The American Prospect Online

Is It Time for Malpractice Reform?

Erin Drankoski — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:12:00 -0500

Year after year, Republicans try to pass legislation that would limit medical malpractice awards. Fix the tort system, they argue, and we fix rising health-care costs. And year after year, Democrats resist placing arbitrary caps on awards to people who may have suffered from an egregious medical error. The fight plays out like a predictable old Western -- good guys versus bad guys. Depending on your politics, the villain is either the greedy doctor or the greedy trial lawyer.

Health reform invites a fresh look at malpractice. The Republican tort reform

Master of Opportunity

Erin Drankoski — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 09:22:00 -0400

There are two battling story lines about the career of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy: Here at the Prospect, we recall the Lion of Liberalism, treating his 1980 convention speech as the hinge of his long career. Meanwhile, on cable news, or in the hands of Dan Balz at The Washington Post, he is the icon of bipartisan compromise, whose close working partnership with Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah among others was legendary. Earlier this week, a number of Republicans including Hatch invoked a disingenuous, "if only Teddy

Are Depressions Necessary?

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 11:21:00 -0400

Economists, particularly those of the ascendant Chicago school of free market enthusiasts, were in a triumphant mood at the beginning of this decade. Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association in 2003, Nobel Laureate Robert Lucas went so far as to say that macro-economics -- with its focus on the stable maintenance of national economies -- could safely be retired. "The central problem of depression prevention," he said, "has been solved for all practical purposes."

But if the technical challenge of depression prevention has rudely

Health Care Heavyweights | The American Prospect Online

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 11:22:00 -0500

"This is a way for Daschle to institutionalize his preeminence," says Len Nichols, director of the New America Foundation's Health Policy Program, "so when he's on the Hill, he's speaking for health reform. It's a reaction to the Clinton structure and shows the world he's in the White House on a daily basis." Original article

The Cost of Doing Nothing on Health Care

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 10:50:00 -0500

President-elect Barack Obama and his new health reform chief Tom Daschle made clear on Thursday that even amid tremendous economic crisis, their New New Deal would take on that persistent piece of unfinished business from the Old New Deal -- health care.

"Some may ask how at this moment of economic challenge we can afford to invest in reforming our health care system," Obama said. "And I ask a different question. I ask how can we afford not to."

What We Need Out of a Second Stimulus Package

Cecille Isidro — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:06:00 -0400

Central bankers usually don’t like to admit that their economies are in recession. But Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke did just that earlier this week in testimony before Congress. He had little choice. The financial storm he has been weathering has almost certainly unleashed a global and national recession. The pain of the recession and the accompanying job loss is already being felt by families and communities across the country, and it is likely to get worse before it gets better. Bernanke realizes that the job is far from done and he gave Congress his blessing for a further expansion of government spending to stimulate the economy. He did so without saying what exactly should be in the bill.

When talk of recession emerged late last year, legislators in Washington quickly passed a bipartisan stimulus package that featured almost $120 billion in tax rebates. The plan was to combat an economic slowdown by pumping money into the economy and keeping demand high and consumption steady. And when second quarter GDP rebounded to 3.3 percent (since revised to 2.8) from the more anemic 0.9 percent, economists widely credited the influx of cash distributed in the spring courtesy of the Federal Treasury. Even before the initial Paulson and Bernanke plan was presented, legislators were already discussing what would go into their next "stimulus" package.

But the focus on stimulus is now misplaced. American families and the overall economy would benefit more if our elected officials served up a suite of policies that instead focused on security. This economic security bill will be most effective if it combines provisions designed to ameliorate immediate hardships with policies that provide access to economic opportunity over the long term. In other words, we need both a safety net and a stronger economic security platform.

The safety net should include provisions to help viable homeowners remain in their homes and communities. No one will be served by allowing massive foreclosures to spread across the country. Additional federal funds should be deployed to state and local governments to support efforts already underway. One such pilot program in Philadelphia requires the convening of a conciliation conference of borrowers, lenders, and the court before a house can be sold. With additional public resources, these sessions can more easily lead to agreements that allow arrears to be paid or forgiven, and for loans to be modified so families can remain in their homes. Government action should also support a number of perennial proposals designed to help vulnerable families make it through hard times. These include such good ideas as increasing the funding for food stamps, extending unemployment insurance, and offering targeted relief for rising home heating and utility costs. And then there is health care. This is no time to forestall the type of expanded coverage promised by an Obama administration.

Besides these insurance protections, constructing an economic security platform will require dusting off an old-time virtue -- savings. Although lost in recent years under an avalanche of easy credit, savings is an essential component of economic security which is capable of stimulating the type of growth that can power the economic recovery. This is because savings can be used to weather unexpected changes in income at the household level. But increasing our collective pool of savings also serves as a source of capital available to fund the next wave of productive investments in machinery, research, and infrastructure which can fuel long-term economic growth. Government spending needs to substantially increase but it will have its limits, and savings will be needed to fill in the gaps. And perhaps more fundamentally, secure savings allows individuals to embrace the opportunities and risks of our dynamic economy. Savings provide a foundation for the risk taking, creativity, and entrepreneurship which creates economic opportunity and drives economic growth.

A sudden increase in savings could exacerbate the recession, especially if it occurs without expanded public sector spending. While we may wish to see some consumer spending sustained, this may be precisely the right time for families to become reacquainted with the concepts of thrift and temperance. It is particularly vital that our policymakers recognize the dynamic and multi-faceted role that savings will play in our economic future and enact policies that facilitate the savings process. What we certainly don't need again is the plea from Congress that it is patriotic to keep on shopping. Beyond a rhetorical packaging, it is more imperative that our policymakers create the necessary support structures that can effectively facilitate greater household savings. What exactly would these support structures entail? Well, there are three primary components that can each be summarized in a word: incentives, infrastructure, and inertia.

Our current incentives which consist of tax deductions and promises of tax-free earnings don't work very well. They don't reach many households with lower incomes and smaller tax liabilities and they end up rewarding people that just move current assets around rather than save money they otherwise would have spent. Instead, the government should provide a direct match to savings deposits just as better employers match the contribution of their workers to 401(k) plans. And rules can be established so this incentive is targeted to the families where it would make the most difference. Senator Menendez (D-NJ) has proposed offering a Saver's Bonus to families that make a commitment to save when they file their tax return. He suggests linking this bonus to eligibility for the Earned Income Tax Credit, so it targets families left out by current policy.

Better incentives will be more effective if people actually have a place to store their assets. Right now, only about half of American workers have access to a savings plan at work, and most of those are focused on retirement. Yet we know that there are a number of beneficial features to savings plans which serve as the essential infrastructure and plumbing to maximize savings behavior. These include economies of scale, limits on investment options, consumer protections, and perhaps most importantly, a link to payroll deductions. It is time we thought about creating a national savings plan that is accessible to all workers, and includes savings for other needs besides retirement. Other countries, such as the United Kingdom, Australia and Singapore, have already implemented successful savings plan programs and provide a blueprint for how it could be done here.

The system will work best if it is set up automatically. We have learned from the growing field of behavioral economics that inertia is a powerful force. It may be better to have fewer decision points. Rather than deciding what a monthly savings allocation should be, earnings can be seamlessly diverted from each pay check. This is how it works from many current participants in 401(k) plans. Recent research has shown that savings outcomes are highest if workers are automatically enrolled by their employers into these plans and when a sufficient contribution level is set as an automatic default.

It will likely take more than one legislative package to re-create an economy based on savings, investment, and innovation. But events of the day have made the calls for economic stimulus seem a bit obsolete. While it may be appropriate for the U.S. government to continue its borrowing on the international markets, individual households should begin to consider how to realign their spending with their incomes and savings needs. In the short term, we are in for a credit crunch, but it was cheap credit that got us into this mess. Wise savings, followed by wise investment will help get us out of it. In the long term, the revival of savings and a rise in the personal saving rate will offer a foundation for the type of vibrant economic growth which will in turn generate meaningful economic security. Congress should help deliver the message that frivolous spending is out, and tried and true savings is in.

Michael Dannenberg in the American Prospect | 'Another Student Loan Crisis?'

Communications — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 16:19:00 -0400

"The vast majority of our schools report a very small number of students who still need loans at this time," says Richard Doherty, who heads the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts. According to an August AICUM poll, 70 percent of their members have had less than 15 students experience difficulties in obtaining private loans. Only a "tiny percent" reported over 50 students with similar problems.

To be honest, says Doherty, the notion of a student loan "crisis" was "perhaps overplayed" by the media.

Michael Dannenberg, Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, agrees. "People were running around, saying the sky is falling, that kids are going to go without federal student loans, but the DOE never said that," says Dannenberg. "Quite the opposite. Because, in truth, there never was a real crisis for students when it came to federal student loans."

"There was, however, a real crisis for some lenders who weren't able to access capital at the same low rates they'd been used to," he adds. LINK

Did Hillary Crack the Working-Class Code?

Ron Tang — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 09:29:00 -0400

The tragedy of Hillary Clinton's campaign for the presidency is that only after she had effectively lost the Democratic nomination did she find a language and message that gave people a reason to vote for her beyond the claim that her nomination was inevitable. By that point, though, the day-to-day proxy war with Barack Obama was so relentless that even her supporters may have missed the subtle argument and language that could be her lasting contribution to progressive politics.

While Clinton was winning primaries in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky, much attention was paid to the reasons that white working-class voters in those states were not voting for Sen. Obama. Yet in every one of those primaries, turnout was two to three times higher than in previous presidential primaries, and in several cases exceeded the total votes for the Democrat in the general election of 2004. Voters don't turn out in such numbers to vote against someone. Support for Sen. Clinton among these voters, male and female, old and not-so-old, was overwhelmingly positive and affirmative. Even those of us who didn't find her candidacy inspiring have to acknowledge that Clinton gave her voters hope, every bit as much as Obama inspired younger voters, African Americans, and voters in other regions.

The magnitude of her accomplishment deserves more respect and analysis than it has received. It is far from obvious that any Clinton, especially Hillary, should have become the vessel in which working-class voters placed their aspirations. That the more credible critic of NAFTA should have been the candidate whose husband signed the deal into law (and whose soft-populist "Putting People First" promises of public investment were traded away for fiscal stringency and narrow appeals to affluent swing voters) is nothing short of miraculous. And in the Bill/ Hillary partnership, it was always he who took the role of earthy populist, while she played the suburban technocratic do-gooder -- a role akin to Obama’s today.

Moreover, few national Democrats in the last several decades were able to reach these particular white working-class voters. West Virginia and Kentucky were the states that swung most sharply to the right in the last eight years, and their brethren in southern Ohio were responsible for the inability of either Al Gore or John Kerry to capture that state. So while Clinton's success with white working-class voters was a distinctly regional one, it is a region of some importance, and her success there is an achievement unmatched by any recent national Democrat.

There are several possible explanations for Clinton's success and the massive turnout. Perhaps voters were mobilized in these states as elsewhere by hatred of Bush, the war and the economy, and once mobilized, Clinton was just a more comfortable, familiar choice. Another possibility is that it was all demographics -- that, even if she had changed nothing about her campaign, the older, whiter, and less educated populations of the later states would have delivered predictable victories. But the passionate commitment of her supporters suggests that there was more to it than that -- something in her words or policies that cemented their allegiance.

I doubt that it was her policy proposals, particularly not the narrow differences between her proposals and Obama's. In a few states, she tried to leverage her specific policy differences with Obama -- running ads on the individual mandate in health insurance in Wisconsin and on the gasoline tax holiday in Indiana -- but that tactic didn't lead to big victories. Where she won with a wide margin, her speeches and ads positioned mostly unsurprising policy proposals in the context of an argument about economic opportunity and fairness.

If Clinton's advantage did not come from what she said, it must have come from how she said it. To understand how she talked about these issues, I went through about a dozen of Clinton's speeches and television ads from after Super Tuesday. I ignored the tendentious remainders of the inevitability argument that had failed her in the first half of the campaign and instead asked, "What was distinctive about her economic message?"

I found two salient features: balance and modest aspirations. "I still have faith in [the American] dream. It's just been neglected a bit," Clinton said in a Pennsylvania TV ad. "They're not asking for anything special," she said of working-class voters in Zanesville, Ohio. "They're just asking for a fair shake. They're asking for a president who cares about them."

Her language created a sense of order in the world, which she described in terms of mutual responsibility, symmetry, and a return to a better past: "We're going to say, 'Wait a minute Wall Street; you've had your president. Now we need a president for Main Street,'" she said on April 14 in Pittsburgh. Here's a complicated version of the same argument, from a speech in Youngstown, Ohio, in February:

For seven long years we've had a government of, by and for the corporate special interests. They have been heard first, they have been heard loudest, and they have drowned out everyone else. And while you pinch pennies to stay within your budget, the president blew the bank on tax breaks for his friend and no-bid contracts for his cronies, borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars from China to pay for it all. He has signed a sub-prime mortgage on America's economic future and that's your future. And so when people ask me "why can't we get tough on China?" well, when was the last time you got tough on your banker? And so we have to get back to fiscal responsibility in order to get tough on China because we shouldn't be borrowing so much money from them.

There's a lot packed into the oscillations of that paragraph: Corruption, taxes, the idea of middle-class responsibility ("pinch pennies") contrasted with government irresponsibility, China, sub-prime mortgages, leading to a final, overarching call for "fiscal responsibility" -- the most modest and essentially conservative of goals. The passage reminded me of a famously decisive exchange in the 1992 presidential debates, when Bill Clinton alone understood that when an audience member asked "how has the national debt affected you personally," she was not asking literally about long-term fiscal policy, but instead using the term as a proxy for economic hardship generally. Hillary Clinton likewise seems to understand that "fiscal responsibility" means not only keeping the budget balanced but also taking an orderly, fair approach to the economy.

Note how different this language is, not just from Obama's, but from the hard populism of John Edwards. Edwards depicted a permanent struggle against a relentless enemy: the corporate special interests themselves, who "will never give up power without a fight." For Obama, there is a similar permanent challenge but also the hopeful idea that a lasting grand breakthrough might be possible.

For Clinton, the hurdles are lower -- there's a fight but no enemy. She argues that government has had its finger on the special interests' side of the scale for seven years, so change is merely a matter of moving the weight over to the other side. Hence her constant theme, used in almost every ad and speech since March 4, of returning to balance -- seven years of this, now seven years of that. Fairness for Clinton is not about resentment, equality, or even equality of opportunity. It's about a return to an imagined normal order, where individuals' thrift is matched by a comparable sense of responsibility on the part of their government. At other times, she uses the metaphor of a recent "detour," arguing that we need to get back onto the "main road" of economic policy.

This is an appropriate message for the candidate of restoration, but the way Clinton talks about the years of her husband's presidency is surprisingly modest. In her telling, he is no FDR or LBJ -- just a capable steward of the normal order. "The 90s were good for Pennsylvania" (or Ohio), she said often, linking the decade with the 1940s and 1950s, when, as she describes it, a man like her grandfather could support a family and build a good life on a single blue-collar income. Of course, the industrial base of Ohio and Pennsylvania has been declining steadily since the late 1970s.

Clinton also embraced the "work" part of "working class," aligning her own image as hard-working and relentless with the pride of her voters: "I was thinking... looking at the sheet-metal workers today. How many mistakes were made before that perfection was reached? How much work had to be done before you felt confident in trusting that new assignment or that young sheet-metal worker? We could go through any kind of work any of you do and say the same thing. Well, it’s true about our government too."

Her ads and speeches of the latter campaign remind me of the poet William Carlos Williams or the artist Charles Sheeler in their evocation of order and purpose in even the dreariest corners of the mid-20th century industrial economy: "This is me in Scranton," she said, narrating her most memorable ad, "where my father was raised, and my grandfather worked in the lace mill. Every August, we’d pile into the car and head to our cottage on Lake Winola. There was no heat, or indoor shower, just the joy of family. I was raised on pinochle and the American dream."

This is in sharp contrast to the original "son of a millworker," John Edwards, who used his father's early years in the mill (in a very different place) as a story of economic hardship. It was only when his father became a manager, Edwards said, effectively making the leap from the working class to the middle class, that their lives improved, and it was this upward mobility that Edwards sought to restore. But upward mobility is unnecessary in Clinton's vision -- the dignity of work, "pinochle and the American Dream," can be as available to the line worker as the foreman.

Clinton's language navigates successfully around three related rhetorical problems that have been tormenting progressives over the last several years. The first, which Edwards tripped over, is the question of whether we're talking about the actual middle class, or the poor who aspire to be part of the middle class. Edwards' "Two Americas" was at first linked to his focus on poverty, but later he declared that the two Americas were really the very rich and everyone else. Clinton avoids this framework entirely.

The second dilemma is the question of whether to take an optimistic or pessimistic tone about economic opportunity. A quiet battle of ideas has been brewing in Washington. On one side, analysts at Third Way, a "strategy center for progressives" and home of the "Middle Class Project," argue that the median household has it pretty good and won't react well to gloomy rhetoric. The other side, led by the Economic Policy Institute, argues that the Middle Class is very far from all right and notes stagnating wages, increasing household insecurity, and high inequality. Neither is wrong, and yet finding a message that speaks to the optimism of those who are doing well, while hearing the frustration of those who aren't and the confusion of many others, is a challenge. Clinton's nostalgia pitch balances the two well.

Finally, Clinton's approach recognizes that "economic issues" are not a well-defined box that excludes the nonmaterial interests and conditions of life. Her speeches and ads make clear that rewarding work and a rich family life are as central to her economic vision as rising median wages. The normal order of life that she invokes has a moral dimension as well as an economic one.

It is tempting to describe this modest, nostalgic, moral language as conservative, and in many ways it is. Certainly it establishes a tone that has no trace of ideology and would not put off more conservative voters. Yet it contains within it policy proposals that are as progressive as any others that emerged in the presidential campaign: universal health coverage, investment in green technologies and public jobs, access to higher education, and a reversal of some of the Bush tax cuts.

The electoral success of Clinton's message -- even if limited to one region -- is a reminder that many working-class voters are uncomfortable with big promises or the permanent struggle. Yet both the idea that we need "balance" in the economy, and the notion that work itself has a value beyond its wage, are vital but easily forgotten liberal concepts. Clinton's economic language in the second half of the campaign worked particularly well for her because it said as much about the kind of person she is as the policies she would pursue. Still, to the extent that the language succeeded, it contains some useful clues about what white working-class voters in one critical region are comfortable hearing, and a way to talk about ambitious, liberal policies without scaring people off.

What Does Not Change

Ron Tang — Wed, 21 May 2008 10:50:00 -0400

The presidential primary process, over the years since Eugene McCarthy "won" New Hampshire by losing it in 1968, has evolved into such an elaborate analysis of expectations and sequence that, this year, it has finally imploded on itself. Every other Tuesday brings a new analysis of whether Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama has done better or worse than expected, is closing the gap or widening it. New measures are invented weekly -- this week, a version of the popular vote that excludes four states, but includes the invalid primaries in Michigan and Florida seems to have taken hold in the media, although it has no actual relevance to the nomination.

At a certain point, the constants of the underlying political alignment reassert themselves over the micro-trends of the artificial narrative. Consider the things that do not change from primary to primary:

Once again, almost as many people voted in a Democratic primary as voted for John Kerry in the 2004 general election (670,000 in the Kentucky primary, and 712,000 for Kerry). Three times as many people voted in Kentucky yesterday as in the 2004 primary, and for all the focus on those who seem to resist voting for Obama, 70,000 more Kentucky Democrats voted for the loser of the primary than voted for the winner in 2004. Together with the enormous sums of money raised by both Democratic candidates -- $22 million for Clinton and $31 million for Obama -- this increase indicates that the process is overwhelmingly additive, adding contributors, adding volunteers, and, in colossal numbers, adding voters.

Another thing that did not change, and that became evident on Super Tuesday, is that Obama has difficulty winning some working-class white voters -- not all, Oregon is as white and working-class as the country gets -- but a particular subset, those in the Appalachian belt from West Virginia through Tennessee. Even Tim Russert and Chris Matthews stopped talked about the "white working-class problem" and started talking about Obama's "Appalachian problem." Of course, white Democrats like Al Gore and John Kerry had an Appalachian problem as well, and it seems likely that West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee will be the three states that have switched away from the Democrats at the presidential level more or less for good, although all will continue to send Democrats to Congress and the statehouse.

In the fall, the "Appalachian problem" matters most in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Obama will likely lose the southern and western counties of Pennsylvania, as would Clinton. But good turnout in Philadelphia, the rapid Democraticization of the suburbs, and growth in the Allentown area (all described in great detail in a new report on Pennsylvania by Ruy Teixeira and William Frey) will enable any Democrat to win the state.

The same is not true in Ohio, though. There, in 2004, massive turnout in the cities and a Democratic trend in the suburbs were not enough to offset the Republican trend in the Kentucky-bordering part of the state. But that was four years ago, before the national revulsion at the Republicans, before Democrats took control of the machinery of government in Ohio, including the secretary of state's office, and before Ted Strickland, born in rural Lucasville, became governor. It's a different political situation in Ohio. If that's true, then Obama's "Appalachian problem" might be of little consequence in the general election.

But Democrats need to be able to speak to those voters, if not in order to win, then because the aspirations of those families, who have benefited least from the recent economic booms, are what the Democratic Party is about. That brings us to the third thing that hasn't changed: Since Obama's victory in the Iowa caucuses, his candidacy has been on a steady trajectory from "a lot of hype and a little too much hope" as he put it last night, back down to Earth, to a substantive, practical politics of difference. Without the hype and hope, he never would have been able to overtake Clinton so readily, but a campaign can't go all the way on air and enthusiasm.

Clinton's greatest success has been in pigeonholing Obama as the candidate of "just a speech." Obama had plenty of policy substance, but not enough to differentiate himself from Clinton. Thus what differences did exist -- as on the individual mandate in health reform or the gasoline tax holiday -- seemed petty and nitpicky, as did the candidate.

David Moberg argued recently in In These Times that, to reach working-class voters, Obama needed to give "a speech on class" comparable to his Philadelphia speech about race. That's terrible advice; giving such a speech would reinforce the image of Obama as a speechmaker and analyst of problems rather than an actor. I can't speak for the working-class whites of America, but I suspect they're less interested in a national conversation about class and more interested in having some small hope that they'll have greater economic security and opportunity next year, and that government can play a role in that. In that sense, Obama's speech last night -- because, and not in spite, of its brevity and ordinariness -- was pitch-perfect. It was a reminder that once out from under the suffocating policy blanket of Clinton, in an open-field general election fight, Obama's economic vision stands in stark contrast to McCain's.

But there's a lot more work to be done. It's not just a matter of denouncing the malefactors of great wealth, Obama must put the pieces together into something that's persuasive and real and positive. That Obama is not there yet is not a knock on Obama -- no one's quite there yet, no candidate, no think tank, no one. No one has quite figured out how to wrestle together the pieces of the next social contract and deal with the government's role in minimizing the disruptive force of trade and globalization while maximizing its benefits.

Yesterday I spent a lot of time thinking about Sen. Kennedy and in the evening went to hear Rick Perlstein talk about his new book, Nixonland, in which he argues we continue to live with the corrosive politics of Nixon. It is worth remembering that what does not change is the robust, aspirational liberal tradition of Kennedy into which Obama fits far better than we have perhaps understood. He is not quite the candidate of the fierce, combative, anti-Nixon left that some argue is the only plausible counter to the right, but rather, the renewal of the unifying liberal consensus of the early '60s, chastened and educated, as Kennedy himself has been, by Nixon, Reagan and Bush, by Vietnam and Iraq. At the event last night, Christopher Hayes of The Nation argued that the nomination of Sen. Obama would be evidence that "Nixonland is over." The politics of resentment and American identity have run their course.

As the poet Charles Olson wrote, "What does not change/Is the will to change." Every primary, every special election, every poll reminds us that this is a moment when the country is ready to throw out not just some elected officials but 30 years of assumptions. The story of these primaries will one day be told quite simply: Barack Obama got that, and Hillary Clinton didn't.

Israel At 60

Ron Tang — Fri, 09 May 2008 08:53:00 -0400

I don't often, or ever really, write about my own relationship to Israel or how I ended up there, but I'll make an exception for its 60th anniversary.

My relationship with Israel started at the time of the ‘good' Iraq war. You remember, the Iraq war whose ambitions were limited to ensuring continued access to Kuwaiti oil -- not the contemporary trifecta effort to own the oil, change the regime, and transform the region.

In January of 1991 I was working in London as the political officer of the Union of Jewish Students, arguing Israel's case on campus (and attempting to do so from within as liberal a discourse as could be summoned for the occasion). When Tel Aviv came under scud missile attack from Iraq, I signed up for one of the Jewish community's solidarity missions and went off to Israel to receive my obligatory gas mask and, well, kill time in between the curfews and sirens.

The Tel Aviv that I came to love -- and that I now consider to be my home -- was displaying its customary irreverence. Baghdad Café on Ben Yehuda Street became the obvious tongue-in-cheek hang out for the short duration of the scud crisis.

The trip solidified my own decision to make Israel my home. By year's end, I had upped sticks and made aliyah (emigrated to Israel, or literally, 'gone up'). I have been fortunate enough to have pursued my interest (well obsession really) of advancing Arab-Israeli peace both in and out of government in Israel and now in a brief sojourn in Washington D.C. (Though not fortunate enough to have succeeded, yet.)

For anyone steeped in the narrative of contemporary Jewish history, or any neutral observer for that matter, Israel's achievements are rather remarkable. It is a new nation forged from the remnants of European Jewry and immigrants from across the Middle East, a biblical language dusted-off and modernized, and it possesses that most precious resource -- gifted human capital. Israel today is at the cutting edge of contemporary creativity, not only in the high-tech fields that keep the economy buzzing along impressively, but also in the arts -- witness the latest batch of award-winning Israeli movies. Israel's premier basketball team, Maccabi Tel Aviv, is a permanent fixture in Europe's Final Four. Tel Aviv itself is a gloriously hip and hedonist bubble of escapism.

And yet that same escapism is also frustrating, even infuriating. Not 20 kilometers from liberal Tel Aviv is a reality that is unforgiveably ignored. In the West Bank, Israel imposes one of the longest, last remaining and most dehumanizing of occupations in the world on Palestinian population. Worse, the Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel are not part of this nation-building exercise, subjected to ongoing and structurally-embedded discrimination.

To try to understand that co-existence of modern, cosmopolitan Israel with the Israel of permanent violent occupation, it's worth going back to that rather silly 1991 solidarity visit and those scud missiles. Ah, of course, Israel is under permanent threat from an relentless foe, or set of foes, unswervingly committed to its destruction, to a second Holocaust -- or so the thinking goes -- so the occupation has to be like that. The conversation normally ends there. If it continues, it's about why embattled Israel deserves empathy, maybe a prayer, along with the unconditional support of the United States, and why it should certainly avoid making risky territorial concessions.

Thankfully, though, the conversation doesn't end there. Israel does have enemies, bitter, even implacable ones. But Israel also has the most powerful military in the region and it's most sophisticated military-industrial complex and R+D capacity. It is one of the world's largest arms exporters and has an economy that is the envy of its neighbors.

The disconnect, I would argue, is that Israel has locked itself into a box of fear that is not only substantially self-generated and all-embracing, but has also become a danger in itself, preventing Israel from taking urgently needed steps. Explaining that fear is easy -- remember the Holocaust, look at how Israel is targeted. But it does not alter the fact that it has become utterly unhealthy and paralyzing, and ironically a reason to actually be concerned.

Post-9/11 America knows a thing or two about the dangers of a policy and popular discourse that is driven by nurturing and abusing people's fears. Now imagine living in a country whose self-
understanding is that it is 3 a.m. all the time and that bloody red phone never stops ringing. Welcome to Israel -- not the reality of Israel but the sense of self that has been formed. Every enemy is a potential Hitler, every threat an existential one, there is a fatalism and almost a desire to retreat into a ghetto and build a big wall (in fact there is a wall, it's called the separation barrier).

This is how one of Israel's smartest political commentators (and occasional basketball reporter) Ofer Shelach, put it in Wednesday's Ma'ariv newspaper:

Sixty years have gone by, and we still do not accept the very idea that it is certain that we will still be here twice as long... A very powerful propaganda machine, some of it deliberate and most of it self-inflicted, works against this simple and normal premise... Anyone who sees themselves as constantly on the defensive against a Holocaust, whose politicians, when they court votes, instead of promising hope and change, purport to be defending against destruction, such politics recognizes no limits, because when you are defending yourself against a Holocaust, there is no limit to the degree of force, and it has no purpose except that of survival.

The point is, of course, that this is not 1938. It has not been 1938 since 1948, so to speak, since Israel's creation. Sixty years later Israel is in an extremely favorable position to establish permanent, recognizable and defensible borders and be accepted in the region. Many states live with a degree of insecurity, face certain manageable threats, as Israel will likely have to. But they avoid hysteria and calibrate their national security postures, their deployments and responses, accordingly. Belatedly, so too must Israel.

The entire Arab League, via the Arab Initiative, has expressed its willingness to accept, recognize and live in security with an Israel that ends the occupation of 1967 (not 1948). The Palestinian PA-Fatah leadership in Ramallah has the same position, while Hamas has stated their acceptance of a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders. Even Iran has said it would respect a deal authorized by a legitimate Palestinian leadership. So Israel has a choice, has an alternative to oy vey every day, and there are plenty of other fissures in Israeli society that require some well-overdue attention.

Michael Chabon's wonderful novel The Yiddish Policeman's Union is set against the backdrop of Israel having lost the 1948 War of Independence, with the Jews having been given a long-term lease in part of Alaska -- The Federal District of Sitka. If I am wrong, and Israel is constantly on the verge of destruction, violently rejected by its neighbors even within the 1967 lines, and condemned to live by the sword in perpetuity, then bring out the thermals, Sitka here we come. Such an Israel would represent a danger to, rather than a cornerstone of, Jewish continuity.

But Chabon's work is fiction. Israel won that 1948 war. Sixty years later an Arab and Muslim offer is on the table -- we accept '48 if you undo '67.

If Israel can overcome its own fears and embrace the hope and the courage on which it was founded, then forget Alaska, we can continue to sun our buns on the warm shores of the Mediterranean, ad meyer ve'esrim, as we say. Until 120, and then some.