If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is when did it change? Didn't the Republican Party just tear the President apart for a year, saying no to everything but yet making him look like the radical? Didn't the same fools who drained our nation's treasury, whose inclination to let the people who run our financial markets do whatever they want, find a way to blame the inevitable collapse on the President who was required to clean up their mess, and succeed with the help of the brainless who populate our television screens and the even stupider people we live with who watch these programs, with their shallow little thoughts and a historical perspective that goes back, at the very most, to the prior week, and form opinions on that basis?

Wasn't the country sliding into an abyss, unable to come to grip with the smallest of problems any nation would face given the new challenges of a new century, because its politics had become so divorced from reality?

It's hard to tell, and the odds are against it, but there is at least some chance that it all changed the same week J.D. Salinger's most unhappy life finally ended. The first sentence posted here is some hack's attempt at an homage to Salinger, of course. If for some reason you have never read Catcher in the Rye, you really should do so as soon as possible. As soon as you are ten pages into it, you will know why. Nobody before Salinger and few since have captured the way people talk and think and what makes them do both. My niece's middle name is Zooey and, just as any sane heterosexual male would, the sight of Zooey Deschanel, not to mention both her speaking and singing voice, make me weak in the knees. The first Zooey any of us ever heard of, Zooey Glass, the sister of Franny, were two more of the most memorable characters ever to populate the pages of prose written in this country but do not even approach the universal identification so many of us have had with Salinger's iconic Holden Caulfield.

But their author was a miserable person who spent his life in unalterable misery. There was never any mystery about the reclusive life he led that one could not understand from the stories he wrote. There was nothing romantic about it, despite the phonies who kept using the name Greta Garbo in the obituaries of as significant an American writer as there has ever been. So much of what is written and read since then is the product of what Salinger wrought, yet the mind that could put those words on paper was that of a person who was unable to cope with almost anything he could not completely control. It would be a sad story, except that a different Salinger likely could not have written what he wrote.

It takes no special insight to know that whatever talents any of us have are bounded by limits: some we can see and understand, others beyond our ken. For all of us, the goal has to be to find those limits, to try to approach them and accomplish as much as we can with the use of the tools at our disposal.

Certainly those achievements include those which are completely personal or to an extension such as our family, maybe our business, even our art if we are so blessed with such talents. That cannot be the end of it, though. The life of a person whose abilities allow all the riches one could want is a failure if that is all he or she accomplishes, of course. This is not a controversial observation, either. No rational person would dispute that.

Yet, as Gail Collins wrote so eloquently this morning, a "sour, us-first mood [has] settled over the country." I might argue with her over when that occurred, but there is no question that we have devolved into a people that look at almost every political issue with one eye on what is best for me, and me alone, and the other with how any initiative will help or hurt political candidates who I favor and who I hope are defeated.

There can be no question that it is hard for a president to know how to conduct himself in such an atmosphere. The instinct to pander, to try to say things that those who oppose the President might like to hear so, perhaps, to reconsider is ever present: Holden Caulfield could tell you that is human nature to do so.

Hence, stupid bromides and ridiculous assertions get thrown out: people start talking, incongruously, about a government spending freeze during as deep a recession as even those of born to Salinger's generation have ever seen, and completely absurd non sequiturs such as that because

families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions[, t]he federal government should do the same.

as if the budget of the United States serves the same purpose as the Barth family budget, come pouring out.

But bullies are not so easily sated. It is the official policy of the Republican Party to oppose anything proposed by a Democrat (unless his name is Lieberman) and particularly if it is championed by a President nominated by the Democratic Party. As Ms. Collins described it:

Rudy Giuliani, who watched "in awe of our system" when terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui was convicted in a civilian court in Virginia, instantly attacked the plans for the Manhattan trial. Giuliani kept finding everything Obama did worse and worse until he finally flipped completely over the edge and claimed that there had been no terrorist attacks in the United States during the Bush administration.

It's all part of a cult of selfishness that decrees it's fine to throw your body in front of any initiative, no matter how important, if resistance looks more profitable.

The economy has a lot to do with this. So does Washington's increasing confidence that Barack Obama can be rolled. We're currently stuck in a place where people no longer feel as though they need to be part of the solution.

So, in the same State of the Union address with the foolish bromides about freezes and the tightening of a government belt while the people it is supposed to protect are losing their pants, the President identified the problem clearly and succinctly:

{W]hat frustrates the American people is a Washington where every day is Election Day. We can't wage a perpetual campaign where the only goal is to see who can get the most embarrassing headlines about the other side -- a belief that if you lose, I win. Neither party should delay or obstruct every single bill just because they can.... The confirmation of well-qualified public servants shouldn't be held hostage to the pet projects or grudges of a few individual senators. (Applause.)

Washington may think that saying anything about the other side, no matter how false, no matter how malicious, is just part of the game. But it's precisely such politics that has stopped either party from helping the American people. Worse yet, it's sowing further division among our citizens, further distrust in our government.

So, no, I will not give up on trying to change the tone of our politics. I know it's an election year. And after last week, it's clear that campaign fever has come even earlier than usual. But we still need to govern.

And there it was. The "we" that has been missing, coupled with the need to govern. The Times continued to miss this point, as so many have because of the brainwashing by presidents and press alike, aided by unspeakably ignorant or malevolent vice presidents and candidates for said office, that presidents, in a republic do not "govern." So, New York Times: the question is not how "President Obama intends to govern" it is whether our system is capable of governing.

The jury is out on that one. We live in scary times as outlined here last week. Both Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman expressed the same worries last week during the march to the State of the Union.

Friedman:

Maybe it's just me, but I've found the last few weeks in American politics particularly unnerving. Our economy is still very fragile, yet you would never know that by the way the political class is acting. We're like a patient that just got out of intensive care and is sitting up in bed for the first time when, suddenly, all the doctors and nurses at bedside start bickering. One of them throws a stethoscope across the room; someone else threatens to unplug all the monitors unless the hospital bills are paid by noon; and all the while the patient is thinking: "Are you people crazy? I am just starting to recover. Do you realize how easily I could relapse? Aren't there any adults here?"

Sometimes you wonder: Are we home alone? Obviously, the political and financial elites to whom we give authority often act on the basis of personal interests. But we still have a long way to go to get out of the mess we are in, and if our elites do not behave with a greater sense of the common good we could find our economy doing a double dip with a back flip.

Krugman:

the long-run budget outlook was dire even before the recent surge in the deficit, mainly because of inexorably rising health care costs. Looking ahead, we're going to have to find a way to run smaller, not larger, deficits.

How can this apparent conflict between short-run needs and long-run responsibilities be resolved? Intellectually, it's not hard at all. We should combine actions that create jobs now with other actions that will reduce deficits later. And economic officials in the Obama administration understand that logic: for the past year they have been very clear that their vision involves combining fiscal stimulus to help the economy now with health care reform to help the budget later.

The sad truth, however, is that our political system doesn't seem capable of doing what's necessary.

And, finally, a President who goes right into the belly of the beast and says it plainly:

we've got to close the gap a little bit between the rhetoric and the reality. I'm not suggesting that we're going to agree on everything, whether it's on health care or energy or what have you, but if the way these issues are being presented by the Republicans is that this is some wild-eyed plot to impose huge government in every aspect of our lives, what happens is you guys then don't have a lot of room to negotiate with me.

I mean, the fact of the matter is, is that many of you, if you voted with the administration on something, are politically vulnerable in your own base, in your own party. You've given yourselves very little room to work in a bipartisan fashion because what you've been telling your constituents is, this guy is doing all kinds of crazy stuff that's going to destroy America.

And I would just say that we have to think about tone. It's not just on your side, by the way -- it's on our side, as well. This is part of what's happened in our politics, where we demonize the other side so much that when it comes to actually getting things done, it becomes tough to do.

As Rachel Maddow noted last night what made yesterday's encounter less similar to Prime Minister's Question Time was that the questions were so poorly put making the President's task was easier. Of course, these days, the real Prime Minister is no rhetorical match for his weekly interlocutor, David Cameron, as slippery a character as any we have in our Republican Party, but whether his poodle routine was not in the best interests of his country or its former colonies over here, the prior Prime Minister well acquitted himself both from Mr. Cameron's attacks and the rest of his party, and it was this ability to show the insincerity of much of what was hurled at them that seemed, at least from this distance, to protect Britain from Tory governments and what that would portend. We can only hope for the same to apply here.

But the press, both in print and otherwise, needs to stop repeating nonsense as if it were fact, just because somebody said it. The President cannot be the nightly truth squad. There is nobody---nobody---Republican or Democrat who believes Sarah Palin should be President of the United States, but few seem willing to say so. The idea that the government was proposing "death panels" was absurd on its face, but few other than partisan Democrats were willing to say so.

There is little faith in this corner that the American people will do what needs to be done but maybe, just maybe, the community that reads the stuff posted here and similar places, will and maybe that will be enough. And, maybe, the President's two major speeches and the comments yesterday to close the week, will at least underscore for the White House the need to act with both eyes open to reality and not to a wish for a different era. I share the dream, but it is just that for now. Maybe some other time.

Maybe this was the week it all changed. Maybe.