Economy

Some of them are eager to handicap the field – a field with a lot of handicaps, an observant man might say – and there’s many months to go before anyone beyond the Beltway will start paying attention to the dreaded leap-year parade of presidential wannabes.

These early “debates,” such as they are, are the exhibition games. Only the pundits are keeping score, an exercise useful mostly to the purveyors of early money. They can see who has a good curve ball, and who doesn’t.

The week included the economists' declaration that the end of the "Age of America" is at hand, but the president was finally freed to make jokes about the birth certificate he kept to himself for all these years. It's still not clear why he fed the mystery for so long. He could have released the long-form birth certificate at the nominating convention in Denver, when the buzz started, and spared himself and the rest of us the long harangue. The controversy may not be on its way to the graveyard yet, but it's probably safe to laugh about it.

The president is on a let's-get-serious kick about the other things he has botched and bungled (he doesn't put it quite that way), so he will exhaust the birth-certificate jokes soon and we can get back to serious things -- the imminent Chinese assumption of economic leadership and domination of the world, and what he and Congress can do about it, assuming he thinks something should be done about it. The International Monetary Fund says the "Age of America" goes onto the ash heap of history five years hence, in 2016, and the "Age of China" begins. That's when the annual size of the Chinese economy will surpass $19 trillion, worth billions more than ours.

Joe Biden sleeps through the boss’ forgettable speech about the economy, caught on camera with his chin against his chest, happily sawing hickory logs. A man sitting next to him in the photograph is obviously wrestling with a protocol problem: how loud does a veep get to snore before he gets a sharp elbow in the ribs?

Presidents, on the other hand, can’t take refuge in a nap in the attic, where our lovable and slightly dotty uncles live. So when Standard and Poor’s, a most highly regarded authority on Wall Street, downgrades its assessment of the U.S. credit outlook as “negative,” the White House has to do better than to dismiss the assessment as partisan politics.

He must know something about economics, so this is presumably how grown-ups deal with serious things. The budget the Democrats want to sell us has lots of low-hanging fruit and bushels of nuts that nobody around now will have to pay for. Let the grandchildren, who will be taking crash courses to speak Chinese, figure out a way to pass the debt on. What? Us worry?

The "negotiations," such as they are, continue as Mr. Obama and his "adults" refuse to talk seriously about what they know they should be talking about. The president, who scolds and evades responsibility with an unmatched skill, tells the Republicans that the budget should have "gotten done" three months ago. His chutzpah is unmatched, too. Six months ago the Democrats were in charge of making the budget, with margins in both the House and Senate large enough to enact almost anything Mr. Obama had put in front of them. So the dance continues, one step forward and two steps backward and three steps to the side. This is the three-step that would have stumped Fred and Ginger.

Every little boy dreams of finding a toy train under the Christmas tree, and maybe little Barry, being shuttled from Hawaii to Indonesia and back again, never got his little engine that could. So he's eager to spend billions of dollars now for a vast new rail network across America. Who, among grown-up little boys who remember them, doesn't like trains?

Scott Walker, the new Republican governor of Wisconsin, for starters – and President Obama, visiting Wisconsin on the morning after congressional date night in Washington, learned about it up close and personal. One of the goodies at the top of the president's fantastical Christmas list is a high-speed rail link between Milwaukee and Madison, and in one of his first acts as governor Mr. Walker scratched that from the list of schemes plotted in a new stimulus program. "The train has left the station in Wisconsin," the governor said. "We're going to focus on things we can afford."

"But if an American sees a new car parked in front of his neighbor's house, he says, 'My, that is such a beautiful car. I'm going ask my neighbor how to get one of those for myself.'"

Alas, that was then, and this is now. The defining difference between liberal and conservative, Republican and Democrat, tea sipper and addict to castor oil, is envy. Bitter, unyielding and unforgiving envy.

Goons have pretty much shut down Paris, with the cops and students trading volleys of tear gas and gasoline bombs. The only bright spot Monday was the dwindling supplies of gasoline; when the pumps run dry, there won't be any more Molotov cocktails to throw at the cops.

The foreign airlines have been told to top off their tanks before taking off to France because they won't find fuel for a return trip. Thousands of gasoline stations have already run dry. "Youths," as young goons (some of whom look to be decades beyond their barefoot years) are referred to in the kind and gentle way, are turning violent, as they are always eager to do when they can manufacture a provocation. In Lyon, they fought for social justice on Monday by smashing bus shelters, tossing a gasoline bomb at a school in the Paris suburb of Combes-la-Ville, blocking traffic at the Paris Town Hall and on the Champs-Elysees, looting restaurants and burning cars. Burning cars has become the national sport of France, uniting Muslim and infidel in pyrotechnic solidarity, if only for the moment. (The national soccer team is usually bounced out of the World Cup early, but nobody can torch a Citroen better than a French layabout.) Truck drivers and railway workers are joining the protests, and France will soon be isolated to marinate au jus. (But who marinates better than a French chef?) The riots are expected to go nationwide Tuesday, and already many trains have been canceled, and half the flights to Paris have been deleted from the arrival boards at Orly and Charles de Gaulle airports.

Recovery has become retribution, with recriminations leading to lust for repudiation. All the rant and rave, if the polls are within a country mile of telling it like it is, is building toward a rout of remarkable proportions. Recession remains with us, despite Democratic invocation of the famous Aiken rule, set out by the late Sen. George Aiken of Vermont to quiet the domestic tumult of the Vietnam War: Declare victory and come home.

By plane, train, bus and automobile, Congress got out of town en masse Thursday, scattering to what one Republican pollster calls "the killing fields" waiting for them back home. Nancy Pelosi is so embattled that even armed with her large majority, she had to cast the speaker's vote to adjourn the House, and prevailed by only a single vote.

The Democrats haven't been on the run like this in a generation, maybe two, but instead of pursuing his advantage, the man most likely to be the speaker if the Republicans take over the House is already talking compromise on taxes, the one issue that unites independents and party regulars.

Rep. John A. Boehner, who has seen some big crowds in some big towns and was inspired to talk some big talk, meekly retreated Sunday after a week of hearing himself criticized — mildly, given the givens — by President Obama. He says he's willing at last to support the president's proposal to begin the dismantling of the George W. Bush tax cuts. Those cuts expire this year unless they are extended by Congress.

Such company is nice when he's in a hurry and the crosstown traffic is a bear, though if it weren't for the honor of it a president on certain occasions would just as soon walk alone. George Bush the elder once told me that he figured beating traffic lights by having the cops hold up everyone else costs a lot of angry votes. John F. Kennedy used to give the slip to his Secret Service bodyguards, pull a hat low over his eyes and a coat with a turned-up collar and duck out late of an evening to hike up Pennsylvania Avenue to the gloom of the old Biograph Theater at the edge of Georgetown to watch a second-run movie.

Presidents have to have escorts. The president can decide when and where he goes and doesn't have to ask or tell anyone why. But he has to take company. Who could begrudge a president a little private time to unwind? Who would deny the first lady a similar pass? Rank, even rank by marriage, has its privileges.