Newman wants more. She’s grown up to be an MIT engineer, and she’s determined to get us where we really want to go: Mars! She’s got a good chance of succeeding: NASA funds a growing force of engineers like Newman who were children when the Eagle landed and who are now eager and capable enough to further our foray into the solar system.

Newman’s graduate students, her fellow professors and her NASA astronaut colleagues all praise her for a rare alignment of qualities: She is a bright and incisive thinker; she is a driven, “roll up your sleeves and solve it now” engineer; and she is a collaborator, a team player who disdains the usual competitive stance of top scientists.

Her partner in life, Guillermo Trotti, became one of the first architects to work with NASA on space-station design. NASA likes his designs so much that they have become reality in the International Space Station habitation module. Trotti and Newman met at an MIT summer session for people interested in human designs for space. For him, she embodies the much-touted American can-do attitude: chin up, team together, get it done.

Though space flight is a much bigger game, Newman is still the undersized, over-spirited basketball player she was as a teenager, the hard-playing, teammate-motivating point guard who leads her team from the great city of Helena, Mont., all the way to the Junior Olympics. If the future mission to Mars inspires a sequel to “The Right Stuff,” who should play Newman in the movie version? Trotti taps Jodie Foster: “She has the drive and the sensibility, the mental and physical beauty for the part.”

It’s not hard to imagine Foster playing the valedictorian wunderkind of Helena. Newman at first thought she wanted to be president (her father was a congressional campaign manager), but without female role models for either politics or athletics, she entered Notre Dame with dreams of becoming the world’s best sports lawyer. She wanted to represent Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Her older brother, himself a lawyer, convinced her that engineering would give her a technical background that law schools would like.

But before she graduated, two things changed her course: She fell in love with flight, especially human space flight; and she despised Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative — Star Wars. Space was no place for war. So, law be damned, aerospace engineering it was — human aerospace engineering, because, as she once said to an audience of young students, that’s the key to ensuring “cooperative, global human space exploration rather than … militarization of space, to which I’m opposed” — what a great moment that would be in a Foster film.

Good engineers are incessant tinkerers, and now that graduate school and professorship have set her at the forefront of aerospace bioengineering, Newman runs a workshop full of toys. It’s like a messier version of Q’s lab in the James Bond films, without the weapons, of course. There are gadgets everywhere: computers, treadmills, whirling platforms, ceiling tracks, moving robots — all generating the engineering know-how to send people to Mars.

The first set of problems has to do with getting astronauts there and back without them turning to jelly. These are problems that scientists, including Newman, began studying on the Mir space station cosmonauts. After a few months in zero gravity, the cosmonauts’ bones and muscles began to deteriorate, especially in the legs, pelvis and back. The human body evolved in gravity. We’re meant to be bipeds that pound the Earth as we move about every day, and we have come to rely on that pounding. Our skeleton needs the repeated stress of our walking weight to break down old, brittle bone, release the trapped calcium and use it to grow sturdy new bone. Without daily pounding, bone doesn’t regenerate. It just gets brittle. Likewise, our muscles — even if we’re not athletic in the modern sense — require the daily motions of moving about and carrying our weight to stay healthy.

Newman’s rocket science colleagues claim they can send a manned spacecraft to Mars and back in two years (a solid achievement at over 6,000 mph). Given what we know about debilitation in zero gravity, here’s what would happen to the person on the ship: A 30-year-old astronaut would come back with the osteoporotic bones of an 80-year-old woman. Pull him out on the landing pad to congratulate him and he will collapse. It will take him months to build up enough muscle to walk again, and he could break his bones a number of times in the process. What’s needed are countermeasures, as the engineers call them.

One of Newman’s countermeasures is a rotating bed, a long, body-wide platform that whirls about quickly. You lie down on it with your head toward the center, and as it spins your feet press against a little endplate. To try it on Earth is sort of a sickening ride. But if you tried it in space (with your eyes closed), you would feel more or less as though you were standing still on Earth: The centrifugal force of the whirling mimics the force of gravity. If the Mars astronaut slept on this every “night,” his body would spend a third of the voyage in artificial gravity, though he would have to get used to the sensation of sleeping standing up.

Another Newman lab project is a specialized treadmill with bungee cords that pull the runner down to the track with a force close to that of gravity. Mir cosmonauts had an early version of this, and they were required to jog on it for four hours a day. Newman and her colleagues work on combinations of treadmill design and dietary supplements to see if they can shorten the amount of exercise time required and still curtail the bone and muscle loss. Newman’s greatest laboratory ever goes into operation next year: the International Space Station, which will be home to a continuous supply of bone-losing, muscle-atrophying astronauts to experiment on.

These are just the problems of getting to Mars and back with the healthy body you started with. What about once you’re there? The lander’s down, the dust has settled and you are required to open the hatch and step outside. This is the moment you’ve come for. What in the worlds do you wear?

“I’d like to put on my sweater and a skirt if I’ve got work to do on Mars,” Newman says. “The moon suit was over 100 pounds, and bunny hopping was fine for what they did. But we have to stop thinking big, white and clunky.” She has started designing her own suit, which will look nothing like anything we’ve seen before.

Newman’s tinker toy for this project is a robot she has on loan from NASA. It’s a 6-foot-2-inch black-and-silver humanoid that Newman calls “Tallchief” because she considers it as elegant as Maria Tallchief, the Native American prima ballerina who founded the New York City Ballet with her husband George Ballanchine. Tallchief (the robot) is wired to a computer and a sensor suit. The way to move Tallchief is to get in the sensor suit and move yourself around. Whatever you do, Tallchief does.

The robot is a human engineer’s dream because you can poke and prod it invasively. To design a suit for running around the surface of Mars — Newman insists: no bunny hopping — she needs to know, for instance, how much torque a human applies at the knee when he pulls his back leg forward while walking in Martian gravity (Martian gravity is three-eighths of Earth’s gravity: If you weigh 150 pounds here, you will feel like 56 pounds there). As Tallchief walks on the treadmill next to the graduate student who controls it, Newman can jab a torque measuring device into the robot’s knee joint. You can’t jab a graduate student.

For Newman, the ultimate Martian space suit should be a “smart second skin”: light and thin like a wetsuit, smart like a computer and wired like the human nervous system so that it knows everything about the precious body inside it. Of course, it must also resist Mars’ frigid temperatures, provide oxygen so astronauts can breathe and apply terrestrial atmospheric pressure so their blood doesn’t, literally, boil.

Newman also wants her smart-skin space suit to help astronauts move, giving them superhuman flexibility as they wander around the hills and valleys of Mars. And she envisions the opposite: The suit could be programmed to resist astronaut movements in zero gravity settings, so that wearing the suit is an exercise in itself — a proper countermeasure to bone and muscle loss. With nanotechnology’s advances making smart devices small, Newman’s ideas may well be buildable by the time NASA is ready to slate a manned mission to Mars. Though the recent losses of remote-controlled craft around Mars have paused all planning for the time being, Newman points out that planetary alignments give prime launch windows in 2011, 2014 and 2018.

Engineers are one of the pools NASA fishes for astronauts. Given her age, her smarts and her life-long athleticism, it’s not hard to imagine Dava Newman leaping at the chance to man the mission to Mars. Asked about it, she talks of “service to my country so it doesn’t matter how I’m involved” and “I would only go if it were the best thing for the mission,” and ends with, “If I could go with my sweetheart, sure.” Sweetheart Guillermo Trotti echoes her; it would be much better to go together. Years of isolation are tough on the strongest of souls. But Trotti doesn’t practice circumlocution: The truth is either of them would go in a second.

Newman is not funded by the military, though there is plenty of money available from the Pentagon for her type of research. But she has become quieter over the years on this point of policy as she has risen to the tenuous rank of associate professor at MIT, an institution that, for all its greatness, has a knack for politicizing its tenure track and a reputation for not promoting women (the record is improving). The purest of scientists, which MITers certainly consider themselves, are always supposed to say that policy is not their business: Who cares where the money comes from? Just do the work. So it is unclear whether Newman’s new silence on the military is an actual fading of feeling — or realpolitik in a department that would consider a commitment to the peaceful exploration of space too political for a pure scientist.

Or perhaps it is enough that her efforts will allow more humans to spend more time in space. After all, the more bodies living aloft in cooperative enterprises like the International Space Station, the more out-of-place the new Star Wars initiative will seem (President Clinton signed off on Star Wars last year, despite the plan’s international status as technologia non grata).

Newman also works hard to bring young people into her field. Her Web page on the National Academy of Engineering site is a solicitation to young women to become engineers. She is famous as a teacher at MIT for the final project she runs in her course “Introduction to Aerospace Engineering and Design.” As they learn about pitch, trim, stability, thrust and yaw, the undergraduates must design and build motorized remote-control blimps. On a sunny day at the end of the semester, they race the blimps against each other along an aerial obstacle course around the MIT field house. According to Dr. Lawrence Young, a senior professor in her department, Newman’s you-can-do-it-too approach brings out the challenge, the art and the fun of engineering that is too often lost in textbook teaching.

She is where she wants to be, says Newman — teaching people to fly and engineering the systems needed to get our fidgety species to Mars, while drawing on her earliest inspiration: “The awe and mystery and expectation that have been with me since I was 5,” when Armstrong and Aldrin, wearing their big, white and clunky suits, bounced around the moon on her television set.

I’ve mostly dismissed stories about rivalry and tension between Obama and Clinton, at least after 2008, as media mischief. But the former president’s comments last week in an interview with Harvey Weinstein on CNN can’t easily be explained away, even as the two men get ready to put up a united front to raise a ton of money tonight.

Clinton got most attention last week for calling Romney’s Bain Capital career “sterling,” and criticizing the Obama campaign’s efforts to focus on the occasions in Romney’s career when he bought companies, cut costs, threw employees out of work, got the government to bail out pension funds and provide a safety net  – while Bain and Romney pocketed a small fortune, no matter what happened to the firm. Apparently Clinton doesn’t see a problem with that. “I don’t think we ought to get into the position where we say, ‘this is bad work, this is good work. There’s no question that, in terms of getting up, going to the office, and basically performing the essential functions of the office, a man who’s been governor and had a sterling business career crosses the qualification threshold.” No one is suggesting Romney isn’t qualified to be president; that’s what the other team says about Obama.

I’ll get back to that outrage in a second, but I want to talk about the Clinton comment I found far more awful and inexplicable, which got less attention: his warm words for top birther Donald Trump, and his unbelievable weasel words when asked about scurrilous lies that Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. It was Harvey Weinstein, subbing for Piers Morgan, who got both the Romney and Trump admissions from Clinton, but the Trump statement was far more disturbing. When Weinstein mentioned Trump’s latest foray into crackpot birtherism and asked, “How do you put that out of the minds of the American public … once and for all?”  Clinton offered his worst answer since saying “it depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is.” He told Weinstein:

I don’t know. You know, Donald Trump has been uncommonly nice to Hillary and me. We’re all New Yorkers. And I like him. And I love playing golf with him. But the evidence is pretty clear that President Obama was born in Hawaii and this whole election should not be about any of these side issues. It really ought to be about the decisions that each of them will make on where we are and where we need to go.

“I like him” is a pretty shoddy thing to say about the guy who’s humiliating your ally, the president, in psychological and racial ways. Even worse is Clinton weakly nodding that “the evidence is pretty clear that President Obama was born in Hawaii.” This was a time for that old Clinton, the angry, righteous guy who ripped Chris Wallace a new one, to attack the birther conspiracy as even lower than the right’s efforts to claim he peddled drugs, fathered an illegitimate black child and had a role in the death of his friend Vince Foster. Even assuming he truly likes Trump, which I find hard to believe, he’s even more required to tell his friend to shut his trap and get back to firing folks on “Celebrity Apprentice.” Now is the time for even erstwhile friends of Trump who have a conscience to usher him off the political stage, and to sharply criticize his birther nonsense.

What does Trump have that Clinton needs, anyway? His wife isn’t New York senator anymore. She says she doesn’t want to run for president, though who knows what will happen in four years. Even if she does, is Trump’s support and money really worth defending the narcissistic fat-cat’s racist bullying of our first black president?

It may be that Clinton’s Trump defense is related to his Bain Capital defense, and both have to do with protecting his dubious legacy: making the Democrats competitive with Republicans in raising money from Wall Street and, more broadly, the FIRE sector — Finance, Insurance and Real Estate, the sector that gave lavishly to both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in 2008 but ultimately favored Obama. While Clinton has expressed regret for signing bills repealing Glass-Steagall and essentially waving a “Go” sign at the predators of Wall Street, he can’t quite quit them.

It’s the same reason that Cory Booker, Harold Ford Jr., Steven Rattner, Ed Rendell (whose populist instincts I normally respect), Sen. Mark Warner and other opportunistic Dems have been doing their best to show finance capital that they’re the good Democrats, the ones who still love Wall Street, even at the expense of the president.

Trust me, if Obama loses, there will be a huge push to blame it on his seeming hostility to Wall Street – a measure of what spoiled little princes and brats those masters of the universe are. Obama once called them “fat cats” – but he otherwise deferred to them, resisting all efforts to break up the banks, limit their bonuses, force them to write down mortgages in default or otherwise help the victims of their casino high jinks. Still, there will be a long list of Democrats – look for Evan Bayh! – to tell us Obama’s “class warfare” cost him the election, and that the party needs to repair its ties to Wall Street, and the top 1 percent more generally, to win back the White House.

Of course, ever since the 2010 midterm debacle I’ve been pointing out that Americans who blame the economy’s troubles on Wall Street voted for Obama in 2008, but Republicans in 2010, according to CNN exit polls. Wall Street may be offended by Obama’s milquetoast rebukes, but many Americans have seen him as their champion.

I think Bill Clinton is trying to telegraph to his old Wall Street friends — and to friends of his Clinton Global Initiative, an admirable philanthropic juggernaut that mainly relies on flattering rich people to get them to do what people of conscience should do anyway — that the young president has taken a wrong turn, and other Democrats don’t agree with his criticizing the financial sector. Let’s hope American voters fed up with Wall Street don’t hear the former president’s imprecations.

I’ve been a huge defender of Bill Clinton over the years but I’ve got to say, his Bain comments were disloyal and his Trump comments were offensive. He better raise a lot of money for the president Monday night to balance out that betrayal — of Obama, and of the party that’s struggling to find its moral and political moorings after its damaging dalliance with the men who wrecked the economy.

Huh? Of course Obama cut taxes for the middle class in the 2009 Recovery Act, which Republicans consistently lie about, and Clinton controversially raised taxes on high earners (Romney would lower them) to cut the deficit in 1993. Meanwhile, Obama has left President Clinton’s welfare reform alone, despite rising rates of poverty and unemployment in the recession.

On Tuesday Romney took his attack up a notch, suggesting that “a personal beef” between the two men accounts for Obama allegedly rejecting Clinton’s centrism.

According to Romney, Clinton understood that “Democrats should no longer try to govern by proposing a new program for every problem. President Obama tucked away the Clinton doctrine in his large drawer of discarded ideas, along with transparency and bipartisanship. It’s enough to make you wonder if maybe it was a personal beef with the Clintons … but really it runs much deeper.”

There he is again, mean ol’ Mitt, trying to hype reports of personal tension between the last two Democratic presidents. It’s silly. Nobody denies there was trouble on the 2008 campaign trail during the Democratic primary, when the former president smarted at Obama camp charges that his overenthusiastic support for his wife’s candidacy, and diminishing of Obama’s, smacked of racism. And today, nobody suggests that the two guys are sneaking off to basketball games together or planning their next joint family trips. But whatever personal strain may persist, they put their problems behind them a long time ago.

Clinton stumped enthusiastically for Obama in 2008, and on behalf of the president and beleaguered Democrats in the 2010 midterms. Who can forget the current president calling on the past president to help him sell the idea of a compromise on the Bush tax cuts (to liberals, by the way) in December 2010 – and then walking away and leaving Clinton by himself at the lectern happily holding forth with the White House press corps (as Obama reportedly went off and did some Christmas shopping)? Currently Clinton is, of course, working hard to help Obama beat Romney. He recently attacked the presumptive Republican nominee for backing failed Bush policies “on steroids.”

As to the notion that Clinton was a centrist and Obama is a liberal: I think they’re both politicians with liberal hearts and centrist political instincts, working to make life better for the non-wealthy in an age when Republicans have become strident, extremist servants of the super-rich. President Clinton raised taxes on the rich. He signed the Family and Medical Leave Act, belatedly letting parents take time off after the birth of a child or when needed by a sick family member.  He let Newt Gingrich’s GOP shut down the government rather than agree to Medicare cuts; on that point, he might be more traditionally liberal than Obama, who entertained the idea of Medicare cuts while trying to get a “grand bargain” on the deficit last summer. (Since then, though, Clinton himself has come out in support of Simpson-Bowles, which would trim Medicare.)

Clinton vastly expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is one main reason why low-income people don’t pay any federal withholding taxes – a scandal (according to all the GOP presidential contenders) that Romney’s tax plan would remedy by imposing taxes on low-wage earners. The EITC is the absolute best proof that it’s Romney who’s moved away from the appealing mainstream ideas of his party’s past, not Obama. The low-wage tax credit Clinton and Obama expanded was originally a Republican notion (inspired by Milton Friedman) to make poorly paying jobs an alternative to welfare. Signed into law by President Gerald R. Ford, it was expanded by George H.W. Bush, and also supported by George W. Bush.

It’s true that Clinton tried to pioneer a “Third Way” attempt at Democratic centrism, balancing the budget and ending “welfare as we know it.” He thought if he met increasingly radical Republicans halfway, the country might make progress. He thought wrong. Instead Romney’s party attacked the man Romney now purports to admire; attacked him viciously, from Day One, culminating in a nihilistic effort at impeachment for sexual indiscretions that are common in Washington, D.C.

What Romney is really trying to do now, of course, is cause trouble with the segment of the electorate that admired Hillary Clinton but took a while to warm up to Barack Obama in 2008, particularly the white working class, as well as white female Democrats and independents. I don’t see it working. I’m on record saying repeatedly that dismissing Clinton’s support with working-class whites as merely racism was mistaken and divisive when Democrats did it four years ago. Working-class voters had valid reasons to doubt the charismatic newcomer whose economic platform was marginally less progressive than Clinton’s, and who talked riskily – and naively, as it turned out – of a post-partisan rapprochement with Republicans.

But that doesn’t make those voters easy targets for Romney. His record as Bain Capital job destroyer combined with his enduring prep-school entitlement should make him less simpatico than Obama to those voters. Romney lacks Bill Clinton’s “I feel your pain” empathy for working-class folks; he comes across as the guy who’s more likely to cause them pain.

Oh, and Romney, by the way, wasn’t always such a Clinton admirer. In his book “Turnaround,” he tells the story of visiting the White House in 1999, while Clinton was president (h/t Andrew Kaczynski):

When we got through the Secret Service checkpoint for clearance at the West Wing, the agent handed each of us a badge to wear around our necks. Mine had a big, red A. I turned to Cindy and, in front of the agents, said, “Why do I have to wear this?” Thinking I was confused, she tried to explain that all visitors to the White House had to wear a badge. “I know that,” I responded, “I’m asking why I have to wear the red A around my neck. I’m not the one that cheated on my wife. He should be wearing the scarlet A- not me.” I grumbled all the way up the drive and into the West Wing lobby. The look on Cindy’s face was priceless.

What a jokester! What a hypocrite.

But the predictable Washington mixture of prurient interest and moral posturing has turned this incident into grist for the scandals-and-investigations mill. And now we have the attempts at somehow making this a winning partisan issue for Republicans. Chuck Grassley, the senator from Iowa who triumphed over adversity and became the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee despite being functionally illiterate, would like to know whether any White House staff also slept with escorts that evening. No one has made the claim, but Grassley’s asking just in case. (For a live peek at a future paranoid right-wing myth in its embryonic stage, read the comments on that Washington Times story: “I can just hear those paper shredders going a mile a minute in the white house, and the document forgers are being called in, you know the same ones that did the birth certificate.”) Grassley was on Fox last night to make sure viewers repeatedly heard baseless speculation as to the involvement of White House staff.

Rep. Pete King, Long Island Republican and stalwart publicity monger, has sent Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan a list of 50 questions about the scandal in order to make it appear that he is very seriously investigating this very serious incident.

For those outside Congress, for whom insinuating escort patronage by unnamed White House staff seems a bit of a reach, the game is to attempt to use the scandal to prove some point the fecklessness of Obama as a leader and his shameful failure to make everyone in Washington stop being so awful and wasteful all the time.

NRO’s Mark Steyn, after praising the fiscal discipline of the agent who attempted to bilk his escort (ugh), suggests that the moral of the story is that we pay too much for presidential security, and that all those agents and fancy bullet-proof Suburbans are wastes of taxpayer funds and evidence of broke post-Imperial America’s profligacy. Sarah Palin, who had every right to be personally aggrieved for once, after it was reported that the agent at the center of the scandal wrote gross sexist things about her on Facebook, was among the first to declare that the problem was with the “culture” Obama has created at the White House. (Karl Rove, smarter than most of these people, suggested that politicizing a Secret Service scandal was dumb and counterproductive. Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan, coincidentally, was elevated to his position under George W. Bush.)

The makeup of the Secret Service, obviously, has very little connection to the political party of the person occupying the White House. Like most American law enforcement agencies, it’s primarily white and overwhelmingly male, and, historically, the culture of the agency has had more than a whiff of machismo. These are not exactly the sort of public sector employees right-wingers get off on demonizing.

In fact, the right has had for years a sort of Clint Eastwood-inspired fantasy of the Secret Service agent as folk hero. Decent, hard-working men putting their lives on the line to protect a bunch of elitist ingrates. That ingratiating phony Bill Clinton and his frigid, hectoring monster of a wife weren’t deserving of such stolid, unflinching loyalty and service.

The fullest expression of this fantasy is in this classic chain email that made its way to every inbox in the nation during the second president Bush’s first term. According to this email, attributed to the unnamed author’s former neighbor, the president’s security detail was constantly disrespected by those awful Clintons and their terrible staff. Hillary Clinton was “arrogant and orally abusive.” “She forbade her daughter, Chelsea, from exchanging pleasantries with” agents. “Al Gore resented Bill Clinton and thought he was to centrist. He despised all republicans.” Agents prayed for Bush to win the election, and their reward was the joy they all felt in the presence of President Bush and his amazing, wonderful wife.

This nonsense has its roots in fake anti-Hillary attacks, attributed to imaginary Secret Service members, that Republican operatives spread to sympathetic media voices starting more or less the day Bill took office. Former Secret Service agents do plenty of gossiping and bitching, most frequently to Ronald Kessler, but their complaints don’t tend to track quite so directly to right-wing fantasy narratives.

But a popular trope is of the upstanding agents blanching at being asked to look the other way as libidinous Democratic presidents — Kennedy, Johnson, and Clinton — womanized. (Clinton was said to have threatened to fire agents who stymied his attempts to have trysts with Monica Lewinsky, though the agent who made the claim admitted to having invented it.) The pat moralism of the conservative Secret Service fantasy makes the agency’s lurid misadventure a bit funnier. It also explains why various people have to somehow convince themselves that the Obama administration somehow degraded the agency, through a lack of “management skills” or the widespread embrace of sexual deviance that is the logical end result of repealing the military’s ban on out gays and lesbians.

“[Obama's] out there running against himself now,” Clinton said. “Soon as he gets an opponent, it will be about the next four years — who do you think is going to take us in the right direction.”

Clinton also weighed in a few of the Republican candidates, saying of one-time nemesis Newt Gingrich that he respected the man’s ability to “think and do.” The former president was, however, momentarily lost for words when O’Reilly followed up by asking if he respected Gingrich “as a man.” Clinton tip-toed around the answer, then spent the next few moments criticizng the former speaker’s “scorched-earth” political approach.

When questioned about Mitt Romney, Clinton damned the former Massachusetts governor with praise for his Massachusetts health reform legislation. He stopped short, however, of issuing any endorsements for the Republican primary, saying only that he would vote for Barack Obama regardless in the general election. In fact, the closest he would get to voicing support for any of the candidates was when he mentioned that he liked Jon Huntsman — though he then quickly poked fun at the Utahan’s meager support in the polls.

You can find the full, 40-minute interview here.

First, let’s take in the list of Obama’s accomplishments as Chait describes them. They’re considerable:

His single largest policy accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, combines two sweeping goals—providing coverage to the uninsured and taming runaway medical-cost inflation—that Democrats have tried and failed to achieve for decades. Likewise, the Recovery Act contained both short-term stimulative measures and increased public investment in infrastructure, green energy, and the like. The Dodd-Frank financial reform, while failing to end the financial industry as we know it, is certainly far from toothless, as measured by the almost fanatical determination of Wall Street and Republicans in Congress to roll it back.

Beneath these headline measures is a second tier of accomplishments carrying considerable historic weight. A bailout and deep restructuring of the auto industry that is rapidly being repaid, leaving behind a reinvigorated sector in the place of a devastated Midwest. Race to the Top, which leveraged a small amount of federal seed money into a sweeping national wave of education experiments, arguably the most significant reform of public schooling in the history of the United States. A reform of college loans, saving hundreds of billions of dollars by cutting out private middlemen and redirecting some of the savings toward expanded Pell Grants. Historically large new investments in green energy and the beginning of regulation of greenhouse gases. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act for women. Elimination of several wasteful defense programs, equality for gays in the military, and consumer-friendly regulation of food safety, tobacco, and credit cards.

We could, and I do, quibble about details in each of Chait’s examples, but his overall point is important: Even if every measure he lists has its flaws, the list itself is impressive. That President Obama took office in the middle of the worst crisis since the Great Depression, and with a nominal Democratic majority in both houses, helps explain why some people still expected more, but we should still stop more often and acknowledge what’s been accomplished in the last three years.

Having conceded that, I think Chait’s piece suffers from big definitional problems. First, how do we define liberals? Polls show self-described liberal Democrats are happy with Obama – in Gallup’s weekly tracking polls upward of 75 percent approve of the job he’s doing (and the same was true for Clinton), and that’s been true since he took office. There’s no crisis of liberal support for the president.

Also, Chait’s roster of unreasonable “liberals” includes MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. That’s silly: Schultz, cited along with New York Times centrist Thomas Friedman, rails against politicians who refuse to cut the deficit by trimming so-called entitlements and raising taxes. But that’s exactly what Obama tried to do with his proposed debt-ceiling “grand bargain”; Republicans wouldn’t cooperate. Those guys aren’t liberals; Friedman is a formerly liberal, formerly smart writer who got rich and stopped paying attention. (You’d think he could at least pay someone to pay attention for him, so he’d stop asking Obama to do what Obama has already done.)

What about actual liberals, people to the left of Schultz and Friedman – people like Rachel Maddow and, OK, sure, me. Yes, some of us have demanded more from Obama – on the economy, on Wall Street regulation, on gay rights, on civil liberties. But you know what? That’s our job. And when Chait goes down the list of the ways liberals have been disappointed with Democratic presidents going all the way back to FDR, I found myself thinking, Good job, liberals! Because we were usually right, and the country’s a better place for our pushing.

While liberals lionize JFK today, Chait notes, during his presidency (cut short 48 years ago Tuesday) they criticized him for not moving faster on civil rights. Yes, they did. Kennedy was trying to find a way to hold his party together and postpone the departure of the Dixiecrats, and he needed pushing. Should Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. have said, “OK, Mr. President, we’ll skip the March on Washington, we know you’re doing what you can.” Liberals were right to push Kennedy. (I am not trying to say that Obama is compromising on anything equivalent to the basic human rights of African Americans, just that on the social justice issues of their day, presidents need pushing.)

Similarly, while FDR gets more historic veneration from liberals (mainly because there’s almost no one here with us who actually lived through his presidency as an adult), his New Deal only came about because of left-wing agitation (and corporate desperation) in the first place. And liberals were right to criticize some of Roosevelt’s compromises: leaving most African-Americans out of the Social Security program (again to mollify Dixiecrats) and easing up on government spending in 1937 (to mollify conservatives and business leaders), which reversed some of the progress he’d made getting us beyond the Great Depression. Japanese internment was a shame that more liberals should have criticized.

In my adulthood, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton got elected with liberal support but wound up disappointing the left, particularly on the economy. Sadly, both men accepted the Republican premise that the economic problems and social disorder of the late ’60s and early ’70s required that Democrats trim back on government and make nice with business. Chait himself admits that while we all love the outspoken human rights defending, “Habitat for Humanity” supporting ex-president we know today, we didn’t love Carter during his term, and for good reason:

The truth is that Carter’s domestic agenda carried only small bits of liberalism, and those small bits (a consumer-protection agency, tax reform) met with total failure in the Democratic Congress. Carter’s policy accomplishments tilted right of center—he deregulated the airline and trucking industries and cut the capital-gains tax. Most infuriatingly to liberals, Carter refused to push for comprehensive health-care reform. A Carter adviser later recalled that the president “did not see health care as every citizen’s right, nor did he think the government has an obligation to provide it.”

When it comes to Clinton, I think many liberals are frustrated with Obama not because of some supposed great contrast with his supposedly liberal predecessor, but because of similarities between the two. Both of these liberal presidents spent considerable political capital trying to compromise with Republicans, and they failed. That’s been a particular problem for Obama because he didn’t have the strong economy that made Clinton’s inability to wrest concessions from the GOP less painful.

It was precisely because Clinton failed to neutralize the critique of Democrats as the “big government” party that I objected to Obama’s effort to do the same thing in a time of economic crisis. Before it all fell apart, the president defended the idea of his deficit-cutting grand bargain to progressives. “Get this problem off the table,” he argued, “and then with some firm footing, with a solid fiscal situation, we will then be in a position to make the kind of investments that I think are going to be necessary to win the future.” But Clinton already tried that, balancing the budget and endorsing a welfare reform plan largely crafted by Republicans. He believed that getting the issue of bloated government “off the table” would set the table for a progressive agenda. Of course, it didn’t work.

Before writing his New York magazine piece, Chait got a lot of attention for a scathing retort to Drew Westen’s left-wing critique of Obama that ran in the New York Times in August. Chait made a lot of good points; some of the things the left blames on Obama either didn’t happen, or couldn’t have happened otherwise given the Blue Dog Democrats in Congress. But he made one point I wanted to answer at the time, and didn’t. He accused Westen and other lefty Obama critics of romanticizing the power of the bully pulpit and the presidential speech:

Westen’s op-ed rests upon a model of American politics in which the president in the not only the most important figure, but his most powerful weapon is rhetoric. The argument appears calculated to infuriate anybody with a passing familiarity with the basics of political science. In Westen’s telling, every known impediment to legislative progress — special interest lobbying, the filibuster, macroeconomic conditions, not to mention certain settled beliefs of public opinion — are but tiny stick huts trembling in the face of the atomic bomb of the presidential speech. The impediment to an era of total an uncompromising liberal success is Obama’s failure to properly deploy this awesome weapon.

I think that’s a caricature of liberals’ criticism. I have an actual model of what I wish the president had done, and it doesn’t come from Bill Clinton or JFK or FDR, it comes from Barack Obama. Look at the way he tried to sell the deficit-cutting grand bargain, to settle the 2011 debt-ceiling stalemate, even though in the end, the GOP didn’t bite — and probably, predictably, never was going to. That let the president tell voters he was the one who really wanted to cut the deficit, but Republicans wouldn’t let him. He railed, he ranted, he ordered both parties’ leaders to work night and day on a deal. He told the American public to call their congressional leaders and demand compromise — and sure enough, they tied up the phone lines in Congress for a while. In the process, he accepted the Republican premise that deficit-reduction was more important than job creation, a hallmark of the Clintonian “third way” politics he’d supposedly rejected, but even critics had to admit it was a bold political move, and he worked hard and risked a lot for it.

Now, imagine the new president had told a comparably bold story about the recession in early 2009: that he was the one who knew how to use government to fix the economy — but Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats wouldn’t let him do all that was needed, so he was probably going to have to compromise to do what was possible. Obama failed to give voters a vision of the kind of government role that would be required to fix the economy — his advisors were telling him it would take at least $1.2 trillion in stimulus — even if he had to compromise and settle for less. And let’s be clear: He did have to settle for less. Since the Senate barely passed the $787 billion stimulus bill, even though 40 percent of it went to tax cuts, it’s hard to imagine the president getting more than that.

But what if the president laid out bigger, bolder plans for the Recovery Act? What if he’d gone on television every few days, as he did during the debt-ceiling crisis, and demanded the American people lobby Congress? Then, when the compromise stimulus worked as well as it did — and it did work, keeping the country out of a Depression and reversing the steep trend of job losses that began under Bush — but its effects trailed off, he’d have been in a much stronger position to push Congress to do more. But Obama never made that case. That was a missed opportunity that wound up hurting the president politically, and hurting the country.

One last thing about the debt-ceiling debacle: Obama’s approval numbers fell as he pushed for compromise with the GOP, and they have climbed since he’s begun pushing for a jobs bill he knows has no chance of getting Republican support. I think Obama’s liberal critics weren’t just right morally, they were right politically. But I’ll also give the president credit for what now looks like shrewd bargaining: He got the debt ceiling raised without cutting Social Security or Medicare, reckoning he could offer whatever he felt like knowing the GOP would never agree to raise taxes.

I think Chait’s right that liberals are less inclined than conservatives to close ranks around their president, right or wrong. Conservatives tend to defer to authority, by definition; our side, not so much. I think he’s right to remind liberals how much Obama has done. I’m grateful to Obama for a lot of those things, but mostly, I’m grateful to be a member of a party that fights openly about what’s right. When the president got heckled by some Occupy Wall Street protesters Tuesday in New Hampshire, he modeled that tolerance, listening to them; he didn’t have them pepper-sprayed. I guess I’m grateful for that too — but I wish I didn’t have to be.

Here’s our “Hardball” debate. Have a great Thanksgiving.

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