Money

Money has been much in the news of late, particularly in Europe, where  the Greeks don’t have enough, which is bad, and the Germans worry that if the Greeks abandon the euro and inflate the drachma, they will have too much, which would be worse. Money is a medium of exchange that itself has no intrinsic worth – the paper of a ten-dollar bill is not worth $10. Backed in the past by precious metals, usually gold, the dollar’s value is now based solely on the assurance of one Rosie Rios, who happens to be the United States Treasurer, that it is “legal tender for all debts, public and private.” But money is also a commodity that is bought and sold, and while the government can say whatever it wants, the marketplace will determine its value.

Clearly, money has enabled humans to accumulate goods and wealth in ways we could not otherwise have done. But it has done so, I think, by making possible the concept of “never enough.” If we are hungry – and lucky enough to have food – we eat until we are sated. Likewise, we fill our other needs until we have enough. To go beyond that is to have an addiction.

It is different with money. Because we can’t get enough of it, we are driven relentlessly to get more. The result is that money has become the opposite of wealth, for it has caused us to extract the earth’s bounty and exploit its people in ways that diminish the value of both.

Conversation

The posts over the last couple of weeks have brought a good deal of response, which has been both challenging and gratifying. Much of it has focused on President Obama, and while it may not be representative of the national debate, it is the kind of thoughtful conversation this country should be having. Perhaps unsurprisingly, birthers and Tea Partiers do not seem to regularly follow this blog, and those who write or tell me of their current opposition to Obama are primarily disappointed supporters from four years ago. Republicans of the vanishing moderate breed, they welcomed the alternative of inclusiveness and moderation that Obama offered to eight years of Bush and Cheney’s nose-thumbing partisanship, ruinous wars and financial mismanagement. They were appalled at the emergence of Sarah Palin and what she seemed to signify for their party.

But they are pragmatists, not dreamers, and Obama has not lived up to their expectations, or even their hopes. They cite his poor administrative skills, saying that his lack of executive experience has made him unable to work the system. They think he dropped the ball on Simpson-Bowles.

While I think there is truth to these criticisms, I strongly believe that the vision Obama presented in 2008 remains the best path forward not just for America but for the world. But these are exactly the kinds of disagreements we need to have in this country – a conversation that is both measured and passionate, one that makes each side stronger by the very act of listening to what the other side says. It may not change our minds – and it should not change our principles – but it will surely help us to work together for the common good.

Stumble of the Week

Yesterday Buddy Roemer announced, “I am no longer a candidate for President of the United States." Who knew? I was reminded of Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, who discovered World War II was over when he came out of a Philippines jungle and surrendered his .25-caliber rifle in 1974.

Of the entire collection once touted as major Republican candidates, only Ron Paul is left (oh, and Fred Karger, the gay-rights advocate who has so far received 3,805 votes). Despite my horror at the time, I kind of miss the mind-boggling prattle and those who uttered it in the endless debates:

• Michele Bachmann, who turned out to have her own birther issue, as she had secretly held Swiss citizenship since 1978.

• Herman Cain, who was finally taken seriously on Stephen Colbert’s ticket.

• Newt Gingrich, whose self-righteous bombast could not conceal all those stories about his ex-wives.

• Jon Huntsman, Jr., the self-proclaimed moderate who got clobbered early and often.

• Gary Johnson, whose platform to legalize marijuana got him laughed out of the Republican fold . . . and nominated by the Libertarians.

• Tim Pawlenty, who ran for so long that people forgot who he was. Well, he’s now on Romney’s vice-presidential short list.

• Rick Perry, whose performance in one debate caused a journalist to ask if he had suffered a stroke.

• Rick Santorum, who almost convinced his party to nominate a 21^st-century Torquemada.

• The Donald, who will simply never go away.

All these candidates had one common goal: to prevent Mitt Romney from getting the nomination. They couldn’t even do that.

Viva Las Vegas

An old friend and I were driving around our childhood neighborhood last weekend, when we passed a decrepit and long-abandoned shack along the road. I recognized it instantly. “Hey,” I said. “Remember Wally’s Ski Shop?”

“Sure do,” he said. “Wally won the lottery . . . The next day he closed up shop and took off.”

The lottery has replaced the American Dream as the way to wealth. In Pennsylvania, where it’s celebrating its 40^th anniversary, billboards urge the public to “play every day.” But the multi-billion-dollar market may be reaching its saturation point, and states are finding it ever harder to sell ever more tickets. So governments must constantly come up with new games and gimmicks to fill their coffers.

The main difference between state lotteries and the TV car salesman who jumps out of the trunk waving a giant cardboard price tag is that the money the states so generously give away comes out of the pockets of their own people – and in particular of those who are least able to afford it and most addicted to trying.

Of all the hidden taxes we pay, the lottery is the most regressive. And in their frantic search for revenues that don’t seem like taxes, the governments have become as addicted as the players.

Maybe it’s time to have an honest conversation about the need to provide essential public services and a fair formula for distributing the cost of doing so. But that would be a tax, which is, of course, unthinkable. The states have a better idea.

Casinos.

All Our Trials

America has long been known as a litigious society, its people just itching to haul somebody into court. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as settling matters at trial seems preferable to dueling with pistols or “necktie parties” in the woods. The courts have declared the right to sue inherent in the first amendment, and the fairest judge I ever knew told me never to sign that right away. But we don’t need show trials to publicize repellent behavior, and two current proceedings strike me as complete wastes of taxpayers’ money – because smarminess, however destructive, is not crime. The prosecutions of John Edwards, the politician, and Roger Clemens, the pitcher, have cost millions of dollars, and the testimony at each seems more appropriate to daytime television than a court of law.

Since taking steroids was not a crime when Clemens played baseball, he is being tried for perjury; and Edwards’ verdict will turn on whether the money Bunny Mellon and Fred Baron funneled to him violated the campaign finance law or was simply to cover up his creepy behavior. We’ll never know, since Ms. Mellon is 101 and Mr. Baron is dead. In any event, that seems a distinction without a difference.

Meanwhile, a trial of huge significance began yesterday at The Hague, where Ratko Mladic, the “Butcher of Bosnia,” is charged with war crimes and genocide. The United States led the effort to bring prosecute those crimes after World War II, although the Bush administration subsequently refused to recognize the court’s jurisdiction.

It seems almost criminal that we waste millions on Edwards and Clemons when real and appalling crimes are being prosecuted at The Hague.

Let Them Read Books

This is an observation, not a statistical analysis, but I have noticed a phenomenon lately on which the pundits have yet to remark – and that is the number of homeless people on New York City’s streets who read books. Many are young, some have their dogs with them, and most stare so intently at the page that, other than the pleas written on cardboard with magic markers, you might think they were students on class break. What people make of this probably depends on their politics.

For some, it must be more evidence that English majors can’t even flip hamburgers. Or that the new hippy generation is too lazy to work. Or that the schools really have failed, not because kids can’t read but because that’s all they can do.

Others may think of their own children’s struggles to get work in this economy. Or find the sight of able-bodied, literate young people begging in the streets a social rather than a personal problem.

Maybe these kids go back to their parents’ apartments after their stints on the sidewalk. But maybe they are part of the city’s homeless population, which has reached it highest levels since the Great Depression.

In fact, almost every statistic about the homeless in New York is an “all-time record”: Over 40,000 people are homeless each day, including 10,000 families and 17,000 children. Over 100,000 different people use the city’s shelters each year, and city authorities have no idea how many others sleep in the streets, the subways and the parks.

The Samaritan

United Flight 414 had just begun to taxi down the runway when the woman in seat 28B threw up. I was in 28C. We were on our way to Newark Airport, five-and-a-half hours across the country. She spoke no English. I do not speak Chinese. This, I thought, is going to be a long trip.

I had a lot of work, and when I had arranged it in the space an economy seat offers, I got up to use the head. When I returned, a man was standing at my seat. He was the woman’s husband, and he sat behind her in 29B. He didn’t speak English either, but he made clear to me that we were to trade places. I looked forlornly at the two large men in 29A and 29C, and as I gathered my stuff, I made it clear how put out I was. People should recognize the sacrifice I was making.

In the Gospel of Luke, a lawyer asks Jesus, “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Part of the answer is to love “your neighbor as yourself.” The lawyer naturally presses, “And who is my neighbor?”

The answer turns out to be the Samaritan, who went out of his way to help the man lying half-dead in the road. He did not act begrudgingly, but cared generously for the stranger – whereas my body language had emphasized the extent of my self-sacrifice. My one-percent roots were showing –  I have a right to my privileged place but occasionally make a noble gesture to the less fortunate.

Oh, Fence, D-Fence

A report released yesterday by the Pew Research Center, which found that net migration from Mexico has dropped to zero – and may even have reversed itself – has roiled international relations and national politics. Speaking in his native Spanish, Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon called on President Obama to hurry up and finish the border fence. “We have enough problems without having to deal with hordes of gringos flooding across the Rio Grande,” he said. “It’s already hard to get our people to go up there” now that the Minuteman Project calls itself "a citizens' Neighborhood Watch on our border."

“This is just one more example of a failed Obama presidency,” said Mitt Romney. “This administration can't even provide jobs for illegal immigrants who will work for practically nothing.”

Asked if he now favored discontinuing the fence, whose cost is estimated at up to $10 million a mile, Romney responded: “I support the efforts of Gov. Jan Brewer, Sheriff Arpaio and others to secure our border.

“But,” he chuckled, “Ann and I have lost good yard boys in three states.”

The campaign quickly clarified that Romney meant to say “maintenance staff” and noted “the Romneys paid all appropriate taxes.”

Convinced he had finally found a winning issue, Newt Gingrich traveled to Arizona, where he accused Obama of maintaining the fence to keep Democratic voters from leaving.

“Mr. Obama,” he said. “Tear down this fence.”

Today the Supreme Court hears testimony on Arizona’s immigration law (SB 1070) aimed at protecting us from “the invasion of illegal aliens we face today.”

Mea Culpa

My feeling about shareholder proxy statements had long been: why bother? The small print, massive word count and abstruse language seemed meant to sow confusion and the deck was completely stacked. Just vote against management, lose in a landslide and get on with life. Irresponsible advice, cynical perhaps, and, it turns out, wrong. For yesterday the shareholders of Citigroup voted down the $15-million pay package for the bank’s chief executive officer in perhaps the first time stockholders have so defied the management of a giant corporation.

It’s about time. Citigroup has delivered little but heartache for its shareholders. Five years ago, in the heyday of Ponzi schemes and self-dealing collateralized debt obligations, the company’s shares were worth over $500 apiece and paid a dividend of $5.40. Today, after being pulled from the edge of bankruptcy by a huge federal bailout, the stock sells for $35; its quarterly dividend is one cent. According to one analyst, “Citigroup has had the worst stock price performance among large banks over the last decade but ranked among the highest in terms of compensation for top executives.”

I have no illusion that small shareholders swayed the nonbinding vote. Big institutions such as Calpers, the California pension fund, voted its 9.7 million shares against the proposal, and ISS Proxy Advisory Services recommended a no vote. Still, the outrage at corporate malfeasance and offensive pay packages clearly is having an impact.

When the modern corporation emerged a little over a century ago, many hailed it as the democratization of capitalism in a world of monopolies. It hasn’t worked out that way recently, but this is a good step.

Paying Attention

It’s exciting to engage in the big issues and philosophical debates of the day. But it’s also important to pay attention to the details where those matters work themselves out. On the surface, the General Services Administration’s $822,000 party in Las Vegas, the prostitution solicitation scandal in Cartagena, Colombia, and the Taliban’s coordinated attacks in Afghanistan don’t have much in common. They happened thousands of miles apart and have vastly different consequences. But in each instance, people who should have been paying attention were not.

Perhaps because the GSA’s party was the most frivolous, its images of people in hot tubs and tidbits of outrageous spending have gotten the most attention. Jeffrey Neely, the event’s organizer, pled the Fifth Amendment before Congress, even to the question of his job title, which will presumably soon be changing anyway. His rationale, I suppose, was “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas."

A couple of dozen members of the military and the Secret Service undoubtedly feel the same way about Cartagena, where they spent the night carousing with prostitutes in preparation for the president’s arrival.

Lastly, while the Afghan military responded to the Taliban raids better than had been expected, the attacks caught U.S. personnel by complete surprise – what one western official called an “intelligence failure for us, and especially NATO.”

The federal government is the nation’s biggest employer, with almost 3 million full- and part-time civilian employees alone. Things slip through the cracks. But perhaps because it's the time when we pay the bill, it seems important to remember that all the details do add up.

Trayvon

George Zimmerman is in custody in Seminole County Jail, charged with second-degree murder in the death of Trayvon Martin on February 26^th in Sanford, Florida. If convicted, he faces a sentence of 25 years to life in prison. Zimmerman’s arrest is long overdue. So why am I uneasy?

Because, in a world in which a bag of Skittles has become the icon of youthful innocence and a hoodie the symbol of ghetto behavior, almost everything about this case has become a dangerous cliché.

Because Zimmerman needs to be tried by a jury of his peers, not by an inflammatory press or an inflamed public.

Because the outcome we seek should be justice, not vengeance or justification.

We are in danger of losing sight of both the big picture and the small one. The small one is the human one: Trayvon Martin, a young man, is dead. President Obama struck the right chord when he said, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” Without mentioning the matter of race, he called attention to the killing of a young black man, and he simultaneously urged us to transcend race by mourning the death of a son.

The big picture is the Florida law that encourages shooting first and explaining it later – a law that is the product of this country’s relentless gun lobby, which continues to insist that we are all safer when we are all armed, and that the horrendous noise of gunfire is just the sound of freedom.

We Don’t Know

I have always had something of a crush on Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the opposition in Myanmar and 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner, who was overwhelmingly elected to the Burmese parliament on Sunday. A woman whose combination of fragile beauty, steely resolve and quiet dignity has never wavered through a life of more tragedy than triumph, she is to me the personification of Hemingway’s dictum that “courage is grace under pressure.” She has endured much: her father assassinated when she was two; a brother who drowned at their childhood home; long separations from her two sons and from her husband who died of cancer in 1999; almost continual house arrest over the last 20 years.

Nothing in her life has been easy, but it is the life she has chosen. She is the same age as I am, and yet I cannot understand what is going on beneath her always-composed demeanor – other than that her life is a mission for which she has given up almost everything.  And she seems to have embodied the aspirations of her long-subjected people.

Just as we don’t know Suu Kyi from her images, so we don’t know what is really happening in her country either. We think of such totalitarian states as crushing all opposition and using propaganda and mind control to create future generations of automatons. So we thought of Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China, of South Africa under apartheid. So we think now of North Korea and Iran. And yet somehow these places have never managed to crush the human spirit.

Due Process

Forty years ago a friend was staying with me, and as we went by a “Neighborhood Watch” sign, he said, “I know what that means. It means, ‘We have no police.’” Today it appears to mean, “Armed vigilantes on patrol.” Woody Brock must wait for a day. I need to try to understand what happened to Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black 17-year-old whom a neighborhood watch captain shot and killed last month in Sanford, Florida.

Here is what I know:

• The young man’s death is a complete and needless tragedy, and a parent’s worst nightmare.
• Florida’s seven-year old “Stand Your Ground” law, which was pushed by the National Rifle Association and opposed by police groups, is an abomination – one that is in effect in 21 states and needs to be repealed in all of them.
• The police department’s response to the shooting is inexplicable.
• The New Black Panthers’ bounty offer of $10,000 for the capture of George Zimmerman is repellent.

Here is what I don’t know: What happened the evening of Feb. 26^th that led to Martin’s death.

Here is what I fear: That we will never know and that justice will never be done.

Trayvon Martin’s death has become a cause in which the pressure to take sides has overpowered the search for truth – and the rush to either canonization or demonization has displaced the humanity of victim and shooter.

These days, it seems, if you want your voice to be heard, your mind must be closed.

And that, too, is a tragedy.

Dr. Brock

I have known Woody Brock since we were six years old, and he has recently published a thoughtful book, American Gridlock, Commonsense 101 Solutions to the Economic Crisis. Since he is neither bashful about his cognitive abilities nor modest in his ambition, he has subtitled his book, “Why the Right and the Left are Both Wrong.” In line with that aspiration, he takes on five of the most contentious and important issues of the day – issues, he argues, that now seem intractable because (1) the public conversation has become a “dialogue of the deaf” and (2) unbending ideologues “cherry pick” data which they use to fortify their intellectual redoubts. “Gotcha,” he writes, “has become the game of our times.”

Brock calls for a return to a rigorous logic in which win-win solutions are deduced from first premises. A discussion of this method is perhaps the most interesting part of the book. Over the next couple of posts I will briefly present each of the issues raised in Brock’s book.

The Deficit. Brock, a serious mathematician, engages in simple math to distinguish between “good” and “bad” deficits. There is a huge difference, he argues, between spending and investing: a government’s negative cash flow is not a deficit if the borrowed money is invested in human capital and infrastructure improvements that will earn a positive return in the future.

“We eclipse all other nations,” he writes, “spending a whopping 71% of GDP on consumption.” In doing so we have created what John Kenneth Galbraith predicted over 50 years ago: an Affluent Society of “private splendor and public squalor.”

Next up: Entitlements; Preventing Perfect Financial Storms; China and Bargaining Theory; Distributive Justice.

Readers Write

Today some comments from readers (two from a public official who follows state activities and two from friends):

• A resolution calling the UN program encouraging sustainable development as a dark scheme to crush people’s property rights through “extreme environmentalism” goes to the Tennessee House for a vote today.

• The Missouri legislature has considered legislation to require equal treatment of global warming and evolution denial positions in a K-12 curriculum being created by the Heartland Institute. "[It] will be a nice counterweight to the many, many materials distributed that present an overtly political and alarmist message in regards to climate change. . . ," said James M. Taylor of Heartland. "By contrast, our materials would be based on sound science and fact."  Mark McCaffrey of the National Center for Science Education said the curriculum creates a debate where none exists. A 2010 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that about 98 percent of active climate scientists believe human activities hasten climate change.

• On yesterday’s blog: A little one sided.  Obama's abandonment of Simpson Bowles, a committee he had set up, is equally as egregious as Mitt’s flip flops, which can be somewhat forgiven considering the audience he has to appeal to. Obama had a chance to set our country on a different path and failed miserably, in my opinion.

• Asked what surprises him most, the Dalai Lama said, "modern man:" "He works so hard for money and ruins his life in the process, then he uses the money he worked for to try to recover his life without getting it back where it was. Then he spends all his present preparing for the future and in the process dies without living in the future while he never lived in the present either.”

Remembrance

I have taken to reading . . . and beginning to chronicle . . . the plaques on New York City’s park benches. There are thousands of stories on these small bronzes, and there is probably, too, one huge story about a city and its people. Several of the plaques are in memory of victims of World Trade Center victims, such as this one to Derek Sword, so poignant in its aching simplicity.

I had intended to write about Sergeant Robert Bales and the killing of 16 people, mostly children in the village of Panjwai, Afghanistan, having as little insight to shed as others. The story became even more difficult with this morning’s news that a gunman had killed four people, three of them children, outside a Jewish school in Toulouse, France.

I have no generalizations to offer, other than we don’t need generalizations. For days, the U.S. government did not identify Sgt. Bales, which seemed such a contrast to the almost immediate release of the name of Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009. With the identification of Sgt. Bales has come an effort to humanize him, to wonder how he could have committed such an atrocity. This is a consideration we must extend to Maj. Hasan.

For the perpetrators and the victims are people, not members of a group, Abdal Samad lost his wife, four young daughters and four young sons at the hands of Sgt. Bales. A father and his two children were killed in Toulouse.

We need to look through the categories and see the people. And we must not, as Kate Wenner wrote yesterday, “lose our memory when it comes to the consequences of wars fought far from home.”

Collateral Damage

Yesterday I saw a bumper sticker that read: “I’m already against the next war.” Not to mention the current undeclared ones.

The latest tragedy in Afghanistan – in which an army sergeant, trained as a sniper, left his base at night, walked a mile south and killed 16 people, including nine children in their homes – has raised again the questions: Why are we there? What are we trying to accomplish? Why don’t we leave these people alone?

This is by far the most awful of a series of recent incidents that have incensed Afghanis and ought to incense us – Marines urinating on dead insurgents’ bodies; burning sacks of Korans; NATO helicopters inadvertently shooting civilians while on a mission to flush out Taliban fighters; a group of soldiers killing for sport.

Everyone decries the most recent tragedy, but even the contrition demonstrates how the language of war threatens our sense of decency.

"This is tragic and will be investigated, and that soldier will be held accountable," said Senator Lindsey Graham. "Unfortunately, these things happen in war."

“These things” are the methodical murders of women and children in their own homes.

Newt Gingrich, who pummeled President Obama over the Koran burning for apologizing “to people who are in the process of killing young Americans,” said the U.S. should offer “condolences” and perhaps “compensation” to the families – as if the children were somehow fungible, their lives replaceable.

A random act by a deranged individual – but as Senator Graham said, “These things happen in war.”

For better or worse, this is now Barack Obama’s war, and it is time to end it.

Shrinking Commons

In Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, Katherine Boo, writes, “Rich Indians typically tried to work around a dysfunctional government. Private security was hired, city water was filtered, private school tuitions were paid. Such choices had evolved over the years into a principle: The best government is the one that gets out of the way. . . .While independent India had been founded by high-born well-educated men, by the 21^st century few such types stood for elections or voted in them, since the wealthy had extra-democratic means of securing their social and economic interests. Across India, the poor people were the ones who took the vote seriously. It was the only real power they had" (pp 216-7). But in Boo’s portrait of the lives of the poor, living in a fetid slum by Mumbai’s gleaming airport, the vote brings no secure power. It brings promises and celebrations at election time; it offers the possibility of individual access to the system through the corrupt political machines that exchange petty patronage for loyalty and eschew any change that might undermine their inconsequential power. The real power lies with the police, courts and government bureaucracy that set the poor against each other and supply “justice” for bribes.

The privatization of public space extends across the economic spectrum in India, just as it does in the rest of a world increasingly characterized by gated communities, private security guards, the dismantling of public education, the shredding of the social safety net, and proxy armies fighting off-budget wars.

The solution to the tragedy of the commons is not to privatize it, as Garrett Hardin suggested in his 1968 essay. It is to reclaim it for the common good.

Both/And

My daughter has both a small child and a demanding career. That is to say, she has two full-time jobs. It isn’t easy juggling her schedule, but she wants to do it, she needs to do it, and she does it well. She lives in a world made possible by the feminist movement, but I don’t think of her as a feminist so much as a mother and a nurse practitioner who struggles every day to balance two roles that define her life. And I am awfully proud of her. So I have followed with interest the flap over the part in Rick Santorum’s 2005 book, It Takes a Family, that says: “Many women . . . find it easier, more ‘professionally’ gratifying, and certainly more socially affirming, to work outside the home than to give up their careers to take care of their children.” The passage goes on to blame “radical feminists” for refusing to acknowledge the equality of work done in the home, and ends up calling for “both fair workplace rules and proper respect for work in the home.”

I think Santorum and his critics have both missed the essential point – for many women the issue is not “either-or”, it is “both-and.” They want – and more often they need – a family and a job, just as men do. And we need what they have to offer on both fronts. So yes, it takes a family. But it also takes a village.

Safety Net

Several of you reminded me that some people sleep on the subway because that is the only place they can sleep. Last evening a man on a packed uptown train emitted a stench that literally cleared the back third of the car.

And Mitt Romney said, “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there.”

I know there is a connection here.

But I don’t think it’s the obvious one that everybody pounced on. Mitt Romney doesn’t seem any more out of touch with the world of struggling people than any of the other candidates who ride around in big buses, insulated by aides, and speak in platitudes to hand-picked crowds. Maybe they would have developed more empathy for the dispossessed if they had done a stint as community organizers.

Still, no amount of backpedaling, clarifications and “you-took-me-out-of-contexts” can justify Romney’s remark because:

1. The “safety net” is the essence of the welfare state that is under assault by all the GOP candidates. To use its current existence to dismiss the plight of the very poor is hypocrisy.
2. The idea that the safety net is adequate (in fairness, Romney said he’d fix it) seems a little callous. As the stinking man made clear, the subway provides sleeping places, not bathing facilities . . . which may explain why the reaction to him was startlingly sympathetic.
3. Polls show that most Americans are incensed at the rich and the poor. But the notion that politicians should divide the country into those they care about and those they don’t – whether it’s Romney’s 90-95% or Rove’s 50% +1 – contradicts the duty of a president to bring us all together.