The investing community is agog at the prospect of the Initial Public Offering (IPO) of Facebook on Friday.

If you’re under 103, you probably have a Facebook page. You and about 901 million others. I have a Facebook page. I started it about four years ago when the younger people in the office teased me about being 103 years old.

I opened my Facebook page and immediately started the “friend” chase. I decided that having more friends than people I knew was a good thing so I started trolling for friends. I now have the maximum number of friends an individual can have. 5,000. I actually know about 27 of them. The rest, as I have mentioned before are a combination of “Friends” trollers, people who have seen me on TV but wouldn’t know me at the Safeway, and Ukrainian hookers.

Although, according to CNBC.com, a final decision won’t be made until Thursday evening, analysts expect Facebook shares to cost between $34 and $38 a share which would value its “upcoming offering at as much as $18.5 billion” and the entire company of something in the area of $100 billion.

The CEO of Facebook is a 28-year-old named Mark Zuckerberg. He and some pals started Facebook in their dorm room at Harvard. By the close of business Friday, some estimates put Zuckerberg’s worth in the $21 billion range which on the Forbes’ list of the richest people in America would put him between number 8 Sheldon Adelson ($21.5 billion) and number 7 George Soros ($22 billion).

But, Zuckerberg is a little younger than everyone above him on the list, so he has time to climb past perennial number one Bill Gates ($50 billion).

Like all things in life, there may be bumps in Facebook’s future. General Motors announced this week that it would no longer spend advertising dollars on those ads that auto-magically appear on the right side of your screen. According to the Wall Street Journal GM studied the situation and found that the “paid ads on the site have little impact on consumers’ car purchases.”

To be fair, GM was only spending about $10 million a year on Facebook ads. That sounds like a lot but GM’s total advertising budget is about $1.8 billion (among the top three advertisers along with AT&T and Procter & Gamble). Also, GM’s advertising represents less than 3/10s of one percent of Facebook’s 2011 revenue of $3.7 billion.

Still, keep in mind that if context-based web advertising begins to falter, you read it here first. Well, first if you don’t count the Wall Street Journal.

If you have been practicing pressing the first 9 digits of your stockbroker’s phone number so you can get in on Facebook at the IPO price you’re probably not going to be dialing for dollars on Friday morning. Unless your broker’s name is Jamie Dimon.

Otherwise, according to MSNBC.com “unless you’re a large institutional investor like a pension fund or your stock broker is unusually well plugged into one of [the] 30 underwriters, you can’t” participate in the early going.

“Facebook plans to sell 337 million shares – which sounds like a lot. But because it’s widely expected to be a hot stock, demand is likely to be much bigger than the first batch of shares.”

If shares pop up because they are oversubscribed you will probably be able to buy some shares on Friday or Monday but you will pay more than the big boys.

According to the San Jose Mercury News: “Among other recent social networking IPOs, Yelp shares rose 64 percent in their first day of trading, while Groupon rose [40 percent] and LinkedIn popped up 109 percent.”

Groupon’s IPO price was about $20 last November and the shares spiked to $28 within minutes of its opening. Last night Groupon shares closed at $12.17. On the other hand LinkedIn opened at $45 last May and closed last night at $110.56.

What will happen with Facebook?

You pays your money, as the man once said, and you takes your chances.

Editor’s Note: Rich Galen is former communications director for House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senator Dan Quayle. In 2003-2004, he did a six-month tour of duty in Iraq at the request of the White House engaging in public affairs with the Department of Defense. He also served as executive director of GOPAC and served in the private sector with Electronic Data Systems. Rich is a frequent lecturer and appears often as a political expert on ABC, CNN, Fox and other news outlets.

Let’s start with Europe and work our way back.

The Greeks held elections last week and they have not been able to form a government since.

The leader of the “Leftist” party (read, Communist), Alexis Tsipras, has told the rest of the European Union that he believes Greece should ignore the promises it made to be bailed out and, in essence, go off on its own.

According to the New York Times, “European leaders have warned that if Greece does not keep its promises, Europe will stop financing it, which would quickly lead to Greece defaulting on its debts and leaving the euro zone, as the countries who share the common euro currency are known.”

I’m not exactly sure what the Greek version of “nanny-nanny-boo-boo” is, but Tsipras appears to be chanting it. If a coalition government cannot be formed, new elections will be called and polls indicate the anti-bailout candidates will gain strength.

As of last night, it was being reported that Tsipras had pulled out of any further talks, so there you are.

Meanwhile up in Germany, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic party has suffered its second major electoral defeat in as many weeks. In a regional vote the rival Social Democrats have gained control of Germany’s largest state. Sort of like Democrats winning control of Texas.

According to the BBC, “Analysts say many voters rejected Mrs. Merkel’s tough line on fiscal discipline as a cure for state debt. Voters in Greece, France and Italy also recently rejected austerity policies.”

Compare and contrast to the issues in California discussed below.

Skipping over the Atlantic Ocean, Obama’s America is not doing very well, either.

On the corporate front, the CEO of Yahoo, Scott Thompson resigned over the weekend after, according to CNNMoney.com “after it was found he padded his resume with an embellished college degree.”

According to the LA Times, “Recent Yahoo filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission stated that Thompson had degrees in accounting and computer science from Stonehill College in Massachusetts.”

But the college didn’t begin offering a degree in computer science until four years after Thompson had graduated.

The reason that, as Yahoo called it, these “inadvertent errors” on resumes have such a huge impact is because your resume is absolutely and completely under your control. You know what jobs you’ve held, what degrees you’ve earned, what organizations you’ve joined.

You can’t blame a phony resume on someone else.

But that bit of major corporate skullduggery paled next to the $2 billion – TWO BILLION DOLLAR – loss suffered by a unit of mega bank JPMorgan based in London.

JP Morgan, according to a piece in the Wall Street Journal, quoted CEO James Dimon, as saying, “if you did adjust current analyst estimates for the loss, we still earned approximately $4 billion after-tax this quarter give or take.”

A billion here, a billion there and …

The thing about this $2 billion loss is it makes people like me, generally an opponent of more government regulations and generally in favor letting corporations take risks, stop and reconsider.

I can’t help but think that somewhere in the JP Morgan corporate DNA is the thinking that if they really, REALLY screwed up, American taxpayers will bail them out.

Have to.

Too big to fail.

Moving west we learned late last week that the People’s Republic of California was now running a deficit of $16 billion. SIXTEEN BILLION DOLLARS.

According to Bloomberg.com Governor Jerry Brown has submitted a ballot initiative, which would: “temporarily raise the state sales tax, already the highest in the U.S., to 7.5 percent from 7.25 percent. It would also boost rates on income starting at $250,000. The 10.3 percent levy on those making $1 million or more would rise to 13.3 percent, the most of any state.”

The emphases are mine, not Bloomberg’s, but I wanted to make the point that Gov. Brown’s solution is to raise taxes, which are already the highest in the nation, rather than cut spending.

The current unease among Americans is shown in the standard polling question: Do you think the nation is going in the right direction, or is off on the wrong track?”

According to the RealClearPolitics summary of national polls, that answer now stands at 33.8 thinking America is going in the right direction. But 58.8 percent think we’re off on the wrong track – a spread of minus 25 percentage points.

Editor’s Note: Rich Galen is former communications director for House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senator Dan Quayle. In 2003-2004, he did a six-month tour of duty in Iraq at the request of the White House engaging in public affairs with the Department of Defense. He also served as executive director of GOPAC and served in the private sector with Electronic Data Systems. Rich is a frequent lecturer and appears often as a political expert on ABC, CNN, Fox and other news outlets.

When Joe Biden was selected by Barack Obama to be his Vice Presidential running mate I was thrilled. I thought “If Obama wins, Biden’s propensity to trip over his own tongue will provide enough material to write two columns a week.” I would only have to earn the third column.

For the most part, darn it, Biden has behaved himself and hasn’t been the loose-lipped fool he has been since he was first elected to the U.S. Senate from Delaware when he was 29 years old.

Biden made up for all of that this past weekend when he proclaimed his support for gay marriage on “Meet the Press”.

That put so much pressure on the President, that he had to come out (so to speak) in favor of gay marriage his own self after attempting to finesse the issue until after the November election.

Here’s something you might not know: Biden had taped that interview on Friday. It would appear that no one on the VP’s staff thought it was newsworthy enough to drift into the West Wing and tell the President’s folks that Biden had said he was for gay marriage. After the fact the Obama folks tried to pretend this was all part of a long-ago developed strategy.

As Sherman Potter might have said: Horse Hockey.

If anyone on POTUS’ staff had known this was coming they would have established a mechanism to deal with it. As it was, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was caught flat-footed about the whole thing.

As the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote: “Carney tried to parry the same-sex-marriage questions, gamely at first and then testily as reporters began to laugh at his answers.”

Democrats here in your Nation’s Capital have tried to pretend that this is a big – BIG – win for Obama.

As Sherman Potter might have said: Mule Muffins.

If it was such a big win, why did NBC report that: “Vice President Joe Biden apologized to President Barack Obama for saying he supported same-sex marriage last Sunday on Meet the Press, according to the Vice President’s office.”

I said to one D friend yesterday that Obama might have gotten to the place where he wanted to be on this issue, but he got there the wrong way. It was like getting the right answer on a math test not because you understood the process, but because you looked in the back of the book.

Because we happen to be inside the six-months-to-go mark for the Presidential election everything is viewed through that lens. The question yesterday was: Will Obama having been backed into having to endorse gay marriage, hurt him in November?

It is no secret that Black voters are very uncomfortable dealing with all gay issues. On Tuesday voters in North Carolina voted for a constitutional amendment to forbid gay marriages.

The Democrat survey research firm, Public Policy Polling, reporting in advance of that vote that “projected 60-65 percent of African-Americans would vote in favor of the ban,” according to Politico.com.

Are African-Americans now going to vote for Mitt Romney?

No. Of course not. But it is another reason for many who turned out to vote for Obama in 2008 to simply stay home in 2012. On this issue, Obama had to choose between Blacks and Liberals. He chose Liberals and that will come at a price.

This is not new territory for Obama. On the Keystone Pipeline issue, Obama had successfully maneuvered himself into a position where he had to choose between unions (pro-pipeline) and environmentalists (anti-pipeline).

This is the working definition of inept leadership.

No. That can’t be right. “Inept leadership” is an oxymoron. Inept governance. That works, right?

I happen to agree with Dick Cheney on this issue. Über-Liberal Markos Moulitsas who writes the very persuasive blog “Daily Kos” got it right. He recognized that Obama had been dragged kicking and screaming to this position when he wrote: “Jump for joy, but don’t make this into something it is not. The President is a political opportunist and you have been played. Yeah, yeah, yeah he’s got my vote.

“But don’t lie to yourself. Obama is four years behind Cheney on this issue.”

“For Obama, gay marriage is not a position of firm belief. ” It is nothing more than a marriage of inconvenience. ”

Editor’s Note: Rich Galen is former communications director for House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senator Dan Quayle. In 2003-2004, he did a six-month tour of duty in Iraq at the request of the White House engaging in public affairs with the Department of Defense. He also served as executive director of GOPAC and served in the private sector with Electronic Data Systems. Rich is a frequent lecturer and appears often as a political expert on ABC, CNN, Fox and other news outlets.

My Uncle Bob calls it the dreaded perpendicular shot.

In golf, when you mis-hit a golf ball so badly that it almost kills the person standing next to you, you have hit a shank. A shank can happen to anybody. And it is very, very scary when it does happen.

The golfer has no idea how it happened or why. One minute you are hitting the ball straight as an arrow. Then next minute, your ball is whizzing around the head of your playing partner.

There was a great scene in the movie “Tin Cup”, when Kevin Costner, the washed-up player who attempts a dramatic come-back after winning a qualifier to play in the U.S. Open, gets a bad case of the shanks on the practice tee before he starts his round. His caddie, played by Cheech Marin, goes through a crazy routine that seems completely non-sensical, all to achieve one goal: To get Costner’s character to forget about his shank and to start hitting the ball again.

I was thinking about that scene and about shanks in general when thinking about what happened to our financial markets four years ago.

When you start shanking the ball, you lose confidence in your swing. You end up over-correcting so that you won’t hurt anybody, and you end up duck-hooking the ball in the woods. And the pattern continues until eventually, you either give in to the game or you work through your problem.

What happened with the financial crash was similar. We lost confidence in the free market system. We lost confidence in the financial system.

This happens periodically. During the Great Depression, it happened for a decade. Franklin Roosevelt took on the role of Cheech Marin. He tried a bunch of different things that may or may not have worked, but eventually, confidence in the market system returned.

President Obama has taken a different route. Instead of finding ways to restore confidence, the President has been like a caddie whom continually talks in our economy’s backswing.

Sure, he continued the Bush bailout of the automakers, and I have said in the past that the Bush bailout of the automakers was the right thing to do. But beyond that, Obama has done little to restore confidence in the marketplace.

He has continued to play the class warfare card, beating up the rich for not paying more than 75% of the tax burden that they currently shoulder.

He has pushed regulations that undermine investment and increase compliance costs. He signed Obamacare, a law designed to kill jobs.

Thankfully, the American marketplace is resilient and America’s entrepreneurs are continuing to innovate. But it isn’t easy to hit a good shot when the President keeps talking in your back swing.

Editor’s Note: John Feehery worked for former House Speaker Dennis Hastert and other Republicans in Congress.Feehery is president of Quinn Gillespie Communications. He is a contributor to The Hill’s Pundits Blog and blogs at thefeeherytheory.com.

The White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, a dazzling display of media narcissism, is slipping from memory now. But before it does, the Association ought to think seriously about not doing it next year. The spectacle is an embarrassment to journalism and the American Presidency. It reinforces an awful perception of Washington culture.

The dinner is an annual affair put on by the White House Correspondents Association under the guise of a fundraising event for journalism scholarships, but it isn’t that at all. The paltry amount of money the Association gives out in scholarships that night could be raised with a tin cup at the corner of Connecticut and K streets in DC.

The newspaper Politico said that the Association has only made $583,000 in scholarship awards in the last 20 years. That averages out to $29,150 a year. The Association website reported this year’s awards at $132,000. Politico said there were 2,800 guests at the dinner, which would mean the scholarship money amounted to no more than $47 per guest. Usually at dinners of this type, some guests are comped–let in free. But those who do pay or have their ticket paid for them, fork over $1,000 a plate.

We don’t know how much the dinner actually grossed or netted, but the numbers raise questions about why there is so little left over for the scholarships.

The reality is the scholarships and other journalist awards handed out that night are a thinly-veiled cover for what has become not just a dinner, but a week-long media celebration of self. It reminds you of the pagan worship scene in the Cecil B. DeMille 1956 classic, The Ten Commandments, that took place while Moses was sweltering in front of the burning bush atop Mount Sinai. The week is one party after another with all the glitz and glamour, lavish meals and mediocre wines, celebrities and paparazzi of Oscar week in Hollywood.

Some of the pre and post-dinner parties were hosted by People and Time magazines, The New Yorker, National Public Radio, Google and the Hollywood Reporter, MSNBC, the McLaughlin Group and Reuters, Bloomberg and Vanity Fair, and The Creative Coalition (on whose advisory board I serve).

The celebrity roster for the dinner was a who’s who of glitter, glamour, military brass, political heavyweights and Washington money.

Hollywood celebrities included Lindsay Lohan, Kim Kardashian, Daniel-Day Lewis, Reese Witherspoon, Goldie Hawn, Sofia Vergara, Elizabeth Banks and George Clooney, one Hollywood celeb who has paid his citizenship dues. The brass included General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Army Chief of Staff, Ray Odierno. The room was full of politicians, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Florida Congressman Allen West, Virginia Congressman Tim Scott and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, among many others. There were several Cabinet secretaries, an ambassador or two, and a host of White House and Obama campaign staffers.

But there was another group of celebrities present whose participation the media did not report.  If it weren’t for a passing camera shot or two on C-Span or a brief mention in a Politico Playbook, you would not have known they were there. Who were ‘they’?  Lobbyists—the Washington insiders– of course. They paid plenty for their tables and invited guests, but their presence was covered up.

I went on website after website and could not find a mention or a list of the Washington insiders in attendance. I am technologically challenged, so I could have easily misapplied a keystroke or two, but there was nothing there, not even on the Association’s website, which was chock full of large color photos of the celebrities, military brass and politicians in attendance, but no glossies of lobbyists (in full disclosure, I quit after viewing the first fifty).

It is interesting and ironic that this charity dinner is one of the few that have survived in Washington. Many others like the Vince Lombardi Cancer Center dinner had to fold their tents, along with similar charitable golf and tennis tournaments that raised millions if not billions for good causes over the decades in Washington. Why? They were, in part, victims of the media, portrayed as unseemly, a cozy way for politicians and lobbyists to mingle and engage in the peddling of influence under the cover of charitable giving.

Eventually rules were adopted and laws were passed that discouraged organizations from sponsoring them and discouraged politicians and lobbyists from attending. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which as was noted, raises relatively little in charitable giving, survived and flourished, untouched by criticism and unfettered by oversight.

The White House Correspondents’ weekend of over-indulgence is a reflecting pool of what’s wrong with Washington and why changing the political paradigm to address the public’s hardening disgust with politics and government will be so difficult.

It is events like this gratuitous weekend that make people think Washington is the last place on earth the country’s problems can be solved, when in reality it is probably the only place they are going to be solved. The solutions, however, won’t happen or certainly won’t be lasting, without a fundamental transformation in the behavior of the troika of power in Washington, first and foremost the media.

Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.

I have no idea whether that translates to “Throw the Rascals Out” but that’s what happened around Europe in elections held yesterday.

In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy got beaten in his re-election try by Socialist François Hollande.

According to the International Herald Tribune (the global edition of the New York Times) Hollande is “seen as a challenge to the German-dominated policy of economic austerity in the Euro Zone, which is suffering from recession and record unemployment.”

In Germany, President Angela Merkel’s party was spanked in a regional election in the northern part of the nation. I am not an expert on electoral politics in Schleswig-Holstein, but according to the IHT the “Pirate party appeared to emerge as the biggest winners with 8 percent of the vote.”

The German Pirate party has not been receiving, perhaps, the coverage it should be on my Twitter feed, but it appears to be the anti-Merkel Conservatives, anti-pro-business-Free Democrats and “continued to suck up disgruntled voters from all of the traditional parties.”

SIDEBAR

Gary Johnson was nominated by the Libertarian Party to be its presidential candidate. This is important because that means Johnson, the former Republican Governor of New Mexico, will be on the ballot in all 50 states.

If there is a growing “I Don’t Like Anybody Very Much” sentiment among voters, it will be interesting to see from whom Johnson draws more votes.

END SIDEBAR

To add to the anti-incumbent fury in Europe over the weekend, there were parliamentary elections in Greece on Sunday which, again according to the IHT, plunged Greece “into political uncertainty after voters bolstered the far left and neo-Nazi right in a wave of protest that saw the crushing defeat of the dominant political parties they blame for Greece’s economic collapse.”

These are not exact parallels to the U.S. For example the unemployment rate in March in the Euro Zone was 10.9 percent compared to the current U.S. rate of 8.1 percent. The Greek unemployment rate was 21.7% in January which was second only to an astonishing 24.1 percent in Spain.

According the DailyFinance.com, “Eight Euro Zone countries, including Greece, Spain and the Netherlands, have seen their economies shrink for two straight quarters or more, the common definition of a recession.”

The U.K. has also slipped into the technical definition of a recession and the employment numbers here last Friday did nothing to assuage international fears about the global economy.

Democrats in the U.S will take a hard look at the results in Europe this weekend. They may well decide the time has come to get off the “You have too much and I don’t have enough, so you have to give some of yours to me” message and get on to a “prime the economic pump to get the economy moving” campaign.

If the Democrats do that – and I’m not certain that Obama can ever leave the class warfare rhetoric behind – it might well appeal to the 12.5 million Americans who are counted as being unemployed.

In the strange world of government programs, California’s unemployment rate has dropped to 11 percent. Because that is less than 10 percent higher than it has been for the previous three years, the federal program that extends unemployment benefits to 99 weeks will no longer be available to 93,000 unemployed Californians.

According to the Huffington Post they “will join 670,000 other unemployed Californians whose benefits, averaging $292 a week, already have run out.”

Over three quarters of a million Californians out of work and out of benefits cannot be a good thing for incumbents of either party there.

The continuing sense of unease around the world is beginning to show itself at the ballot box. If the major parties – on both sides of the Atlantic - don’t begin to show they can come together on programs alleviate those economic fears we may see wholesale changes in local, state, and federal offices here as well.

Editor’s Note: Rich Galen is former communications director for House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senator Dan Quayle. In 2003-2004, he did a six-month tour of duty in Iraq at the request of the White House engaging in public affairs with the Department of Defense. He also served as executive director of GOPAC and served in the private sector with Electronic Data Systems. Rich is a frequent lecturer and appears often as a political expert on ABC, CNN, Fox and other news outlets.

Freedom of speech and press keep the blood flowing through public discourse. But sometimes they are not all they’re cracked up to be.    

A good example is Dana Milbank’s column in the Washington Post May 2, in which he excoriated House Republicans for not getting anything done. “It’s another recess week for our lazy leaders,” he wrote. “They are planning to be on vacation—er, doing “constituent work”—17 of the year’s remaining 34 weeks, and even when they are in town (Washington) the typical workweek is three days.”

Milbank is way off base on several counts and on balance, contributes more to the ignorance of his readers than their enlightenment, which you would think would be one of the key tests of whether a responsible news outlet prints or broadcasts anything broadly categorized as news or news commentary. In other words does what is printed or broadcast contribute to the public good; that is more the education than the entertainment of the people the media are trying to help govern themselves? 

Someone once said that the First Amendment guarantees to Americans the right to make a damn fool of themselves, but it doesn’t require them to do so. By the same token, there’s nothing in the First Amendment that says the Washington Post is required to print the drivel that sometimes drips form the pen of Dana Milbank or other strident partisans and ideologues like him—Norm Ornstein immediately comes to mind after his similar diatribe on Republican rule in the Post.

To Milbank’s misfired shots, Members of Congress don’t go on vacation one week out of every month. They are on a legislative schedule that, thanks to House Speaker John Boehner, permits them to spend more time among their constituents. That is one of the fundamental responsibilities of members and, it could be argued, a more important responsibility than legislating itself. The Founding Fathers thought it critical that members of Congress stay in constant contact with their constituents, live among them, ‘think as they think’, and act as they would want them to act. You can’t do that going home on quickie weekend trips when most of your constituents are not accessible.

Members of Congress on “vacation”? Balderdash. I spent thirteen years traveling the 18^th District of Illinois with Congressman Bob Michel from Peoria. Most of those 10-12 hour days were spent with farmers at feed mills, churchgoers at picnics, laborers on the assembly line and barbers in their shops, among many others. Nobody knew more about how Peorians thought or what they wanted from their government than Bob Michel–well, maybe with the possible exception of his district director, Ray LaHood, who succeeded him.

Nothing has changed. After reading Milbank’s column I contacted chiefs of staff for members from Ohio, Oregon, Texas, Illinois, Arizona, and California and asked them what their members were doing last week and every one of those members was in the District, conducting small business conferences, job fairs, nursing home visits, speaking to high school students and meeting with professions from real estate to pharmacology. 

When it comes to the cold statistical on bills passed and days in session, on which Milbank makes his case, you can paint a picture that the 112^th Congress hasn’t done anything. But the statistics mean little if they aren’t put in context.

To draw from the famous line in the movie Absence of Malice it’s accurate, but not true. The numbers don’t describe the work of Congress, they distort it, particularly in the total absence of the legislative work done in committees.

The incessant partisan bickering that Milbank seems to enjoy fomenting, sucks the oxygen from the more important debates to which the citizenry need more exposure. People need to know the real causes of political dysfunction and they need to know of its chronic nature and how difficult but urgent it is to purge it from the political system.    

The blame for the breakdown of our governmental processes cannot be ascribed to either party, or either house of Congress or any branch of government unilaterally. They’re all culpable, and no more so than the media.

The blame can spread far and wide. Dysfunctional, divisive and uncivil politics, from campaigning to governing, reflects a pattern of social and political misbehavior that runs the gamut from “reality” television to super PAC campaign ads, and every attempt by political candidates, media pundits and political opportunists in and out of government, to divide us into distinct classes of victims and villains and getting us snapping at each other. 

Granted, Congress is not generating governmental action that satisfies anyone, but last week most members were all over the country doing what they were supposed to do; they weren’t bellowing from the ivory towers in which Milbank resides. They were on the streets listening to confused, angry, and frustrated constituents who continue to suffer the brunt of gradations of political dysfunction now 20 years or more in the making, and still don’t understand why.

Who can blame them? No one is really telling them why, particularly you know who.

Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.

Perhaps it was all part of a plan.

Still it seems oddly coincidental that just as revelations come out that the woman Barack Obama dated in one of his many autobiographies was actual not a woman but a composite of several women, the Obama campaign is unveiling Julia, another fake woman. Here is a tidbit from National Journal about Julia: “If the 2008 campaign had Joe the Plumber, 2012 might have “Julia,” a fictional woman created by the Obama campaign to show his strengths on women’s issues.

On Thursday, the campaign launched a webpage called “The Life of Julia,” tracking how the president’s policies have helped her throughout her lifetime and contrasting those to Mitt Romney’s policies. Starting at her childhood and ending at retirement, each slide shows an older Julia and a new policy. For example, at 31-years-old, a visibly pregnant Julia is at the doctor’s office. The caption reads, “Under President Obama: Julia decides to have a child. Throughout her pregnancy, she benefits from maternal checkups, prenatal care, and free screenings under health care reform.” As for Romney’s policies, the site says, “Health care reform would be repealed.”

In case you didn’t know about Obama’s fictional girlfriend, David Maraniss wrote about her in his new book, an excerpt of which just come out in Vanity Fair this week.

“Much later, after the publication of his book Dreams from My Father, and after Barack Obama became famous, a curiosity arose about the mystery woman of his New York years. “There was a woman in New York that I loved,” he wrote. “She was white. She had dark hair, and specks of green in her eyes. Her voice sounded like a wind chime. We saw each other for almost a year. On the weekends, mostly. Sometimes in her apartment, sometimes in mine. You know how you can fall into your own private world? Just two people, hidden and warm. Your own language. Your own customs. That’s how it was.”Obama did not name this old girlfriend even with a pseu­donym—­she was just “a woman” or “my friend.” That she remained publicly unidentified throughout his rise to national prominence became part of the intrigue of his New York period’s “dark years” narrative. His physical description was imprecise but close. Genevieve is five-seven, lithe and graceful, with auburn-tinged brown hair and flecks of brown, not green, in her hazel eyes. Her voice was confident and soothing. Like many characters in the memoir, he introduced her to advance a theme, another thread of thought in his musings about race.

To that end, he distorted her attitudes and some of their experiences, emphasizing his sense that they came from different worlds. Decades later, during an interview in the Oval Office, Obama acknowledged that, while Genevieve was his New York girlfriend, the description in his memoir was a “compression” of girlfriends, including one who followed Genevieve when he lived in Chicago.”

Now, I happen to think that this is an odd coincidence.

The same week that Obama’s composite girlfriend is revealed, the Obama campaign unveils a fake woman to make the point that he is pro-women.

Like these fakes composites, the Obama campaign has completely fabricated a phony Republican war on women. It is a bogus argument made simply to score political points.

But then again, everything Mr. Obama does is fake. It is all a composite of something, made up to score political points.

And maybe that is the deeper significance of this odd coincidence. It lets people know that the President, as John Boehner said last week, is an emperor with no clothes. It is all an illusion.

In the mid-1980’s, Social Security was going broke, as was the Federal government. And the retirement program for all Federal employees was in the cross-hairs of voters who thought it cost too much and was too generous to retirees.

I was thinking about the transition to the current Federal Employee Retirement System as I picked up a letter sent to my wife from the Thrift Savings Program.

The TSP was a part of the reform effort from that period in history when Ronald Reagan was President, Bob Dole was Majority Leader, and Tip O’Neill was Speaker of the House.

I ran across a fascinating history of that period written by Jamie Cowen in a back issue of the Employee Benefit Research Institute magazine. Cowen was a staff member of former Senator Ted Stevens, a driving force behind the reform initiative at that time, and his insights into how a major reform of an entitlement program is informative.

In coming up with a plan to fix Social Security, Congress decided in 1983 that a huge chunk of Americans, Federal workers, had to start contributing to the system by paying the FICA tax. The Civil Service Retirement System predated Social Security. It was enacted in 1920 as a way to encourage older workers to leave the workforce. Before that time, Federal workers would stay at their jobs until they died. Maybe that legacy is why we have so many Senators who stay in office until they are 90.

CSRS was nice program. Federal employees didn’t have to rely on Social Security because they got a nice pension, so they didn’t pay into Social Security. But that didn’t actually work, because as it turned out, Federal retirees wouldn’t just sit back and do nothing when they retired from the Federal government. They would often get another job, which meant they would start paying into Social Security for that job, and lo and behold, they would get both their pensions and a Social Security check.

Ted Stevens and his loyal staff went to work to change that system. In an odd bit of bad luck for Stevens but good luck for the Federal retirement system, the Alaska Senator lost a leadership race to Bob Dole, and decided to turn his entire attention to fixing the retirement system.

What Stevens and his team decided to do was hold a bunch of stakeholder forums, where they got some buy-in from all of the interest groups who cared about Federal pensions. As is their typical strategy, the Labor Unions vociferously opposed all reform.

But somehow Stevens was able to come up with a strategy of replacing the CSRS system with the less costly FERS system. Unlike the simple CSRS system, where if you work for a certain period of time, you get a certain system, FERS has a three-pronged approach.

Federal employees are now required to pay into Social Security from the get-go, and they are eligible for Social Security benefits. They also get a defined pension, but at a far reduced rate from the heyday of CSRS. And they get access to a Thrift Saving Plan (which is like a 401k plan).

The Federal government matches up to 5 percent of a Federal employees salary and the employee could set aside 5 percent more of his or her salary.

Despite the initial opposition from Big Labor, the transition has proven to be a success. The new retirement system is very popular with Federal employees and it is far less costly than the old system. By some estimates, the current system is 25% less expensive than the old system would have been.

Stevens was able to use some clever parliamentary tactics to get this plan agreed to by both the House and the Senate. He had a good relationship with his counterpart in the House, Bill Ford, who happened to be a liberal Democrat. And he was able to get buy-in from the Reagan Administration, which initially had serious reservations.

Obviously, there are some parallels between how the old bulls changed the Federal retirement system and how policy makers should think about changing our current entitlement program.

First, there needs to be the political will on both sides of the aisle to make serious changes.

Second, for folks who rely on the current program, there should be assurances that nothing will change for them.

Third, to sweeten the change, some new element should be added that could create greater wealth or health potential. Whether that element is a private savings account, access to a better health care option or tax breaks for deciding not to take the benefits (while continuing to contribute to the system), something needs to make the new system a more enticing choice for the younger generations.

Fourth, policy makers shouldn’t be scared off by those who complain about any change to the status quo. The status quo is not acceptable and no matter how violently some groups might protest change, they have to acknowledge that change is necessary.

It is possible to change retirement systems. It has been done before. It can be done again.

Editor’s Note: John Feehery worked for former House Speaker Dennis Hastert and other Republicans in Congress.Feehery is president of Quinn Gillespie Communications. He is a contributor to The Hill’s Pundits Blog and blogs at thefeeherytheory.com.