“They’re my representatives. I send them there – oftentimes into harm’s way…Secretary Clinton has done an extraordinary job. But she works for me. I’m the president. And I’m always responsible.”

The Obama of national security is accountable, responsible, and when necessary, culpable.

That approach is historically sound. When the Deepwater Horizon turned the Gulf of Mexico black in 2010, BP CEO Tony Hayward couldn’t shrug, hold up his palms, and point the rig’s mechanics. (We know this because that’s exactly what he tried to do.) In the wake of Benghazi, Obama expressed without reservation that – even in the minutia of these national security issues – he had been responsible for prevention and must be liable upon disaster.

But when last week told a tale of two scandals – both underscored by the Libya barrage that will not cease – that air of accountability emptied out of the Obama administration. It became evident that Obama’s feelings of direct responsibility were isolated to the realm of national security.

What happened in Libya was deplorable because that which could have been prevented wasn’t prevented. Where security personnel should have been proactive, they were shoved into a corner and forced to be rushed and reactive. It all happened more than five thousand miles from the White House, but Obama took the fall. He held himself to a higher standard.

But last week’s IRS case laid bare an imbalance in Obama’s priorities. Though his appointees – or bureaucrats hired by people who fit that bill – engaged in something steeped in moral and legal turpitude, their transgressions were minor in the scheme of things; the scandal concerned quotidian domestic financial issues. No death, no carnage – just taxes. The agency’s office is just five blocks from the White House. And what’s been the White House response?

Obama is “concerned by every report he sees on this,” Jay Carney told reporters last Tuesday, “and that is why he looks forward to finding out what the IG report says.” In short: the president will take no responsibility before someone of consequence pins it on him.

Not proactive, reactive. Not accountable, evasive. Obama shrugs, hold up his palms, and point to the rig’s mechanics. Suddenly, he’s Tony Hayward at the Resolute Desk. An incongruence in governing.

The virtually simultaneous revelation that the Department of Justice seized hundreds of phone records prompted a similarly aloof response from team Obama. AP White House reporter Jim Kuhnhenn asked the first question at the May 14 press conference, immediately following the disclosure. His query can be boiled down to its premise. “In every instance,” Kuhnhenn scolded Carney, “either the president or you have placed the burden of responsibility someplace else.” A far cry from the buck-stops-here Obama of October fame.

The first chunk of Carney’s response amounted to a surface defense of the president’s record on First Amendment issues. Then he shifted the scope of his answer to White House jurisdiction over Justice cases. “We are not involved…with any decisions made in connection with ongoing criminal investigations,” he said, adding that “those matters are handled, appropriately, by the Justice Department independently.”

Again, Obama is innocent until proven guilty. His head bobs above the waters of responsibility until he’s drowning in them. The question arises: who’s in charge during the perennial White House side-step?

Perhaps the answer is the president’s surrogates – the people who run the departments being investigated. But when Attorney General Eric Holder was initially asked about the seizure of AP phone records, he told a media pool at the DOJ that it was “getting into matters that are beyond my knowledge.” His recusal from the matter left him uninformed as to “what the circumstances were here…and I frankly don’t have knowledge of those facts.”

I’m a self-declared political liberal and voted for Barack Obama last November. That seemed a clear indication that I wanted him running the country, fully informed and profoundly engaged. The more than 51% of eligible voters that opted for him reflects a similar sentiment. The de facto administration policy can’t be precautionary ignorance and retrospective hand-wringing.

The political left mustn’t echo the absent-minded rhetorical gunfire of the right; but it should make President Obama the subject of real targeted criticism until his “buck-stops-here” mentality takes the form of a coherent, comprehensive policy that encompasses his administration’s involvement in tax and law questions as much as it does issues of national security.

We don’t yet know if the IRS and DOJ allegations will grow into convictions, but regardless of circumstance, Obama’s policy should be one of continuity in accountability, not of strategic ignorance that leaves him blindsided and irreproachable. “I’m always responsible,” he said in October. I voted for that Barack Obama.

When I was seven, I watched terrorists fly airplanes into buildings. When I was five, two teenagers killed their teacher, and then their classmates, and then themselves in an attack on their high school. Before I turned one, a truck exploded in Oklahoma City, killing hundreds and injuring almost 700. And three weeks before my nineteenth birthday, the Tsarnaev brothers allegedly visited brutality on the Boston Marathon.

If it happens over, and over, and over again, should we accustom ourselves to tragedy? To terrorism? Should we become used to breach after breach of decency? Would it benefit us to force ourselves to foresee mass-casualty incidents?

If we had expected Boston, would we feel any less pain?

Every worldview is built on a first premise – the bedrock assumption upon which all else rides. We assume that there exists an Almighty presence – powerful and unseen – and therein we find religion. We assume a basic set of properties – physical rules, features of time and of space – and along comes science. We assume that zero means nothing, and so we have math; that “I” refers to oneself and that “he” refers to another, and so we have language.

And then there’s that broader, less theoretical set of assumptions that guides our behavior. The social norms and societal conventions: we assume that others won’t raise their voices in the library and that they’ll recycle their empty Coca-Cola cans. Then, the expectations of heavier consequence and loftier import: that shoppers will pay for their groceries before they leave the store; that other drivers will stop at the stop sign; that a run through town will go unbroken by IEDs, a sidewalk will be unrattled by nails, and restaurant windows will remain unshattered by bitter reverberations.

The thinker John Locke had his own first premise of human interaction. He called it the “state of nature.” It was the idea that men live in peace until the quiet is breached – until rights are ignored, or disregarded, or assaulted. Change rises out of the embers of injustice. We follow the rules until someone else breaks them.

The rules were broken on 9/11. We shifted our collective consciousness to reconcile the gulf between our American idealism and the hard reality that razed two towers. Did that day change our assumptions, our expectations of one another? Have we become a passive people living in a weary stupor, awaiting the inevitable? A young classroom eliminated at gunpoint. A movie audience mutilated by the bullet. A Patriot’s Day marred by a billow of smoke and ash. All in the same year.

Would we be better off accepting violence as our new first premise?

Maybe. We know that, according to medical authorities at several Boston hospitals, every victim who wasn’t killed on site on April 15 will likely survive. How could that be? “What we saw unfold was the cultural legacy of the September 11th attacks and all that has followed in the decade-plus since. We are not innocents anymore,” wrote one area doctor in the New Yorker. “Everyone’s imaginations have come to encompass these once unimaginable events.”

As the week’s violence drew to an close, we saw a wave of reactions from Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s high school and college classmates. They seem jolted. According to one friend, the suspected bomber spoke cryptically about the event just a day after he walked unscathed from Boylston Street – during the crippling confusion that followed the explosions. “Yeah, man, tragedies can happen anywhere in the world,” Tsarnaev  said, according to CNN, at a UMass Dartmouth gym, “It’s too bad.”

Tsarnaev cynically voiced an expectation of tragedy. But is it something the rest of us really prepare for? That he was comfortable with expecting tragedy may well have enabled him to carry it out. If we believe violence to be inevitable, why shy away from our guns?

Americans find ourselves shocked, disquieted time and again when terror rears its head. Writing for the Boston Globe, one doctor on the scene shared an alternate perspective on the medical response, saying that he had “never been in any kind of tragedy like this.” Neither had most of his colleagues seen trauma of this sort. “These events are not something the medical community generally prepares for.” Terror and massacre are still the American exception, not the rule.

Yes, the anticipation of moral turpitude is sewn into the fabric of our nation: our government has black hawk helicopters, predator drones, and a nuclear arsenal that could blow up the world several times. The constitution calls for a well-regulated militia. We’re not naïve.

But speaking in Boston last Wednesday, President Obama said that the city had been thrown from a certain “state of grace.” Somewhere, John Locke nodded in approval. In this country, as in Boston, grace is the rule – the expectation. Last Monday was the exception. One day we grieved for the dead, and the next we danced in the streets, celebrating a return to normalcy. The state of grace does not account for improvised explosive devices.

Leon Wieseltier authored a piece in the New Republic earlier this week that critiqued the pervasive American desire to “move on” immediately after tragedy. “Only a stupid society would come away from the events in Boston with its sense of its security unshaken,” he wrote. “There is a scar.”

But it’s important to remember that we’re shaken because we’ve been caught off guard. And though we must always seek to avert that scar, that incision, when we miss the signs or let something noxious slip through the cracks, we should feel deeply shaken.

No, we cannot move on immediately, but the violence in our backyard does not reflect our essential being; it is – to borrow from James Joyce – a nightmare from which we are trying to awake; a truth that we are coping with; a fracture that we are trying to heal. The bombings at the Boston Marathon were a blow to our senses, a tremor within the very ground we stand on. To have expected it would have been a tragedy in its own right. We should be shocked, and we should be appalled.

Premeditated killing is not a circumstance to which we can be sensitized. To get used to death and terror would be to walk down a path that leads only to paranoia and mutually-assured destruction. We can’t get used to it. We must always hurt. If we expect tragedy, then we will let fall the full weight of contempt on every man, woman, or child who looks and talks like the Tsarnaev brothers. If we expect tragedy, then we will come to conclusions about millions based on the actions of two.

When that first premise is broken, our task is to fix it; to walk a cautious and ever-hopeful path; to be grounded by empathy and revel in our capacity to restore and reroute the state of grace when it is breached. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s nineteenth birthday marked the year that he would allow his expectation of violence to overtake him. I pray that mine will usher me into a world in which we assume grace, elude bloodshed, and never grow comfortable with tragedy.

The President steps away from the podium, Beyonce belts out a few bars (or does she?), and then – without delay – comes the question: Who’s next? Somewhere in Trenton, a large man with a short fuse is the answer. Chris Christie is the most electable man in the country. It’s simple: Americans regard Congress with scorn. Chris Christie is the anti-Congress. Americans will seriously consider electing him president in 2016.

The 113th Congress’s nine percent approval rating stems from the difficult truth that President Obama is a shepherd with an unruly flock – one with whom this country is deeply disenchanted. But “nine percent” is abstract, a difficult figure to grasp. Just how bitter is American cynicism? With just how much ire does Citizen X gaze upon her leaders?

Public Policy Polling sought a tangible answer to that question. Its recent poll (the results of which were published earlier this month) did just that. According to PPP, Congress is less popular than brussels sprouts, traffic jams, and NFL replacement referees. But it gets worse: Americans have less taste for Congress than they do for root canals, colonoscopies or lice. Nine percent means insurmountable attrition and enough cynicism to makes the writings of Christopher Hitchens look like they’re smiling.

Why such severe disillusionment? Congress is stuck. Consider the filibuster, through which senators can shift the agenda by merely talking about something other than the floor’s proceedings. We watched again, last week, as Harry Reid’s hopes of doing away with the filibuster disappeared in a Congressional inferno. But beyond the filibuster, parliamentary procedure allows for any senator to stop a bill from reaching the floor. Chairmen of committees can ensure that certain controversial ideas never see the halls of the Cannon or Dirksen office buildings; such ideas live and die in hearing rooms.

Or consider regulations surrounding the debt ceiling: Congress may authorize spending beyond the government’s means, then prohibit the president from borrowing money. Paul Krugman summarized last month’s Republican approach to this issue as “openly threatening to use that potential for catastrophe.” I’d summarize it as GOP lawmakers simply bringing to bear the tools of engagement that legislative precedent grants them.

Give a toddler a delicate martini glass and warn him not to break it. That’s Congressional protocol. Don’t act surprised by the inevitable: He’ll grab it and he’ll play with it, he’ll shatter it, and he’ll hurt himself. Such legislative immobility has become convention. We can assume that the normality of gridlock – the comfort of being anchored in a sea of antagonism – has had a disenchanting effect on Americans. Not only is gridlock legal, but it’s encouraged.

Members of Congress issue statements and arrive at decisions based purely upon political efficacy. For better or for worse, Chris Christie doesn’t. Representatives put up a virtually impenetrable block against President Obama, shrouded in an ideological guise, but stemming from partisan convictions. Chris Christie doesn’t. When he thinks the president is right, he pats the president on the back. When he doesn’t, he’s sure to tell you so.

After Hurricane Sandy, Christie has stumbled upon an asset that Rudy Giuliani exploited in the years that came after 2001: becoming the instantaneous champion of those who hurt; the one who mends, who restores faith, who rebuilds.

But this Congress has granted Christie’s case a new flavor. In being that champion, in mending, in restoring faith, he’s had to fight Congress all the way. And when your enemy is loathed more than root canals, colonoscopies and lice, you aren’t just a rebel with a cause – you’re a hero among men.

Each time Christie acts against the will of Congress, confronts John Boehner, or operates out of step with either party’s legislative agenda, his speechwriters begin to pen the first lines of his election night victory address.

While Christie’s most significant political liability will invariably be the Republican base, a painful reality has been seared into the collective psyche of the Republican party: winning the base spells trouble in winning the country.

In 2008, we bore witness to a moderate candidate who felt forced to pander to the fringes of his party as a means of reaching the GOP nomination. By the time McCain was nominated, he had alienated millions of conservative democrats. We saw the same thing this year, but to a more severe degree.

Mitt Romney was the ‘etch-a-sketch’ candidate, altering his platform at his own convenience. Romney’s political volatility may have been his poison. He appeared a man who would ascend to the presidency at any cost. An opportunist and a sellout is a noxious mixture.

Whatever his confidences, Chris Christie doesn’t betray them – at least, he hasn’t yet. In recent weeks, Christie has wrestled with whether to accept a federal expansion of Medicaid for New Jersey. If he opts to take the money, he wins the hearts of Democrats, independents, and his current constituents. If he doesn’t, he’s one step closer to securing the support of friends to his far right. Even Christie’s dilemmas are victories; his lose-lose scenarios are win-win. He can be a Jon Huntsman with a little gusto and a real chance.

Chris Christie holds the rare opportunity to govern his state within the framework of his own moderate conservative ideology, while maintaing measured reason; it’s a worldview that renders him not blind to rationality or averse to nuance, but receptive and cautious in his acceptance of his president’s word. Christie can defy legislative immobility. And he can do it all while the cameras are rolling.

Over the years, people I’ve met have often asked me what I’m working on, and I’ve usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden. I said that to Harrison Starr, the movie-maker, one time, and he raised his eyebrows as inquired, “Is it an anti-war book?”

“You know what I say about people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?”

“No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?”

“I say, ‘Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?’”

What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers.

Harrison Starr seems to be speaking frankly and directly to a fractured American public, spawned by a fractured Newtown. He is insisting that a race whose end is out of sight isn’t worth running; that an epidemic that can’t be cured overnight is nothing short of a lost cause; that gun violence is better left to hollow prayer and band-aid solutions than to sensible long-term remedies. But Harrison Starr is wrong.

Last Friday, Wayne LaPierre, CEO and Executive Vice President of the National Rifle Association stood behind a mahogany podium and delivered the his organization’s official response to the Newtown massacre. In a sing-song timbre, LaPierre began. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Before he could deliver his next sentence, that statement sank into sea of punditry and antagonism.

On Sunday, LaPierre appeared on MSNBC’s Meet the Press. During the program, host David Gregory offered him – albeit forcefully – an opportunity to clarify his Friday remarks. No clarification was necessary. LaPierre proved unrelenting in his conviction that the principal problem is the person, not the weapon. The mentally ill, he said – or “lunatics,” as he tastefully called them – are the dominant players in the debate over guns in the United States.

Mental illness is surely a factor in the debate. Liza Long’s now-famous Blue Review piece “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother” gave voice to a desire to shift the debate from gun control to aid for families of kids who are mentally ill. Long’s son, Michael, is violent, erratic, and – disturbingly, more problematic – undiagnosed. He needs help. And so does his mother. She describes a bleak conversation with her son’s social worker, who advised that the family’s best bet in finding treatment and therapy for her young son was “to get Michael charged with a crime.”

Few deny that the American penal establishment – entangled with the nation’s mental health establishment – is afflicted by deep-seated systemic failures. No one – neither President Obama, nor the vocal families of Newtown’s victims, nor the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence (which has more than a million mental health records on file) – professes that the mental health issue should not play a significant role in our national conversation.

Yes, Jared Lee Loughner, who carried out the January 2011 rampage in Tucson, suffered from mental illness. As did James Holmes, who killed 12 people in July at a movie theater in Aurora. As did Ian Stawicki, who made headlines last May when he murdered five in a Seattle coffee house. And it is presumed – though not confirmed – that Adam Lanza did, too. But as Sen. Chuck Schumer said on Sunday, “trying to prevent shootings in schools without talking about guns is like trying to prevent lung cancer without talking about cigarettes.” Yes, many mass shooters are mentally ill. But in want of proper treatment, they kill people – and they do it with guns. So let’s talk about guns.

During the course of their exchange, David Gregory uncovered (and his guest confirmed) that the NRA’s criteria for supporting congressional legislation was straightforward: if an idea may reduce loss of life, it’s worth trying. Gregory followed up by asking LaPierre if the NRA would support any form of reduction of high capacity magazines. LaPierre sang a tune of evasion for a few minutes before conceding that it wouldn’t. Then Gregory asked if there was any gun regulation that LaPierre would support. There wasn’t. Not even one.

It seems to me alarming that the nation’s chief gun advocates can’t – nay, won’t – acknowledge inherent dangers in weaponry, even as a mechanism of mitigating those dangers. Hazard, they say, lurks only in its operators. A December 16 piece in The Atlantic noted that the Second Amendment, while safeguarding Americans’ rights to guns, “doesn’t say a single thing about the right to own bullets.” The same notion was central to an old Chris Rock comedy routine. “I think all bullets should cost five thousand dollars,” Rock would say. “Five thousand dollars per bullet…and people would think before they killed somebody.” You remember the old adage about truth in humor.

Taxing or regulating bullets could prove effective in reducing loss of life, thus the proposal fits snugly in LaPierre’s criteria. James Holmes bought 6,000 rounds of ammunition on the Internet. Had anyone been watching, one might assume that such a purchase would have been a red flag of sorts. High capacity magazines in assault weapons allow a gunman to shoot off thirty or more rounds without having to reload his weapon. But LaPierre and the NRA are adamant: “A gun is a tool; the problem is the criminal.”

They are fatally mistaken. If last year we had borne witness to 8,583 murders caused by rocks, I would likely be an advocate of rock control. And had those deaths been caused by umbrellas, I would be in favor of umbrella control. But nearly 70 percent of murders last year were caused by guns. Firearms act as subservient accomplices in homicide. Yes, people kill people. But they kill people with guns.

Gun violence in this country will not end in full until there emerges a new lethal instrument that usurps the gun in efficacy and vogue. With anticipation, we dread that day. Harrison Starr couldn’t have predicted the melting of the glaciers.

The solution doesn’t eliminate the problem, but renders its victims fewer. Wayne LaPierre’s soapbox is wearing thin, and while it would be naïve to think or to claim that we can wholly eliminate gun violence, it would be a deadly crime not to try.

For the record, there are also no results for the terms “Newtown” or “Lanza.”

 May we be safe and may tonight’s speech not be last we hear of this issue.

Consider a hypothetical situation.

About a year ago, someone took a hammer to my kitchen window, leaving shattered glass strewn about the floor.

My family and I aren’t of retaliatory blood, so we swept up, replaced the panel, and put the incident behind us.

A few days later, we awoke to another mess. Our front lawn had been dug up, spilling dirt into the driveway and leaving the carcasses of daisies to shrivel in the sun. Again, we cleaned up quietly and went about our lives.

But it wasn’t long before my family couldn’t keep up with the damage.

We awoke each day to a new sordid surprise: paint scraped off of the side of our house; rain seeping through where roof panels had once sat; sewage pipes uprooted; damage with such consistency and such severity that the very foundation of our house began to rot away. Each time, we swept up the mess. Each time, we kept quiet.

You’re wondering: You allowed all this? You didn’t take legal action? You didn’t seek out the people who’d been carrying out an unprovoked assault on your home? It sounds, to you, absurd. Because it is absurd.

None of this happened to my family, nor to my home. My telling is diluted. In reality, the narrative was much worse.

Instead of a hammer, it was a rocket. Instead of a shovel, it was a rocket. Instead of a scraping tool, or an axe, or a jackhammer, it was a barrage of rockets. And instead of my family’s home, it was the schools and streets, playgrounds and homes of Israel’s southern region.

For anyone to live in constant fear that they may die by rocket fire seems a way of life unbefitting of the civilized.

It’s now been more than a week since Operation Pillar of Defense ended. We’ve had time to reflect. The regional conflict remains hazy and oft times complex – even impenetrable. But one thing is clear: Last week, Israel rightly defended itself against those who sought to bring its citizens into that shadow of constant fear.

Israel is not without profound, sometimes devastating flaws. It is a society whose legal statutes often pull from the norms of biblical antiquity; one which is deeply and continually invested in an occupation of the West Bank that poses threats to its own democratic principles and to its Jewish underpinnings; one with a system of government that proves inefficient time and again.

Because the Israeli government’s constituency extends far beyond the borders of the Jewish state, it has already begun to face criticism on these issues.

The era of a subservient global Jewish community has passed. These issues are difficult and important.

But the action that Israel took last week doesn’t fall under that umbrella of flaw. The sobering truth is that Israel’s use of force was warranted. Consider a concise sequence of events – a far cry, I hope, from the convolution of the news cycle:

Yielding to international pressure, Israel withdrew unilaterally from Gaza in 2005. The withdrawal granted Palestinians living in Gaza full power to assemble (by whatever means) its own governing body, its own internal legal systems, its own investments. A few months later, the people – whether by coercion or by choice – elected Hamas, who vowed to bring years of prosperity to Gaza.

Hamas is a terrorist organization. In its founding charter, it calls for the destruction of the Jewish people in the Jewish state.

Not a century ago, someone carried out a similar vision – a memory seared vividly into the collective psyche of the Jewish people. By absolutely no means is the Holocaust the basis for Jewish self-determination, but by all means is it a reason to shudder and recoil at Hamas’ words.

Since its ascent, Hamas has opted away from substantial investments in infrastructure or medicine. It hasn’t moved toward opening a robust competitive market. Instead, it has prioritized weaponry supplied in large part by its allies in the Iranian regime. Those weapons are katyusha and qassam rockets.

Hamas launches them from schools, mosques, and hospitals. The rockets land in Sderot, Ashdod, Be’er Sheva, Ashkelon, Kiryat Malachi – Israeli towns where Israeli kids play on playgrounds and rush to shelter when their afternoons are pierced by warning sirens.

It’s easy to fall victim to certain western conceptions that compel us to view Hamas as a political opponent or ideological dissenter of Israel’s. But Hamas is not a righteous army of freedom fighters. Its militants are not “activists.” They are terrorists. Hamas does not protect its citizens. It plants fear in the hearts of both Israelis and Palestinians and dispatches the cursed and capable hands of death upon them.

Had my family taken action against simply the first act of aggression (the mere broken window) we would have been justified beyond doubt.

Israel has seen an average of three rockets per day over the last 11 years; more than 22 thousand pieces of burning metal crashing into small towns over the last year alone. Can you imagine even one rocket landing in your neighborhood – even one time?

I mourn for the infant whose only crime was serving involuntarily as a terrorist’s shield.

I thirst for a partner for peace who will cease to cloak itself in smoke and bullets. I pray that combatants in Gaza and in Israel will lay down their arms and labor for their own safety, their neighbors’ safety. But we aren’t there yet.

Last week, Israel carried out its obligation to unshackle Israelis from the chains of existential fear. In a heap of shattered glass, a hammer is not a valid partner for peace.

It’s an abiding message, but one we keep learning the hard way. David Petraeus scribbled it across his forehead in permanent marker this week: things are not always as they seem.

The 2012 election season played host to exceptional political duplicity. Like never before, candidates proposed policies bereft of accountability. They zigged and zagged to pander to donors and special interests. Identity was malleable; some candidates seemed to forget that alchemy went out of style some millennia ago. Politics is politics, but this year was different. Machiavelli is turning in his grave.

Sure, stories tend to have two sides. There is precedent in both political and philosophic history for a plurality of voices — sometimes contradictory. Madison wrote in the Federalist papers of the ever-constructive, ever-important role of factions in a vibrant democracy. Social and political dissent and a variance in opinion helps maintain the vigor of our government. Schopenhauer, the nineteenth century thinker, would call these truths complementary objects of a single reality.

But complementary truths from the same candidate? Let’s call them lies.

Take the Ohio senate race.

State Treasurer Josh Mandel ran an unsuccessful senatorial challenge against incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown. At an August rally for Mitt Romney, Mandel revved up a crowd of workers at a coal mine in the state’s southern region:

“There’s (sic) a lot of radical organizations throughout this country, funded from places like Hollywood and New York City. People who’ve never stepped foot in Appalachian Ohio. They’re trying to convince the American people that coal is a liability. We understand that coal is an asset.”

Mandel’s layers of dishonesty would be comical if they weren’t so disturbing.

An ambitious Ohio politician — at a campaign stop just beyond West Virginia — deriding “radical organizations” in “Hollywood and New York City” is much like Newt Gingrich pushing the notion that “the literati sent out their minions to do their bidding.” New York? Hollywood? It’s almost shocking that Mandel didn’t mount an attack on his Bubbe’s matzo ball soup recipe in the same breath. The 35-year-old is a strong supporter of AIPAC and the Republican Jewish Coalition. Assailing the Left for being out of touch, über intellectual, or foreign to the strains of being a coal miner is crooked and laughable from a Cleveland native whom the New Republic called “a nice Jewish boy from a nice Jewish family.”

We tasted a different flavor of duplicity in the closely-watched race between Brad Sherman and Howard Berman in California’s 30th congressional district. The two incumbent Democrats have virtually identical political records. Both have worked to alleviate local and wider scale environmental issues. Both have supported lending to small businesses and employee protection in the entertainment industry. They share nearly twin records on foreign policy.

Aside from their truly negligible policy differences, Howard Berman and Brad Sherman are socially liberal, fiscally indistinguishable candidates. The two are cut from the same ideological cloth. But if you watched the war they waged against one another this year, you’d never know that.

Sherman chastised Berman for taking trips outside the United States with taxpayer dollars. But Berman had taken most of those trips in his capacity as chair and ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The candidates worked hard to make the distinctions between one’s support of Israel through missile defense and another’s support through increased sanctions against Iran. An October debate even saw physical aggression play out between the candidates as they sparred over who was the true author of a piece of left-wing legislation.

The Los Angeles Times called the nearly yearlong Berman v. Sherman spectacle “a debate over debating.” Both men became architects of artificial differences that didn’t actually exist. They accentuated their real, marginal distinctions in unnatural and counterproductive ways.

And one final instance, lest we neglect to mention duplicity in its purest form.

History will not forgive the Republican party for nominating a chameleon instead of a candidate. During the campaign, Mitt Romney’s views simply took on those of his audience.

After the first presidential debate – for which Romney was lauded in conservative circles and lambasted in liberal ones — Gail Collins summed up the former Massachusetts governor’s positions: “taxes will go down, but not revenues. The health care reform plan will go away, except for all the popular parts, which will magically remain intact.” From the campaign’s outset, his statements and proposals were steeped in very little math, subject to very little consistency, and comprised of very little truth.

The dishonesty and denial seeped well into election night. After it had become clear that President Obama would take Ohio and the networks called the electoral college in his favor, Romney waited more than an hour to concede defeat. In the same hour, Karl Rove forced Megyn Kelly to parade around Fox News headquarters on live television, searching for the misplaced plus or minus sign that would change the electoral outcome projected by every major news organization in the world.

Hubris and wishful thinking are a noxious mixture. The vicious narrative that ended last Tuesday night — in whose epilogue we read about the downfall of a venerated American hero — may have amounted to a victory for certain worthy political causes, but it dealt a devastating blow to truth.

It felt almost as surreal as it did cold.

I was a shivering, wonderstruck ninth grader. He was just minutes into his turn at the helm of the world’s most powerful engine. Between us were a cement barrier, a military guard, and an armored limousine wall. As the sirens whined, I waved, then he waved back. And then he was gone.

Minutes earlier, I had been on my tip toes, trying to steal a glimpse of the man himself, but my eyesight was too weak, and the podium was obscured among clusters of naked trees. I had laid my feet flat and settled for the megatron.

Now, as the inauguration parade began, I stood on Pennsylvania Avenue and made eye contact with the President of the United States. My innumerable thoughts were drowned out by the cheering thousands behind me and beside me. I had just seen Barack Obama take the oath of office. Now he was looking at me.

I was blissfully unaware. He knew that the celebration would be short.

Nearly four years later, his critics’ words are a thunderclap: “He hasn’t done enough.”

They’re right. It would be irresponsible to claim that President Obama should be reelected exclusively on the merits of what he has accomplished. It seems without doubt that he has not achieved nearly enough; so speak the fractured limbs of a nation still in pain.

But on issue after issue, the Obama administration has moved in the direction of progress, even if it hasn’t yet attained exhaustive success. It is the collection of alternatives — the terrifying nature of what could have been, and what could still be — that amount to a ringing endorsement of President Obama for another term.

Under the belief that Obama should have treaded further on the issues he has undertaken — that he hasn’t done “enough” — it would be counterintuitive for us to veer sharply toward a radical alternative. Progress unfinished is but a puddle of futile hope. If he hasn’t done enough, then let him do more.

Some issues on which Obama has made real headway seem only spoken about in hushed murmurs, eclipsed by Washington’s hyperbole-prone discussion of the favored children of the media — the issues that take up airtime. We are best served not by shouting about how the president has spent money (indeed, he has — and lots of it), but by assessing where and on what he has spent it.

Take, for example, the environmental realm. Experts across the board agree that the president’s deepest failure in the area took the form of a cap-and-trade bill that, had it passed, would have cut the nation’s carbon footprint by 80 percent by 2050. The bill ultimately disappeared in the congressional inferno.

Scarred by legislative burn-marks, President Obama felt the sting of his mistakes. He swiftly issued (by executive order) what the Washington Post recently called “the most sweeping attack on air pollution in U.S. history,” placing severe limitations on the production of toxic gasses. Some have grumbled that these regulations immobilize the coal industry. For those in the sustainability sector, such a truth is a far cry from tragedy.

Perhaps this administration’s pinnacle environmental accomplishment is its groundbreaking fuel-efficiency rule: by 2016, all new cars will be required to average 35.5 miles to the gallon. The rule will cut back on 1.3 million barrels of oil each day and reduce carbon emissions by hundreds of millions of tons.

Bill Maher — comedian by name and social commentator by practice — noted last week a paradigmatic shift from the fantasyland of the Bush years to a sobering new reality. “Before Obama got in (to office) the Smithsonian couldn’t mention global warming as a possible reason the glaciers were shrinking.” By merely acknowledging certain truths, President Obama has restored the nation’s standing as the world’s top investor renewable energy.

Despite his reforms, however, President Obama’s work isn’t yet adequate. And now, the House Republican budget — supported in full by its proud architect, Paul Ryan — outlines cuts topping $897 billion, many of which will uproot the seeds of sustainability that Obama has planted and spoil the fruit that his constituents have borne. If he hasn’t done enough, then let him do more.

The thirst for more doesn’t end at the ozone layer. Examine the changes in the classroom that the last three and a half years have seen.

The stimulus package took effect at the recession’s apex. Most of its funds appropriated toward education were spent on ensuring that teachers kept their jobs. Since that initial groundwork legislation, however, President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have been met with exceptional success in driving the translation of their own policies into state ones.

In the process, the president has taken a page from the Republican playbook and painted his education initiatives in a laissez-faire glaze. The Race to the Top initiative has invited states to compete for a limited sum of money, which has been awarded to the legislatures who most thoroughly employ administration education policies — implementing merit pay for teachers, building data systems to track student progress, and the like.

The tactic has worked: Upwards of thirty states have actually altered their education platforms to heighten their grant prospects.

But Obama’s most assertive push has been his fight against Bush-era education policies. The administration has exempted 33 states from the laws of No Child Left Behind. The states who qualified for exemptions did so by proactively seeking out ways to sidestep NCLB’s über-idealistic requirement that every student perform at least grade-level work in English and math studies by 2014.

Again, a noble effort. Again, insufficient. The vast majority of Obama education policies are blueprints — semi-complete plans for full implementation in the coming years. In a February GOP primary debate, Mitt Romney was emphatic in declaring that “we need get the federal government out of education.” He has echoed such sentiments deep into the general election season. But the only avenue through which states can legally forgo unhealthy NCLB practices is federal government action — precisely the kind that the President Obama has begun to take. If he hasn’t done enough, then let him do more.

Was my optimism on that frigid inauguration day for naught? The morning had begun as my dad and I sprinted through the streets of Arlington to catch the 4:30 am subway car that would take us — at a bumpy, rhythmic adagio — to Capitol Hill. We had stood in line for five hours, watching the sun rise over the Mall, wondering if perhaps our president-elect was doing the same. The symbolism didn’t escape us.

Indeed, we have been awakened to the limitations of “hope and change.” The environmental and education issues I present are simply a case study representative of the phases of forward movement. But the progress we’ve made rings hollow if we halt it abruptly. President Obama hasn’t yet done enough; I’m opting to let him finish what he’s started.

The sun is peaking out. Let it rise.

I hear the conversation everywhere.

Well, I suppose it isn’t so much a conversation as it is a statement. My Jewish friends say it all the time: “I’m voting for Romney because Obama doesn’t support Israel.” More often, the statement comes in a blunter form: “Barack Obama hates Israel.”

Each time, I cringe. Each time, I’m perplexed.

There is no nation on earth that this country, under this administration, supports more comprehensively and more fervently than it supports the State of Israel. Barack Obama does not hate Israel.

At a meeting in February 2011, the month’s U.N. Security Council president entertained a resolution condemning Israeli construction in the West Bank.

When more than 115 nations moved to pass the condemnation, only one delegate from one country raised her hand: American Ambassador Susan Rice. Because America’s status as a permanent member affords it veto-power (and as per the policy of Rice’s boss), the vote failed and the draft-resolution vanished from the international docket.

Last November, President Obama was recorded having what was meant to be an off-the-record conversation with French Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. Obama told Sarkozy that the United States would “have to impose economic sanctions” if the September 2011 Palestinian bid for statehood went through. In a room bereft of TelePrompTers and absent of television cameras, the American president affirmed his support for policies of the Jewish state.

That same month, Assistant Secretary of State Andrew J. Shapiro – a de-facto representative of and spokesperson for the Obama Administration– delivered a speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. In his remarks, he declared that “Israel is a long time democratic ally and we share a special bond.”

Shapiro went on to note that “some skeptics are questioning whether that’s enough of a reason to continue to spend hard earned American tax payer dollars on Israel’s security.” His rejoinder was frank: “We don’t just support Israel because of a long standing bond,” he said. “We support Israel because…ensuring Israel’s military strength and its superiority in the region is (critical) to regional stability and as a result is fundamentally a core interest of the United States.”

The cash sum that the United States spends on aid to Israel has increased steadily since Obama’s first year in office. According to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, in 2009, the administration spent about $2.81 billion on aid to Israel; in 2010, it spent about $3.04 billion; in 2011, about $3.49 billion. That’s an average eight percent increase in each of those three years – not to mention a 14 percent increase between the second and third years.

Israel is the single largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid since the second world war.

Obama has preserved and prolonged that commitment; his budget request for the 2013 fiscal year consists of $3.1 billion in aid to Israel, which includes $99.8 million specifically allocated to joint American-Israeli missile defense development.

President Obama has also sculpted American foreign policy to quell the existential threat posed to Israel by Iran. In his first appearance at the United Nations as president, Obama asserted that if Iran chose to “put the pursuit of nuclear weapons ahead of regional stability…then they must be held accountable.”

He echoed such sentiments in comments during his 2010 and 2011 U.N. remarks. And just last month, he told delegates, “a nuclear-armed Iran is not a challenge that can be contained,” and vowed that “the United States will do what we must to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”

And if Obama’s words speak, his actions scream. During the summer of 2010, Obama signed into law the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act (CISADA), which enacted severe penalties for companies who do business with the Iranian petroleum sector. And under the Iranian Transactions Regulations as amended by the Obama administration in March 2012, anyone involved in breaching said laws may be slapped with up to a $1 million fine or jailed for up to 20 years.

Last August, Obama signed yet another set of crippling sanctions against Iran. The law, according to the Wall Street Journal, “closes loopholes in existing sanctions law on Iran, and adds penalties…(and) broadens the list of available programs under which sanctions can be imposed on Iranian individuals and entities.”

A representative of AIPAC recently told me that these Obama administration policies are “the most severe sanctions the U.S. has imposed on any country – even the Third Reich.” Barack Obama does not empathize with the Iranian regime.

The Obama years have seen no adverse change in the way of American policy towards Israel; and yet, Obama’s stronghold on Jewish voters (who traditionally support Democrats overwhelmingly) slips from his grasp each day.

The president’s support among Jewish voters has dropped 19 percentage points since last election season, from 78 percent in 2008 to just 59 percent today.

Why is there a disparity between steps Obama has taken and the approval he’s gained? In truth, today’s underlying “tensions” between Israel and the United States amount to a handful of personal gripes between leaders, a series of ultimately trivial comments on West Bank settlements, and hyperbolic questions surrounding Obama’s ties to the Islamic religion.

These conditions have acted as a frustration in the realm of PR and messaging, but by no means have they given rise to a real shift in policy.

Every day, I hear it from close friends, in op-eds by billionaire Jewish donors, pervading the blogosphere: President Obama is anti-Israel; he exercises evasion in the face of the Iranian threat; his policies are crippling or harmful to Jews, Israelis, or Zionists. I respond to my Jewish friends in a voice that I hope will resound: Any such claim is a rash one, based on perceptions plagued by exaggerations and misreadings. We know anti-Israel; we have seen anti-semitism. President Obama embodies neither.

If you intend to support Governor Romney in this election because you believe that the top 2 percent of the American populace should see its taxes decrease, or that women should have their bodily decisions checked and regulated by wealthy men, or that immigration reform should begin by way of expulsion, I wish all the power to you. But if your allegiance to Israeli security is holding you back from casting your ballot for the Democratic ticket, it’s time to rethink your vote.

Though they shared a stage at the University of Denver on Wednesday evening, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama seemed in different worlds. Their tones presented an eerie, almost disconcerting dichotomy: Where Romney contested, Obama conversed; where Romney insisted, Obama dismissed; Where Romney had just finished his sprint up the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum, Obama was on a coffee break between lectures at the University of Chicago. The candidates were entirely incongruous.

Why did Obama seem so much less prepared than Romney did?

What was it that gave Romney such a definitive debate victory? Did the Commission for Presidential Debates make a mistake in choosing Jim Lehrer? The following is my take on some of these questions that have pervaded American minds and airwaves since Wednesday night.

A Thought on the Downfalls of Passivity

For several weeks, the Romney-Ryan ticket has been the subject of intense media scrutiny. News personalities and journalists alike have pushed the ever-evasive pair to provide specifics on its tax and healthcare plans (e.g. Paul Ryan’s recent interview with Chris Wallace). If Romney felt that he could afford to shirk the electorate’s pleas for specifics thus far, he certainly must have believed that he would be pressed on such details during the first nationally-televised debate.

Romney came prepared: he marched on-stage Wednesday night with a heaping arsenal of statistics and figures. But the “specifics” Romney spewed didn’t quench the nation’s thirst for details. His supposed plans, proposals and numbers rang hollow in the ears of several venerated commentators. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted that Romney’s arguments were laden with glaring miscalculations. “The numbers simply don’t add up,” Marshall wrote. “It really is simple math. The studies Romney cited aren’t even studies. A couple are just (op-eds) by his advisors.”

New York Times columnist Gail Collins echoed Marshall’s point. According to Romney’s emphatic debate proclamations, she noted that, “taxes will go down, but not revenues. The health care reform plan will go away, except for all the popular parts, which will magically remain intact.” Romney’s words were glazed in opportunism and in want of coherence.

To the chagrin of many on the left, President Obama employed a crippling passivity. His subtle nods, reverberating silences and almost patronizing smirks propagated a general air of concession. Pinned against Romney’s feigned charisma, Obama’s efforts were futile; his submissive energy fell flat.

The president’s passivity didn’t afford him room to hit forcefully on either of Marshall’s or Collins’ points. Can you imagine if Obama had asked Romney to add up the numbers he had presented or to cite even one of his “studies?” Mitt Romney didn’t win on the coattails of substance. He won in the absence of an opponent on the offensive.

A Thought on Benefits of Passivity

On Wednesday night, Obama didn’t mention Romney’s “47 percent” comments. He didn’t mention Bain Capital. He didn’t mention Romney’s offshore bank accounts. Romney’s advisors may have equipped him with a quick and potent retort for each issue, but the candidate was scarcely handed the opportunity to use one.

The next day, Romney appeared on a cable television program to concede that his comments on the 47 percent had been “just completely wrong.” As a result of Obama’s passivity, Romney’s rejoinder and attempt to shift the national conversation was reduced to a small subtext in the blogosphere, in place of reaching nearly 38 million attentive pairs of ears.

A Thought on Priorities

Beyond strides to shroud his tax returns in a mist of evasion, Mitt Romney’s mind is presently one-track, ingrained with a single abiding goal: become the president of the United States. Obama’s is more complex: be the president of the United States.

In a recent Rolling Stone feature piece, Michael Lewis profiles a Barack Obama whose approach to governing has been stripped of any tangible concern for public opinion. Lewis draws a rough sketch of the issues that sat atop President Obama’s psyche when he was awoken from his sleep and informed that the nuclear fallout in Japan may have placed the United States in the worldwide path of a radiation cloud.

Lewis writes: “At that very moment (if you were the president), you were deciding on whether to approve a ridiculously audacious plan to assassinate Osama bin Laden in his house in Pakistan. You were arguing, as ever, with Republican leaders in Congress about the budget. And you were receiving daily briefings on various revolutions in various Arab countries.”

Obama has made a practice of limiting his presidential wardrobe exclusively to navy or gray suits. The president’s rationale? His existence is plagued by a tiny margin for error; he simply can’t afford to allocate brainpower for decisions and exercises whose implications are trivial. It’s safe to assume that the debate was just another (less weighty) issue on his heavy plate.

A Thought on the Moderator

Jim Lehrer was the victim of an off-night. The Los Angeles Times synopsized most major criticisms of his performance, noting that Lehrer “didn’t enforce time limits, gave Obama four more minutes to speak than he gave Romney and didn’t clarify some of the arcane terms tossed about by the two combatants.”

But it’s important to remember that this debate, by Lehrer terms, was a fluke. After the 2008 election season, the news anchor announced that the McCain-Obama contest would be his last. Only the tenacity of the Commission for Presidential Debates would persuade him to return for one final rodeo.

Lehrer is widely regarded as the most skilled and adept moderator of the era of televised debates. He has successfully steered debates in during election year since 1988, each performance lauded success by standards of objectivity and direction. A recent Pew Center poll ranked the show he spearheaded and long anchored, PBS NewsHour, “one of the most trusted news sources in the country.” This week’s widely-proliferated notion of Lehrer as the debate’s “loser” may bear relevance on Wednesday’s event in Denver, but should count as only a blemish on an otherwise distinguished and prolific career.