After two weeks of manufactured hysteria over the Nigerian “underwear bomber,” our esteemed national political media happily returned to their primal missions: inane partisan bickering, phony racial controversies, sexual innuendo and adolescent backstairs gossip.

I refer to the ubiquitous publicity attending the release of Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s book “Game Change,” reportedly an insider account of the 2008 presidential campaign by the largely anonymous aides and consultants who lost it. Observing virtually the entire “Gang of 500″ — as Halperin’s clubby Internet rumor sheet “The Note” calls its audience — going ape over the fool thing you could almost hear them emit an audible sigh of relief.

Enough tedium about health care, jobs, taxes, financial regulation and foreign affairs. Back to what really matters to these fops and courtiers: what Newsweek’s Howard Fineman called “tweetable nuggets.” As so often happens, Fineman speaks for them all: “A long analysis of the demographics of the electorate is not going to get you an HBO movie,” he said. “But the tawdry psycho-drama of the Edwards’s and a racist crack by Harry Reid will.”

Hollywood gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons had nothing on these two. Everywhere you looked — “60 Minutes,” CNN, NBC, even BBC America — the authors were on television dishing the dirt: Psst, Cindy McCain hates her husband. Psst, Elizabeth Edwards is a highfalutin’ witch. Psst, Hillary can’t trust Bill out of her sight. Psst, Sarah Palin’s a “mentally unstable” moron, and get this, Bill Clinton’s also secretly a redneck bigot. Details at 6 and 10.

Now, a person of my temperament finds it easy to suspect that anybody who’d willingly submit to the daily torture of a national political campaign must have something psychologically wrong with them. (Not that you’d want a guy who owns more dogs than neckties running the country.)

But what strikes me as significant about this episode isn’t whether Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid used the shocking phrase “Negro dialect” or noted that President Obama’s skin color makes him what the Strom Thurmonds and Trent Lotts of the world used to call a “high yellow.” Nor whether John Edwards’ betrayed, terminally ill wife may have lashed out as described in one of the book’s more grotesquely inhumane passages.

Rather, it’s what the widespread acceptance of Halperin and Heilemann’s brand of journalism says about our impoverished national discourse.

Everywhere they went on television, the authors were at pains to describe their many exhaustive interviews. Immediately before supplying her readers a detailed list of “tweetable nuggets” from “Game Change,” the New York Times’ capable book reviewer Michiko Kakutani outlined her reservations about their methods: “a spicy smorgasbord of observations, revelations and allegations — some that are based on impressive legwork and access, some that simply crystallize rumors and whispers from the campaign trail, and some that it’s hard to verify independently as more than spin or speculation (by) unnamed sources. The authors mix savvy political analysis … with detailed reconstructions of scenes and conversations they did not witness firsthand (like an exchange that Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bill Clinton had on a beach in Anguilla).”

Kakutani, who’s been making this fundamental objection to fictionalized Washington narratives by authors like Bob Woodward and James B. Stewart for years, also points out that the book has no source notes of any kind. “Trust us,” the authors are in effect saying. “We’re the ultimate insiders.”

But can we trust their judgment and motives? Several bloggers have pointed to this passage on page 218: “The day after Iowa, (Bill Clinton) phoned (Sen. Ted) Kennedy and pressed for an endorsement, making the case for his wife. But Bill then went on, belittling Obama in a manner that deeply offended Kennedy. Recounting the conversation later to a friend, Teddy fumed that Clinton had said, a few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.”

So Bill Clinton, formerly (and absurdly) known as America’s first black president, thought the way to win Teddy Kennedy over was to mock Obama as a bus boy? Give me a break.

On evidence, no, you can’t trust these guys any more than they trust their readers’ intelligence, which appears to be not at all. Do I believe that Hillary Clinton, in another suspiciously paraphrased passage, initially wanted to decline the Secretary of State job because her husband’s big mouth might cause problems? No, but I’m confident she and Obama must have talked about how to handle the Gang of 500’s voyeuristic obsession with her marriage.

On the subject of which — along with the McCain and Palin marriages, I’m confident — the best rule of thumb has always been that anybody who’s talking doesn’t know, and anybody who does know ain’t talking.

With apologies to T.S. Eliot, this is the way the world ends: not with a bang but a whisper.

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When the Democrats announced that they would be forgoing conference committee proceedings and negotiating a final health care reform bill informally, critics pounced on President Barack Obama for violating his promise of greater transparency in government. And I, for one, had no great urge to defend him.

As a presidential candidate, Obama had not merely promised to introduce more transparency to government. He had very specifically, and very repeatedly, promised to conduct deliberations over health care “in front of the cameras on C-SPAN.” Although I never took the pledge literally — clearly, you can’t negotiate an entire bill in public view — plenty of voters did. Now Obama was paying a political price for the boast. I figured it was punishment for rhetorical hubris.

But then, on Wednesday, a press release from the Republican National Committee came across my desk. It contained a statement by Rep. Tom Price, Ga., chairman of the Republican Study Committee. “If the Democrats aren’t engaging in more nefarious backroom deal-making, why do they refuse to pull back the curtains and let the public see what’s going on?” Price said. “What are they doing that they don’t want us to see?”

To call that statement priceless is not just a bad pun. It’s a gross understatement. As you may recall, the previous administration — that is, the very Republican George W. Bush administration — had its own problems with transparency. Perhaps most famously, Vice President Richard Cheney convened a task force to help the administration design energy policy. People were naturally curious about what this task force was doing, particularly given the administration’s close ties to the petroleum industry, but Cheney wouldn’t even reveal who was on the task force, let alone open its proceedings to the public.

If Republican leadership was in high dudgeon then, I must have missed it.

The energy task force episode was emblematic of the Bush administration’s approach to transparency. And that approach has changed pretty radically in the last year. According to Ellen Miller, president of the Sunlight Foundation, the Obama administration has made “enormous strides” towards open government. The record is “not perfect,” she says, but “no White House has been more open.”

One sign of this progress is the decision to make public the names of all visitors to the White House. Want to know how frequently Billy Tauzin, the former congressman who now lobbies for the drug industry, visited 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? You can look it up at www.whitehouse.gov. There’s even a handy search tool.

Of course, if you do that search, you’ll see that Tauzin visited the White House 11 times last year — which is not unrelated to the fact that his organization, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, struck a deal with the administration over health care reform. In a nutshell, PhRMA agreed not to fight reform and the administration, with Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., as a partner, agreed it wouldn’t seek changes that reduced drug industry revenues by more than $80 billion. While the existence of a deal was no secret — the administration itself announced it, as a sign of legislative progress — the details only came to light later on, in reports that appeared in the New York Times and Huffington Post. Those details suggest the industry will make out rather well.

Still, everything is relative. The health care industry seemed to have even more influence in 2003, when the Bush administration worked with the Republican congress to create a drug benefit for Medicare. The role of lobbyists in that episode was so obvious and the resulting giveaways to industry so egregious that it disgusted even some Republicans — like Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., who told “60 Minutes” that “the pharmaceutical lobbyists wrote this bill.”

Nor did the Bush administration and its allies seem particularly concerned with transparency during that fight. On the contrary, when the chief actuary for Medicare concluded that the drug plan would cost more than its proponents were predicting, an administration official ordered the actuary to say nothing — to the point where the actuary believed his job was in jeopardy. That same actuary, Richard Foster, has spent much of the last year issuing (somewhat) critical projections about Obama’s reforms. But neither the president nor his allies have tried to squelch Foster. Instead, they’ve been content to argue their case, in public, on the merits.

One more fact to consider is that Obama and his supporters are pushing reforms that will, on their own, advance the cause of transparency — not transparency in government, mind you, but transparency in health care. When insurance carriers make decisions about what services or treatments to cover, they often do so in secret — and leave beneficiaries no legal recourse for challenging those decisions. Reform would create a standard set of benefits, to be determined by democratically accountable officials, that all insurers must cover. It would also create binding legal processes, through which patients could challenge decisions they thought were unfair.

Could Obama be doing more to bring health care — and its policy work — out into the open? Without a question. But he could also be doing a lot less. That’s worth something.

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There’s not much hope for major changes in Congress’ health care bill as it moves toward final passage, but some incremental improvements surely can be made.

One is for the House to adopt the Senate’s proposal to devote $500 million a year to bridge the “valley of death” that prevents medical-research discoveries from being translated into disease treatments and cures.

Another would be for House-Senate conferees to revive a Senate proposal — rejected because it would cost $1 billion a year — to increase America’s supply of doctors, especially the primary-care physicians that will be needed to treat 30 million newly insured people.

The conferees also should pick up on a new proposal by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to train a corps of dental therapists — akin to nurse practitioners — to provide basic service in rural and urban areas where dentists are unavailable.

And, if Congress really wants to take responsibility for what it is doing, it should give all states the same deal that Sen. Ben Nelson (D) gained for Nebraska — pick up the full cost of expanding Medicaid instead of creating a giant unfunded mandate.

There’s no time or appetite for huge conceptual changes in the bills the House and Senate have adopted.

President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats want to produce a bill that Obama can sign as soon as possible this election year to show that Democrats have achieved the president’s signature policy goal.

To get a bill passed, it’s clear that the House basically will have to adopt the bill the Senate passed with a bare 60 votes. That will mean foregoing a public insurance option to compete with private insurance and a tax on millionaires to pay for health reform.

Unless some other pay-for can be found that can attract 60 votes in the Senate, the House will also have to accept the idea — stoutly opposed by organized labor — to tax rich-benefit or “Cadillac” insurance plans.

If this weren’t an election year, it might be possible to revisit the whole design of the package — for instance, adopting proposals such as that of Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Bob Bennett, R-Utah, to give Americans tax credits to buy their own private insurance, giving them maximum choice and portability.

But it’s not going to happen. What conferees can do, however, is make sure that as many Americans as possible obtain insurance — especially young people — by increasing the penalties for not being insured.

The Senate bill contains a penalty starting at $95 but requires insurance companies to cover everyone regardless of pre-existing conditions. That’s an invitation for young people to hold off buying insurance until they get sick or injured — a recipe for increasing premiums on all those who are covered.

In addition, conferees should accept the Senate’s “valley of death” proposal — originally written by Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa. — to increase “translational research” that will move scientific discoveries “from bench to bedside.”

Basic research funded by the National Institutes of Health, nonprofit foundations and biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies has increased substantially over the past decade, but approvals of drugs and devices by the Food and Drug Administration have dropped.

Specter proposed, and the Senate adopted, an amendment to create a public-private “Cures Acceleration Network” to target “high need cures” and distribute matching grants to bring them closer to market.

Meantime, the president of the Association of American Medical Colleges, Darrell Kirch, recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the nation already faces a physician shortage that will be worse when 30 million uninsured people have coverage and are able to see doctors regularly.

He proposed that Congress lifts the cap it imposed on the number of medical residents Medicare would pay for by 15 percent. That idea had substantial Democratic support, but it was dropped as too expensive.

On Dec. 16, the Kellogg Foundation issued a report by Burton Edelstein of the Children’s Dental Health Project showing that 48 million Americans live in areas without enough dentists to provide routine care.

The foundation proposed that the U.S. follow the example of countries such as England, Australia and the Netherlands in creating a dental therapist profession to provide such care under the supervision of dentists.

The idea, which has been resisted in the past by the American Dental Association, is not in either the House or Senate bill. But it should be.

And, finally, it’s only fair that if Nebraska can be spared $100 million over 10 years in costs associated with Congress’ mandate to expand Medicaid coverage, other states should be, too.

The House bill extends Medicaid coverage to people up to 150 percent of the federal poverty level and provides a 100 percent federal payment for two years, dropping to 91 percent thereafter.

The Senate bill goes to 133 percent of poverty and fully covers state costs for two years — then drops to 82 percent to 95 percent for various states.

Governors of both parties have complained loudly that they are cash-strapped, yet Congress is requiring them to cover 11 million more people and insisting that they pay the freight. They’re right. Congress should pay it all — an estimated $30 billion — and find the money to do so.

Democrats are pushing health-care reform even though it’s unpopular in the country. They ought to make it as good a program as they possibly can.

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WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats were stunned by two recent back-to-back retirements in their ranks that foreshadow more election losses to come.

Democratic insiders knew their muscular 60-vote Senate majority was not going to survive the midterm elections, especially at a time when the landscape has dramatically changed, much to Republicans’ advantage. But they didn’t think they would begin to see the shrinkage take place this early in the year, handing the GOP two potentially strategic victories before stepping on the battlefields.

Sens. Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota were both marked for defeat, and their retirements open up two seats that could fall into GOP hands.

Dodd was brought down by a sweetheart home-mortgage deal that he could not overcome, with his support dropping to 40 percent or lower against a strong GOP field. Dorgan faced the possibility of running against popular Republican Gov. John Hoeven, who is running nearly 20 points ahead of Dorgan in the polls.

Insiders tell me they may not be the only Senate Democrats who have been contemplating retirement instead of running in a rough environment (worsened by the recession and high unemployment and growing public opposition to the Democrats’ government takeover of the healthcare system).

How rough can it get? Start with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada who for all intents and purposes is a goner in a state where the unemployment rate is 12.3 percent and there is strong opposition to Reid’s healthcare bill — two potent issues that are driving the GOP’s resurgence.

Apart from these three seats, polls show Republicans leading in five more races in the largely blue states of Ohio, Arkansas, Pennsylvania, Colorado and Delaware, where Vice President Joe Biden’s former Senate seat is in danger of falling to the Republicans. Right now, most election handicappers list Biden’s open seat as “leaning Republican.”

Another sign of how the political landscape has turned against the Democrats can be seen in deep-blue Illinois, where President Obama’s Senate seat is clearly up for grabs following a wave of Democratic corruption scandals and an ongoing, almost 11 percent unemployment rate.

A four- to five-seat pickup for the GOP in November would mean the end of Obama’s agenda for the rest of his term. His cap-and-tax climate-change energy plan was deadlocked in the Senate anyway, even with 60 votes, as I reported it would be last year. But additional GOP gains that now seem in the cards would put any action even further out of reach for the White House on a wide range of unfinished business.

In the meantime, the House outlook for 2010 looks even gloomier for the Pelosi Democrats and Obama. Right now, there are at least 46 Democratic seats in play versus only 14 Republican seats, according to election forecaster Stuart Rothenberg’s latest race-by-race analysis.

“Substantial Republican gains now look almost inevitable,” Rothenberg reported last month in the Rothenberg Political Report. “While Democratic control of the House is not yet at risk, losses of 15 to 20 seats are likely, and that target range could well grow with additional Democratic retirements and voter anger.”

Polls show that voter anger is likely to worsen as voters learn more about the unpopular consequences of the healthcare bill that is being taped together behind closed doors by Democratic leaders. Possibly adding to Democrats’ woes is if unemployment remains in the 9 percent to 10 percent range for the rest of this year, as the Federal Reserve and other top economists are now forecasting.

There is one more strategic political front that bears close watching: the nation’s governorships. Election forecasters now predict Republicans will hold a majority of them after November.

Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter Jr. of Colorado announced last week that he would not be seeking a second term, opening up an opportunity for a GOP pickup in a swing state. Ritter has long been trailing his Republican challenger, former Rep. Scott McInnis. He joins several other Democratic governors in GOP-leaning red states who have been term limited, opening up further opportunities to expand the GOP’s governorships this year after winning state houses in Virginia and New Jersey in 2009.

Thus, the midterm elections — when the party in power historically loses seats in Congress — are shaping up as a bleak time for the Democrats.

The high energy levels that drove Democrats to victory in 2008 will not be there this year. Obama is not on the ballot. The Democrats’ left-wing base is angry that their party leaders have ditched a strong public option in the healthcare bill and have expanded the war in Afghanistan.

“Obviously, if that tension grows during 2010, it could have a significant impact on Democratic midterm turnout,” Rothenberg points out.

The American electorate took a sharp left turn in 2008, but now appears to be swinging back toward the right.

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There’s not much hope for major changes in Congress’ health care bill as it moves toward final passage, but some incremental improvements surely can be made.

One is for the House to adopt the Senate’s proposal to devote $500 million a year to bridge the “valley of death” that prevents medical-research discoveries from being translated into disease treatments and cures.

Another would be for House-Senate conferees to revive a Senate proposal — rejected because it would cost $1 billion a year — to increase America’s supply of doctors, especially the primary-care physicians that will be needed to treat 30 million newly insured people.

The conferees also should pick up on a new proposal by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to train a corps of dental therapists — akin to nurse practitioners — to provide basic service in rural and urban areas where dentists are unavailable.

And, if Congress really wants to take responsibility for what it is doing, it should give all states the same deal that Sen. Ben Nelson (D) gained for Nebraska — pick up the full cost of expanding Medicaid instead of creating a giant unfunded mandate.

There’s no time or appetite for huge conceptual changes in the bills the House and Senate have adopted.

President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats want to produce a bill that Obama can sign as soon as possible this election year to show that Democrats have achieved the president’s signature policy goal.

To get a bill passed, it’s clear that the House basically will have to adopt the bill the Senate passed with a bare 60 votes. That will mean foregoing a public insurance option to compete with private insurance and a tax on millionaires to pay for health reform.

Unless some other pay-for can be found that can attract 60 votes in the Senate, the House will also have to accept the idea — stoutly opposed by organized labor — to tax rich-benefit or “Cadillac” insurance plans.

If this weren’t an election year, it might be possible to revisit the whole design of the package — for instance, adopting proposals such as that of Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Bob Bennett, R-Utah, to give Americans tax credits to buy their own private insurance, giving them maximum choice and portability.

But it’s not going to happen. What conferees can do, however, is make sure that as many Americans as possible obtain insurance — especially young people — by increasing the penalties for not being insured.

The Senate bill contains a penalty starting at $95 but requires insurance companies to cover everyone regardless of pre-existing conditions. That’s an invitation for young people to hold off buying insurance until they get sick or injured — a recipe for increasing premiums on all those who are covered.

In addition, conferees should accept the Senate’s “valley of death” proposal — originally written by Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa. — to increase “translational research” that will move scientific discoveries “from bench to bedside.”

Basic research funded by the National Institutes of Health, nonprofit foundations and biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies has increased substantially over the past decade, but approvals of drugs and devices by the Food and Drug Administration have dropped.

Specter proposed, and the Senate adopted, an amendment to create a public-private “Cures Acceleration Network” to target “high need cures” and distribute matching grants to bring them closer to market.

Meantime, the president of the Association of American Medical Colleges, Darrell Kirch, recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the nation already faces a physician shortage that will be worse when 30 million uninsured people have coverage and are able to see doctors regularly.

He proposed that Congress lifts the cap it imposed on the number of medical residents Medicare would pay for by 15 percent. That idea had substantial Democratic support, but it was dropped as too expensive.

On Dec. 16, the Kellogg Foundation issued a report by Burton Edelstein of the Children’s Dental Health Project showing that 48 million Americans live in areas without enough dentists to provide routine care.

The foundation proposed that the U.S. follow the example of countries such as England, Australia and the Netherlands in creating a dental therapist profession to provide such care under the supervision of dentists.

The idea, which has been resisted in the past by the American Dental Association, is not in either the House or Senate bill. But it should be.

And, finally, it’s only fair that if Nebraska can be spared $100 million over 10 years in costs associated with Congress’ mandate to expand Medicaid coverage, other states should be, too.

The House bill extends Medicaid coverage to people up to 150 percent of the federal poverty level and provides a 100 percent federal payment for two years, dropping to 91 percent thereafter.

The Senate bill goes to 133 percent of poverty and fully covers state costs for two years — then drops to 82 percent to 95 percent for various states.

Governors of both parties have complained loudly that they are cash-strapped, yet Congress is requiring them to cover 11 million more people and insisting that they pay the freight. They’re right. Congress should pay it all — an estimated $30 billion — and find the money to do so.

Democrats are pushing health-care reform even though it’s unpopular in the country. They ought to make it as good a program as they possibly can.

READ MORE >

WASHINGTON — Renewed terrorist penetration of homeland security and U.S. intelligence and military bases has thrown President Obama on the defensive — raising deeply disturbing questions about his policies to keep America safe.

Over the past week or more, in the wake of an attempted bombing of an American jetliner over Detroit on Christmas Day, the president and his advisers have responded with a raft of confusing and contradictory statements that has further shaken public confidence in the administration’s handling of the war on terrorism (a term that Obama hates to use).

It started, in the hours following the attempt to bring down a U.S.-bound airliner, with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s statement that the nation’s counterterrorism “system worked,” only to scrap those naive words sometime later and admit the attack had exposed serious failings in our security system — an incredible contradiction by the woman in charge of our homeland defenses.

Obama’s initial statement, while on vacation in Hawaii, referred to the failed bombing attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian trained in Yemen, as an “isolated” act. His erroneous description was scrapped, too, when the president told the nation what had already been widely reported, that this was a carefully planned Al Qaeda operation — an even more incredible contradiction.

Even more disturbing was the porous nature of the U.S. homeland’s security and counterterrorism systems that were unable to connect the dots on a long list of signals that numerous security agencies received over many months.

“We did have the information throughout the course of the summer and fall about … plans to carry out attacks,” John O. Brennan, Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “We had snippets of information, we had information about Umar Farouk, but we didn’t have any type of information that really allowed us to identify Mr. Abdulmutallab.”

“We may have had a partial name. We might have had an indication of a Nigerian. But there was nothing that brought it all together,” he said.

In fact, the terror trail of information that various agencies received over the course of many months cried out to be connected and recognized by people whose job it is to do that. Brennan admitted as much when he said “clearly the system didn’t work,” but pointed to many “bits and pieces of information” but not enough to “map it and attach it to” the young Nigerian radical who had been trained for his bombing mission by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, where he was referred to as “Brother Umar Farouk the Nigerian.”

Intelligence intercepts were coming in last summer from Yemen that revealed an Al Qaeda plot built around “a Nigerian” being trained for a bombing attack, though Abdulmutallab’s name had not entered the database reports until his father notified embassy officials that his son was working with extremists. That report alone was the smoking gun that would have connected him to the earlier intercepts.

It is now clear that had this information been put together, Abdulmutallab would have been put on a watch list that would have prevented him from getting onboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253.

America came within milliseconds of another deadly terrorist attack, but the failed attempt has renewed bothersome questions about the Obama administration’s mishandling of homeland-security safeguards and the larger war on terrorism.

Among them: Why are we closing down Guantanamo Bay and moving terrorists to prison facilities here in the United States? Why are we sending many of them to terrorism breeding grounds where they have rejoined Al Qaeda training camps? Obama has released 42, including seven who were sent home to Yemen. Why are we giving terrorists the privileges and rights of our civilian-court system where their cases will likely go on for years through an unending legal process, followed by a string of appeals?

Brennan, using Obama’s arguments for closing Guantanamo, says it has become “a propaganda tool for Al Qaeda,” as if moving the terrorists there to U.S. prisons here would effectively prevent Al Qaeda from making this specious claim.

The administration’s botched handling of this latest bomb plot, revealing numerous counterterrorism agencies asleep at the switch, and its policy of giving terrorists the full benefits of our criminal-justice system has alarmed the American people — as it should. The president’s job-approval polls have fallen into the 40s this week.

Perhaps the last straw was Brennan’s claim Sunday that Abdulmutallab would be given the chance to win a plea agreement if he agrees to tell us what he knows about Al Qaeda’s terrorist operations in Yemen.

Abdulmutallab’s “lawyers recognize that there is advantage to talking to us in terms of plea agreements, (and) we’re going to pursue that,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

So the man who almost snuffed out the lives of everyone aboard that airline on Christmas Day would be offered a chance to cop a plea. This is Obama’s war on terrorism.

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