Liberal critics were dead wrong in condemning Glenn Beck for holding a rally at the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Nobody owns that place or that date.

The real problem with Beck is not where and when he speaks. It’s what he says. And while he insists that he is not a politician, his choice of location clearly reveals his profoundly political purpose. That purpose is not just to disagree with President Obama but also to discredit him, not just to defeat him but also to demonize him.

Listen carefully to Beck and his pals on right-wing radio, such as Rush Limbaugh, and their message is unmistakable. Obama is not “one of us.” He’s “the other.” He’s “un-American.”

But that sentiment itself is deeply un-American. The great genius of this country is that it welcomes all colors, creeds and nationalities. Unlike the British, say, or the French, we don’t have one image or archetype that defines our identity. Barack Hussein Obama is as American as Glenn Lee Beck, but Beck cannot seem to accept that and neither can his followers who crowded the Mall last weekend.

One marcher, Kristine Sullivan, told Salon’s Mark Benjamin that she was “here to take back America. I want it back. I want our country back.” Back from whom, exactly? The implication was obvious: the others, the outsiders, the foreigners, the people with dark skin and funny names and strange religions. And if you think Beck, Limbaugh, et al., are not stirring up these fears and phobias, then you’re not paying attention.

Limbaugh now refers to the president as “Imam Hussein Obama” and recently called him “the best anti-American president the country’s ever had.” He endorses the “birther” movement and insists that Obama “has failed to prove” that he’s a natural-born citizen.

In the days before his march, Beck said that Obama’s “belief structure” stressed “collectivism, not individual salvation,” and added, “I don’t know what that is, other than it’s not Muslim, it’s not Christian. It’s a perversion of the gospel of Jesus Christ as most Christians know it.” For good measure, speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” Beck asserted that Obama was a follower of “liberation theology,” and added, “It’s Marxism disguised as religion.”

Beck and Limbaugh have built a fire under a boiling stewpot of resentment, and they’re tossing in every incendiary innuendo they can put their hands on. Their critique might be incoherent but their mission could not be clearer: to brand Obama as a devil, not just a Democrat. He’s not just misguided; he’s a Marxist, a heretic, an apostate.

And who are the true believers? The real Americans? Why the good white Christians who showed up at Beck’s rally, of course. “America today begins to turn back to God,” he assured his followers, “For too long, this country has wandered in darkness.”

This drumbeat of denunciation — this deliberate distortion of the president’s background and beliefs — is having an effect. The Pew Research Center found that 18 percent of Americans now think Obama is a Muslim, up from 11 percent at the start of his presidency, and only 34 percent can correctly identify him as a Christian.

The correlation of religious views with political views is stunning. Sixty-seven percent of those who say Obama is Muslim disapprove of his presidency; 62 percent of those who call him a Christian like his performance.

Obama always knew this was possible, that he was vulnerable to attack as an alien “other.” In an interview with “NBC Nightly News,” he noted, “We dealt with it when we were first running for the presidency. There were those who said I couldn’t win … because I had a funny name and people would be unfamiliar with it.”

But he did win, in large part because he successfully defined himself with a message that said, “I am just like you.” He did that in many ways, telling stories about his kids, his wife, his mother and his struggle. As he told NBC, he was able to convince voters to say to themselves, this fellow is “somebody who cares about me and cares about my family.”

Somehow, that connection has been lost. For a growing number of Americans, Obama’s narrative no longer defines who he is. And the haters have filled the vacuum with their falsehoods and fabrications. If Obama wants to win re-election, and have a successful presidency, he has to take back his story, his faith and his very identity.

Steve’s 91-year-old mother recently spent time in a hospital near our home in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. The nurses who cared for her included Leah from Kenya and Jo-Anne from South Africa. The social workers who processed her discharge were Grace from Cameroon and Patricia from Trinidad. If you withdrew all the foreign-born women from that hospital, its infrastructure would collapse overnight.

This is no surprise to us. The women who have cared for Steve’s mother over the last few years are all from Jamaica. The group that ministers to Cokie’s 94-year-old mother is from the Philippines. We even refer to them in the family as Team Jamaica and Team Philippines.

Our mothers are fed and bathed, caressed, cajoled and consoled, by the strong hands of foreign-born women. And that says something significant about the changing nature of immigration in contemporary America. We are living through a historic shift that has been called the “feminization of immigration.” In every year since 1993, women have accounted for a majority of the legal newcomers to this country, and today just about half of all foreign-born Americans are female.

Moreover, these women are not just passive dependents following their male relatives. Increasingly, they are independent figures, migrating on their own for economic and social reasons. As sociologist Susan C. Pearce has written, “Immigrant women today are more likely than in the past to be single, to have few children, and to join the labor force.”

Critics of immigration often focus on the rare examples of violent newcomers — criminals, gang members, terrorists — to smear everyone who comes to this country with a dark skin and a strange accent. As one woman, protesting the construction of a mosque in Tennessee, shouted, “We are at war with these people.”

No. We are not.

The foreign-born nurses and caregivers far outnumber the plotters and gangsters but get far less publicity. They just do their work, behind the scenes, patient by patient, and we’re a far richer nation because they are here.

It’s a cliche that immigrants “do jobs that Americans won’t do.” The usual examples are male-dominated trades like construction and landscaping, but that misses an important point. Yes, many foreigner-born workers cut our lawns, but they also care for our parents. In the next 20 years, the over-65 population will exceed 70 million, almost one in five Americans, and immigrant caregivers will be more needed than ever.

The migration of younger, independent women is not just about income, it’s also about identity. The process of leaving home can free women from traditional social structures that dictate where they live, what they earn, and who they marry.

As Pearce wrote in a paper for the Immigration Policy Council: “Although changing gender roles have opened up new educational, professional and personal opportunities for women in many parts of the world, immigrant women often find the United States to be especially liberating in this regard when compared to their home countries.”

For his recent book on immigration, “From Every End of This Earth,” Steve interviewed Anya Plana, who was recruited in the Philippines to teach school in Texas. Back home, she said, “My identity was tied to my family name. Here I was free to have my own circle of friends, I could choose to be influenced by people or not.”

Immigrant women also have a major impact on the countries they leave behind. Remittances play a critical role in many developing countries, reaching $420 billion worldwide last year, according to the World Bank. Demographer Nancy V. Yinger has found that women stay more closely connected to relatives back home and therefore “tend to remit a larger portion of their earnings” than men do.

One woman who cares for Cokie’s mother helped build a house for her family in the Philippines. Alice Ingabire, a woman from Rwanda profiled in Steve’s book, did the same thing. From the day she arrived in America for college, and started cleaning professors’ homes to earn money, she sent half of her paycheck to her mother and sisters.

Immigrant women transmit ideas and attitudes as well as cash, in the form of “social remittances.” And these imports of information, says Yinger, “can lead to new gender norms” in traditional cultures that boost women’s health and economic status, and “promote human rights and gender equality.”

That’s all to the good. But right now we are most grateful to the hands, and hearts, of the immigrant women who make our mothers’ lives better. Every day.

The question of the week in Washington is whether President Obama will pay a political price for defending the right of New York Muslims to build a religious center near Ground Zero. The answer is probably yes, but there’s a more important question.

Are the critics of the center encouraging America’s enemies and undermining our national security? The answer to that one is definitely yes.

Those critics — mainly Republicans, but including some cowering Democrats like Senate leader Harry Reid — are playing a cynical and dangerous game, stirring up xenophobic fears for short-term political gains. Take Newt Gingrich, who is clearly running for president and trying to attract attention.

“We’d be quite happy to have a mosque built near the World Trade Center,” he says, “the morning one church and one synagogue are opened in Mecca.” What? Our standard for religious tolerance in America is now set by Saudi Arabia? Does Gingrich understand anything about the country he wants to lead?

Then there’s the argument that Obama is “turning a deaf ear” to public opinion. Yes, the latest CNN poll shows two out of three Americans against the mosque, but that number is partly based on false impressions. The mosque will be a small part of a large building housing such subversive facilities as swimming pools and daycare centers. No minarets towering over Ground Zero, no Arabic calls to prayer echoing through Lower Manhattan.

Even if public opinion opposes the mosque, should that be the basis for a decision? The essence of democracy is not majority rule but minority rights. Liberty in this country should not be subject to polls or even votes. But standing up for unpopular minorities is an unpopular position right now.

America is going through a nasty period — all too common in our history — of blaming our troubles on foreigners. The Arizona law cracking down on undocumented workers is one example; so is the opposition to an Islamic center in the Tennessee town of Murfreesboro. As one protestor told a public meeting there in June, “Everybody knows they’re trying to kill us. Somebody has to stand up and take this country back.”

That’s a ridiculous statement, easy to dismiss and disregard, except for one thing. It reflects an attitude that’s deeply damaging to America’s national interest, especially at a time when we have troops on the ground in two Muslim countries, Iraq and Afghanistan. Critics like Gingrich, and that woman in Murfreesboro, are accepting and encouraging Al Qaida’s worldview — that there is a holy war going on between the East and West, Islam and Christianity.

Obama has consistently battled against that view: pointing to his middle name, his Muslim relatives and his time in the Islamic world. He has identified with peace-loving Muslims and tried to marginalize the extremists. “Al Qaida is not Islam,” he said at a White House dinner marking Ramadan, “it’s a gross distortion of Islam.”

Not all Muslim leaders have been quick enough to condemn violence. But the tragedy here is that the leaders who want to build the mosque in New York are outspoken foes of terrorism and committed to cementing relations with other religions. Daisy Khan, executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement, and wife of the imam who heads the project, told the news program “Democracy Now”: “We have been in the bridge-building business for a long time.”

In fact, she said, the idea for the center grew out of talks with Jewish and Christian leaders who urged Muslims to develop institutions comparable to YMCAs and Jewish community centers. That’s the way to connect to a community and gain acceptance, notes Khan: “Once you go from a place of worship to an institute that serves the general public is when that faith becomes Americanized.”

But instead of supporting that process of Americanization, and encouraging mainstream Muslims, foes of the center refuse to see a difference between “the religion of Islam (and) the actions of the extremists” that brought down the twin towers, says Khan. The result: reinforcing Al Qaida’s propaganda “that the United States is hostile to Islam (and) strengthening the hand of the extremists, who are the very people we are all trying to stand against.”

She’s right. The foes of the Islamic center are not fighting our enemies but helping them. Helping them to demonize America, recruit terrorists and organize the resistance that threatens our soldiers abroad and our security at home. All for a few votes, or a few minutes on TV. Shame on them.

PARIS — During his first six months as a waiter in a fine Paris restaurant, Claude was a model employee. “But this you must know about French labor law,” says Claude’s boss. “During the initial ‘trial period,’ we could dismiss Claude without too much difficulty; after six months on the books, however, the waiter was considered a full-time employee, with a long list of ironclad rights. Getting rid of him thereafter was extremely difficult and costly.”

The day after his probation ended, Claude turned into a professional slacker and scam artist. When his boss tried to fire him, his union stepped in, threatening to drag the restaurant to court and blacken its name. Finally, Claude was bought off with an outrageous settlement — two years pay plus holidays.

That story is fiction, told by Richard C. Morais in his new novel, “The Hundred-Foot Journey.” However, the core issue is very real. France’s left-wing unions have demanded — and won — a host of “ironclad rights” for their members: 35-hour weeks, six weeks of vacation, retirement at age 60.

It’s a great deal except for one thing: France can no longer afford such a generous pension system and neither can the other countries of Western Europe. That hard truth slammed home earlier this summer when the Greek debt crisis threatened to engulf the entire 16-nation euro zone. “Europe is in a fantasy world,” David Blake, director of London’s Pension Institute, told Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

Many Americans share those sentiments — and a certain glee at the debt crisis. Those Europeans were always so smug and self-righteous, bragging about their enlightened social policies and deriding the United States as a less civilized and humane society. How is that working out for you now?

But that’s not the end of the story. European leaders actually seem to be taking their debt problem seriously. In rather stark contrast to many American politicians, they are recognizing reality and contemplating some tough and unpopular decisions.

In Great Britain, conservative Prime Minister David Cameron has proposed the sharpest cuts in public spending since World War II. For the first time ever, a German official attended a French cabinet meeting and co-signed a letter urging strict new penalties on euro-zone countries that don’t vigorously reduce their budget shortfalls. And French President Nicolas Sarkozy has advanced a plan to raise the retirement age by two years, to 62.

There’s real pain here. The cutbacks will fall most heavily on the most vulnerable, the poor and the sick. But the alternative — soaring deficits and interest costs — is simply unsustainable.

The unions of course are screaming in protest. About 800,000 demonstrators clogged the streets of Paris in June, and even bigger demonstrations are threatened for next month. But Sarkozy seems determined to push through a reform that has become the centerpiece of a much larger effort, reducing France’s annual deficit from the current rate, 8 percent of the nation’s GDP (gross domestic product), to 3 percent. Sarkozy’s budget minister, Francois Baroin, was blunt, saying that, without pension reform, “it is totally illusory to think that we can consolidate our public finances.”

His comments could apply to America as well. If anything, the deficit problem is even worse in Washington, with this year’s shortfall reaching about $1.5 trillion, or more than 11 percent of GDP. And it’s “totally illusory” to think that real progress can be made without a drastic overhaul of America’s own system of social entitlements, particularly Medicare.

True, the United States is not Europe. As Britain’s Cameron keeps pointing out, the dollar is a reserve currency, and other countries (particularly China) are still willing to finance Washington’s debt. Europeans don’t have that same luxury. America also has a higher birthrate — and more youthful immigrants — than Europe, so in the future it will have more active workers supporting its retirees.

President Obama continues to believe that, faced with a fragile recovery and persistent unemployment, stimulus spending should take priority over deficit reduction, and he’s right about that — for now. But all the talk from the White House about “pivoting” away from spending and toward saving is starting to sound a bit hollow. Where are the plans? The urgency? The Republicans who keep attacking the Democrats for their fiscal foolishness are equally silent — and wildly hypocritical — when it comes to outlining specific sacrifices.

The numbers are clear and catastrophic. Unchecked entitlements will devour America’s future. Europe’s leaders, faced with a similar threat, are actually confronting the issue. Americans are hiding from it.

The war logs, thousands of secret documents released to the public, don’t reveal much new information about the war in Afghanistan. But the whole episode reveals a great deal about modern journalism, and the complex, ever-changing relationship between the old and new media.

Both forms of journalism need each other, and when they work together, the public benefits by gaining access to more useful information. But there are limits to collaboration. The old and new media still play by different rules, and that culture clash can cause them to disagree on a critical issue: how seriously to consider national-security interests.

There are two main actors in the war-logs drama. One is WikiLeaks, a shadowy, stateless organization that exists mainly in cyberspace. It obtained the documents and posted them on the Internet for anyone in the world to read.

The second actor is the New York Times. A month before that posting, WikiLeaks gave the Times (and publications in Great Britain and Germany) access to the raw material and allowed the paper to sift through it, find the themes and story lines, analyze and evaluate its importance.

Both actors gained something. The Times plugged into a new and cost-free source of enormously valuable information. At a time when economic pressures are compressing news staffs and budgets, it’s hard to imagine any mainstream-media outlet devoting the time and money needed to unearth this information on its own.

And even the most ardent defenders of the old media (including us) have to admit that the new media are potent partners in advancing one of journalism’s prime goals: holding government, any government, accountable. As media critic Jay Rosen put it, “WikiLeaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new.”

Yes, it is. But the new media is also starting to realize what the old media still has to offer. WikiLeaks could have simply dumped its documents into cyberspace without using the Times or any middleman. It didn’t do that because those documents were next to useless without being processed through editors, analysts and filters.

“The episode was … an affirmation of traditional journalism,” wrote David Carr in the New York Times. He then quoted media expert Clay Shirky: “WikiLeaks was soaking, drowning in data. What they needed was someone who could tell a story. They needed someone who could bring accuracy and political context to what was being revealed.”

The second lesson, however, is about divergence, not convergence. WikiLeaks and the New York Times used each other and worked together, but they operate in different ways, on different value systems, and those differences emerged in a graphic way.

Julian Assange, the founder and editor of WikiLeaks, held a press conference in London and explained that in releasing the information, he paid absolutely no attention to issues of national security. When a reporter asked whether there was any line he would not cross or any limit to what he would release, Assange answered contemptuously.

“States have national-security concerns, we do not have national-security concerns,” he retorted. “You often hear … that something may be a threat to U.S. national security. This must be shot down whenever this statement is made. A threat to national security? Is anyone serious?”

Well, yes we are. Deadly serious. And so, fortunately, are the New York Times and other mainstream outlets. Under American law, it is virtually impossible for the government to stop publication of even the most incendiary material. But with those extraordinary rights come extraordinary obligations, and the media has to use its freedom wisely.

The Times did that, withholding information that could threaten the “national security” that Assange holds in such low regard. “We took great care both to put the information in context and to excise anything that would put lives at risk or jeopardize ongoing military missions,” wrote Bill Keller, executive editor of the Times. “We erred, if at all, on the side of prudence.”

In fact, at the request of the American government, the Times asked Assange to show similar “prudence” in releasing the raw documents. And while Assange claimed to follow a “harm minimization” policy, the Times and other publications found many cases where WikiLeaks jeopardized intelligence operations by revealing the names and locations of Afghan informants.

So here’s the lesson of the war logs. The Internet is a new and powerful force for enlightening the public. But there is still a key role in journalism for old-fashioned values, standards and judgment.

Plenty of people messed up in the firing of Shirley Sherrod. She is, of course, the African-American political appointee who was forced to resign from the Agriculture Department after an edited videotape made it look as if she were anti-white. But while it’s completely justifiable to point fingers at the Obama administration, the NAACP, the mainstream media, the right-wing media and the blogger who started it all, it’s also important not to let the underlying assumption behind the charges against Shirley Sherrod stand. To equate black resentment against whites with white racism aimed at blacks dangerously ignores hundreds of years of American history.

“In far too many ways, American Negroes have been another nation: deprived of freedom, crippled by hatred, the doors of opportunity closed to hope.” Lyndon Johnson spoke those words more than 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation officially freed the slaves. The president was in the process of dismantling the Jim Crow laws and battling for the Voting Rights Act when he went to Howard University to make that speech, planting the seeds of affirmative action.

Johnson knew, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” Fairness, he insisted, required an affirmative act, an invitation to push open the doors of opportunity. In the 45 years since that speech, the American workplace, especially the public sector, looks much more like the country, both in terms of race and sex.

But now affirmative action is under attack, with the assumption that we are now all equal, that if anyone’s facing discrimination these days, it’s white people. That’s the attitude underlying the precipitous firing of Shirley Sherrod, who was accused of just such discrimination. In a screed against diversity programs published in the Wall Street Journal, Democratic Sen. Jim Webb cites the sorry history of both blacks and whites in the post-Civil War South — the lack of education, employment and health care for both races. His litany echoes Shirley Sherrod’s conclusion that the differences in our society are less about black and white than about haves and have-nots.

But we would be surprised if she agreed with Webb’s assertion that “Beyond our continuing obligation to assist those African-Americans still in need, government-directed diversity programs should end.” Get rid of those programs and apply nondiscrimination laws equally to blacks and whites and, says the senator, “Fairness will happen, and bitterness will fade away.”

Come on. Has fairness to blacks in this country ever just happened? Didn’t it take a war? Didn’t the entire American experiment almost explode over race? Yes, whites in the South have suffered poverty, but as children they weren’t herded off to schools specifically designed to keep them from achieving a decent education; they weren’t excluded from swimming pools in public parks. As adults, they weren’t shunted into the filthy “colored” waiting rooms at train and bus stations, denied access to toilets and water fountains; they weren’t humiliated by little children moving the “white patrons only” sign on the streetcar to the row behind them, forcing elderly blacks to stand. Poor white kids could kick African-Americans out of their seats just the same as rich white kids could.

Ending that legal discrimination took a movement of courageous black people “acting with impressive restraint,” in the words of Lyndon Johnson, joined by right-thinking whites. It’s hardly surprising that some blacks are bitter. Not everyone has the capacity for forgiveness like Nelson Mandela, or Shirley Sherrod, who ended up saving the farm of the white man she had at first resented.

Now, with an African-American in the White House, too many people seem to think that we have overcome our history. They equate racist sentiments in a demonstrably powerful political movement, the Tea Party, with those of a fringe group of thugs, the New Black Panthers. They think race is just another card to play in the game of left versus right. They’re wrong. We’ve come a long way in this country, but stirring up racial passions can only cause harm. Lyndon Johnson, a southern president who had seen the effects of “a century of oppression, hatred and injustice” knew that blacks faced a bias “whose dark intensity is matched by no other prejudice in our society.” America must not forget that.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs is in deep trouble for committing one of Washington’s most unforgivable sins. He spread a vicious truth.

Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Gibbs said out loud what every analyst in the capital knows: “There’s no doubt” that Republicans could regain control of the House in November. But his frankness caused such dismay in the party ranks that the White House dispatched Joe Biden to say on ABC’s “This Week” that he was “absolutely confident” the Democrats were in “great shape” with the voting public.

Gibbs’ remark was so noteworthy because it was so rare. The fastest-growing industry in Washington, D.C., today goes by different names: spin control, message discipline, crisis management, image branding. These are not exactly euphemisms for lying but they are certainly not formulas for truth-telling, either. Here’s a good rule to follow for the next 100 days until the fall elections: Anyone with a vested interest in the outcome can’t be trusted. The honest brokers are out of power and want to stay there.

Two of the most valuable candor merchants out there today are Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the co-chairs of a commission established by President Obama to recommend a solution for the nation’s exploding budget deficits. Simpson, a Republican from Wyoming, retired from the Senate after 18 years; Bowles, a Democrat from North Carolina, was Bill Clinton’s chief of staff and an unsuccessful Senate candidate.

Both are liberated from the burden of ambition to speak their minds freely. “There are many who hope we fail,” Simpson said recently, and if anything, he was understating the problem. Liberals say no solution should cut social programs, and conservatives say tax increases should be off the table. Neither side is willing to face reality, but they are both wrong, and Bowles said as much in a recent talk to the nation’s governors. “This debt is like a cancer,” he warned, “that will destroy the country from within.

“We can’t grow our way out of this,” insisted Bowles. “We could have decades of double-digit growth and not grow our way out of this enormous debt problem. We can’t tax our way out. … The reality is we’ve got to do exactly what you all do every day as governors. We’ve got to cut spending or increase revenues or do some combination of that.”

Simpson, who works hard at being folksy, put the problem a bit differently: “I was in the Senate for 18 years, and the cry to me was always, ‘Al, go bring home the bacon.’ Well, the pig has died.”

Yes, it has. And it’s refreshing when someone says so. Take Rep. Bob Inglis, an obscure backbencher from South Carolina who lost the Republican primary this past spring and is firing some parting shots at his old party.

Sarah Palin, complained Inglis, exercised “the lowest form of political leadership” by accusing the Democrats of advocating “death panels” in their healthcare bill. It was not true, and she knew it, he said, but she was deliberately deceiving the voters by “preying on their fears” and few, if any, Republicans were willing to challenge her.

The “birthers” who question the president’s legitimacy are also trading in fear, he said: “Why do we do that? We do it because we want to vilify the other side. We want to make them into the big bad guys.” And racism, Inglis insisted, helps fuel that invidious campaign: “I love the South. I’m a Southerner. But I can feel it.”

Obama himself could use some honest advice on the subject of Afghanistan, and a particularly piercing critique comes from Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. A former adviser to Republican presidents, Haass is now outside the partisan system and free to write in the latest Newsweek: “The war the United States is now fighting in Afghanistan is not succeeding and is not worth waging in this way. The time has come to scale back U.S. objectives and sharply reduce U.S. involvement on the ground. Afghanistan is claiming too many American lives, requiring too much attention, and absorbing too many resources.”

Any politician running for office who made that point could and would be accused of “cutting and running,” of “abandoning the troops” and “undermining morale.” Only an independent voice like Haass can afford to take the heat.

So here’s to the truth-tellers: Bowles and Simpson, Inglis and Haass and, yes, Robert Gibbs. When the pig dies, someone has to find the courage to say so.

The debate over how to create more jobs has paralyzed the capital. President Obama wants to spend federal dollars to extend unemployment benefits and bolster state budgets. Republicans (and a few conservative Democrats) focus on reducing the deficit and encouraging the private sector. As common ground disappears, the real unemployment rate, including discouraged and underutilized workers, approaches 17 percent.

This is the central issue facing the country. And in the middle of all the partisan posturing, there is actually one job-producing measure advanced by the White House that most Republicans support: a free-trade pact with South Korea that has stalled on Capitol Hill since it was negotiated by the Bush administration in 2007.

Seoul is Washington’s seventh-largest trading partner, and the administration argues that the deal could boost American exports by $10 billion a year — a small but useful step. In a surprise move last month, Obama vowed to work out lingering issues with the Koreans and have the pact ready for congressional consideration early next year.

Republicans, who usually oppose just about anything the president supports, reacted with enthusiasm. The Korean deal, said Rep. Dave Reichert of Washington state, “has the potential to create thousands of American jobs and continue a partnership with a democratic ally.” A bipartisan group of lawmakers called the pact “the most commercially significant agreement the U.S. has negotiated in 15 years.”

Obama and Republicans like Reichert are right on this one. Freer trade is — and always has been — a critical component of economic growth and job creation. So what’s the catch? A big one. The labor movement and its key allies in Congress remain adamantly opposed. No matter that most economists agree on the enormous benefits of increased trade. Union leaders hold firm to their fantasy that they can preserve manufacturing jobs that no longer exist and will never return. As Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, insisted, “This flawed agreement is the last thing working people need.”

Well, the last thing Obama — and “working people” — need is to listen to reactionaries like Trumka. Protectionism is always the wrong answer, especially at a time of sputtering job growth. The real question is whether the president will actually follow through on his promise, defy the unions, and push the pact on Capitol Hill.

As a candidate, Obama railed against “special interests” that distort and dominate the debate in Washington, but as president, he has often caved in to forces that contribute heavily to Democrats. During the healthcare debate, he shelved any serious discussion of medical-malpractice reform under pressure from the trial lawyers. And when labor opposed proposals to tax expensive “Cadillac” healthcare plans, he accepted a deal that eviscerated the whole concept.

Now the president has another chance to show that he actually meant what he said about opposing “special interests” that favor a narrow constituency over a broader public benefit.

The trade deal is not perfect. Obama should demand more access to the Korean market for American automobiles and beef. On balance, however, it will create jobs and lower prices for the “working people” Trumka professes to care so much about.

There’s a larger point here as well. Economic stress always creates protectionist pressures. As the Global Trade Alert, an international monitoring service, recently reported, since the economic downturn started in November 2008, “the governments of the world have together implemented 496 beggar-thy-neighbor policy measures; that is, more than one for every working day.” Promoting — and passing — the Korean deal will send a clear signal to other countries that Washington is ready to reject that trend and lead the fight for freer trade.

Korea is only the beginning. Obama should then push for congressional approval of bilateral agreements the Bush administration negotiated with Colombia and Peru. He should also get behind a bill, recently passed by the House Agriculture Committee, that would pry open Cuban markets for American farm products. And he should use his voice and visibility to help restart the Doha round of negotiations on a sweeping overhaul of the world’s trading rules.

Right now, the United States is not leading but falling behind. As the Colombia trade deal languishes, other South American countries are forging their own arrangements with Bogota and slashing America’s share of that import market. Europeans and Canadians are eagerly pursing trade talks with Seoul, and posing yet another threat to American products.

More trade means more jobs. Obama clearly understands that. Now he needs the guts to act on his convictions.

During his years as the Senate’s Democratic leader, Robert C. Byrd would occasionally give presents to reporters who covered him. One was his four-volume history of the Senate, liberally sprinkled with erudite references to Cicero and Caesar. Another was his record album, “Mountain Fiddler,” featuring such country favorites as “Cripple Creek” and “Turkey in the Straw.”

When Sen. Byrd died recently at 92, obituaries mentioned the high points of his career (longest-serving member of Congress) and the low points (youthful membership in the Ku Klux Klan). What we remember most is symbolized by his two gifts. He venerated the Hill of his adult years, but never forgot the hills of his boyhood.

Byrd had many flaws common to politicians, including an endless fascination with the sound of his own voice. He proudly funneled billions of dollars in taxpayer money to his home state, contributing to skyrocketing budget deficits.

But he was not some cartoon character, some made-up myth about the promise of American life. He was the real deal, a self-made man in the truest sense, who embodied two of the country’s most profound values: self-reliance and redemption.

Byrd owned little as a boy, not even his name. He was born Cornelius Calvin Sale Jr. in 1917, but his mother died the next year and his father sent him to live with an aunt and uncle. Renamed Robert Carlyle Byrd, he grew up learning to slaughter hogs, play the fiddle, and memorize Bible verses.

He graduated first in his high-school class, but college was out of the question. So he married at 19, pumped gas, taught himself how to butcher, worked as a welder during World War II, and then opened a grocery store in the tiny town of Sophia (population 1,301 in 2000). There was always a hunger in the man, to be respected and respectable, and when a chief of the local Klan told him that he had “talents of leadership,” he gulped down the praise. “Suddenly, lights flashed in my mind,” he later wrote. “Someone important had recognized my abilities.”

Byrd never completely erased the stain of his Klan ties, but he was willing to say words that are seldom heard in Washington these days: “I know now I was wrong.” A Sunday-school teacher in his youth, Byrd used his own sin to impart a moral lesson. “I apologized a thousand times,” he said in 2005, “and I don’t mind apologizing over and over again. Intolerance had no place in America.”

As his political career ascended — state legislature, Congress, Senate — the drive to reinvent himself never abated. He studied law at night, often eating a cheese sandwich for dinner out of a “paper poke” hand-delivered by his wife, Erma, and earned his degree at 46. James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress, says the last time he saw Byrd, the senator asked him, “What is the one book I should read in the Library of Congress?”

Byrd knew that the education once denied him would elevate others. He sponsored scholarship programs for high-school graduates, and one of his proudest achievements was a bill mandating schools to teach about the Constitution on Sept. 17, the date it was signed in 1787.

He was a poor performer on radio and TV — too wordy and fidgety — but he understood their power to enlighten the electorate. He allowed National Public Radio to broadcast the Panama Canal debate live in 1979, and seven years later, he led the campaign to televise all Senate sessions. In 1999, he told Cokie that the impeachment trial of President Clinton should also be broadcast: “I think for the people, they’re really seeing history in the making.”

Many current lawmakers see the Senate as just another cable-TV studio, a place to repeat partisan or ideological talking points. Byrd was different. He respected the Senate and defended its powers, and he was particularly outraged when his fellow senators endorsed President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. That decision, he wrote later, “amounted to a complete evisceration of the Constitutional prerogative to declare war.”

Byrd also respected other senators, from both parties. He worked closely with the Republican leader, Howard H. Baker, to ratify the Panama Canal treaties and decried the hyper-partisanship that now pervades the chamber he revered. Already frail and failing, he pleaded last year: “Let us stop the name-calling and have a civilized debate on health care.”

His appeal failed. But the senator from Sophia remained a civilized and civic-spirited man. Not a bad epitaph.

After his election, Barack Obama was talking about choosing a pet for his daughters. “Obviously,” he noted, “a lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me.” The president-elect’s “offhanded remark indicates his different approach to race,” reported the Associated Press. During Obama’s term, “the country is likely to hear more about race from the White House — and from the perspective of a black man — than it ever has before.”

That has not happened, in part because other pressing issues have dominated Obama’s agenda — jobs, health, oil, war. But as new census data reveals, the president’s personal story embodies a marked change in the way Americans act and think about race.

Who the president is might be more important than what he says.

In 1961, when Obama’s Kansas-born mother married an immigrant from Kenya, fewer than one in 1,000 new marriages resembled theirs — a black-white pairing. By the year Obama was elected, the rate had dropped to one in 60.

But for all marriages in 2008, 14.6 percent — one in seven — reflected a partnership across racial or ethnic lines. (The Pew Research Center, which analyzed the census data, defines Hispanics as an ethnic group because they can be of any race.)

These marriages are producing “mutts” like the president, and a revolution in public attitudes. Pew reports that 63 percent of Americans would be “fine” if a relative married a person of a different race. And 83 percent said it was “OK for whites and blacks to date each other.” That represents a sharp shift from 1987, when fewer than half approved of interracial romance.

The reason comes down to one word: experience. One in three adults now has a relative married to someone of a different race, including us. (Our family includes black and Chinese partners.) When the daughter of old friends recently celebrated her bat mitzvah (the Jewish coming-of-age ritual), a family gathered on the altar included an Asian-born aunt.

Steve attended a wedding last winter between a former student, the child of Indian immigrants, and an Irish Catholic. Two flower girls preceded the bride down the aisle, young relatives of the couple. The Irish child was tall, pale and timid; the Indian short, dark and peppery. It was a very American scene.

Growing comfortable with intermarriage is a public as well as a private experience. The likely Republican candidate for governor in South Carolina, Nikki Haley, was born Nimrata Nikki Randhawa; her parents are Sikh immigrants from India, and her husband is a white Methodist she met in college. Their two children are, well, mutts.

Pew reports that this dramatic change in public attitudes “has been driven in part by the weakening of longstanding cultural taboos against intermarriage.” This is particularly true among the young. About 13 percent of all couples under 25 have “married out” compared to 3 percent for those over 75.

The other driving factor is immigration. Vast tides of newcomers, primarily from Asia and Central America, have deepened the pool of possible mates. And leaving home can be a liberating journey, particularly for young women, who are far freer in America to shake off old-world traditions that limit their freedom of choice in many areas, including marriage.

For the paperback version of his recent book, “From Every End of This Earth,” Steve interviewed Anya Plana, an immigrant from the Philippines, who taught school in Texas, moved to Washington, and married a white lawyer of German, Irish and French-Canadian stock.

“It’s easier to date here — the Philippines are so small, and America is so big,” Anya said. “In a way, it was a reinvention of myself when I came here. I wanted to be free.”

Children of immigrants are even more likely to marry out than their parents. Amanda Albert’s family came from Jamaica and settled in the Bronx. She had a child with her Jamaican boyfriend before moving to the Connecticut suburbs with her mother and meeting Thomas, a white neighbor. Amanda has defied the disapproval of friends and family to nurture her relationship with Thomas.

“Real love is not just a relationship that looks right,” she said. “Lots of times people look good on paper and don’t fit. Thomas is a white boy with a Subaru, and I’m a black girl with a car seat. We’re a mismatched mess, and we make it work.”

Day by day, family by family, these “mismatched messes” are producing mutts like the president and changing American attitudes toward race.

PAWLEYS ISLAND, S.C. — Is this the year of the Mama Grizzlies? The answer is a clear, resounding maybe.

Sarah Palin coined the phrase to describe an “emerging, conservative feminist identity” among Republican women running for higher office.

Several female candidates who received her endorsement — or fit her definition — scored impressive victories in primary elections last Tuesday. Other “Mama Grizzlies” won tough primaries earlier this year or are running well in states that have yet to vote.

Without a doubt, Republican women are more energized and enthusiastic than their Democratic counterparts this year, and Palin has a lot to do with that. In describing a “Mama Grizzly,” she was of course describing herself, and in state after state, commentators are asking whether their homegrown talent will be Nevada’s or South Carolina’s or New Mexico’s version of Alaska’s former governor.

But these “MGs” face two problems when it comes to the fall elections, and both have to do with arithmetic. First, a hard-edged conservative creed plays well in Republican primaries, but will it win over the swing voters who usually decide statewide contests?

Their second problem is the contradiction that lies at the heart of Palin’s low-tax, less-government, anti-Washington theology. That litany sounds great in theory, but as the oil spill in the gulf and the economic collapse on Wall Street demonstrate, only the federal government has the ability to counterbalance powerful economic interests — and clean up the mess when they fail.

Then there’s the economic crisis facing the states. The same Republican governors who cheer on Palinism are pleading with Washington to plug gaping holes in their state budgets. Where are those federal dollars going to come from if an anti-tax obsession cripples Washington’s ability to raise revenues?

Still, the Mama Grizzlies are for real. In California, Carly Fiorina, a wealthy business executive, profited from Palin’s endorsement and won the chance to face Sen. Barbara Boxer in the fall. Certainly Fiorina’s fortune was more critical to the outcome than Palin’s favor, but being dubbed an “MG” gave Fiorina credibility among hard-line conservatives who might have backed one of her opponents, Tea Party favorite Chuck DeVore.

In Nevada, Sharron Angle, a former state legislator, did not have Palin’s backing in her successful run for the Republican nomination to challenge Sen. Harry Reid in November. But Angle was clearly channeling her inner Palin when she told a Washington audience: “You know, I feel a little lonely today. I usually bring Smith and Wesson along.”

In New Mexico, county prosecutor Susana Martinez was locked in a tight race for the gubernatorial nomination when Palin blessed her candidacy in mid-May. Two weeks later, she scored a narrow victory and gave the Republicans a valuable political commodity: a Hispanic woman who colors in the party’s pale, male outline.

In New Hampshire, Kelly Ayotte, a former attorney general, is running for the Senate nomination in a September primary, and the Daily Beast headlined its story on her: “The Next Sarah Palin?” The comparisons are striking: Ayotte is 41, the mother of two small children and the wife of an Iraqi war vet who started a small landscaping and snowplowing business. She’s now the favorite to face Democrat Paul Hodes in the fall.

One of the most intriguing Mama Grizzlies is here in South Carolina. Nikki Haley was an obscure state legislator when she decided to challenge three better-known men in the Republican primary for governor. Her campaign took off after Palin endorsed her as “the scrappy underdog in a tough, competitive primary.”

After two men claimed to have had sexual relations with Haley, Palin recorded a taped phone message urging voters to ignore the allegations: “They come after you with all kinds of made-up nonsense to try to knock you down. Believe me. I’ve been there.”

It was a classic Mama Grizzly response, and on the eve of the election, Trudy Martin, a retired nurse told the Washington Post that Haley “is like Sarah Palin. Sarah told them to take a hike — the oil companies, the crooked Republicans. Nikki can do the same.” Haley garnered 49 percent of the vote on Tuesday and is the heavy favorite to win a runoff later this month.

Not all these Mama Grizzlies will win in November. Like Palin herself, they have to demonstrate their ability to reach beyond their conservative base and attract moderate voters who don’t think of “government” as a four-letter word. But they have already left their claw marks on the politics of 2010.

Seventeen years ago, when Colin Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he declared that “open homosexuality” was “incompatible” with military service. At the time, he was defending the policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which forced gay and lesbian soldiers to hide their sexuality or leave the service. But now he thinks that policy should be repealed. “Today we’ve changed,” he told ABC’s “This Week.” “The country has changed.”

Powell is right. When it comes to sexual orientation, this is a far more open and tolerant country. It’s time to end a policy that has ended the careers of 13,000 homosexual troops, and forced countless others to live a lie while defending our security.

The House has passed a bill that would eliminate “don’t ask, don’t tell” after the Pentagon completes a study of the issue next December. A Senate committee has passed a similar measure (attached to the defense funding bill) but it still faces a rocky legislative road.

A small but vocal chorus of Christian conservatives continues to oppose any change in current law, and they are strongly supported by some orthodox military chaplains who believe homosexuality is a sin. As a result, only five House Republicans backed repeal on the floor and only one Senate Republican supported it in committee.

A filibuster is looming, and with time running out in the legislative session, repeal could get trampled in the rush for the exits. That would be wrong. The American people — including rank-and-file Republicans — know the current policy is deeply unfair. Christian conservatives have a right to their opinion, but they don’t have a right to impose their narrow-minded view of homosexuality on the rest of the country.

In the latest ABC/Washington Post survey, 75 percent of Americans favor a military that includes openly gay and lesbian troops. That’s up from 44 percent in 1993, a swift and stunning shift, but the change is even greater among two key groups. Eighty-four percent of women favor ditching “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and for young people under 30, the rate is 81 percent. Even among Republicans, 64 percent back repeal.

The reason is reality. Most Americans know and like openly gay people in their schools, their workplaces, their neighborhoods and their own families. Our grandsons play on a Little League team with a child who has two dads. Steve has a half-dozen former students living in loving, committed same-sex relationships. That’s America, folks.

And remember: we have an all-volunteer army. Those 13,000 troops who were kicked out over the past 17 years chose to serve their country. We should be thanking them, not trashing them.

A change in policy does pose real challenges on issues like domestic partnerships and base housing. And the military should respect the sensibilities of serving soldiers and their families during the transition. But two other issues raised by critics are not legitimate.

The first is “unit cohesion” or “troop morale.” About 30 other countries, including most of our NATO allies, allow gays to serve openly, and we are told that in private conversations with Pentagon officials, these allies have sent a strong, uniform message: Your fears are unfounded; the impact has been minimal.

That leaves the Religious Right and their allies in the chaplain corps. They have tried to frame this as a free-speech issue, arguing that chaplains who believe homosexuality is morally wrong will be forced into silence. As 41 retired chaplains asserted in a recent letter, “Chaplains will confront a profoundly difficult morale choice: whether they are to obey God or to obey man.”

Ringing words, but false ones. As three other retired chaplains said in their own letter: “Under such a theory, President Truman would have been unable to integrate blacks into the armed forces, for many chaplains then believed that integration was sinful, and against God’s wishes.”

In a more basic sense, they added, the critics of repeal misunderstand the role of military chaplains, who “are trained to be pluralistic (and) to minister within the military’s pluralistic and multicultural setting.” Chaplains swear to uphold the Constitution, and “the Bible does not trump the Constitution.”

We have many bibles, many scriptures, many faiths in this country, but only one Constitution. Vast majorities now agree that the equal rights ordained by that document bar discrimination based on sexual orientation. The country has changed, for the better. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” served a purpose for its time, but that time is over.

In the category of Hypocrite of the Week, we have co-winners — Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. Both politicians, potential rivals for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, have made their careers bashing the federal government’s propensity to spend money and regulate business. And yet when oil started gushing into the Gulf of Mexico from a damaged BP well, who were they quick to blame for a slow response? Washington, of course.

Here’s Jindal: “We’ve been frustrated with the disjointed effort to date that has too often meant too little, too late for the oil hitting our coast.” Sixteen months ago, he was telling a national TV audience that Republicans have a “fundamental disagreement (with Democrats) about the proper role of government.” Now he’s demanding that the feds compensate the state’s fishermen and build sand barriers to keep oil out of the state’s marshland.

Palin, whose husband worked for BP for 18 years, suggested, incredibly enough, that the oil company’s campaign contributions to President Obama were responsible for him “taking so doggone long to get in there, to dive in there, and grasp the complexity and the potential tragedy that we are seeing here in the Gulf of Mexico.”

Both have a point. There’s not much that Washington can do to plug the leak, but the administration has reacted slowly to its impact. As oil strangles more birds and stains more beaches, the political risks for Obama expand.

Still, Jindal and Palin miss a much larger issue. The real problem here is the failure of government agencies to monitor and regulate the offshore-drilling industry. Washington does not have all the answers, and the risk of overregulation is real, but the past few months have reinforced a basic economic truth: Profit-making corporations will do everything possible to evade costly rules and maximize their bottom line. And only tough standards, enforced by independent regulators, can hold those corporations accountable and protect the rest of us from their worst excesses.

The failure of government regulation only starts with blemished beaches. The dismal performance by federal agencies monitoring the economy has had a far more devastating impact. Consider the following:

– The Securities and Exchange Commission repeatedly ignored “significant red flags” about the billion-dollar Ponzi scheme perpetrated by Bernie Madoff, according to the commission’s inspector general. “His report,” said Mary Schapiro, the SEC’s current chairman, “makes clear that the agency missed numerous opportunities to discover the fraud.”

– The SEC has filed a civil complaint against Goldman Sachs, Wall Street’s most powerful firm, alleging that Goldman marketed investments to clients that were designed to fail. But when the deals were being carried out, SEC lawyers apparently had other concerns. A recent report by the inspector general found 31 cases of commission employees downloading pornography on their office computers.

– In the months before a deadly explosion in West Virginia killed 29 coal miners, Massey Energy, the mine operator, had been cited for numerous safety violations. But it was never told to stop operating. Ken Hechler, the former congressman who helped write current mining regulations, said they were never enforced. And that makes the Mine Safety and Health Administration “partially responsible” for the disaster, he argued.

This same pattern of incompetent, even corrupt, regulation shows up in the oil industry. Testifying before Congress, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar condemned his own agency, the Minerals Management Service: “We need to clean up that house.” Asked if the service had properly monitored the safety procedures taken by BP, Salazar answered bluntly: “No.”

A report issued by Mary L. Kendall, the Interior Department’s acting inspector general, fleshed out the details behind Salazar’s harsh judgment. She describes a culture where regulators, and the corporate executives they are supposed to oversee, trade favors, gifts and jobs on a regular basis. “Of greatest concern to me,” she wrote, “is the environment in which these inspectors operate — particularly the ease with which they move between industry and government.”

The importance of government oversight is enhanced by another dispiriting trend: the financial troubles of major news organizations and their growing inability to devote resources to investigative reporting. Holding the powerful to account is an expensive business, and reporters, like regulators, are the essential watchdogs of a secure democracy.

There’s one clear lesson here: The feds have to be tougher on corporations, not softer. The watchdogs have to bark more loudly and more often. Otherwise, we’ll have more oil spills, more mine cave-ins, more economic collapses. That’s a truth the Hypocrites of the Week refuse to recognize.

Jessica Colotl is a 21-year-old student at Kennesaw State University in suburban Atlanta, Ga. Last March, she got pulled over by campus police for a minor traffic violation — and became a glaring example of a major flaw in America’s half-baked, jerry-built immigration system.

Colotl is an illegal immigrant. Her parents brought her here from Mexico when she was 10 or 11 (accounts differ), and when the cops discovered her status, she was turned over to immigration authorities, imprisoned in Alabama, and threatened with deportation.

A torrent of protest followed: from lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union, sorority sisters at Lambda Theta Alpha, even Kennesaw State president Daniel Papp. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency relented, granting her a one-year reprieve, but she still faces exile once she finishes her degree.

“I never thought that I’d be caught up in this messed-up system,” Colotl said after her release. “I was treated like a criminal, like a threat to the nation.”

Jessica Colotl is not a criminal, and she’s certainly not a threat. In fact, she’s an enormous asset, a hardworking young woman who wants to become a lawyer and contribute to her adopted country. But she’s trapped in a political, legal and cultural limbo.

Raised in America, she has no hope of becoming a citizen under current law. Yet she knows little of her original homeland. As one of her classmates, Willie Myrick, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “This is her home, not Mexico. At least she is here trying to do something productive.”

Yes, she is. She is using her accidental visibility to argue for passage of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, better known as the Dream Act. Its purpose is to resolve the status of young people like Colotl who are essentially stateless, innocent victims of decisions made for them when they were too young to choose their own future.

The measure would apply to undocumented immigrants who arrived before they were 16, lived here for five consecutive years, graduated from high school, and demonstrated “good moral character.” Qualifying young people who then finish at least two years of college, or serve in the military, could apply for permanent residence.

It’s a good idea that has attracted bipartisan support, but it never seems to go anywhere. In 2007, 52 senators voted for the bill, eight short of the number needed to break a filibuster, and here is where politics comes in. The Dream Act is almost too popular. Proponents of more comprehensive immigration reform, which would deal with about 12 million illegal aliens now in this country, are holding the bill hostage. They worry that splitting off the Dream Act and passing it separately would weaken the coalition behind the larger legislation.

In an ideal world, that strategy might make sense. But tell that to Jessica Colotl and about 65,000 other undocumented youngsters who graduate from high school every year and plunge into a black hole of uncertain identity. They are one traffic ticket away from disaster, and their desperation is growing.

Five protestors wearing caps and gowns, including three undocumented immigrants, recently staged a sit-in at the Tucson, Ariz., office of Sen. John McCain, who once backed the Dream Act but has withdrawn his support in the face of a right-wing primary challenge. One demonstrator, Lizbeth Mateo, came from Mexico at age 14 and completed California State University, Northridge, the first college graduate in her family.

“I’ve been organizing for years, and a lot of my friends have become frustrated and lost hope,” says Mateo, who risked deportation to voice her opinion. “We don’t have any more time to be waiting. I really believe this year we can make it happen.”

That same sense of urgency motivated four students at Miami Dade College to walk 1,500 miles from their campus to Washington, D.C., in support of the Dream Act. Gaby Pacheco, who came to the United States from Ecuador at age 7, told the Washington Post: “What you see is the all-American girl. Orchestra, cross-country, basketball, ROTC.” Another walker, Carlos Roa, has been here almost his entire life: “Venezuela would be a strange land if I was deported. I’m an American.”

They are all Americans, in spirit and loyalty but not in law, and we’re a better country because they are here. If Congress cannot get its act together and adopt comprehensive immigration reform this year, it should pass the Dream Act separately. As the poet Langston Hughes so eloquently put it, “A dream deferred is a dream denied.”

The U.S. Senate likes to think of itself as “the world’s greatest deliberative body.” Lately, however, it has often resembled the Iraqi parliament, a legislature where sectarian hostility undermines any chance for cooperation across tribal lines.

But there’s one small change in Senate procedure that might actually improve the climate on Capitol Hill: Ending the insidious practice of secret “holds.” Part rule, part custom and all murky confusion, holds allow one senator, acting anonymously, to stop any bill or nomination from coming to the floor.

The touchstone of any effective democracy is not guaranteeing majority rule; it’s protecting minority rights. But permitting a single lawmaker to paralyze the entire Senate — without taking any responsibility for the consequences — is an absurd abuse of a noble idea. Democracy requires accountability, not secrecy.

Now, in what amounts to a minor miracle, a senator from each party — Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon and Republican Chuck Grassley of Iowa — are working together on a fix. They would not end the practice entirely (which we would prefer); they would simply require all senators to acknowledge their holds publicly within two days.

“If any of my colleagues have holds on either side of the aisle,” says Grassley, “they ought to have the guts to go public.”

A hold can serve a legitimate purpose. Lawmakers (and their constituents) should be protected against unscrupulous leaders who try to sneak measures through without thorough debate. But the concept made a lot more sense when people and information traveled slowly over long distances. In the age of tweets and texts, holds are about as sensible as recording congressional debates with quill pens.

In fairness, Democrats have abused holds in the past, but the practice spiked sharply upward after President Obama took office. Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the Democratic whip, recently estimated that 96 administration appointees are currently blocked by Republican holds. That compares to 20 nominees held up by Democrats at a comparable point in the Bush presidency.

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, one of many freshmen Democrats pushing to end the practice, put it this way: “It seems like we’re institutionalizing dysfunction. This seems to be an attack on this administration to do its constitutional duty.” Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri was more blunt: “This is a stupid tradition.”

Yes, it is. But previous attempts at reform have all failed. In 1997, the two party leaders — Republican Trent Lott and Democrat Tom Daschle — briefly abolished the practice but were forced to back down by rebellious backbenchers. In 2007, Wyden and Grassley successfully sponsored a reform mandating that all holds be announced within six days. But Republicans quickly invented “hold laundering,” a devious system in which senators would block a measure for five days and then pass the task on to another member, so the six-day trigger was never met.

In an important sense, the real problem here is not the hold rule at all but the culture of the Senate. If lawmakers from rival parties trusted one another, or even talked to one another, holds would be invoked far less frequently. But if anything, the rise of confrontation and the decline of comity are getting worse, not better.

Look what happened to Sen. Robert F. Bennett, a three-term conservative Republican from Utah. An inquisition masquerading as a political convention denied him renomination by his own party. The evidence of his sinful heresy: He was responsible enough to vote for the bailout bill that rescued the financial system, and actually co-sponsored a healthcare bill with — oh, the horror — a Democrat.

And he was not the first victim of Republican purists. Sen. Arlen Specter, a moderate from Pennsylvania, was driven out of the party altogether; so was Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, who abandoned a bid for the Republican Senate nomination and is running as an independent. Arizona Sen. John McCain, who worked often and honorably with Democrats during his long career, is fighting for his life against a primary opponent who has branded him an infidel.

The Democrats have their own jihadists. Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas is facing a primary challenge from leftists who think she should vote and act like a New Yorker — an inane, if not insane, idea. And a more liberal rival could wipe out Specter in the Democratic primary.

If that’s the outlook for the next Senate, then changing the hold rule is more imperative than ever. No more secrecy. No more games. It’s time for senators to have the guts to take responsibility for their actions.

The massive oil-rig explosion off the coast of Louisiana has set off the usual round of finger-pointing. It’s British Petroleum’s fault, President Obama and members of his administration keep repeating, and the oil company will pay. But we need the federal government to help solve the problem, say the governors on the ground, and to make sure that BP delivers on the damages.

There’s more than a little irony in the fact that the gulf-state governors — Republicans all — are calling on Washington for help. These are states currently suing the federal government over the healthcare law, claiming that it infringes on states’ rights, but when they need the federal government to help pick up the tab for activating the national guard, their own state militias, that’s another story.

Eager to show that the administration is doing everything it can in this part of the country that felt so abandoned by the Bush White House in the days after Hurricane Katrina, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates immediately agreed to write the check to the governors without even a snide remark regarding their complaints about Washington spreading its tentacles into their states. The Defense Department expects to send the bill on to BP, which is responsible for the cleanup.

But it’s not clear whether BP will be forced to pay for much beyond the cleanup — whether the oil company will be held responsible for the loss of income to the fishing and tourism industries, for example, because of a federal law limiting the oil company’s liability to $75 million in damages, a number likely to be miniscule compared to the hardship suffered along the Gulf Coast. Members of Congress, who have already summoned oil-company executives for a public grilling, introduced legislation earlier this week to increase the liability amount to $10 billion, but if it passes, it will come too late for the humans, the wildlife and the wetlands suffering from the gulf disaster.

When we start looking for the villain in this explosion that took the lives of 11 men, and in the one in the West Virginia coal mine that killed 29 more, we find the U.S. Congress firmly in our cross hairs. The laws have simply let the energy companies off the hook. The builder of the rig, for instance, failed to install a remote-control device that may have been able to stop the massive leak. Would BP have insisted on the $500,000 switch if it knew its liability was unlimited? Instead the company, which has faced a series of other violations and paid minimal fines, has lobbied against stricter safety regulations.

That’s hardly unusual; no business wants more rules hampering its operations. But the energy companies have been more successful than most at avoiding them. Look at what happened in West Virginia — the owner of the Upper Big Branch mine had been called to task 123 times so far this year by the Mine Safety and Health Administration. But those citations didn’t cause the mine to shut down or cleanups to occur. The company can challenge them and keep operating. That’s what Massey Energy did.

These companies give millions in campaign contributions and spend many millions more on lobbyists in Washington. But representatives from oil- and gas-producing states and coal-mining states don’t even need to be lobbied in order to protect the energy companies. They are the engines that fuel the states’ economies, paying taxes that help support public services and providing well-paid jobs to thousands of people.

Those jobs matter a great deal to the people of West Virginia and Louisiana. But their lives matter more. And the preservation of the environment matters as well. These companies make billions of dollars. Right now, their profits are hitting record highs. They can more than afford to install whatever devices exist that could better protect the people who work for them, instead of spending their money lobbying against safety requirements. Shame on them for not putting their workers’ well-being first.

But even more shame on Congress for allowing the energy companies to escape tougher laws. That’s the first role of government — to protect the people. Soon we’ll see the familiar spectacle of company executives called to Capitol Hill, facing a series of lectures by lawmakers. And they deserve those lectures. But as the members of Congress look for someone to blame for the explosions that have had such devastating effects, the mirror would be a good place to start.

Russell Pearce is no Benjamin Franklin, except they share one of our most repellent and recurring prejudices — xenophobia, fear of foreigners. Throughout our history, Americans have been profoundly ambivalent on the subject of immigration. We get misty-eyed seeing the Statue of Liberty, or hearing about our own foreign-born ancestors, and then periodically erupt in spasms of nativist nonsense.

The country is going through one of those spasms right now. Witness the measure passed in Arizona that requires law-enforcement officers to question anyone they “reasonably suspect” of being illegal. Sponsors say that would not lead to racial profiling, but their denials ring hollow. Of course it would. That’s what they want.

Pearce is a former sheriff’s deputy who sponsored the bill in the state legislature. As the New York Times reported, he has “long been considered a politically incorrect embarrassment by more moderate members of his party.” He’s proudly posed for pictures with neo-Nazis and circulated an anti-Semitic e-mail from a white supremacist group — which he later said was an accident.

“Invaders, that’s what they are,” Pearce calls undocumented workers. “Invaders on the American sovereignty and it can’t be tolerated.” He was once shot arresting gang members, and in an interview with NPR, he insisted: “It’s not that they’re Hispanic; it’s because the culture is different. The gangs are bigger. There’s more violence, kidnappings are way up.”

Fortunately, Pearce’s hate mongering has provoked an immediate outcry. President Obama branded the law “misguided” and said it would “undermine basic notions of fairness.” Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles termed the legislation “mean-spirited,” and Mayor Phil Gordon of Phoenix called Pearce and his supporters “bitter, small-minded and full of hate.”

All true, but mean-spirited small-mindedness is part of our tradition, which brings us to Benjamin Franklin. In 1753, he called the German immigrants flocking to Pennsylvania “generally the most stupid sort of their own nation” and warned: “They will soon outnumber us (and we) will not, in my opinion, be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious.”

Then the Irish replaced the Germans as prime public enemy. The Chicago Post wrote, “Scratch a convict or a pauper and the chances are you tickle the skin of an Irish Catholic.” In 1856, the Know-Nothing Party’s “anti-Papist” platform drew 25 percent of the presidential vote.

Fifty years later, Italians and Jews inherited the title of despised newcomer. Ellwood P. Cubberley, a New York educator wrote in 1909: “These Southern and Eastern Europeans are of a very different type from the Northern Europeans who proceeded them. Illiterate, docile, lacking in self-reliance and initiative, and not possessing Anglo-Teutonic conceptions of law, order and government, their coming has corrupted our civic life.”

In 1913, California passed the first of many state laws barring Asians from owning property, and they lasted until the Supreme Court threw them out in 1948. Meanwhile, the U.S. government had interned 120,000 loyal Japanese-Americans during World War II.

The know-nothings have been remarkably consistent. In every era, their reasoning has been the same: America is now perfect. It’s time to slam the gates shut, because the next wave of immigrants will “corrupt” our “culture.” That’s exactly what people like Pearce are saying today about Hispanics.

To be fair, illegal immigrants do cause problems in Arizona, the prime entry point for smugglers from Mexico. While crime statistics do not support Pearce’s scare tactics about violence and kidnappings, undocumented families do crowd schools and hospital emergency rooms. And they can push down wages in industries like construction. Any serious attempt at legalizing the status of 12 million aliens must seal the border as part of the deal.

We also share another concern: Because Spanish is now so prevalent in many states, newcomers lack an incentive to learn English or integrate into civic life. But that has always been true. In his fine book “The Long Way Home,” David Laskin documents the story of Joe Chmielewski, who never spoke English in Fifficktown, Pa., until he was drafted during World War I: “There was really no need or opportunity. Everyone he knew or had to deal with at the mine, at home, in the tavern, in church spoke Polish.”

The basic point is this: Benjamin Franklin was wrong in 1753, and Russell Pearce is wrong today. The great genius of America is that we are never perfect, never finished and never static. Germans enriched our country and our culture 257 years ago, and Latinos do the same today.

The number is startling. Only 22 percent of Americans “trust the government in Washington almost always or most of the time,” according to the Pew Research Center. “Trust in government rarely gets this low,” said Andrew Kohut, the center’s director.

This is a dangerous trend because it reflects our growing inability to trust one another, to work together to solve common problems. And Lord knows we have them: from warring terrorists and warming temperatures to the demographic car bomb of retiring baby boomers that’s about to explode.

Government is not them; it’s us. It’s not some alien force imposed against our will. Government is friends and neighbors, schoolteachers and firefighters, soldiers and social workers. And government is a tax-collection system that finances services many of us use every day, from roads and airports to food stamps and student loans. Those same tax dollars fund agencies that keep our water clean, our food safe and our markets honest.

And yet the numbers are clear: Americans are hostile, suspicious and, at times, wildly uninformed. How often during the healthcare debate did protestors demand that government keep its hands off Medicare?

We believe strongly that government is not the answer to all of our problems, or even most of them, and a vigorous structure of checks and balances serves an invaluable purpose. As Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, told NPR, “When you think about the beginning of the country, it was all about throwing off the shackles of the English monarchy.”

As a result, said Hetherington, “We set up institutions that were designed to cut down on people imposing their will on ordinary folks. Given those circumstances, it’s not surprising that we’ve had a legacy of distrust of government ever since the beginning.”

But as the Pew survey showed, that healthy distrust has morphed into an unhealthy cynicism, a growing belief that government is not for the people and by the people but against the people. And there’s no doubt that government can be its own worst enemy, alienating citizens by making promises it cannot keep and placing short-term partisan advantage over long-term national interest. As Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, told the Associated Press after seeing the Pew results: “This should be a wake-up call. Both sides are guilty.” They sure are, and here are just two examples.

The Republicans took power under George W. Bush as the party of small government and fiscal responsibility; yet they cut taxes and increased spending in such a reckless disregard for the laws of economics that budget surpluses turned into stupefying deficits.

Then the Democrats under Barack Obama passed a trillion-dollar healthcare bill that was partly “paid for” by promises to cut payments to doctors and hospitals; yet they have shown absolutely no willingness or ability to take such unpopular steps.

Outside forces have also undermined government’s reputation. “Public satisfaction plunged amid the financial crisis” last year, reported Pew, and partisan “politics has poisoned the well,” added Kohut. For example: 53 percent of Republicans trusted government when Ronald Reagan lived in the White House, but only 12 percent feel that way with Obama in charge.

Moreover, for an entire generation now, politicians in both parties have run for office by tearing down the very government they want to lead. Reagan campaigned against the “puzzle palace on the Potomac” and derided “welfare queens” buying beer on food stamps. The message was strong and simple: Government does not serve ordinary hardworking Americans, but raises their taxes to pay for lazy cheats.

Democrats have always been more sympathetic to government (one in three trust it today), but Obama played on the same anti-Washington feelings that helped elect Reagan, running against a political culture that he argued was dominated by well-connected lobbyists and special interests.

This incessant drumbeat of anti-government language has devastated confidence in our public institutions. As former President Bill Clinton said on the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, “The words we use really do matter, because there’s this vast echo chamber and they go across space and they fall on the serious and delirious alike.”

He warned against encouraging violence as a political tactic, but the Timothy McVeighs or the armed militias are not the real threat to America’s civic health. The real threat is our loss of faith in our common goodness and good sense. In a very real way, if we hate our government, we hate ourselves.

“To keep my edge, I must think and act like an immigrant.” Those are the words of Omid Kordestani, who was born in Iran, moved to California as a teenager, and became a senior vice president of Google. “There is a special optimism and drive that I have benefited from and continue to rely on that I want all of you to find,” he told a graduating class at San Jose State. “Immigrants are inherently dreamers and fighters.”

It’s important to keep Kordestani’s words in mind as Congress contemplates a new effort to pass immigration reform. The debate focuses mainly on the 12 million undocumented workers now in America, but another group is equally important: the highly educated immigrants who want to live and work in this country but are driven away by our stupid and self-defeating policies.

Every economist agrees — skilled immigrants are job-creating engines. Moreover, ideas have no boundaries. The United States will not prosper by making cheaper goods than Bangladesh; it will only grow richer by remaining a Mecca for innovation and imagination. Right now, we’re locked in a worldwide competition for the best and the brightest minds from around the world, and we’re falling behind.

Vivek Wadhwa, a Duke economist, tells USA Today, “For the first time in American history, we are experiencing the brain drain that other countries experienced.” Adds Suren Dutia, CEO of TiE Global, a worldwide professional network, “If the country is going to maintain the kind of economic well-being that we’ve enjoyed for many years, that requires having these incredibly gifted individuals who have been educated and trained by us.”

Other countries get it. A recent article in the Canadian magazine Maclean’s — “Stealing talent from Uncle Sam” — details how Canadian officials are recruiting foreign-born professionals in California. Their cause is greatly aided by our cumbersome and complicated visa process. “The longer Uncle Sam takes to get his house in order, the better it is for us,” the magazine says.

There are two ways for these “incredibly gifted individuals” to stay in the United States: employment-based green cards, which permit permanent residency, or H-1B visas, which allow companies to hire foreign-born graduates of American universities. Both programs, hamstrung by strict limits and lengthy delays, are in desperate need of revision.

Farsighted legislators such as Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer and Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham have recently proposed awarding green cards to immigrants who receive advanced degrees here in science, engineering or technology. President Obama has endorsed the idea, and Sen. Harry Reid, the Democratic leader, has promised to take up immigration reform this year.

The chance for legislative action before the election remains slim, but cities across the Rust Belt are not waiting for Washington to act. They see immigrants as the answer to their economic decline and are trying to attract as many as possible.

As the Detroit News writes, “Bring us your fired-up, your hungry-to-succeed, your Ph.D.s. Bring us your entrepreneurial foreign born, who were 189 percent more likely to start a business in 2008 than those of us born stateside.”

Immigrant-bred companies such as Yahoo and Google garner a lot of publicity, but computer scientists are not the only immigrants who create jobs. Many of them grow the economy store by store, block by block. Richard Herman, co-author of a new book, “Immigrant, Inc.,” argues that his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, “needs the fresh optimism and pluck of new immigrants” to replace the people who are fleeing the city every day. He quotes bank executive Craig Thomas: “As people leave, it really does take international folks to come in, open up stores and fill up neighborhoods.”

That’s exactly what’s happened in St. Louis, Mo., where 70,000 Bosnians have settled in recent years. Writes the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “They have bought homes and started businesses. They have stabilized a broad swath of the city and have begun to move to the suburbs. In short, they’ve done what waves of German, Irish and Italian immigrants did before them.”

American history has been scarred by outbursts of anti-immigrant sentiment. In the 1840s, the Know-Nothing Party flourished by denouncing Irish and German Catholics. In the 1940s, we interned Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast. Today, that virulence is directed at Hispanics and Muslims and fueled by modern-day Know-Nothings such as Lou Dobbs and Pat Buchanan.

The haters were wrong then, and they’re wrong now. The “dreamers and fighters” who constantly renew our strength and our spirit have always blessed America. We need them more than ever.

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Looking out from the harbor here, it’s easy to imagine a mortar lighting up the night sky as it hurtled toward Fort Sumter and signaled the start of the Civil War. It’s also easy, standing inside the walls of the island garrison, to view today’s nullification battle over health care less as a frivolous political game and more as a serious threat to the Constitution.

“The last ray of hope for preserving the Union peaceably expired at the assault on Fort Sumter,” mourned President Lincoln. Painted on the wall of the fort’s small museum, those words remind us that the war was the final act in the unraveling of the union. The disintegration began here in South Carolina as well, with the state’s declaration almost 30 years earlier that federal tariff laws were “unauthorized by the Constitution … and are null, void and … not binding on this state.”

That states’ rights sentiment is with us again. The attorneys general of 14 states have filed suit challenging the healthcare law because, they argue, the Constitution does not authorize the federal government to require the purchase of health insurance. Virginia, acting in direct defiance of federal law, passed a measure making mandated health insurance illegal.

To critics who say this is just political gamesmanship by Republican AGs (plus a Louisiana Democrat who claims he’s doing the bidding of the Republican governor), the states’ chief-law-enforcement officers insist they’re following in a tradition dating back to the Founding Fathers themselves. Jefferson and Madison, they remind us, wrote the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions challenging the Alien and Sedition Acts as an assumption of “undelegated powers” by the federal government. The 1798 resolutions termed the laws “unauthoritative, void and of no force.”

It’s a familiar argument to anyone who lived through the civil-rights era in the American South when Jefferson and Madison were hauled out regularly as champions of states’ rights. The memory of that struggle remains fresh in Arkansas, where the attorney general has resisted pressure to join the nullifiers, sharing Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe’s view that “They tried it here in Arkansas in ‘57, and it didn’t work.” That year, President Eisenhower sent in federal troops to enforce school integration, deeming the Supreme Court’s school-desegregation decision “the law of the land.”

Recalling his state’s history, Attorney General Dustin McDaniel bluntly concludes: “A state deciding that it wants to singularly defy federal law simply because the citizens may not like it — that’s not the way the democratic process works. That’s not the way the Constitution is set up.”

In the 1950s, it was the Supreme Court, not the Congress, that then-Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus took on by his insistence that “neither the state of Arkansas nor its people delegated to the federal government … the power to regulate or control the operation of the domestic institutions of Arkansas.”

And it’s the Supreme Court that is likely to have the final say on this current challenge to federal authority. Most legal experts agree that the justices will probably uphold the healthcare law under the clause of the Constitution that gives the federal government the power to regulate interstate commerce. But the currently constituted court could come to a different conclusion, and the defenders of states’ rights could once again, as they did in the days before the Civil War, find a judicial branch sympathetic to their views.

It’s hard to imagine what would happen politically if the Supreme Court sided with some states against Congress. The already severely frayed fabric of government would certainly be further torn apart. It’s far better to leave the healthcare debate in the arena of electoral politics — and for the losers to accept defeat. That’s the essence of democracy.

It’s an election, after all, that defused that first challenge to federal authority. Thomas Jefferson won the presidency and simply allowed the Alien and Sedition Acts to expire. The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions became irrelevant until the South Carolina nullification declaration when John Calhoun invoked them as precedent for his actions. But James Madison was still around to dispute Calhoun, calling the South Carolinian’s attempt to defy the law “anarchical,” adding that it would have “the effect of putting powder under the Constitution & Union, and a match in the hand of every party, to blow them up at pleasure.”

Which, of course, is exactly what happened 30 years later here at Fort Sumter. It’s not a history any American wants to repeat.