By Michael Kinsley

To oversimplify: Democrats are for Big Government; Republicans are against it.

To oversimplify somewhat less, Democrats aren’t always for Big Government, and Republicans aren’t always against it. Democrats treasure civil liberties, whereas Republicans are more tolerant of government censorship to protect children from pornography, or of wiretapping to catch a criminal, or of torture in the war against terrorism. War in general and Iraq in particular–certainly Big Government exercises–are projects Republicans tend to be more enthusiastic about. Likewise the criminal process: Republicans tend to want to make more things illegal and to send more people to jail for longer. Republicans also consider themselves more concerned about the moral tone of the country, and they are more disposed toward using the government in trying to improve it. In particular, Republicans think religion needs more help from society, through the government, while Democrats are touchier about the separation of church and state.

Many people feel that neither party offers a coherent set of principles that they can agree with. For them, the choice is whether you believe in Big Government or you don’t. And if you don’t, you call yourself a libertarian. Libertarians are against government in all its manifestations. Domestically, they are against social-welfare programs. They favor self-reliance (as they see it) over Big Government spending. Internationally, they are isolationists. Like George Washington, they loathe “foreign entanglements,” and they think the rest of the world can go to hell without America’s help. They don’t care–or at least they don’t think the government should care–about what people are reading, thinking, drinking, smoking or doing in bed. And what is the opposite of libertarianism? Libertarians would say fascism. But in the American political context, it is something infinitely milder that calls itself communitarianism. The term is not as familiar, and communitarians are far less organized as a movement than libertarians, ironically enough. But in general communitarians emphasize society rather than the individual and believe that group responsibilities (to family, community, nation, the globe) should trump individual rights.

The relationship of these two ways of thinking to the two established parties is peculiar. Republicans are far more likely to identify themselves as libertarians and to vilify the government in the abstract. And yet Republicans have a clearer vision of what constitutes a good society and a well-run planet and are quicker to try to impose this vision on the rest of us. Now that the Republican Party is in trouble, critics are advising it to free itself of the religious right on issues like abortion and gay rights. That is, the party should become less communitarian and more libertarian. With Democrats, it’s the other way around.

Very few Democrats self-identify as libertarians, but they are in fact much more likely to have a live-and-let-live attitude toward the lesbian couple next door or the Islamofascist dictator halfway around the world. And every time the Democrats lose an election, critics scold that they must put less emphasis on the sterile rights of individuals and more emphasis on responsibilities to society. That is, they should become less libertarian and more communitarian. Usually this boils down to advocating mandatory so-called voluntary national service by people younger than whoever is doing the advocating.

Libertarians and communitarians (to continue this unjustified generalizing) are different character types. Communitarians tend to be bossy, boring and self-important, if they’re not being oversweetened and touchy-feely. Libertarians, by contrast, are not the selfish monsters you might expect. They are earnest and impractical–eager to corner you with their plan for using old refrigerators to reverse global warming or solving the traffic mess by privatizing stoplights. And if you disagree, they’re fine with that. It’s a free country.

The chance of the two political parties realigning so conveniently is slim. But the party that does well in the future will be the one that makes the better guess about where to place its bets. My money’s on the libertarians. People were shocked a couple of weeks ago when Ron Paul–one of those mysterious Republicans who seem to be running for President because everyone needs a hobby–raised $5 million from July through September, mostly on the Internet. Paul is a libertarian. In fact, he was the Libertarian Party presidential candidate in 1988. The computer revolution has bred a generation of smart loners, many of them rich and some of them complacently Darwinian, convinced that they don’t need society–nor should anyone else. They are going to be an increasingly powerful force in politics.

By Joe Klein

There is only one American politician who sounds like this: “With my usual suicidal, masochistic tendencies, I spoke at the Detroit Economic Club last week and supported increased fuel-efficiency standards.” Yes, yes, it’s John McCain, rising from the crypt, but not as a zombie. The foolishly conventional Republican McCain of last year was the zombie. No, this is the funny, free-range McCain reincarnated, the independent who dares speak to an environmental forum in New Hampshire, touting his green credentials, actually supporting a return to the Kyoto global-warming negotiations, which is anathema to most Republicans. That guy–the interesting one–is back.

I am not suggesting that John McCain is a plausible front runner for the Republican nomination. Republicans tend not to like people like McCain: too wild, too willing to work with Senators like Ted Kennedy (gasp!) and Russ Feingold (gulp!) on legislation. Then again, what are the options? There is no plausible front runner. Each of the Republicans is flawed and flailing. The despair and hilarity as the various candidates try to squeeze into the conservative base’s straitjacket, like the stepsisters struggling to fit into Cinderella’s slipper, have been the gaudiest political show of 2007.

To review the bidding on the leading candidates: Rudy Giuliani, the national front runner in the polls, supports abortion rights, supported gun control, supported Democrat Mario Cuomo for Governor, moved in with a gay couple when his second marriage fell apart–and, pause for breath, well, isn’t that enough? Mitt Romney, the front runner in Iowa and New Hampshire, was a liberal when he ran for the Senate from Massachusetts and a moderate when he ran for Governor. He has disavowed his former positions on abortion, gay marriage–and now seems even to disavow the groundbreaking state health-care plan he passed. Asked in a recent debate if he’d seek congressional authorization to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities, he responded, “Well, you sit down with your attorneys …” For a Republican, that’s something like a Democrat saying, “Well, maybe we should overturn Roe v. Wade and turn abortion over to the states.” Also, he is a Mormon, which many religious conservatives consider a cult. Fred Thompson seems to be performing a quarter-hearted presidential-campaign drop-by, living proof that not all actors can play charming. He’s another divorcé, and was once, among other things, a lobbyist for the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association.

Given the embarrassing contortions being performed by the three leading candidates, John McCain almost seems comfortable in his apostasy. His attempt to run bland in 2008, an echo of the 2000 edition of George W. Bush, cratered ignominiously. It was, in part, attributable to McCain’s executive ineptitude; when it came to spending, his consultants were as prudent as the pork-peddling legislators he likes to deride. But there was a substantive reason for his failure: his support for a comprehensive immigration bill–the one he co-sponsored with Ted Kennedy–that would provide a path to citizenship for the estimated 12 million immigrants here illegally. “I got the message,” he told a town meeting in Hopkinton, N.H. “Americans want the border secure. I will secure it.” Which seemed to satisfy most of the audience.

A day earlier, McCain had been confronted by a woman who upbraided him for not being a “real” Republican because of his dealings with Kennedy and Feingold. “I reminded her about Ronald Reagan standing in the Rose Garden with Tip O’Neill, a liberal Democrat, pledging to fix Social Security,” McCain told me later, with some satisfaction. “Even a real Republican needs to work with Democrats if you’re going to tackle things like Social Security.” McCain remains the rare Republican candidate who has attempted bipartisanship in Washington. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t stone conservative on most things. He has always been pro-life; he is relentlessly antitax. His brimstone bellicosity about the war in Iraq is unmatched by any of his fellow candidates and unwarranted by reality. McCain’s use of words like victory and surrender indicates a stubborn unwillingness to acknowledge the complexities of the Mesopotamian quagmire.

He is not a likely nominee because many Republicans, of all stripes, tend to believe he “ran against the party” in 2000, as a prominent Republican told me. Indeed, McCain won the New Hampshire and Michigan contests with the help of Democrats and Independents who crossed over to support him. Those votes won’t be so available this time. But it is wonderful to have McCain, the old suicidal, masochistic McCain, back roiling the waters.

David S. Broder
Washington Post
October 30, 2007

If I had the power to summon all 16 of the people running for president to one place, I would want them in a Senate hearing room for a session that is taking place Wednesday morning.

The hearing has been arranged by Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Democratic chairman of the Budget Committee, and Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, the Republican ranking member.

They have invited David Walker, the comptroller general of the United States and the head of the Government Accountability Office, an arm of Congress; William Novelli, the head of AARP, the senior citizens lobby; Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the House majority leader; and Leon Panetta, the former White House chief of staff, budget director and former congressman.

What brings all these worthies together is an effort to revive the idea of a bipartisan effort to head off the bankrupting of America by runaway entitlement programs.

They and others, including Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, clearly see that unless ways are found to reform the financing and benefits of Social Security and Medicare, the demands imposed by the retirement of millions of baby boomers will consume the federal budget and blight the prospects of the next generations.

Because neither party can solve this problem by itself, Conrad and Gregg have proposed the creation of a bipartisan task force, whose recommendations to the president and Congress chosen next November would be guaranteed quick consideration.

The idea was greeted favorably by leaders of both parties in the Senate, and Paulson found support for it in the White House. But it has encountered criticism from the opposing flanks. Vice President Cheney objected publicly to any consideration of tax increases, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi threw cold water on the idea. Apparently, she does not trust the administration to deal fairly or she may want the Social Security issue saved for Democrats in the coming campaign.

So Conrad and Gregg backed off and decided to begin again – making the case, through expert testimony, that a policy of inaction, looking the other way, is dangerous to the country’s fiscal health.

As Gregg has noted, the first of the baby boomers filed for Social Security benefits this year – and millions more will soon follow. By most official estimates, Medicare and Social Security by 2034 will eat up 20 percent of the gross domestic product – equivalent to the entire federal budget of today.

To Gregg, that flashes a clear warning that “the next president, if he or she serves eight years, will find themselves in very dangerous waters. There is no way to support this system as it is constituted.”

Conrad, who says he inherited a fear of debt from his Depression-era ancestors in North Dakota, said he laments that the government has added $500 billion to the national debt this year, just as those boomers are starting to retire. “You see the dollar going down, and interest rates going up,” he said. “And there’s more to come.”

Neither man expects a quick fix – but both insist that delay is the most costly and wasteful strategy. The task force idea that they developed during a congressional trip to South America this past winter is an effort to assure all parties a voice – and a fair process.

It would have 16 members, equally balanced between Republicans and Democrats. Fourteen would be members of Congress, chosen by the leadership and presumably representing the major economic policy committees. Two would be from the administration, with one of them, the secretary of treasury, serving as chairman.

It would take 12 of the 16 votes to submit a report – guaranteeing each party a voice in the outcome. And the report would be translated into bill form and given a fast track to a final vote in both the House and Senate, with a requirement of 60 percent support for it to go to the president – again, protection for the minority.

Despite all these safeguards, neither Cheney nor Pelosi is satisfied, and without their backing, its prospects seem dim. But the issue will haunt the next president – unless at least the first steps to deal with it are taken now.

That is why those candidates ought to be at this hearing.

Post any questions or answers to posted questions pertaining to Chapter #11 “Interest Groups” in this thread.

Conservatives have become surprisingly charitable about two of history’s greatest mass murderers.

By Fareed Zakaria

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 1:57 PM ET Oct 20, 2007

At a meeting with reporters last week, President Bush said that “if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.” These were not the barbs of some neoconservative crank or sidelined politician looking for publicity. This was the president of the United States, invoking the specter of World War III if Iran gained even the knowledge needed to make a nuclear weapon.

The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative ideologist whom Bush has consulted on this topic, has written that Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is “like Hitler … a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism.” For this staggering proposition Podhoretz provides not a scintilla of evidence.

Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland’s and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?

When the relatively moderate Mohammed Khatami was elected president in Iran, American conservatives pointed out that he was just a figurehead. Real power, they said (correctly), especially control of the military and police, was wielded by the unelected “Supreme Leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Now that Ahmadinejad is president, they claim his finger is on the button. (Oh wait, Iran doesn’t have a nuclear button yet and won’t for at least three to eight years, according to the CIA, by which point Ahmadinejad may not be president anymore. But these are just facts.)

In a speech last week, Rudy Giuliani said that while the Soviet Union and China could be deterred during the cold war, Iran can’t be. The Soviet and Chinese regimes had a “residual rationality,” he explained. Hmm. Stalin and Mao—who casually ordered the deaths of millions of their own people, fomented insurgencies and revolutions, and starved whole regions that opposed them—were rational folk. But not Ahmadinejad, who has done what that compares? One of the bizarre twists of the current Iran hysteria is that conservatives have become surprisingly charitable about two of history’s greatest mass murderers.

If I had to choose whom to describe as a madman, North Korea’s Kim Jong Il or Ahmadinejad, I do not think there is really any contest. A decade ago Kim Jong Il allowed a famine to kill 2 million of his own people, forcing the others to survive by eating grass, while he imported gallons of expensive French wine. He has sold nuclear technology to other rogue states and threatened his neighbors with test-firings of rockets and missiles. Yet the United States will be participating in international relief efforts to Pyongyang worth billions of dollars.

We’re on a path to irreversible confrontation with a country we know almost nothing about. The United States government has had no diplomats in Iran for almost 30 years. American officials have barely met with any senior Iranian politicians or officials. We have no contact with the country’s vibrant civil society. Iran is a black hole to us—just as Iraq had become in 2003.

The one time we seriously negotiated with Tehran was in the closing days of the war in Afghanistan, in order to create a new political order in the country. Bush’s representative to the Bonn conference, James Dobbins, says that “the Iranians were very professional, straightforward, reliable and helpful. They were also critical to our success. They persuaded the Northern Alliance to make the final concessions that we asked for.” Dobbins says the Iranians made overtures to have better relations with the United States through him and others in 2001 and later, but got no reply. Even after the Axis of Evil speech, he recalls, they offered to cooperate in Afghanistan. Dobbins took the proposal to a principals meeting in Washington only to have it met with dead silence. The then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he says, “looked down and rustled his papers.” No reply was ever sent back to the Iranians. Why bother? They’re mad.

Last year, the Princeton scholar, Bernard Lewis, a close adviser to Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal predicting that on Aug. 22, 2006, President Ahmadinejad was going to end the world. The date, he explained, “is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the Prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to ‘the farthest mosque,’ usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back. This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world” (my emphasis). This would all be funny if it weren’t so dangerous.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/57346

In New Hampshire even Ron Paul could have a shot.

By Howard Fineman

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 2:07 PM ET Oct 20, 2007

Whatever Hollywood says a presidential candidate is supposed to look like, Ron Paul isn’t it. At 72, wearing mall-walking shoes and an inquisitive smile, he looks like a retired obstetrician, which he is. His platform is hardly from central casting, either. He not only wants U.S. troops home from Iraq, he wants them home from the rest of the planet. He wants to abolish an alphabet of federal agencies and the income tax, dismantle the Patriot Act, reconnect the dollar to the price of gold, decriminalize prostitution and call an end to the drug war. Seated in the House Speaker’s Lobby, he speaks matter-of-factly, like a doctor describing an easy delivery. “This is my freedom message,” says the Texas representative. “People have to be left alone.”

Much of the world dismisses Paul as a libertarian crank. But mainstream candidates from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney have good reason to watch him. That reason’s called the New Hampshire primary. Always unpredictable—there’s not even a date set for it yet—the primary is more mysterious now because a record 44 percent of voters have registered “undeclared.” Suspicious of established politics, with an antiwar sentiment stretching back to Vietnam, they decide at the last minute. Since they can vote in either party’s race, their migrations choose the outcome in both. In 2000, two thirds asked for GOP ballots, boosting John McCain and dooming Bill Bradley, who was going after the same voters.

This time, Obama, Giuliani and Mc Cain are the big names fishing in the sea of independents. But conditions have changed: it’s expected that two thirds of those voters will take part in the Democratic contest, which could be Obama’s main, or last, chance. His yearning to change a “broken political system” is a good hook, but only if he can convince voters he has the guts and skill to do it. He has work to do: a recent Marist College poll shows Clinton leading him among independents 38 to 29 percent. A hot Democratic race would be bad for McCain and Giuliani, whose appeal rests in part on their perceived distance from GOP orthodoxy. The arithmetic of the undeclared is one reason Romney is sprinting to the right and why Mike Huckabee is getting a look in the state.

As George W. Bush’s Republican coalition falls apart, its rougher edges become more visible and Paul’s small-government, isolationist message gets heard. Many New Hampshirites see the state’s Live Free or Die motto as an article of faith, and they blame mushrooming federal deficits as much on the GOP as on the Democrats. “Independents are so mad about spending they can’t see straight,” says Jennifer Donahue of Saint Anselm College in Manchester. These voters loathe the war in Iraq, too. “They are as antiwar as anyone here, maybe more so,” she says.

For now, Paul is a blip on New Hampshire’s radar; in a recent poll, he stood at 5 percent among independents. But that could change. He’s banked more than $5 million, recently raised more in the state than most other candidates, has a huge Web presence and just bought $1.1 million in New Hampshire TV ads. His staff is inexperienced, but smart. Andy Smith, a pollster at University of New Hampshire, says Paul could get 10 to 20 percent of the vote in the GOP race. That would be a dramatic story, but maybe not one most Republicans would want to read.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/57350

He says he’s ‘pro-disclosure,’ but Bill has kept Hillary’s White House files under wraps.

By Michael Isikoff

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 4:08 PM ET Oct 20, 2007

When author Sally Bedell Smith was researching her new book about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s White House years, she flew to Little Rock to visit the one place she thought could be an invaluable resource: the new William J. Clinton Presidential Library. Smith was hoping to inspect records that could shed light on what role the First Lady played in her husband’s administration. But Smith quickly discovered the frustrations of dealing with a library critics call “Little Rock’s Fort Knox.”

An archivist explained to Smith that the release of materials was tightly controlled by the former president’s longtime confidant Bruce Lindsey. Could she look at memos detailing the advice Hillary gave Bill during debates over welfare reform? Smith asked. No, the archivist said, those memos were “closed” to the public because they dealt with “policy” matters. What about any records that show what advice Bill gave his wife about her 2000 U.S. Senate campaign? Those, too, were closed, the archivist said, because they dealt with “political” matters. “He essentially told me I had no chance of getting anything,” says Smith, whose book, “For Love of Politics: Bill and Hillary Clinton, the White House Years,” hits the bookstores this week.

The response Smith got isn’t unusual. Nearly three years after the Clinton Library opened—and more than 21 months after its trove of records became subject to the Freedom of Information Act—barely one half of 1 percent of the 78 million pages of documents and 20 million e-mail messages at the federally funded facility are public, according to the National Archives. The lack of access is emerging as an issue in Hillary’s presidential campaign: she cites her years of experience as First Lady as one of her prime qualifications to be president. Like other Democratic candidates, she has decried the “stunning record of secrecy” of the Bush administration; her campaign Web site vows to bring a “return to transparency” to government. But Clinton’s appointment calendar as First Lady, her notes at strategy meetings, what advice she gave her husband and his advisers, what policy memos she wrote, even some key papers from her health-care task force—all of this, and much more documenting her years as First Lady, remains locked away, most likely through the entire campaign season. With nearly 300 FOIA requests pending for Clinton documents, and only six archivists at the library to process them, Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper says it is “really hard to predict” if any of this material will be released before the election.

Bill Clinton has tried to cast blame for the backlog on the Bush White House. “Look, I’m pro-disclosure,” Clinton said in a testy exchange with reporters during a recent press conference. “I want to open my presidential records more rapidly than the law requires and the current administration has slowed down the opening of my own records.” But White House spokesman Scott Stanzel tells NEWSWEEK the Bush White House has not blocked the release of any Clinton-era records, nor is it reviewing any. (Under the 1978 Presidential Records Act, the former president and the current president get to review White House records before they are disclosed. Either one can veto a release.) Ben Yarrow, a spokesman for Bill Clinton, says the former president was referring “in general” to a controversial 2001 Bush executive order—recently overturned, in part, by a federal judge—that authorized more extensive layers of review from both current and former presidents before papers are released. (Hillary’s campaign didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

But documents NEWSWEEK obtained under a FOIA request (made to the Archives in Washington, not the Clinton library) suggest that, while publicly saying he wants to ease restrictions on his records, Clinton has given the Archives private instructions to tightly control the disclosure of chunks of his archive. Among the document categories Clinton asked the Archives to “consider for withholding” in a November 2002 letter: “confidential communications” involving foreign-policy issues, “sensitive policy, personal or political” matters and “legal issues and advice” including all matters involving investigations by Congress, the Justice Department and independent counsels (a category that would cover, among other matters, Whitewater, Monica Lewinsky and the pardons of Marc Rich and others). Another restriction: “communications directly between the President and First Lady, and their families, unless routine in nature.”

Archives officials say Clinton is within his legal rights. But other Archives records NEWSWEEK reviewed show Clinton’s directives, while similar, also go beyond restrictions placed by predecessors Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, neither of whom put any controls over the papers of their wives. This undoubtedly reflects the larger policy role Hillary played in her husband’s administration. Still, some analysts are surprised at the broad range of documents Clinton asked the Archives to withhold. “It does sound pretty expansive. You start to wonder what’s not included,” says Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy. Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group suing the Clinton library for failing to respond to its FOIA requests, is struck by the former president’s restriction on records relating to his and his wife’s families. That, he says, blocks disclosure of records relating to Roger Clinton, the former president’s half brother, and Hillary Clinton’s two brothers, Tony and Hugh Rodham, both of whom were involved in controversial business deals and efforts to secure last-minute pardons later investigated by Congress. But John Carlin, a former Archives chief (and a Clinton appointee) who got the 2002 letter from Clinton, didn’t blame the former president. “Given all that they went through in office,” he says, the restrictions Clinton placed were “not surprising.” Who knows, he asked, how the papers might be used by political foes? That’s a question the Clintons don’t want answered—at least not before next November.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/57351

Oct 29, 2007 Issue

We all know that $30-a-barrel isn’t coming back. Just as we know that simply turning off a few lights won’t halt global warming. Yet the search for a low-emission, non-fossil-fuel source of energy has been a bit like “American Idol”: every now and then, another fresh-faced alternative-energy rock star wanna-be is eliminated. Wind and solar are nice and clean—but the sun doesn’t work 24/7 and the wind is fickle. Ethanol offers politicians the irresistible combination of grow-your-own energy independence and the potential to make primary voters in Iowa rich. But because it’s corrosive and soluble in water, it’s hard to transport ethanol over long distances through pipelines. Besides, to raise a crop sufficient to meet our gasoline thirst, we’d have to plant the entire continental United States with maize, leaving only a small corner of Delaware for bedrooms and a den.

As contestants are eliminated, it’s worth looking at the geezer in the bunch: nuclear power. Nearly 50 years after the Shipping port Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania became the first commercial power plant to hit critical mass, the New Jersey-based utility NRG last month filed papers seeking permission to build a nuclear power plant in Texas. This represents the first such new application since 1979, nuclear’s annus horribilis. Two weeks after the debut of the fear-inducing nuclear-disaster flick “The China Syndrome,”life imitated art, as the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania suffered a partial meltdown. That effectively forestalled the creation of new nuclear power plants for a generation. The last reactor to come online was the Watts Bar reactor in Tennessee, in May 1996.

So what’s changed? Thirty years of safe operations have helped pave the way for NRG, and for a couple of dozen other possible plants in the works. Indeed, even as they’re mocked in popular culture—like on “The Simpsons”—the nation’s 104 commercial nuclear generating units have been quietly humming along without significant incident. “The Bureau of Labor Statistics will tell you that the nuclear industry is the safest place to work—safer than real estate and Wall Street,” former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman tells NEWSWEEK. (You remember her—she played the environmentalist in the first Bush term). Through the first half of this year, nukes provided 19.8 percent of U.S. electricity generation, about the same proportion as they did in 1990.

placeAd2(commercialNode,’bigbox’,false,”)

<a href=”http://ad.doubleclick.net/click%3Bh=v8/35fb/3/0/%2a/q%3B142477321%3B0-0%3B4%3B19702143%3B4307-300/250%3B23080777/23098630/1%3B%3B%7Eaopt%3D2/1/2200ff/1%3B%7Esscs%3D%3fhttp%3A//bs.serving-sys.com/BurstingPipe/BannerRedirect.asp%3FFlightID%3D305880%26Page%3D%26PluID%3D0%26Pos%3D5854″ target=”_blank”><img src=”http://bs.serving-sys.com/BurstingPipe/BannerSource.asp?FlightID=305880&Page=&PluID=0&Pos=5854″ border=0 width=300 height=250></a>

More important, thanks to developments in the broader environment, many longtime critics are changing their tune. As a cofounder of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore used to call nuclear energy “synonymous with nuclear holocaust.” But he now believes “nuclear is the cleanest, safest and has the smallest footprint” of any major energy-alternative source. He says that nukes are cheap and reliable, unlike alternative-energy sources like wind and solar. Neither do nuclear plants spew sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, like coal-powered plants do, or create massive volumes of CO2 emissions, like gas-fired plants do. The attitude of Moore, who co-chairs the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, an industry-backed supporter of nuclear energy, is virtually indistinguishable from that of David Crane, chief executive officer of NRG: “Advanced nuclear technology is the only currently viable large-scale alternative to traditional coal-fueled generation to produce none of the traditional air emissions—and most importantly in this age of climate change—no carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases.”

Another megatrend is working in nuclear’s favor: demographics. In 2006, an estimated 41.3 percent of the population was below 30. Which is to say that the percentage and number of Americans who remember the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl decline with every passing year.

To be sure—in any article dealing with alternative energy, there’s always a “to be sure” section—nuclear power has some serious problems. It takes a lot of money, and a long time to build new capacity. NRG says that if all goes well, its new nuclear units, which could power 2 million homes, may come online in 2014 and 2015. And investors aren’t eager to commit billions of dollars to controversial long-term projects that might never get built. The government is trying to help by providing risk insurance and streamlining the approval process.