton headed after Florida. Romney stumped there too. Will Ohioans never know a moment's peace?

The Obama and Romney campaigns think that dropping in on a swing state over and over again will win them favor, but that's questionable. Given the traffics jams, flight delays and hordes of sarcastic columnists that candidates bring with them, I wouldn't want a personal visit. Maybe just a gift basket.

As Sandy churned, so did the political panic. Would the storm down enough phone lines to impede daily tracking polls? A column in The Huffington Post articulated this dark fear, which I'd characterize instead as a delightful reprieve.

Would the surge of tides end the surge of Mitt, his momentum washed away by the storm's domination of the news?

And would the Labor Department seize on Sandy and the shutdown of federal offices as an excuse not to release new unemployment figures on Friday, saying that work on them had been delayed? Republicans went into anticipatory conniptions, until officials with the department announced that there probably wouldn't be any lag.

Reality checks were imperative. The state whose cancellation of early voting was most often cited was Maryland. Obama doesn't need early voting to win Maryland. He almost doesn't need a pulse.

And climate change was brought up. "It's as if Mother Nature is sending yet another message to American voters: ignore me no longer," wrote Heather Taylor-Miesle, the director of the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund, in a blog post e-mailed to many journalists.

Of course Obama and Romney themselves ignored climate change in their three debates. So maybe Mother Nature isn't so much putting her thumb on the scale as showing both candidates the back of her hand.

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Editorial: Surveillance and Accountability

Nearly seven years after the disclosure of President George W. Bush's secret program of spying on Americans without a warrant, the Supreme Court is about to hear arguments on whether judges can even consider the constitutionality of doing this kind of dragnet surveillance without adequate rules to protect people's rights.

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President Obama's solicitor general, Donald Verrilli Jr., will be calling on the court to toss out the case based on a particularly cynical Catch-22: Because the wiretaps are secret and no one can say for certain that their calls have been or will be monitored, no one has standing to bring suit over the surveillance. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit rejected that avoidance of accountability, and so should the Supreme Court.

The lawsuit the Justice Department is trying so hard to block concerns the 2008 statute amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The new law retroactively approved Mr. Bush's legally dubious warrantless wiretapping and conferred immunity from prosecution on the telephone companies that cooperated in the program.

The measure gave the government broad and unprecedented power to intercept the communications of Americans without individualized warrants based on probable cause or any administrative finding of a terrorism connection. It lowered the burden of proof for government wiretapping of suspects, weakened judicial supervision, and failed to set adequate limits on retention and dissemination of acquired information. The statute discarded traditional constitutional protections for the privacy of innocent people, and chilled the exercise of the core democratic rights of free speech and association.

It would not require a legal stretch for the court to find that the plaintiffs had standing to sue. The plaintiffs are lawyers and human rights, labor, legal and media organizations engaged in work that requires them to be in communication with colleagues, clients, journalistic sources, victims of human rights abuses and others outside the United States. They have a reasonable fear of government monitoring of sensitive conversations, based on the law's vacuum-cleaner approach to surveillance and the identities and locations of their contacts.

They have taken expensive and burdensome steps to avoid the risk of government eavesdropping, demonstrating tangible injury. For lawyers, an ethical obligation to safeguard client confidences requires such protective actions. Under existing Supreme Court doctrine, plaintiffs who have been harmed by government conduct are allowed to bring suit, even if, as here, they may not be direct targets. As the Supreme Court recognized in an important 1972 case, the invoking of national security to justify warrantless surveillance only heightens the need for searching judicial review.

Technically, the only question before the court is the fairly narrow-sounding issue of standing that it has agreed to hear. But should the court acquiesce to the government's cramped reading of standing, the larger implications should be clear to everyone. As a practical matter, it would foreclose any meaningful judicial review of the warrantless wiretapping statute, perhaps permanently. The damage to the nation's system of checks and balances, which relies on independent court scrutiny of laws as a safeguard against legislative and executive branch overreaching that disrespects constitutional rights, would be serious.

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Campaign Stops: Billionaires Going Rogue

If there is one rule of thumb governing campaign finance regulation, or the lack thereof, it is that the consequences of any changes in the system are unpredictable.

In 2002, when Congress enacted the McCain-Feingold law barring large "soft money" contributions from corporations, unions and rich people to the political parties, many observers assumed that the Democrats would suffer more. The party had never fully cultivated a small donor base and had consistently been more dependent on mega-contributions than the Republican Party.

In less than two years, this assumption was proven wrong. First, in the 2004 election, small donors in droves gave their credit card numbers to the Democratic campaign of John Kerry, and Kerry was able to keep pace with George W. Bush, dollar for dollar. Four years later, the cash flow to Barack Obama swamped John McCain. The Internet, and with it the ability of campaigns to inexpensively reach millions of prospective donors, permanently transformed fundraising.

In 2010, campaign finance law was turned on its head. The Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, and appeals court decisions such as Speech Now v. F.E.C., opened the door to unlimited contributions to technically independent political action committees (super PACs) from corporations, unions and individuals.

The result has been a stupefying array of PACs, 501(c)4s and 501(c)6s that even professionals can barely keep track of. The future that Buckley v. Valeo set in motion almost 40 years ago has arrived, and the current multiplicity and multidirectionality of "reform" has overwhelmed both the people and the parties.

The virtually unanimous view throughout the course of four decades of revised regulation was that the Republican Party and its candidates would be the major beneficiaries, and, so far, that has been true.

The first chart, provided by the Center for Responsive Politics, shows that outside spending tilted left in every year from 2000 to 2008, but that in 2010 — in the aftermath of deregulation — the balance skewed decisively to the right. In the current 2011-12 election cycle, it shifted overwhelmingly to the right:

The movement rightwards of almost half a billion dollars in this cycle alone — signified by the red bar on the graph representing Republican donations — is not, however, the pure gold that analysts on both sides expected.

While, the rapid growth of well-financed and autonomous competitors threatens all existing power structures, the bulk of the costs are likely to fall on the Republican Party. The right wing of the Republican Party has more disruptive potential than the left wing of the Democratic Party because it is more willing to go to extremes: see the billboards showing Obama bowing down before an Arab Sheik, or the ads and DVD claiming that Obama is the bastard son of the African American communist, Frank Marshall Davis.

There are, furthermore, structural and historical differences between the parties: the Republican Party and the conservative establishment is institutionally stronger than the Democratic Party, with an infrastructure that served as a bulwark through the 1960s and 70s – the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Olin Foundation, etc. — when Republicans appeared to be a permanent congressional minority. Its financial prowess enabled the party to enforce more discipline on its consultants and elected officials. The Republican establishment also exercises more authority over policy and candidate selection than does its Democratic counterpart.

In recent years, the Democratic Party organization has gained some strength and it plays a much more active role in campaigns at all levels than in the past, but as an institutional force capable of command and control, it remains light years behind the Republican Party.

Republicans, in contrast to Democrats, prefer hierarchical, well-ordered organizations, and are much more willing to cede authority to those in power. Democrats, despite the discipline of individual campaign efforts, tend more toward anarchy than hierarchy. Historically, one result of this partisan difference is that the Republican establishment has tightly managed candidate selection at the presidential level. With extraordinary consistency, the party has crushed insurgent candidates and selected the next in line. Ronald Reagan and Bob Dole, for example, both had to wait until it was their turn.

The Republican establishment has a full arsenal of weapons at its disposal, including endorsements, favored speaking engagements at key party gatherings, leverage over top consultants and a signaling process to show who has been anointed from on high.

The most powerful weapon of all was always the oversight exercised by party leaders over the flow of money to candidates. Every four years when the nomination process began, business leaders, Republican-leaning trade associations, top corporate law firms and investment bankers slowly formed a consensus behind a favored candidate.

The establishment snuffed out insurgencies, including candidates from the social right — Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson and Gary Bauer — and candidates from the economic right like Jack Kemp and Steve Forbes. None of these outsiders rose past marginal status, although their presence in primary contests often forced the mainstream candidate to make concessions that proved damaging in the general election.

Compare that history of unbroken authoritarian dominance to the 2012 Republican nomination fight.

Unleashed by Citizens United, a handful of renegade billionaires made life miserable for Mitt Romney, the establishment candidate. More importantly, it only took four men — Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas and Macao casino mogul; Harold Simmons, a Dallas-based leveraged buyout specialist; Foster Friess, a conservative Christian and a successful investor; and William Dore, a Louisiana energy company C.E.O. – to stun traditional party power brokers during the first four months of 2012.

The millions of dollars these men put into the super PACs associated with two clearly marginal candidates, Newt Gingrich and the former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, turned the primary process into an open contest, giving full voice to the more extreme wings dominated by the Tea Party and the evangelical right.

The newly empowered billionaires are positioned to challenge the Republican Party at its point of greatest vulnerability, during the primaries. The three major party organizations — the Republican National, Congressional and Senatorial Committees – cannot, except in unusual circumstances, intervene in primaries. Those are to be decided by voters, not the party.

The new class of financial bosses, equipped to legitimate primary candidates at all levels, has no such restriction over participation in primaries. Instead, the incentives are substantial to engage full force in the nomination process where the marginal value of each dollar is higher and more likely to influence the outcome than in the general election.

These new players, along with their super PACs, undermine the influence of the parties in another crucial way. Before Citizens United, the three major Republican Party committees exerted power because their financial preeminence gave them the final word on the award of contracts to pollsters, direct mail, voter contact, and media consultants – very few of whom were willing to alienate a key source of cash.

The ascendance of super PACs creates a separate and totally independent source of contracts for the community of political professionals. Super PACs and other independent groups already raise more than any of the political party committees and almost as much as either the Republican or Democratic Party committees raise in toto.

This chart shows the rapidity of the growth of independent spending:

And this chart shows the amounts raised so far this year by the party committees:

Nathan Persily, a professor at Columbia Law School and a political scientist, made the point to me with a question: "Who is the Republican Party in the Citizens United age? If you had to point to the 'Republican Party' would you be more likely to point to Reince Preibus (and implicitly the R.N.C.) or Karl Rove (and Crossroads G.P.S.)? I think candidates might consider Rove more important."

Preibus is the chairman of the R.N.C.; Karl Rove founded American Crossroads, a super PAC, and Crossroad GPS, a tax exempt independent expenditure organization that is not required to disclose donors. So far in the 2011-12 election cycle, American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS have spent $174.28 million, a sum two million dollars greater than the $172.2 million spent by the Republican Congressional and Senatorial Committees combined.

By now you may have the question in the back of your mind: who cares about the political parties? Aren't they just agents of the status quo at a time when innovative thinking is needed? Maybe diminishing their role will help lessen polarization and open up the system?

There may be some truth to this and perhaps the benefits will outweigh the costs. Conversely, the diminishment of the parties means that the institutions with the single-minded goal of winning a majority will be weakened. When parties are influential, they can help keep some candidates and office holders from going off the ideological deep end. The emergence of independently financed super PACs give voice to those with the most extreme views. An ad like this is likely to alienate as many citizens as it motivates:

Predictions are notoriously dangerous, given the multitude of possible outcomes. If the parties are eviscerated, the political system could adjust itself and regain vitality. But I doubt it. For all their flaws, strong political parties are important to a healthy political system. The displacement of the parties by super rich men determined to flex their financial muscles is another giant step away from democracy.

Thomas B. Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of the book "The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics," which was published earlier this year.

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Op-Ed Columnist: Medicaid on the Ballot

There's a lot we don't know about what Mitt Romney would do if he won. He refuses to say which tax loopholes he would close to make up for $5 trillion in tax cuts; his economic "plan" is an empty shell.

But one thing is clear: If he wins, Medicaid — which now covers more than 50 million Americans, and which President Obama would expand further as part of his health reform — will face savage cuts. Estimates suggest that a Romney victory would deny health insurance to about 45 million people who would have coverage if he lost, with two-thirds of that difference due to the assault on Medicaid.

So this election is, to an important degree, really about Medicaid. And this, in turn, means that you need to know something more about the program.

For while Medicaid is generally viewed as health care for the nonelderly poor, that's only part of the story. And focusing solely on who Medicaid covers can obscure an equally important fact: Medicaid has been more successful at controlling costs than any other major part of the nation's health care system.

So, about coverage: most Medicaid beneficiaries are indeed relatively young (because older people are covered by Medicare) and relatively poor (because eligibility for Medicaid, unlike Medicare, is determined by need). But more than nine million Americans benefit from both Medicare and Medicaid, and elderly or disabled beneficiaries account for the majority of Medicaid's costs. And contrary to what you may have heard, the great majority of Medicaid beneficiaries are in working families.

For those who get coverage through the program, Medicaid is a much-needed form of financial aid. It is also, quite literally, a lifesaver. Mr. Romney has said that a lack of health insurance doesn't kill people in America; oh yes, it does, and states that expand Medicaid coverage show striking drops in mortality.

So Medicaid does a vast amount of good. But at what cost? There's a widespread perception, gleefully fed by right-wing politicians and propagandists, that Medicaid has "runaway" costs. But the truth is just the opposite. While costs grew rapidly in 2009-10, as a depressed economy made more Americans eligible for the program, the longer-term reality is that Medicaid is significantly better at controlling costs than the rest of our health care system.

How much better? According to the best available estimates, the average cost of health care for adult Medicaid recipients is about 20 percent less than it would be if they had private insurance. The gap for children is even larger.

And the gap has been widening over time: Medicaid costs have consistently risen a bit less rapidly than Medicare costs, and much less rapidly than premiums on private insurance.

How does Medicaid achieve these lower costs? Partly by having much lower administrative costs than private insurers. It's always worth remembering that when it comes to health care, it's the private sector, not government programs, that suffers from stifling, costly bureaucracy.

Also, Medicaid is much more effective at bargaining with the medical-industrial complex.

Consider, for example, drug prices. Last year a government study compared the prices that Medicaid paid for brand-name drugs with those paid by Medicare Part D — also a government program, but one run through private insurance companies, and explicitly forbidden from using its power in the market to bargain for lower prices. The conclusion: Medicaid pays almost a third less on average. That's a lot of money.

Is Medicaid perfect? Of course not. Most notably, the hard bargain it drives with health providers means that quite a few doctors are reluctant to see Medicaid patients. Yet given the problems facing American health care — sharply rising costs and declining private-sector coverage — Medicaid has to be regarded as a highly successful program. It provides good if not great coverage to tens of millions of people who would otherwise be left out in the cold, and as I said, it does much right to keep costs down.

By any reasonable standard, this is a program that should be expanded, not slashed — and a major expansion of Medicaid is part of the Affordable Care Act.

Why, then, are Republicans so determined to do the reverse, and kill this success story? You know the answers. Partly it's their general hostility to anything that helps the 47 percent — those Americans whom they consider moochers who need to be taught self-reliance. Partly it's the fact that Medicaid's success is a reproach to their antigovernment ideology.

The question — and it's a question the American people will answer very soon — is whether they'll get to indulge these prejudices at the expense of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.

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Op-Ed Contributor: Want to Boost the Economy? Invest in Science

MITT ROMNEY said in all three presidential debates that we need to expand the economy. But he left out a critical ingredient: investments in science and technology.

Scientific knowledge and new technologies are the building blocks for long-term economic growth — "the key to a 21st-century economy," as President Obama said in the final debate.

So it is astonishing that Mr. Romney talks about economic growth while planning deep cuts in investment in science, technology and education. They are among the discretionary items for which spending could be cut 22 percent or more under the Republican budget plan, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the plan, which Mr. Romney has endorsed, could cut overall nondefense science, engineering, biomedical and technology research by a quarter over the next decade, and energy research by two-thirds.

Mr. Romney seems to have lost sight of the critical role of research investments not only in developing new medicines and cleaner energy sources but also in creating higher-skilled jobs.

The private sector can't do it alone. We rely on companies to translate scientific discoveries into products. But federal investment in research and development, especially basic research, is critical to their success. Just look at Google, which was started by two graduate students working on a project supported by the National Science Foundation and today employs 54,000 people.

Richard K. Templeton, chief executive of Texas Instruments, put it this way in 2009: "Research conducted at universities and national labs underpins the new innovations that drive economic growth."

President Bill Clinton, for whom I served as science adviser from 1998 to 2001, understood that. In those years, we balanced the federal budget and achieved strong growth, creating about two million jobs a year. A main reason was the longstanding bipartisan consensus on investing in science. With support from Congress, Mr. Clinton put research funding on a growth path, including a doubling over five years (completed under President George W. Bush) of the budget for the National Institutes of Health.

In 2010, the federal government invested about $26.6 billion in N.I.H. research; those investments led to $69 billion in economic activity and supported 485,000 jobs across the country, according to United for Medical Research, a nonpartisan group.

Moreover, the $3.8 billion taxpayers invested in the Human Genome Project between 1988 and 2003 helped create and drive $796 billion in economic activity by industries that now depend on the advances achieved in genetics, according to the Battelle Memorial Institute, a nonprofit group that supports research for the industry.

So science investments not only created jobs in new industries of the time, like the Internet and nanotechnology, but also the rising tax revenues that made budget surpluses possible.

American science has not been faring so well in recent budgets. President Obama has repeatedly requested steady increases for scientific research, aimed at putting the budgets of three key science agencies — the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy's Office of Science, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology — on a path to double, by 2016, the combined $10 billion they received in 2006. But a polarized Congress has not delivered at that rate, and the goal could be nullified if next year sees the beginning of draconian cuts.

Meanwhile, the frontiers of science continue to expand. President Obama is proposing that the United States boost its overall national research and development investments — including private enterprise and academia as well as government — to 3 percent of gross domestic product — a number that would still lag behind Israel, Sweden, Japan and South Korea, in that order.

In an increasingly complex world, that should be only a start. If our country is to remain strong and prosperous and a land of rewarding jobs, we need to understand this basic investment principle in America's future: no science, no growth.

Neal F. Lane, a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University, was director of the National Science Foundation and the chief science and technology adviser to President Bill Clinton.

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Op-Ed Columnist: The No Agenda Myth

I feel a rising tide of ennui. America is in the last, numbing days of an excruciating slog to Election Day and some of my tribe — the jaded scribes, the blogging sages and caffeinated cable chatterers — have run out of patience, poor babies. Searching for the source of their malaise, beyond the dubious science of the polls and the mean spirits of the campaigns and the emptiness of the slogans and our own limited attention spans, those of my ilk have come up with this high-minded diagnosis: the candidates have No Agenda.

They say: "It's a good time to follow the candidates if you like elections about nothing." And: "Obama's greatest weakness is that his proposals for the future are nonexistent." And: "The president did not lay out a second-term agenda ... And that is where he is the weakest." And: "People say, I want to vote for him, but he hasn't told me what he's going to do." And, by the way: "You don't get that from Mitt Romney, either." I've heard it countless times and, truth be told, probably said it myself once or twice. No Agenda!

When President Obama's campaign last week issued a 20-page booklet of its intentions, it was dismissed in my own newspaper for containing "no new proposals," and in The Wall Street Journal as a "glossy" pitch to critics who say "Mr. Obama hasn't fully explained what he hopes to accomplish if re-elected." Romney has made the ostensible lack of an Obama agenda the heart of his closing argument. That's shrewd politics. The No Agenda meme works nicely for Romney. If Obama has no agenda then he is, by default, the candidate of the status quo, and the status quo is a painfully slow recovery, a hovering debt crisis and a worrisome world. Obama's retort is that Romney is trying to hide his agenda — dressing a pack of wolves in sheep's clothing.

But Romney, with or without an agenda, is the candidate who has not presided over a time of national anxiety, and therefore he is the de facto candidate of change. Or as the new slogan has it, "Big Change."

Let us breathe deeply and clear our minds.

There are plenty of legitimate reasons voters (and the media) should be disenchanted by the candidates and the campaign, but the idea that we'll be voting in the dark is not one of them. Yes, the candidates have been reluctant to publish some unpleasant details of their policies. [See footnote 1] Most presidential candidates in modern times don't, for the understandable reason that details can be cherry-picked for attack ads. Yes, identifying Romney's plan requires some guesswork, because he has been at various times all things to all voters. And yes, Obama has been short on grand man-to-the-moon promises and on the pulse-quickening oratory our weary commentariat requires. He sometimes seems to have misread Mario Cuomo's famous guidance: he governs in prose and campaigns in prose.

And yet, can we really say we don't know what to expect from these two men?

With Obama, we can anticipate that the unfinished business of universal health care and the re-regulation of the Wall Street casino will be finished. We can expect investments in education, infrastructure and innovation, followed by a gradual, balanced attack on deficits that includes higher taxes on the wealthiest. (And this time he will have a hefty stick to apply to a recalcitrant Congress: the fiscal cliff, which forces Congress to compromise or share the blame for the ensuing havoc.) We can expect the Pentagon, after winding down two wars, to bank a peace dividend. If Obama is re-elected, especially if he is elected with substantial Latino support, we can expect that he will try to deliver on his postponed promise of comprehensive immigration reform. The fact that these objectives represent a continuation of his first term does not mean he is aiming low. These are ambitious goals.

If Romney is elected, there will be tension between his inner pragmatist and the stubborn extremists in his own party, but we can fairly expect a rollback of universal health care in favor of the rough marketplace, and at least a partial dismantling of regulations on banks, extractive industries and whatever other industries squeal about job-killing red tape. We can expect a lowering of the safety net, especially a retrenchment of Medicaid and a marketization of Medicare. His deficit plan will rely on draconian spending cuts and on the supply-side superstition that tax cuts automatically produce growth. Romney will be somewhat more enthusiastic about oil and coal, and will put less faith in renewables. The military will not want. You can expect another Scalia or two on the Supreme Court, the defunding of Planned Parenthood and a social agenda aimed at appeasing the evangelical base, mainly by letting the states decide. On foreign policy Romney has gravitated toward Obama's caution, and I tend to believe him, if only because whoever is president will have his hands too full at home to embark on a war in Iran or Syria as long as it is avoidable. [See footnote 2]

There's more, but you get the idea. Two agendas; compare and contrast.

The second thing to say is that an "agenda" is at best a rough guide to what a president will do, given the constraints imposed by Congress, curveballs pitched by fate, and what presidents learn on the job. Presidents surprise you, and surprise themselves. Obama really meant to close Guantánamo; he lost that one. I think he intended to reform immigration until other priorities took his energy. Libya was certainly not high on his 2008 agenda.

And that is why — third point — we don't elect agendas, we don't elect platforms, we don't even elect parties to the presidency. This is not a referendum or a ballot initiative. Indeed, we are skeptical of agendas. If either candidate had announced in his final weeks some grandiose initiative of the kind the pundits prescribe, we'd have mocked it as October-surprise gimmickry, a sign of desperation. We elect the human being we trust to have our best interests in mind. We choose a direction, a disposition, a set of instincts and convictions and competencies.

When voters tell pundits, and pundits tell us, that they are frustrated that the candidates lack an agenda, they are just saying they wish we could foretell the future. If we could do that, a lot of pundits would be out of business.

•

Footnote 1: The most familiar example of withholding details, of course, is Romney's refusal to identify which tax breaks he would eliminate to offset the revenues lost by reducing income tax rates. He knows perfectly well that tax deductions for things like home mortgages and charitable donations are popular and well defended by lobbyists. But lost in that whole discussion was one of the more interesting ideas of the campaign season.

Romney said that rather than abolish popular tax breaks, he would cap deductions at a fixed amount; at various times he tossed out $17,000, $25,000 and $50,000 as possible limits.

The inescapable problem with Romney's plan, as the impartial Tax Policy Center calculated, is that the math doesn't work. Even if you eliminate all personal deductions, you recoup less than half of the $4 trillion to $5 trillion cost of his plan to lower income tax rates by 20 percent. Capping deductions recoups even less.

But that doesn't mean capping deductions is a bad idea. It is a lot easier than taking on the constituencies and lobbyists defending each specific tax break. It's simple, politically doable and highly progressive. In short, as the Tax Policy Center's Roberton Williams and Howard Gleckman have explained on the center's blog, while it doesn't raise the amount Romney needs to make his math work, it's an excellent way to raise revenues. Obama should think about grabbing it.

Footnote 2: If I had to bet which candidate was more likely to launch airstrikes against Iran or to up the military ante in Syria, I'd be inclined to give a slight edge to Obama. He has already crossed the daunting psychological threshold of dispensing death: surge troops, drone strikes, the Bin Laden raid. Romney talks tough, but has never had to make the hard decision to use force, which is easier said than done.

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Editorial: Barack Obama for Re-Election

The economy is slowly recovering from the 2008 meltdown, and the country could suffer another recession if the wrong policies take hold. The United States is embroiled in unstable regions that could easily explode into full-blown disaster. An ideological assault from the right has started to undermine the vital health reform law passed in 2010. Those forces are eroding women's access to health care, and their right to control their lives. Nearly 50 years after passage of the Civil Rights Act, all Americans' rights are cheapened by the right wing's determination to deny marriage benefits to a selected group of us. Astonishingly, even the very right to vote is being challenged.

That is the context for the Nov. 6 election, and as stark as it is, the choice is just as clear.

President Obama has shown a firm commitment to using government to help foster growth. He has formed sensible budget policies that are not dedicated to protecting the powerful, and has worked to save the social safety net to protect the powerless. Mr. Obama has impressive achievements despite the implacable wall of refusal erected by Congressional Republicans so intent on stopping him that they risked pushing the nation into depression, held its credit rating hostage, and hobbled economic recovery.

Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, has gotten this far with a guile that allows him to say whatever he thinks an audience wants to hear. But he has tied himself to the ultraconservative forces that control the Republican Party and embraced their policies, including reckless budget cuts and 30-year-old, discredited trickle-down ideas. Voters may still be confused about Mr. Romney's true identity, but they know the Republican Party, and a Romney administration would reflect its agenda. Mr. Romney's choice of Representative Paul Ryan as his running mate says volumes about that.

We have criticized individual policy choices that Mr. Obama has made over the last four years, and have been impatient with his unwillingness to throw himself into the political fight. But he has shaken off the hesitancy that cost him the first debate, and he approaches the election clearly ready for the partisan battles that would follow his victory.

We are confident he would challenge the Republicans in the "fiscal cliff" battle even if it meant calling their bluff, letting the Bush tax cuts expire and forcing them to confront the budget sequester they created. Electing Mr. Romney would eliminate any hope of deficit reduction that included increased revenues.

In the poisonous atmosphere of this campaign, it may be easy to overlook Mr. Obama's many important achievements, including carrying out the economic stimulus, saving the auto industry, improving fuel efficiency standards, and making two very fine Supreme Court appointments.

Health Care

Mr. Obama has achieved the most sweeping health care reforms since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. The reform law takes a big step toward universal health coverage, a final piece in the social contract.

It was astonishing that Mr. Obama and the Democrats in Congress were able to get a bill past the Republican opposition. But the Republicans' propagandistic distortions of the new law helped them wrest back control of the House, and they are determined now to repeal the law.

That would eliminate the many benefits the reform has already brought: allowing children under 26 to stay on their parents' policies; lower drug costs for people on Medicare who are heavy users of prescription drugs; free immunizations, mammograms and contraceptives; a ban on lifetime limits on insurance payments. Insurance companies cannot deny coverage to children with pre-existing conditions. Starting in 2014, insurers must accept all applicants. Once fully in effect, the new law would start to control health care costs.

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Op-Ed Columnist: Why I Am Pro-Life

HARD-LINE conservatives have gone to new extremes lately in opposing abortion. Last week, Richard Mourdock, the Tea Party-backed Republican Senate candidate in Indiana, declared during a debate that he was against abortion even in the event of rape because after much thought he "came to realize that life is that gift from God. And even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen." That came on the heels of the Tea Party-backed Republican Representative Joe Walsh of Illinois saying after a recent debate that he opposed abortion even in cases where the life of the mother is in danger, because "with modern technology and science, you can't find one instance" in which a woman would not survive without an abortion. "Health of the mother has become a tool for abortions anytime, for any reason," Walsh said. That came in the wake of the Senate hopeful in Missouri, Representative Todd Akin, remarking that pregnancy as a result of "legitimate rape" is rare because "the female body has ways to try and shut that whole thing down."

These were not slips of the tongue. These are the authentic voices of an ever-more-assertive far-right Republican base that is intent on using uncompromising positions on abortion to not only unseat more centrist Republicans — Mourdock defeated the moderate Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana in the primary — but to overturn the mainstream consensus in America on this issue. That consensus says that those who choose to oppose abortion in their own lives for reasons of faith or philosophy should be respected, but those women who want to make a different personal choice over what happens with their own bodies should be respected, and have the legal protection to do so, as well.

But judging from the unscientific — borderline crazy — statements opposing abortion that we're hearing lately, there is reason to believe that this delicate balance could be threatened if Mitt Romney and Representative Paul Ryan, and their even more extreme allies, get elected. So to those who want to protect a woman's right to control what happens with her own body, let me offer just one piece of advice: to name something is to own it. If you can name an issue, you can own the issue. And we must stop letting Republicans name themselves "pro-life" and Democrats as "pro-choice." It is a huge distortion.

In my world, you don't get to call yourself "pro-life" and be against common-sense gun control — like banning public access to the kind of semiautomatic assault rifle, designed for warfare, that was used recently in a Colorado theater. You don't get to call yourself "pro-life" and want to shut down the Environmental Protection Agency, which ensures clean air and clean water, prevents childhood asthma, preserves biodiversity and combats climate change that could disrupt every life on the planet. You don't get to call yourself "pro-life" and oppose programs like Head Start that provide basic education, health and nutrition for the most disadvantaged children. You can call yourself a "pro-conception-to-birth, indifferent-to-life conservative." I will never refer to someone who pickets Planned Parenthood but lobbies against common-sense gun laws as "pro-life."

"Pro-life" can mean only one thing: "respect for the sanctity of life." And there is no way that respect for the sanctity life can mean we are obligated to protect every fertilized egg in a woman's ovary, no matter how that egg got fertilized, but we are not obligated to protect every living person from being shot with a concealed automatic weapon. I have no respect for someone who relies on voodoo science to declare that a woman's body can distinguish a "legitimate" rape, but then declares — when 99 percent of all climate scientists conclude that climate change poses a danger to the sanctity of all life on the planet — that global warming is just a hoax.

The term "pro-life" should be a shorthand for respect for the sanctity of life. But I will not let that label apply to people for whom sanctity for life begins at conception and ends at birth. What about the rest of life? Respect for the sanctity of life, if you believe that it begins at conception, cannot end at birth. That radical narrowing of our concern for the sanctity of life is leading to terrible distortions in our society.

Respect for life has to include respect for how that life is lived, enhanced and protected — not only at the moment of conception but afterward, in the course of that life. That's why, for me, the most "pro-life" politician in America is New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. While he supports a woman's right to choose, he has also used his position to promote a whole set of policies that enhance everyone's quality of life — from his ban on smoking in bars and city parks to reduce cancer, to his ban on the sale in New York City of giant sugary drinks to combat obesity and diabetes, to his requirement for posting calorie counts on menus in chain restaurants, to his push to reinstate the expired federal ban on assault weapons and other forms of common-sense gun control, to his support for early childhood education, to his support for mitigating disruptive climate change.

Now that is what I call "pro-life."

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Op-Ed Columnist: Of Mad Men, Mad Women and Meat Loaf

MY sister, who was a secretary in the "Mad Men" era, is not worried that Republicans want to drag us back to being secretaries in the "Mad Men" era, as Tina Fey suggests.

Peggy is that most sought-after creature, an undecided woman who is a swing voter. She started as a blond concrete block in President Obama's female firewall, but like many other women, is now pondering divorcing him for the man who looks and darn well talks like a '50s sitcom dad.

She does not believe the economy is getting better, and she trusts Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan not to do anything radical on women's reproductive rights or Medicare. She rejects my contention that Republicans in Congress would force them to; they see Mitt as an empty suit who would happily sign their far-right bills as long as he got Air Force One.

Our mom, a strict Catholic, taught us that it was immoral for a woman to be expected to carry a rapist's baby for nine months. (Don't even mention that rapists can assert parental rights in 31 states.)

But compassion is scant among the Puritan tribe of Republicans running now. As The Huffington Post reports, at least a dozen G.O.P. Senate candidates oppose abortion for rape victims. The party platform calls for a constitutional amendment with no exceptions for rape, incest or the mother's life.

Representative Todd Akin, running against Senator Claire McCaskill in Missouri, differentiated between rape and "legitimate rape," implying that women would fake rape to get abortions, and suggested that women have a magic way not to get pregnant from rape.

Representative Joe Walsh, running for re-election in Illinois, contended that "with advances in science and technology, 'health of the mother' has become a tool for abortions of any time or for any reason." Appalled obstetricians ticked off a litany of life-threatening situations.

Last week, Richard Mourdock, a Senate candidate in Indiana, said in a debate that "even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen."

Mitt was certainly no profile in courage after Mourdock's comment blew up. He didn't take back his endorsement. He hid from reporters on his plane, and even dodged his usual custom of giving a reporter a birthday hug. Instead, he broadcast a birthday message to her on the intercom from the safety of first class.

It shouldn't be a surprise that many women support Romney, even though he has somersaulted on reproductive rights and his running mate sponsored a bill with Akin giving fertilized eggs the "legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood." Just as it shouldn't be surprising that Romney has the support of a huge swath of blue-collar white men, even though he's on a mission to make the 1 percent 100 percent able to indulge in car elevators.

Republicans are geniuses at getting people to vote against their own self-interest. Hispanics, however, do not seem inclined to vote against their self-interest on immigration laws, and Obama is counting on that to buoy him.

After the draining W. years — when grumpy old men foolishly refought grumpy old wars — Barack Obama was going to sweep us to modernity.

But, as the Republican strategist Alex Castellanos notes, "He gets to Washington and calls Larry Summers." The only hope and change Obama could conjure this time was changing the period on his campaign slogan — "Forward." — to an exclamation point. Romney was right when he spoke at a rally in Iowa on Friday and said the president had made the election "about small, shiny objects."

Mitt may have peaked too soon. Now he is left counting on what advisers call "the silent majority." Obama's support among white voters has dived, and news reports call this the most racially polarized race since 1988. John Sununu, shockingly still a Romney surrogate, offered another flash of thinly veiled racism when he suggested that Colin Powell endorsed the president because they both were black, a comment he recanted. Sarah Palin said Obama was guilty of "shuck and jive" on Benghazi.

The high-minded Obama is trying to be hip, trash-talking Mitt in Rolling Stone, going on MTV to chitchat about hip-hop, joking with Jay Leno about his childhood in Kenya with Donald Trump. His campaign has a new ad with Lena Dunham, the creator of "Girls," slyly comparing your first vote to "your first time." The ad agitated some conservatives — one used Twitter to align Dunham and Obama with Satan — but was harmless. Ronald Reagan had a racier version 32 years ago.

Mitt hopes Americans are ready for some rules — and binders. He is baked in the fuddy-duddy dad image from the era when white men ruled and the little women toiled over a hot stove. On Thursday, Ann Romney made his annual birthday treat, meatloaf cakes, on Rachael Ray's show while the candidate collected the endorsement of Meat Loaf, another blast from the past who balked at the notion that the cold war was over.

Mitt may have my sister. But he still needs Ohio.

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