Film Review: ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’

By Ann Hornaday, Published: March 13, 2014

http://www.washingtonpost.com/

“The Grand Budapest Hotel,” by Wes Anderson, is a compulsively arranged sacher torte of a movie, an elegant mousetrap of stories-within-stories that invokes history with a temperament ranging from winsome to deeply mournful.

As a carefully constructed miniaturized universe, “The Grand Budapest Hotel” is that most Andersonian of endeavors, evincing the deadpan drolleries, screwball action and dollhouse aesthetic that have alternately charmed and chagrined filmgoers for the past couple of decades.

Set in a castlelike hotel in the fictional Mitteleuropean country of Zubrowka on the eve of World War II, “The Grand Budapest Hotel” revolves — like all of Anderson’s films — around a quirky middle-aged man and the precocious boy he takes under his wing. As such, the film fully engages one of the fascinating tensions that have always animated Anderson’s fussily decorated cinematic jewel boxes, namely how one learns to become a man within a universe of characters so stylized and artfully concocted that they seem barely human.

The great good fortune of “The Grand Budapest Hotel” is that the tutor in question is played by Ralph Fiennes, who lends a lambent sincerity to a character who can be charming and rather loathsome at the turn of a schilling. Monsieur Gustave H., concierge at the Budapest, is a smooth, sinuously manipulative epitome of his craft, especially when it comes to his elderly female guests — who provide ample opportunity for Gustave to hone his gift for seduction and flattery.

Those gifts are on view even when the recipient is dead, as we see when Gustave and a young lobby boy named Zero Moustafa (Tony Revolori) embark on a fateful trip to honor a guest’s memory, and wind up embroiled in a zany murder mystery that will take them from a spooky, taxidermy-filled mansion to a cartoonish prison break to a vertiginous ski-and-sled chase from a mountaintop monastery.

Enlivened by such antic set pieces, “The Grand Budapest Hotel” finds Anderson at his most spirited and stylish: The story, told as a series of flashbacks, actually spans three distinct eras, each defined by its own color palette and aspect ratio (the 1930s sequences are set within the boxy, storybook-like frame of the time). Draped in extravagant shades of amber, rose and amethyst, as lovingly crafted and iced as the airy delicacies that Gustave eagerly devours from pink boxes tied with blue ribbons, “The Grand Budapest Hotel” bears Anderson’s now-unmistakable signature of bespoke, unapologetic devotion to craftily ordered prettiness.

The film also features cameos from Anderson’s informal rep company, including Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, Owen Wilson and an almost unrecognizable Tilda Swinton, as well as newcomers to the club F. Murray Abraham, Jude Law and Saoirse Ronan, among several others. They make for a gifted gaggle of players, each blessed with a great face, and Anderson choreographs them with the assured hand of a pro. But it’s Fiennes who provides the ballast — the gravitas and ambiguous soul — of an endeavor that otherwise makes a genteel, picturesque burlesque of Nazi-era anxieties. (According to an epigraph, “The Grand Budapest Hotel” was inspired by the writings of Stefan Zweig, an Austrian author who fled the country when Hitler came to power and later took his own life.)

Fiennes brings a magnificent sense of detail but also withholding to Gustave, who remains a cryptic figure — sexually omni-oriented, civilized, refined, but also prone to vulgarities and casual cruelties (especially regarding women he regularly beds). In fact, “The Grand Budapest Hotel” is shot through with startling images of violence, from a character off-handedly discarding a dead pet in a trash can to the sight of someone’s recently disembodied fingers. There’s also a brief glimpse of carnality that feels as shockingly out of place in a Wes Anderson film as a stop-motion fox might be in something by Michael Bay.

For all of his commitment to the finer things in life, Anderson is willing if not eager to indulge a fancy for the crude and grotesque, a juxtaposition that comes into even more curious play when he treats characters’ physical blemishes and deformities as mere elements, visual one-liners. Are the shoeshine boy with the prosthetic leg and the bakery girl with “a port wine stain the shape of Mexico” on her face supposed to convey Anderson’s humanism, or a more arch and sneakily contemptuous fetishistic tendency?

Even though melancholy threads through “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” it’s not a particularly deep film. Comparisons have been made to the wartime comedies of Ernst Lubitsch, but Anderson hasn’t created a playfully stinging satire as much as its softer mirror image. He convincingly mimics the gestures of the genre — abhorrence of authoritarianism, not as a crime against humanity but as an affront to good taste and Old World etiquette — but ultimately seems unable or unwilling to delve under the sumptuous surface and grapple with darker realities.

Still, “The Grand Budapest Hotel” is as enchanting, well-appointed and smoothly run as its titular establishment, and Gustave earns the right to be called a genuinely tragic figure. If Anderson buries relatively little moral substance under lavish dollops of rich cream, at least he, like his fascinating protagonist, sustains the illusion with a marvelous grace.

★ ★ ★

R. At area theaters. Contains language, some sexual content and violence. 99 minutes.

Putin, Ukraine, and Our Unserious Response

Obama’s announced “consequences” of the Crimean referendum are laughably weak. 

By Charles Krauthammer

http://www.nationalreview.com/

March 20, 2014

Early in the Ukraine crisis, when the Europeans were working on bringing Ukraine into the EU system and Vladimir Putin was countering with threats and bribes, one British analyst lamented that “we went to a knife fight with a baguette.”

That was three months ago. Life overtakes parody. During the Ukrainian prime minister’s visit to Washington last week, his government urgently requested military assistance. The Pentagon refused. It offered instead military ration kits.

Putin mobilizes thousands of troops, artillery, and attack helicopters on Ukraine’s borders and Washington counters with baguettes, American-style. One thing we can say for sure in these uncertain times: The invasion of Ukraine will be catered by the United States.

Why did we deny Ukraine weapons? Because in the Barack Obama–John Kerry worldview, arming the victim might be taken as a provocation. This kind of mind-bending illogic has marked the administration’s response to the whole Crimea affair.

Why, after all, did Obama delay responding to Putin’s infiltration, military occupation, and seizure of Crimea in the first place? In order to provide Putin with a path to deescalation, “an off-ramp,” the preferred White House phrase.

An off-ramp? Did they actually think that Putin was losing, that his invasion of Crimea was a disaster from which he needed some face-saving way out? It’s delusional enough to think that Putin — in seizing Crimea, threatening eastern Ukraine, destabilizing Kiev, shaking NATO, terrifying America’s Eastern European allies, and making the West look utterly helpless — was actually losing. But to imagine that Putin saw it that way as well and was waiting for American diplomacy to save him from a monumental blunder is totally divorced from reality.

After Obama’s Russian “reset,” missile-defense retreat, and Syria comedown, Putin had already developed an undisguised disdain for his U.S. counterpart. Yet even he must have been amazed by this newest American flight of fantasy. Putin reclaims a 200-year-old Russian patrimony with hardly a shot and to wild applause at home — Putin’s 72 percent domestic popularity is 30 points higher than Obama’s — and America’s leaders think he needs rescue?

Putin made it clear that he preferred Sevastopol to good reviews from the “international community.” Yet Obama and Kerry held off doing anything until the Crimean referendum — after which, they ominously threatened, there would be “consequences.”

Obama unveiled them Monday in a four-minute statement as flat-toned as a legal notice in the classifieds. The consequences? Visa denial and frozen assets for eleven people, seven of them Russian.

Seven! Out of 140 million. No Putin. No Dmitry Medvedev. No oligarchs. Nor any of Putin’s inner circle of ex-KGBers. No targeting of the energy sector or banks, Russia’s industrial and financial lifeblood.

This elicited unreserved mockery from the targeted Russians themselves. One wondered whether the president’s statement had been written by a prankster. The Duma voted that it should be sanctioned — all 353 members who’d voted for annexation. And the financial markets, which abhor disruptions and crave nothing but continuity, responded with relief: Russia’s spiked 3.7 percent; the Dow Jones rose 1.1 percent (180 points).

Putin responded with appropriate contempt. Within hours he recognized Crimea’s secession. The next day, he signed a treaty of annexation. (Two days later, Obama expanded the list of sanctioned Russians and added one bank. It will make no difference.)

Europe’s response was weaker still, sanctioning a list of even lesser Russian functionaries. The irony is that for two decades we’ve encouraged Russia’s integration into the world economic system — including Obama’s strong support for Russian accession to the World Trade Organization — thinking those ties, and the threat of losing them, would restrain Russian behavior.

On the contrary. It restrained European behavior. Europe has refused to adopt any measure that might significantly affect its commerce and natural-gas imports from Russia.

What’s our excuse? We import no Russian gas and have minimal trade. Yet our president appears strangely disengaged. The post–Cold War order of Europe has been brazenly violated — and Obama is nowhere to be seen.

As I’ve argued here before, there are things we can do: Send the secretary of defense to Kiev tomorrow to negotiate military assistance. Renew the missile-defense agreement with Poland and the Czech Republic. Announce a new policy of major U.S. exports of liquefied natural gas. Lead Europe from the front — to impose sanctions cutting off Russian enterprises from the Western banking system.

As we speak, Putin is deciding whether to go beyond Crimea and take eastern Ukraine. Show him some seriousness, Mr. President.

— Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2013 the Washington Post Writers Group

Why Obama will not change gears

From its earliest days, the Iranian regime has been courted by one US administration after another seeking to accommodate Tehran.

By CAROLINE B. GLICK
http://www.jpost.com/
March 17, 2014


President Obama and Iranian President Hassan Rowhani

Just before Russian President Vladimir Putin orchestrated Russia’s takeover of Crimea, the US’s Broadcasting Board of Governors that controls Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty announced that it will be ending its broadcast to Iraq and the Balkans next year.

And this makes sense. As far as the Obama administration is concerned, Iraq ceased to exist in 2011, when the last US forces got out of the country.

As for the Baltics, well, really who cares about them? Russia, after all, wants the same things America does. Everything will be fine.

As Obama said to Governor Mitt Romney during one of the 2012 presidential debates, “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”

During the election, Obama was famously caught on an open microphone promising President Putin’s stand-in Dmitry Medvedev that he would have “more flexibility,” on missile defense after the presidential election.

He asked Medvedev to ask Putin to give him “more space” until after November 2012.

With a five-and-half-year record of selling US allies like Poland, the Czech Republic and even the Syrian opposition out to please Putin, it should be obvious that Obama will do nothing effective to show Putin the error of his ways in Ukraine.

Obama doesn’t have a problem with Putin.

And as long as Putin remains anti-American, he will have no reason to be worried about Obama.

Consider Libya. Three years ago this week, NATO forces supported by the US began their campaign to bring down Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

As Patrick Coburn noted in The Independent over the weekend, the same Western forces who insisted that their “responsibility to protect” the Libyan people from a possible massacre by Gaddafi’s forces compelled them to bring down Gaddafi and his regime have had nothing to say today about the ongoing bloodbath in post-Gaddafi Libya.

Libya is disintegrating today. There is no central governing authority.

But Gaddafi, the neutered dictator who quit the terrorism and nuclear-proliferation rackets after the US-led invasion of Iraq, is gone. So no one cares.

Coburn mentioned the recent documentary aired on Al Jazeera – America that upended the West’s narrative that the bombing of Pan Am 103 in 1988 over Lockerbie, Scotland, was the work of the Libyan government. According to a credible Iranian defector, the attack was ordered by Iran and carried out by Palestinian terrorists from Ahmed Jibril’s PFLP-GC.

He wrote, “the documentary emphasizes the sheer number of important politicians and senior officials over the years who must have looked at intelligence reports revealing the truth about Lockerbie, but still happily lied about it.”

If the Al Jazeerah documentary is correct, there is good reason for the public in the US, Europe and throughout the world to be angry about the cover-up.

But there is no reason to be surprised.

Since its inception, the Iranian regime has been at war with the US. It has carried out one act of aggression after another. These have run the gamut from the storming of the US Embassy in Tehran and holding hostage US diplomats for 444 days, to the use of Lebanese and Palestinian proxies to murder US officials, citizens and soldiers in countless attacks over the intervening 35 years, to building a military presence in Latin America, to developing nuclear weapons.

And from its earliest days, the same Iranian regime has been courted by one US administration after another seeking to accommodate Tehran.

A similar situation obtains with the Palestinians. Like the Iranians, the PLO has carried out countless acts of terrorism that have killed US officials and citizens.

From the 1970 Fatah execution of the US ambassador and deputy chief of mission in Khartoum to the 2003 bombing of the US embassy convoy in Gaza, the PLO has never abandoned terrorism against the US.

No less importantly, the PLO is the architect of modern terrorism. From airline hijackings, to the massacre of schoolchildren, from bus bombings to the destabilization of nation states, the PLO is the original author of much of the mayhem and global terrorism the US has led the fight against since the 1980s.

And of course, the PLO’s main stated goal is the destruction of Israel, the US’s only dependable ally, and the only liberal democracy in the Middle East.

Yet, as has been the case with the Iranian regime, successive US administrations have courted, protected and upheld the PLO as moderate, reformed or almost reformed militants.

In many ways, then the Obama administration is simply a loyal successor of previous administrations. But in one essential way, it is also different.

IN A 2006 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, civil rights historian Shelby Steele argued that the reason the US has lost every war it has fought since World War II despite the fact that it has had the military might to vanquish all of its enemies is “white guilt.”

White guilt, he argued, makes its sufferers in the West believe that they lack the moral authority to act due to the stigma of white supremacy and imperialism.

Writing of the then raging insurgency in Iraq, Steele explained, “When America – the greatest embodiment of Western power – goes to war in Third World Iraq, it must also labor to dissociate that action from the great Western sin of imperialism. Thus in Iraq we are in two wars, one against an insurgency and the other against the past – two fronts, two victories to win, one military, the other a victory of dissociation.”

This neurotic view of America’s moral underpinning is what explains the instinctive American tendency to strike out at those who do not oppose the West – like Gaddafi’s regime in Libya and Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt – while giving a pass to those who do – like the Palestinians and the Iranians.

But whereas white guilt has afflicted the US leadership for the past several generations, past administrations were willing to set it aside when necessary to advance US national security interests.

This cannot happen with Obama.

Obama owes his presidency to white guilt. His promise to American voters was that by voting for him, they would expiate their guilt for the sins of European imperialists and southern racists.

It was the American desire to move beyond the past that enabled a first-term senator with radical connections and the most liberal voting record in the Senate to get elected to the presidency.

But tragically for the US and the free world, Obama’s worldview is informed not by an appreciation for what Steele extolled as America’s “moral transformation,” on issue of race. Rather it is informed by his conviction that the US deserves its guilt.

Obama does not share Bill Clinton’s view that the US is “the indispensable nation,” although he invoked the term on the campaign trail in 2012.

From his behavior toward foe and friend alike, Obama gives the impression that he does not believe the US has the right to stand up for its interests.

Moreover, his actions from Israel to Eastern Europe to Egypt and Libya indicate that he believes there is something wrong with nations that support and believe in the US.

Their pro-Americanism apparently makes them guilty of white guilt by association.

So Iran, the Palestinians and Russia needn’t worry. Obama will not learn from his mistakes, because as far as he is concerned, he hasn't made any.

Caroline Glick is the author of The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East. 

Today's Tune: Roxy Music - Avalon (Live 2001)

Not Your Father’s Cold War

The West has forgotten the foreign-policy lessons that predate 1945. 

By Jonah Goldberg

http://www.nationalreview.com/

March 19, 2014

Will everyone please stop talking about a new Cold War?

However badly things work out between Russia and the United States and the West, a new Cold War isn’t in the cards because Russia today isn’t the Soviet Union. Sure, there are similarities. We are in a diplomatic and geostrategic conflict with Russia, which was the heart of the old Soviet Union. Also, Russia wants much of the real estate that belonged to the Soviet Union before it collapsed. And Vladimir Putin is a former KGB colonel who now waxes nostalgic for the good old days. That’s about it.

That’s hardly nothing, but the Cold War was far more than a conflict with Russia. Everyone should agree on that. Communism, anti-Communism, and anti-anti-Communism divided Americans for decades, particularly among academic and media elites. Right and Left may still argue over the merits of those divisions, but no informed person disputes that the topic of Communism — the real version and the imagined ideal — incited riots of intellectual and political disagreement in the West for a half-century.

Meanwhile, Putin’s ideology holds little such allure to Americans or the populations of the European Union. With the exception of a few cranky apologists and flacks, it’s hard to find anyone in the West openly defending Putin on the merits. And even those who come close are generally doing so in a backhanded way to criticize U.S. policies or the Obama administration. The dream of a “greater Russia” or a “Eurasian Union” simply does not put fire in the minds of men — non-Russian men, at least — the way the dream of global socialist revolution once did. And that’s a good thing.

What’s less encouraging is that the actual nature of the threat posed by Russia is being obscured or distorted by the talk of a new Cold War. It’s a bit like how for decades, every war was described as “another Vietnam” — at least until the Iraq War, which now seems to be the prism for every potential conflict. “We don’t want another Iraq” is the go-to phrase to justify doing nothing these days.

What is downright dismaying is how the West’s surprising and bloodless victory in the Cold War left us ill-equipped for the world that has taken its place. For many, the understandable hope was that once the Cold War was behind us, a new era would be ahead of us. Neoconservatives envisioned a democratic Pax Americana. Liberal internationalists preferred a new democratic order led by something called “the international community” that would meet over cheese plates and bottled water at the United Nations or The Hague.

Many have called the decade between the fall of the Soviet Union and the attacks of 9/11 a “holiday from history.” The truth is closer to the opposite. The Cold War years, while historic in a literal sense, were something of a great parentheses, a sharp departure from historical norms. Communism was a transnational ideology imposed on nationalist movements. That’s why every supposedly Communist movement eventually became nationalist once in power. Still, the rhetorical and psychological power of Communist ideology, combined with the fear of nuclear war, made international relations seem like a sharp break with how foreign affairs worked before 1945 — or 1917.

It turns out, the Berlin Wall wasn’t blocking us from a new world order, it was holding back the tide of history. Western Europe was especially slow to realize this. Its politicians and intellectuals persuaded themselves that they had created a continental “zone of peace” through diplomacy, when in reality they were taking U.S. protection for granted. They let their militaries atrophy to the point of being little more than ceremonial.

The contrast with Russia and China (not to mention Iran and Saudi Arabia) is amazing. In Moscow and Beijing, they still believe foreign policy is about military and economic power, “spheres of influence,” formal alliances, and political control. In Western Europe (and much of this administration), it’s about moral authority, international norms, and other kinds of “soft power.” Soft power is great, but it’s useless against people who respect only hard power. And that lesson predates the Cold War by a few millennia.

— Jonah Goldberg is the author of The Tyranny of Clichés, now on sale in paperback. You can write to him by e-mail at goldbergcolumn@gmail.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2014 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Russia’s brutality with Ukraine is nothing new

By George F. Will, Published: March 17, 2014

http://www.washingtonpost.com/

Passers-by and the corpse of a starved man on a street in Kharkiv, 1932

“Boys from another school pulled out the severed head of a classmate while fishing in a pond. His whole family had died. Had they eaten him first? Or had he survived the deaths of his parents only to be killed by a cannibal? No one knew; but such questions were commonplace for the children of Ukraine in 1933. . . . Yet cannibalism was, sometimes, a victimless crime. Some mothers and fathers killed their children and ate them. ... But other parents asked their children to make use of their own bodies if they passed away. More than one Ukrainian child had to tell a brother or sister: ‘Mother says that we should eat her if she dies.’ ”

— Timothy Snyder, “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin” (2010)

While Vladimir Putin, Stalin’s spawn, ponders what to do with what remains of Ukraine, remember: Years before the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which the Nazis embarked on industrialized genocide, Stalin deliberately inflicted genocidal starvation on Ukraine.

To fathom the tangled forces, including powerful ones of memory, at work in that singularly tormented place, begin with Snyder’s stunning book. Secretary of State John Kerry has called Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “a 19th-century act in the 21st century.” Snyder reminds us that “Europeans deliberately starved Europeans in horrific numbers in the middle of the 20th century.” Here is Snyder’s distillation of a Welsh journalist’s description of a Ukrainian city:

“People appeared at 2 o’clock in the morning to queue in front of shops that did not open until 7. On an average day 40,000 people would wait for bread. Those in line were so desperate to keep their places that they would cling to the belts of those immediately in front of them. . . . The waiting lasted all day, and sometimes for two. . . . Somewhere in line a woman would wail, and the moaning would echo up and down the line, so that the whole group of thousands sounded like a single animal with an elemental fear.”

This, which occurred about as close to Paris as Washington is to Denver, was an engineered famine, the intended result of Stalin’s decision that agriculture should be collectivized and the “kulaks” — prosperous farmers — should be “liquidated as a class.” In January 1933, Stalin, writes Snyder, sealed Ukraine’s borders so peasants could not escape and sealed the cities so peasants could not go there to beg. By spring, more than 10,000 Ukrainians were dying each day, more than the 6,000 Jews who perished daily in Auschwitz at the peak of extermination in the spring of 1944.

Soon many Ukrainian children resembled “embryos out of alcohol bottles” (Arthur Koestler’s description) and there were, in Snyder’s words, “roving bands of cannibals”: “In the villages smoke coming from a cottage chimney was a suspicious sign, since it tended to mean that cannibals were eating a kill or that families were roasting one of their members.”

Snyder, a Yale historian, is judicious about estimates of Ukrainian deaths from hunger and related diseases, settling on an educated guess of approximately 3.3 million, in 1932-33. He says that when “the Soviet census of 1937 found 8 million fewer people than projected,” many of the missing being victims of starvation in Ukraine and elsewhere (and the children they did not have), Stalin “had the responsible demographers executed.”

Putin, who was socialized in the Soviet-era KGB apparatus of oppression, aspires to reverse the Soviet Union’s collapse, which he considers “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century.” Herewith a final description from Snyder of the consequences of the Soviet system, the passing of which Putin so regrets:

“One spring morning, amidst the piles of dead peasants at the Kharkiv market, an infant suckled the breast of its mother, whose face was a lifeless gray. Passersby had seen this before . . . that precise scene, the tiny mouth, the last drops of milk, the cold nipple. The Ukrainians had a term for this. They said to themselves, quietly, as they passed: ‘These are the buds of the socialist spring.’ ”

U.S. policymakers, having allowed their wishes to father their thoughts, find Putin incomprehensible. He is a barbarian but not a monster, and hence no Stalin. But he has been coarsened, in ways difficult for civilized people to understand, by certain continuities, institutional and emotional, with an almost unimaginably vicious past. And as Ukraine, a bubbling stew of tensions and hatreds, struggles with its identity and aspirations, Americans should warily remember William Faulkner’s aphorism: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

* * *

Note: I wish to apologize to the New York Times for inadvertently reproducing in my March 13 column without attribution 12 words from an October 2007 Times story describing the 1971 Bon Vivant botulism and bankruptcy episode.

Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.

Read more about this issue:

Vladi­mir V. Kara-Murza: Ukraine is Putin’s, not Russia’s, war

Angela Stent: Why America doesn’t understand Putin’s thinking

Charles Krauthammer: How to stop — or slow — Putin

The Post’s View: The U.S. and the E.U. can’t back down on Russian sanctions

Henry A. Kissinger: How the Ukraine crisis ends

A Celeb Is Not a Cause

The kids are all right. ObamaCare's not so hot.

By James Taranto

http://online.wsj.com/

March 17, 2014

What's the matter with kids today? Dana Milbank, a grumpy old man at the Washington Post, would like to know. He's not literally talking about kids, but about voting age adults--the "army of 15 million voters under 30" who "swept [Barack] Obama past Hillary Clinton and John McCain and to the presidency in 2008," and the smaller force, "more than 12 million," who "helped him return in 2012."

"But now his presidency is on the line," Milbank warns, "and the Obama youth are abandoning him in his hour of need." Which is to say that few of them are buying overpriced health-insurance policies:

The administration announced last week that only 1.08 million people ages 18 to 34 had signed up for Obamacare by the end of February, or about 25 percent of total enrollees. If the proportion doesn't improve significantly, the result likely will be fatal for the Affordable Care Act.

The administration had projected that 40% of seven million enrollees would be adults under 35. Actual sales came up short in every way. "But the alarming shortcoming is the number of young participants, which would make the insured population older and sicker and the program too expensive." There's no way to know, but it wouldn't be surprising if the young enrollees are sicker than their overall age cohort, too.

Milbank poses the question why Obama, once "a demigod among that demographic," can't seem to sell them insurance:

What went wrong? The president and his aides failed to keep his youth movement engaged. But part of the problem also is the inability of the millennial generation to remain attached to a cause. The generation that brought Obama to power is connected online but has no loyalty to institutions--including, it turns out, the Obama White House. . . . Asking them to pay money to join a health-care exchange, it seems, is too tall an order--even though the presidency they created depends on it.

One point that doesn't seem to occur to him is that time marches on, and most people are older today than they were six years ago. In fact, the oldest of the "under 30" voters who supported Obama in 2008 are no longer young enough (under 35) to be considered "young adults" for the purpose of propping up ObamaCare. A good many of today's 18- to 34-year-old cohort were minors as young as 12 in 2008. The youngest of whom had yet to attain majority even in 2012.

A more important rejoinder is that Milbank has an odd idea of what constitutes a "cause." You don't need to invoke generational fickleness to explain the disconnect between voting for Obama in 2008 and declining to purchase ObamaCare insurance in 2014. The two actions are so vastly different that the disconnect is inherent in them.

Enlarge Image

Obama on MTV, February 2008Associated Press

Obama's 2008 campaign scarcely deserves to be called a "cause." It was more a cult of personality. "His entire political persona is an ingeniously crafted human cipher, a man without race, ideology, geographic allegiances, or, indeed, sharp edges of any kind," observed Rolling Stone'sMatt Taibbi in 2007. "As far as political positioning goes, his strategy seems to be to appear as a sort of ideological Universalist, one who spends a great deal of rhetorical energy showing that he recognizes the validity of all points of view."

His slogans were vapid even by the standards of political sloganeering: "Yes, we can." "Hope and change." "We are the ones we've been waiting for." He was often called a "rock star"--a celeb, not a cause. It's as if the Beatles came to America in 1964 to run for president rather than to sell records, and got elected on slogans like "Let it be," "Please please me" and "I want to hold your hand." Half a century later, the Beatles' tunes have an enduring appeal to their once-youthful, now-elderly fans. Had they been forced to face the exigencies of governing, it's unlikely a Lennon-McCartney administration would be remembered much more fondly than Johnson-Humphrey is.

Obama might have made a serviceably good president had he proved to be administratively competent and ideologically modest instead of the other way around. His personality-based campaign of 2008 diverted attention from his ideological ambitiousness, which expressed itself most forcefully in the enactment of ObamaCare. But while "health-care reform" in the abstract can be characterized as having been a "cause," what Americans, and especially young Americans, are rejecting now is something different: a product, one that is both shoddy and overpriced.

Even Milbank has to acknowledge that the efforts at marketing that product are rather pitiful:

[Last] week saw the release of Obama's sit-down with comedian Zach Galifianakis, of "The Hangover" fame, to encourage the young to join the Obamacare exchanges. It was good comedy. . . . Yet the fact that Obama sought Galifianakis's help was an indication of how much the president's standing has slipped among young Americans.

It's not just Galifianakis. The Weekly Standard's Daniel Halper notes that "the mothers of celebrities Jonah Hill, Adam Levine, Jennifer Lopez, and Alicia Keys star in a new web ad to promote Obamacare." They say things like, "Seriously, do you want your mothers to have a nervous breakdown? You need health insurance. It's imperative that you have health insurance." The ad ends with Michelle Obama declaring: "We nag you because we love you. Go to healthcare.gov and enroll today."

Up in Maine, the Portland Press Herald reports a nonprofit called the Maine Health Access Foundation (whose website, enroll207.com, is named for the state's only area code) is running a print ad reminiscent of Colorado's ludicrous "Brosurance" campaign. It features "a young man who is otherwise unclothed but covered by a strategically placed laptop computer" with the slogan "Dude: it's time to get covered." Here's how the ad was developed:

Meredith Strang Burgess, whose Portland-based Burgess Advertising produced the naked man ad and other ads for enroll 207, said she and her team had to "channel our younger, inner selves" for inspiration.

"Everyone thought it was hysterical," Strang Burgess said of the naked man ad.

She also bounced ideas off her three sons, who are in their 20s and 30s, for the social media campaign and advertising on cable television geared toward young men and women.

"I'm feeling very hip right now," said Strang Burgess, who's 57.

We'll bet she is. ObamaCare market researchers might want to check out a Las Vegas Review-Journal op-ed by Evan Feinberg, a conservative activist on the cusp of 30 who heads a group called Generation Opportunity:

Given such pitiful attempts at reaching the young and the healthy, it's no surprise that Millennials haven't responded by signing up for Obamacare in droves. In reality, it's too expensive for too many Millennials--and none of the marketing campaigns have been slick enough to bury this fact.

Obamacare leaves the average 27 year old facing a gender-averaged 47.5 percent premium increase, according to Forbes. Even after subsidies, that's an expense that many Millennials can't afford. . . .

We know a bad deal when we see one--and we're not as dumb as Obamacare's marketers seem to think.

Because ObamaCare prohibits insurance companies from charging different premiums according to sex, and because women tend to use more medical services than men--a disparity that is greatest among younger policyholders--the "gender averaged" premium increase is greater for young men than for young women.

That means young men are the most disadvantaged by ObamaCare's price controls--and, as a corollary, that they are the group on which ObamaCare's solvency is most dependent. And the hip Mainers think the way to appeal to them is with male nudity?

Obama supporters have a quaint faith in the power of marketing. They don't seem to grasp that persuading people to vote for one politician over another--essentially a cost-free proposition--is a far smaller order than persuading them to purchase an expensive product, especially one that offers a poor value for their money.

Many cling to the idea that ObamaCare is still "popular" because polls show support for some of its provisions in the abstract. "Voters support every piece of the Affordable Care Act except the mandate," declares pollster John Zogby. Robert Shrum, a Democratic operative who is a veteran of many a losing campaign, elaborates in the Daily Beast, offering Democratic congressional candidates this advice:

Pound away at a Republican candidate for proposing, and a Republican House incumbent for voting 51 times, to permit insurance companies to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions; 65% of Americans disagree with that in the Bloomberg data. Assail Republicans for opposing a ban on lifetime limits, so policies can't be canceled when patients are sickest and need them most; 53% of Americans support the ban. And go after Republicans for favoring or voting for a bill to deprive children up to the age of 26 of the chance to stay on their parents' health insurance policy. Here Democrats are in sync with 73% of the country.

Even the individual mandate elicits just narrow disapproval, 51% to 47%. Democrats can defend it, but it's imperative to go on offense by recognizing and actualizing the reality that the parts of health reform are more powerful politically than its sum.

Note that with the exception of the individual mandate, all the poll questions whose results Shrum cites are about the purported benefits of ObamaCare. The trouble is that because ObamaCare is an actual law finally coming into full effect, "its sum"--the costs as well as the benefits--is what people are actually experiencing.

Those costs include not only tangible ones like lost policies, higher premiums and deductibles, and limitations on medical choice, but also intangibles such as the injury of having been defrauded by the if-you-like-your-plan-you-can-keep it promise and insecurity about future lost coverage and higher premiums, even among those who have yet to be adversely affected.

As appealing as the notion of an Obama presidency might have seemed in 2008, the reality of the Obama presidency in 2014 consists in substantial part of the reality of ObamaCare. No wonder, as the New York Times reported over the weekend, "one Democratic lawmaker, who asked not to be identified, said Mr. Obama was becoming 'poisonous' to the party's candidates."

The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne, summing up the Democrats' current state, mentions "listlessness," "defensiveness," "resignation," a "sense of drift," "disaffection," "hopelessness" and "exhaustion." He leaves out "malaise," though he does offer the pitiful plaint that "Democrats thought the killing of Osama bin Laden would forever guard Obama from comparisons with Jimmy Carter."

Dionne's advice echoes Shrum's: Democrats, he says, should go "on offense"--which means, among other things "embracing the Affordable Care Act." Of course, that's just what they did in 2009-10, and what got them--and the country--into the current mess.

The Food Is Terrible--and Such Small Portions! 
"So, no: the problems plaguing the inner city aren't created by culture. They are the indirect result of government policies. And it's going to take progressive government policies to solve them."--Jonathan Capehart, MSNBC.com, March 15

Out on a Limb 
"Russia's Isolation Over Crimea Doesn't Seem to Bother Moscow"--headline, Puffington Host, May 16

Problem and Solution

• "Bee Colony Collapse Viruses Spreading to Bumblebees"--headline, Los Angeles Times, Feb. 19
• "Dianne Feinstein Wants Drones Regulated"--headline, Politico.com, March 16

Don't They Have to Finish Law School First? 
"Leading Teachers Group Backs Frosh for Md. Attorney General"--headline, Washington Post, March 16

It's a Cookbook

• "Sandwich Democrats Will Host Candidates"--headline, Cape Cod Times (Hyannis, Mass.), March 14
• "Homework Is Eating American Schoolkids and Their Families"--headline, BoingBoing.net, March 16

'What an Incredible Smell You've Discovered' 
"Missing Woman Found Alive in Trash Compactor"--headline, Newser.com, March 16

The Lonely Lives of Scientists 
"Harvard Scientists Find Ripples of Big Bang in Ancient Light"--headline, Bloomberg, March 17

Hey, Kids! What Time Is It?

• "It's Time to Realize That Vladimir Putin Can't Be Trusted"--headline, Washington Examiner, March 16
• "Analysis: Time to Rethink How We Educate Nation's Doctors"--headline, Arizona Daily Star(Tucson), March 17

Answers to Questions Nobody Is Asking 
"What Happens if Hillary Clinton Doesn't Run for president? Chaos."--headline, Washington Post website, March 14

Question and Answer--I

• "Nasa-Funded Study: Industrial Civilisation Headed for 'Irreversible Collapse'?"--headline,Guardian website (London), March 14
• "Derby Loss Is Far From the End of the World for the Swans"--headline, TheRoar.com.au, March 16

Question and Answer--II

• "Would You Ever Try Orange Eyeshadow?"--headline, StyleBistro.com, Feb. 27
• "County Schools Eye Make-Up Possibilities"--headline, Murray (Ky.) Ledger & Times, March 14

Question and Answer--III

• "How Did My Fellow Irish-Americans Get So Disgusting?"--headline, Salon.com, March 15
• "An earlier version of this article misquoted a comment from Malachy McCourt on St. Patrick. Mr. McCourt said, 'My attitude is, St. Patrick banished the snakes from Ireland and they all came here and they became conservatives.' He did not say St. Patrick banished the slaves from Ireland."--New York Times, March 17

It's Always in the Last Place You Look 
"Where Are the People of Color in Children's Books?"--headline, New York Times, March 16

Everything Seemingly Is Spinning Out of Control 
"This Week a Do-Nothing Congress Did Something"--headline, Washington Post, March 15

News of the Tautological 
"Somali Suicide Bomber Kills Self"--headline, Associated Press, March 15

Breaking News From 1808 
"James Madison Won't Be on the Ballot in Syria"--headline, National Review Online, March 15

News You Can Use 
"Pope Francis Wants You to Get Over Him"--headline, Denver Post, March 15

Bottom Story of the Day 
"Trump Says He's Not Running for New York Governor"--headline, Associated Press, March 14

All's Well That Ends Kvell? 
"It's not just congressional Democrats who are kvetching," observes the New York Times's Maureen Dowd in a column on the party's political woes. But as we noted Saturday on Twitter, she originally wrote "kvelling." Ann Althouse proves it with a photo of the printed page.

Kvell and kvetch are both Yiddish words, but their meanings are roughly opposite. To kvell is to beam with pride; to kvetch, to complain incessantly. The late William Safire had a column on the subject in 2007, back when it was Republicans who were kvetching. Too bad the Times doesn't have any Jewish editors anymore.

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(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Eric Jensen, David Hallstrom, Chris Papouras, Michele Schiesser, Irene DeBlasio, Miguel Rakiewicz, Tony Lima, Zack Russ, Ann Cain, John Hutsebaut, Dave Ceely, Terry Holmes, Mordecai Bobrowsky, James Benenson, Merv Benson, Rod Pennington, Robert Crawford, Wayne Anderson, Joe Hack, Steve Gilbert, Terry Holmes, Joel Engel, Edward Himmelfarb, Aaron Davidson, Ed Grinberg, Stuart Sullivan, Michael Smith, Mark Finkelstein and Ethel Fenig. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)