Eric The Blue

Church seeks $64,000 from victim of sexual assaults

Father Thomas Adamson is one of the more notorious of the Catholic Church's serial  abusers.  His criminal acts span over twenty years, during which time two dioceses persisted in reassigning him; upon each new assignment, fresh allegations would arise in his new parish, thereby causing another reassignment, and so on.  While he has not himself been prosecuted for his crimes, the Catholic Church has paid over a million dollars in jury awards to a subset of his victims.

But not all his accusers have been successful at recovering compensatory awards.  An article in last Wednesday's Star Tribune newspaper reports that a lawsuit filed by a Twin Cities man alleging he was abused by Adamson on several occasions from 1980 to 1982, at Church of the Risen Savior, in Burnsville, Minnesota, was dismissed on the ground that the incidents occurred too long ago.  The local archdiocese has now asked that $64,000 in costs it incurred defending the case be recovered from the plaintiff. 

It's been twenty years since the seven-figure jury award for the Church's negligence regarding Father Adamson.  You might think it would have learned something about what not to say or do on any charge relating to molestation by its priests.  The law permitting defendants to recover money for costs from unsuccessful plaintiffs is meant to discourage the filing of nuisance lawsuits.  Does the Church view the complaints against Father Adamson as trivial?  Its actions for twenty years suggest that it does, and its action availing itself of provisions in the law allowing defendants to recover costs from unsuccessful plaintiffs has the effect of corroborating testimony.  Pieties, like those of the pope when meeting with victims, are just part of a public relations script.  The Church's view of its priest's victims is to be found in its legal moves.

Father Adamson is protected from criminal prosecution by statutes of limitation. If he had not been protected by the Church, quietly kicked down the street to the  next parish instead of handed over to the police, a judge and jury would long ago have had a chance to render the appropriate judgment based on criminal statutes.  But because the Church shielded him, his victims have recourse only to civil actions alleging negligence on the part of the Church; and when one of these plaintiffs fails, not on the merits but on a technicality arising from another statute of limitations, the Church responds by attempting to collect from him costs that likely surpass his annual income.

Only the superannuated virgins residing in the hermetically sealed upper reaches of the Church hierarchy can fail to see how outrageous this is.  Yet they expect us to listen to them about the evils of gay marriage and contraception?  It'd be laughable if lives hadn't been ruined. 

Netflix: Sunshine Cleaning

Thirtyish sisters, down but not entirely out in Albuquerque, New Mexico, go into business cleaning up hazardous waste after suicides and more accidental messes.  The plot is thin and the dialogue sometimes embarrassingly bad, as when one sister, having suffered a humiliation at the home of a more "successful" high-school classmate, is told by the other: "You're better than them."  There's more not to like:

• Supporting characters, such as a one-armed shopkeeper and the sisters' gruffly likable father, who are too plainly intended as "lovable eccentrics."
• Throwaway emotion elicited by the plight and wonderings of a boy, the son of one of the sisters, who turns eight just before the touching resolution of the implausible plot.
• A sort of pat psychological undertone when it develops that the young businesswomen, who clean up the physical messes made by suicides, are themselves messes on account of the suicide of their own mother while they were still young enough to frolic, in slow-motion flashbacks, in a lawn sprinkler.

And yet: I liked it, quite a lot.  There is a scene wherein the young entrepreneurs buy a (very) used van from a paunchy, pasty car salesman who with friendly nonchalance declines to budge on the price.  He doesn't look like his customers, except inasmuch as he qualifies as another unexceptional American struggling to earn a living--a rare sight at the movies.

Directed by Christine Jeffs (Sylvia) and featuring Amy Adams (Doubt) and Emily Blunt (The Devil Wears Prada), as the sisters.

At the hospital

Amanda and I are in the hospital with our youngest, born last Tuesday, who is lounging, blindfolded, beneath a lamp of blue light with a case of neonatal jaundice.  It hasn't been all bad. I get the distinct impression that the professionals here in "the family care center" have seen worse than what our newborn presents to them, and on my strolls to and from the cafeteria I sometimes glimpse sights that make the ones in our room appear bucolic in comparison.  We have two windows, a view of a freeway, TV, a mostly quiet baby, books and newspapers, a cribbage board, and, to remind us we're not at the Red Roof Inn, a surfeit of medical equipment and an occasional visit from a friendly nurse.

In keeping with the conceit that the sick have their own kingdom, the hospital campus makes its own self-contained world.  After a few days, it seems to shrink, and it's cramped to start with.  At the cafeteria I find myself eyeing with interest all those who, by their medical scrubs and direct routes between food stations, announce that at a certain o'clock they will return to their homes in the better kingdom.  Time is suspended for the rest of us.  Our departure times are unconnected to the certain movements of the clock.

Tonight, while I ate my mediocre beef pot pie, two women in street clothes sat down at the table next to mine and murmurred a table prayer together before advancing on their cafeteria food.  They might have been a mother and daughter, for the difference in age  looked to be about 25 years--50 and 75, something like that.  The older one faced me.  Her hamburger appeared to bear an oppressive burden of ketchup, which indeed squirted out the side onto the meaty part of her palm when she took her first bite about two seconds after the prayer ended.  She took a second bite, then let go of the burger with her ketchupy hand only and, having inspected the nature of the accident, used her tongue to make the necessary repair.  This seemed a more satisfying invasion of animal health than those staged by the white-coats wearing their stethoscopes like necklaces. I walked back to our room feeling, not on account of the pot pie, temporarily restored.

Updike: an afterword

I've just read over my recent post on John Updike and got a chuckle over the way in which my attempt at achieving a critical "balance," by giving voice in the last paragraph to the less enthusiastic responses of other readers, shifted so quickly into more praise.  I am almost incapable of saying a bad word about Updike.  So let me try again--at first, by quoting someone else.  Of Updike, the critic Harold Bloom wrote that he is "a minor novelist with a major style."  You see here, perhaps, that Updike's achievement is sufficiently variegated as to recommend the back-handed compliment as an available weapon.  What of the claim that he is a "minor novelist"?  Updike's characters, unlike Dostoevski's, go to the dentist, which may be part of what lies behind the insult: in the work of major novelists, characters commit murder and shake their fists at God but never undergo a root canal.  I'd rather reread all four Rabbit novels than figure out whether there is more to Bloom's case than that.

But let us postulate that the ordinary events of daily life are an apt subject for the novelist.  It seems to me that one considerable aspect of the quotidian slog is largely absent in Updike: the world of work, making a living.  Rabbit is a Linotyper, then inherits a Toyota dealership--an unusual career arc, and we do not often see him on the job.  Bech, the author, and winner of the Nobel prize, has a yet more exotic means of earning a living.  In the first of the Maples stories, we are told that Richard Maple works in advertising, but it doesn't carry through; later, when he's divorced,  we follow him as he prosecutes a new daily routine that still does not, however, involve going to the office.  It's hard to say for sure what he does for money.  He gets scientific monographs in the mail.  Maybe he's graduated from advertising to authorship or a professorship.  In Roger's Version, there is a professor, but I don't remember him teaching or voting on anyone's tenure.  Here is how that novel begins:

I have been happy at the Divinity School.  The hours are bearable, the surroundings handsome, my colleagues harmless and witty, habituated as they are to the shadows. To master a few dead languages, to parade sequential moments of the obdurately enigmatic early history of Christianity before classrooms of the hopeful, the deluded, and the docile--there are more fraudulent ways to earn a living.

There are 325 pages to go but that is pretty much all there is about what he does to get paychecks.  If there is a stunning counterexample to this general trend, I have in my feedings at Updike's ample table not yet come to it.  Therefore, I nominate the workaday world as Updike's one blind spot.  Being one of Augustine's fit and fair, he probably never had a chance to study at close range the eight-to-five that takes up so much of so many lives, and it's not really a subject you can read up on and then make fiction out of your researches. 

 

Wherein I consider the possibility that I overestimated the decency and good sense of state Republicans

After election returns showed that Mark Dayton had defeated Tom Emmer by just under 9000 votes in Minnesota's gubernatorial race, GOP state chair Tony Sutton declared that something smelled bad and that Dayton's apparent victory could be explained only by some combination of fraud and the incompetence of election officials.  Republicans, after all, had in the same election wrested control of both houses of the state legislature from the DFL and had, moreover, defeated an 18-term incumbent, Jim Oberstar, in one of the state's eight congressional districts.  Emmer therefore could not have lost.  He was cheated.

I evaluated these claims here.  I had thought that Sutton's election-night analysis might have been impaired by the heat-of-the-moment disappointment of a partisan, but he soon declared that the GOP, in its determination "not to get rolled again," would turn over every stone in a search for more Emmer votes.  "Getting rolled," apparently, is what judges, including several appointed by Republicans, did to the GOP two years ago when they held, unanimously, that Democrat Al Franken had gotten more votes than Republican Norm Coleman in a US Senate race that was more than 25 times closer than this year's gubernatorial contest.  That Dayton won is impossible and the task is to do whatever is necessary to flip the result obtained by the ordinary election machinery, which, notwithstanding a great many Republican victories, is unreliable, corrupt, sloppy, and, though the details remain murky, tilted in favor of the DFL. 

Such talk brought into view a nightmare scenario.  What if the GOP played out the recount, employing every delaying tactic along the way, and then, when Emmer remained several thousand votes behind, contested the outcome of the recount in court?  That would all take long enough to keep Dayton from assuming office at the appointed time, and the newly elected Republican legislature could then act in concert with the current Republican governor, Tim Pawlenty, on a conservative agenda that Dayton, were he in the office voters had elected him to, would surely block.  I at first thought this sounded as crazy as Sutton on election night and that cooler heads would prevail.  But the local rag has quoted an unnamed Republican operative to the effect that maneuvering to permit Pawlenty to preside over the next legislative session is a no-brainer for his party, and now the GOP has asked the State Supreme Court to delay the start of the recount in order to determine whether "phantom votes"--Sutton's phrase--were cast in a few precincts that allegedly failed to reconcile the number of voters with the number of ballots cast.  Jay Wiener, of Minn Post, has the technical details concerning the dubious merits of what looks like a fishing expedition. 

But if the goal is to keep Dayton out of office for as long as possible, a fishing expedition is perfect.  And a fishing expedition before the recount can even begin--perfecter! I'm done thinking there's something so low that state Republicans wouldn't dive for it.

Addendum: Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., national Republicans are doing their best to block ratification of a START treaty that would commit the US and Russia to work more closely on issues pertaining to nuclear proliferation and "loose nukes."  As Michael Tomasky points out, you have, on one side, not only President Obama but also former Republican secretarys of state Henry Kissinger, James Baker, and Brent Scowcroft, Republican senatorial grown-up Richard Lugar, and also every government in the world save the ones in Iran and North Korea--and, on the other side, John Kyl and other Republican members of the US Senate.   

John Updike

John Updike was born on March 18, 1932, at Reading, Pennsylvania, and grew up in the small town of Shillington, which is around 60 miles northwest of Philadelphia. He was the only child of a schoolteacher father and a mother who worked steadily at writing but hardly ever got published.  He was a top-flight student.  Upon finishing high school, he enrolled at Harvard College, from which in 1954 he graduated summa cum laude with a degree in English.  He was interested in drawing and wanted to be a cartoonist, but after a year in England he returned to the United States and began contributing to The New Yorker, where for the next fifty-some years his short fiction, book reviews, and occasional poetry appeared regularly.

Updike, who died in 2009, is now regarded as one of the greatest contemporary American authors; in a hundred years, he will likely be regarded as one of the greatest American authors, ever.  The critic Elizabeth Hardwick begins her essay "Citizen Updike" by designating her subject "one of Augustine's 'fair and fit'"--and, later, on the topic of the novels concerning the life and times of Rabbit Angstrom, refers to "a long flow of attention and feeling."  The phrases are evocative of Updike's prodigious output as well as of a gift that was plainly nurtured by steady hard work.  It's as if Cal Ripken could run very fast, too.  Updike wrote more than twenty novels, a couple hundred stories, and a considerable amount of verse. His "occasional" prose, much of it reviews first published in The New Yorker, was collected, at least a half dozen times, in 850-page installments--Hugging the Shore, Odd Jobs, More Matter, and Due Considerations are the ones I can see on our shelves from where I'm typing.

In a body of work this size a reader seeks guidance.  I haven't read even half of it--I'm only a little over 50 and have to work for a living--but my recommendation, like that of a lot of other people, would be to start with the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy.  Read them straight through, in the order they appeared: Rabbit in the 1950s (Rabbit, Run); in the 1960s (Rabbit Redux); in the 1970s (Rabbit is Rich); and in the 1980s (Rabbit at Rest).  It's a portrait of a man and of a country, the United States in the second half of the twentieth century.  The author's concerns range from swingin' sexuality to Barthean theology, the in-between and spill-over being American middle-class life in four decades, including thousands of small artifacts fully rendered, catalouged, and integrated into the sprawling narrative, all of it conveyed in that controlled, effortless, shimmering flow described by Hardwick.  Four great books, the latter two a little ahead, I think, of the first two, maybe only on account of being longer and,therefore, the better to luxuriate in.

If so inclined, the next step might be to become acquainted with some of Updike's other serial creations, like the Maples, Richard and Joan, whose problematic marriage is chronicled in a series of stories first collected in Too Far To Go and, later, with some additions, in an Everyman pocket edition, The Maples Stories.  If you like these, proceed to The Early Stories, 1953-1975, another volume of luxurious length, more than a hundred short stories, including the baker's dozen or so concerning the Maples, which however you will want to read again anyway. 

If you love all this as well as I you will by this point want to find your own way.  But, of the other novels, I should say that I am a particular fan of Roger's Version, wherein religion, a steady theme, clashes with reason, the former championed by a manifest nut and the latter by an over-urbane divinity scholar.  I also am a fan of the stories about the writer Henry Bech, who, while sharing Updike's vocation, seems in many respects his opposite--withdrawn, Jewish, cramped, and a winner of the Nobel prize.  These fictions, also, have been collected in an Everyman edition, The Complete Henry Bech.

I think the criticism, collected in those 850-page tomes, is too easy to overlook.  Rooting around in these volumes, first in the essays you think will interest you and then in the ones you at first thought maybe wouldn't, is like hanging out, for hours, with someone loquaicious, unpretentious, and really smart. It sometimes seems there is nothing he doesn't know about.

It's natural to be curious about the man who created this body of literature, but, to keep the length of this decently brief, I will mention only a couple of things that seem connected to his fiction. 

Updike married young, in 1953, and was divorced 21 years later.  According to his memoir, Self-Consciousness (I forgot to mention the autobiographical work, which includes another memoir, The Dogwood Tree), he took it hard: he felt like he "couldn't breathe" and "broke out" to such a degree that "my shoulders and neck [were] so encrusted I couldn't turn my head without pain."  Like the Maples, who also divorced, Updike and his first wife had four children.  He later remarried, and this one lasted till his death, of lung cancer, on January 27, 2009.

As a young man, Updike for a time felt he could not maintain the Christian faith in which he had been raised, and he took this hard, too.  His reading became heavily theological, in particular the works of the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, both of whom he unfailingly named when asked about authors who had "changed his life."  In Odd Jobs, for example, he includes his response to a request, from a British newspaper, to contribute to a weekly section called "A Book that Changed Me."  From Kierkegaard, Updike wrote, he eagerly took

the idea that subjectivity too has its rightful claims, amid all the desolating objective evidence of our insignificance and futility and final nonexistence; faith is not a deduction but an act of will, a heroism.  So I took courage and thumbed my nose, in a sense, at the world, in imitation of Kierkegaard's proud, jeering, disorderly tone.

There is here perhaps more exhiliration than hard, good sense--and it is, I guess, his point that hard, good sense has its limits.  Close readers of Updike's work will detect an abiding interest in things theological and a distinct, if in these times unconventional, religious sensibility.  Perhaps one senses it most in the way things look--the manner, I mean, with which ordinary objects are charged with something resembling what the poet Hopkins called "God's grandeur." 

In the interests of balance, he is not for everyone.  Students, when asked to read a Rabbit novel, frequently express repugnance for the main character.  I won't defend him.  It's true that you will not feel about Rabbit Angstrom the way you are apt to feel about, say, Constantine Dimitrich Levin.  But while the Russian may be ahead of the American in the likable department, I don't think he is a more representative specimen of humanity.  Getting tired of Rabbit Angstrom reminds me of what Dr Johnson said about being tired of London: it's like being tired of life.

More on Lydia Davis

I've finished The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, which I first wrote about a couple weeks ago, here, when I was maybe half-way through it. There are 198 "stories" in all, and, as the book has 733 pages, you can see that most are very short.  Like this one, titled "Index Entry":

Christian, I'm not a

There are several others that aren't much longer.  I'm not sure what I'd make of any one of these if I came upon it, individually, in a magazine.  But in this volume, intermixed with longer ones like "Helen and Vi: A Study in Health and Vitality," the cumulative effect is--here comes a paradox--overwhelming in an understated sort of way.  Perhaps nothing is more impressive than the portraits of old age, the depredations endured by those who live long enough to experience them and the responses of their children.  It's pretty clearly a subject close to Davis's own experience.  One can make out a sequence on the topic that concludes with this shattering prose poem, called "Head, Heart":

Heart weeps.

Head tries to help heart.

Head tells heart how it is, again.

You will lose the ones you love.  They will all go.  But even the earth will go, someday.

Heart feels better, then.

But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart.

Heart is so new to this.

I want them back, says heart.

Head is all heart has.

Help, head.  Help heart.

Many in our neighborhood are mourning the death, last Saturday, of Dr Suzanne Grant.  The claims made in the obituary for her excellent personal characteristics are as true as the date of her birth, the names of her relatives, and the number of years she practiced medicine.  She was a great favorite of our 7-year-old and you can't trick people of that age.  Whenever she spotted me gardening, she'd hobble over and begin quizzing me about this plant or that one.  Finally one day I told her to stop wasting her breath:  "If there's something you don't know about these flowers, Dr Grant, it's a sure thing I won't know either."  One thing the obituary doesn't mention: hers was a death freely chosen.  She had a perforated ulcer, which might have been repaired by a surgery, but she declined, and now her many friends are hosting the head-heart colloquy.

Power Line analyzes Nevada

I finally got around to checking out the election analysis of the Power Line philosophers.  Despite a series of posts entitled "Wasn't that a mighty wave, parts 1 to n," it was not as triumphalist as I had expected.  I'm not saying it wasn't ridiculous.  Here is the conclusion to Paul Mirengoff's postmortem of the Nevada senate race:

Most conservatives, including me, were overly optimistic about Republican chances in the Senate. This was due, I think, to our understanding that this was a wave election and our faith that the Senate vote would pretty fully reflect the wave.

It didn't in Nevada. The reason can be debated. The possibility that the Republicans nominated a much less than optimal candidate cannot be dismissed.

You have to love the way the author mincingly approaches, then flees from, the question of Sharron Angle's fitness for high office.  The possibility that the square root of 5 is greater than 2 cannot be dismissed.  The possibility that the author knows his blog is read by people even crazier than he cannot be dismissed.

How come John Hinderaker is posting so infrequently?  Almost his last contribution, back on October 24, ran under the title "Angle looks like a winner."  It's not as fun when he's on a sabbatical.

Election bytes

1. Early in the evening, searching for a place to settle on TV, I happened across ABC just as George Will was asked a question about the tea-partiers.  His answer applied to this group the adjective, "Madisonian."  I'm putting that in my Department of No Comment.

2. I do have something to say about Michele Bachmann's victory speech.  Is she unable to read?  Is everyone who works for her as dumb as she is?  You could barely spot the non sequiturs through the incoherence.

3.  I would have traded Harry Reid for Russ Feingold.  That would put Sharron Angle in the Senate but that is how much I think of Feingold, who, in his classy concession/farewell, quoted a famous local boy: "But my heart is not weary, it's light and it's free/I've got nothing but affection for those who've sailed with me."

4. Feingold's successor appears to have no qualifications other than his wealth.  At least the people of California didn't fall for that.  They had two candidates who fit the description, Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, and both crashed and burned.  Whitman spent more than $140 million of her own money, mostly on TV ads that persuaded Californians they didn't like her.  Fiorina's nonconcession concession speech was at the other end of the spectrum from Feingold's.  Though by the  time she spoke every network had called the race for Boxer, Fiorina claimed to be locked in a "dead heat tie."  She lost by almost 700,000 votes.

5. It will be hard to wrest the House away from the Republicans.  Jon Chait explains but it is basically the problem I described, here, about the way in which Democrats in these parts are under represented in the House of Representatives.  It's not just in the Twin Cities.  Across the country, Democratic voters are crowded together in entirely urban districts in which Republicans are nearly extinct.  That leaves way too much of "everywhere else" open to the blandishments of the GOP. 

6. The results of the retention election for the state Supreme Court in Iowa were as depressing as most everything else.  You will remember that in 2009 the 7-member court held, unanimously, that the state's constitution requires that homosexuals not be barred from marrying each other.  Three of the justices faced a retention election Tuesday and all were defeated. 

7. Tony Sutton, chairman of the state Republican party here in Minnesota, says "something doesn't smell right" about the outcome of our governor's race, in which DFLer Mark Dayton appears to  have defeated Crazy Tom Emmer by around 9,000 votes.  The Republicans won control of both the state house and the state senate, and, in the eighth congressional district, which is usually a Democratic bastion, a Republican stunned DFLer Jim Oberstar, an 18-term incumbent.  So, naturally, Emmer was cheated.

Three things, Tony, you might have considered before lobbing wild claims into the public sphere:

I. No Republican won a statewide race.  Auditor, attorney general, secretary of state, governor--DFLers won them all.  Do you think there was cheating in all those races but not in the legislative ones?  And not in the 8th district congressional race?

II. In the legislative races, voters generally had to choose between a DFLer and a Republican.  That was true in the 8th district as well.  In the gubernatorial race, however, the choice was between Dayton (a DFLer), Emmer (a Republican), and Tom Horner (the Independence Party candidate and former Republican insider who got more than ten per cent of the vote).  Very different dynamic.

III. Tony's argument draws the wrong conclusion from the observed evidence.  That Emmer lost on the same night that Republicans captured the state legislature and the 8th district congressional seat does not prove there was fraud in the governor's race.  It proves that Emmer was a really terrible candidate.

David Frum speaks; Eric the Blue listens, criticizes

Here, in its entirety, is a recent commentary by Republican David Frum on the NPR show "Marketplace":

I know, I know, I know! There's Christine O'Donnell, Rand Paul and Sharron Angle. Never mind Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Fox News. There's the crazy guy in Texas who says that revolution is "on the table." And anyway, what kind of fiscally conservative party campaigns on a pledge to protect Medicare exactly as it is?

Yet I will, nevertheless, be voting the straight Republican ticket on Nov. 2, and here's why: The Obama Administration has launched more big bold initiatives than any administration since Lyndon Johnson's, from health care reform through Afghanistan.

Now ask yourself this: Which of these measures has produced the results promised? Of them all, in fact, there's only one that has done the job -- and that was a continuation of a Bush-era policy, the Troubled Asset Relief Program. TARP averted a second Great Depression. But the Obama stimulus did not ignite job creation. Health care reform will increase the number of insured Americans somewhat, at enormous cost, but it will not slow cost inflation. It will mean higher subsidies and more taxes. The auto bailout is just plain bad economic policy. More disappointments.

The financial regulation fix ignored as "too hard" -- the status of the government mortgage lenders, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. "Green jobs" is an excuse for government boondoggles. Meanwhile, the crucial goal of energy security is no closer today than two years ago.

We need a change of course. And ironically, the biggest winner from such a change might be the president himself. Again and again, this president has excessively deferred to Democrats in Congress. He let them write his stimulus and his health care bill.

Obama won't defer to Republicans, which means a big Republican win will not only redirect the country, it will also remind this president that it's his job to lead, not just preside.

The opening is probably intended as a come-on to the latte-sipping, NPR-listening, Democrat-voting demographic that tunes into "Marketplace."  Look!  See!  I am not a nut!  What's more notable, I think, is that Frum's only mention of Republicans, in a piece purporting to explain why he'll vote a straight-Republican ticket, concerns how embarrassing they are.  The case for them is the case against Obama, but the case against Obama is sort of sketchy.  Averting a second Great Depression will strike some as a considerable achievement.  Frum credits the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which the current crop of insurgent Republicans would have opposed.  If Frum lived in Minnesota's sixth congressional district, would he be voting a straight-Republican ticket?  That would mean casting a ballot for Michele Bachmann, who voted against TARP, and is proud of it.

The problem comes into focus, I believe, when you begin to consider such phrases as "Obama's stimulus."  It shouldn't really be called  "Obama's stimulus," because Obama wanted something bigger.  But the Republicans, united in their opposition, whittled it down.  Similarly with health care reform, which did not include the public option the White House wanted. 

Democracy, American-style, has the weakness that the "party in power" cannot really enact its agenda and then be judged by the results.  People like Frum are saying that Obama has failed, he hasn't done enough--but it's the people Frum will vote for who have thwarted him.  Now Republicans will take over the House, and possibly the Senate, but to what end?  Frum speaks vaguely of a "change of course" but there are no details.  We know what Republicans are against--anything that Obama is for--but where do they want to take the country?  Frum isn't saying, and neither are the Republican candidates he will vote for, unless you count "cut taxes" and "reduce the deficit"--we've heard it before, tried it, given it a fairer trial than Frum will give Obama, and it hasn't worked. The only thing new is the crazy background noise provided by the likes of Sharron Angle.