Harold Meyerson

Of all the critiques made of President Obama’s performance in the first debate, the most telling, I think, was leveled before the debate — 2,000 years before, more or less. The criticism came in the form of a question, but then, that’s how rabbis talk.

“If I am not for myself, who shall be for me?” asked Rabbi Hillel — the first of three questions that he believed people needed to ask themselves if they were to lead decent lives.

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Suppose the growth of the U.S. economy slows to a trickle. I don’t mean in the next quarter or next year or even over the next decade. I mean from this time forth.

That’s the prediction of Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon in a new paper that’s become the subject of widespread commentary.

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America has the Koch brothers, and now California has the Munger kids. Unlike the right-wing Kochs, Molly Munger and her brother Charles Jr. entered politics from opposite directions—she’s a liberal Democrat and a champion of inner-city schools; he’s an economic conservative, a social moderate, and a Republican activist. But thanks to the vicissitudes of California politics and the self-absorption that wealth can bring (their father is Charles Munger, a Pasadena attorney and investor who is the longtime vice-chairman of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway investment consortium), they’ve come together in the past couple of days to attack the most important measure on the California ballot: Governor Jerry Brown’s initiative to raise taxes on the rich so that the state’s schools and colleges won’t take a massive fiscal hit immediately following the election.

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The scariest piece in the news this week isn’t about the election or the economy or the threat of terrorism—though it touches on all three. It’s about the latest development in humanity’s ceaseless urge to invent things—subcategory, the ceaseless urge to invent things that let people do things more cheaply than before.

Specifically, it’s Nick Bilton’s “Disruptions” column in the business section of Monday’s New York Times. Bilton writes about 3-D printing—nothing new about that—and how it will soon enable people to build their own plastic, but very functional, handguns in the comfort of their homes. That’s news—and the more you think about it, the scarier it becomes.

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What’s weighing President Obama down? In a brilliant essay, Garance Franke-Ruta of The Atlantic (and a Prospect alumna) argues that the emotional toll of his job—particularly, of presiding over two wars and having to reckon with their casualties—has emotionally “shut down” the president. “Running a drone war that kills innocent civilians, ordering the death of militants, overseeing a policy that’s led to an increase in American casualties in Afghanistan, and delivering funereal remarks at a ceremony honoring the returning remains of a slain American diplomat,” she writes, have taken a toll on the “easy swagger and rambunctiously playful enthusiasm” that he displayed in his 2008 campaign.

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Will the questions in the presidential debates reflect the concerns of the Beltway and financial elites, or those of the 99 percent?

Plenty of questions would, of course, rightly reflect the concerns of both groups: questions about war and peace, the deployment of American forces, the right to marry, school quality. But a number of questions related to the top 1 percent’s rise over the rest of our citizenry are simply not part of standard Beltway discourse, and asking them would require some outside-of-the-box thinking from the debate moderators. Herewith, a few helpful suggestions.

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