mr-damon/usa

For well over two centuries, the United States has been vastly more diverse than its ruling families. Now the Obama family has flipped that around, with a Technicolor cast that looks almost nothing like their overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly Protestant predecessors in the role. The family that produced Barack and Michelle Obama is black and white and Asian, Christian, Muslim and Jewish. They speak English; Indonesian; French; Cantonese; German; Hebrew; African languages including Swahili, Luo and Igbo; and even a few phrases of Gullah, the Creole dialect of the South Carolina Lowcountry. Very few are wealthy, and some -- like Sarah Obama, the stepgrandmother who only recently got electricity and running water in her metal-roofed shack -- are quite poor.

"Our family is new in terms of the White House, but I don't think it's new in terms of the country," Maya Soetoro-Ng, the president's younger half-sister, said last week. "I don't think the White House has always reflected the textures and flavors of this country."

Sean D. O'Neil, a 22-year-old who stood shivering outside an Army recruitment office in St. Louis, said he was forgoing plans to become a guitar maker for now, realizing that instruments are seen as a luxury during a recession. Mr. O'Neil, a Texas native, ventured to St. Louis for an apprenticeship but found himself $30,000 in debt. Joining the Army, his Plan B, was a purely financial decision. With President-elect Barack Obama in office, he expects the troop levels in Iraq to be lowered.

Going to war, although likely, feels safer to him. "I'm doing this for eight years," he said. "Hopefully, when I get out, I'll have all my fingers and toes and arms, and the economy will have turned around, and I'll have a little egg to start up my own guitar line."

"I'm running the risk of being tarred and feathered," Godfrey Hodgson says from his home in London. He is speaking about the potential fallout from his new book, The Myth of American Exceptionalism (to be published this month by Yale University Press), an assault on the deep-rooted American belief that the United States is morally and politically superior to other nations. The country has embraced a "boilerplate and pompous version of American exceptionalism," he says, that is "a dangerous basis for national policy."

He accuses iconic historians like Frederick Jackson Turner, Perry Miller, and Daniel J. Boorstin of laying the foundations of that widespread belief by encrusting American history "with accretions of self-congratulatory myth." Recent scholars may have provided a more nuanced account, but the narrative of exceptionalism, Hodgson argues, continues to shape the American popular -- and political -- imagination. And in the past few decades, a deafening chorus of intellectuals, commentators, and politicians has insisted that America be not only admired but also worshiped. According to those apostles of exceptionalism, the United States is a nation of unrivaled virtue, a chosen land with a special destiny and duty to spread liberty, democracy, and the rule of law -- "a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom," in the words of President Bush, exceptionalist par excellence. Intoxicated by an exalted sense of national purpose, more and more Americans are "attracted to a national ideology that cast them as redeemers of a sinful world," writes Hodgson, a British journalist and an associate fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, at the University of Oxford.

The precipitous drop in prices for recyclables makes the stock market's performance seem almost enviable.

On the West Coast, for example, mixed paper is selling for $20 to $25 a ton, down from $105 in October, according to Official Board Markets, a newsletter that tracks paper prices. And recyclers say tin is worth about $5 a ton, down from $327 earlier this year. There is greater domestic demand for glass, so its price has not fallen as much.

This is a cyclical industry that has seen price swings before. The scrap market in general is closely tied to economic conditions because demand for some recyclables tracks closely with markets for new products. Cardboard, for instance, turns into the boxes that package electronics, rubber goes to shoe soles, and metal is made into auto parts.

One reason prices slid so rapidly this time is that demand from China, the biggest export market for recyclables from the United States, quickly dried up as the global economy slowed. China's influence is so great that in recent years recyclables have been worth much less in areas of the United States that lack easy access to ports that can ship there.

The downturn offers some insight into the forces behind the recycling boom of recent years. Environmentally conscious consumers have been able to pat themselves on the back and feel good about sorting their recycling and putting it on the curb. But most recycling programs have been driven as much by raw economics as by activism.

Cities and their contractors made recycling easy in part because there was money to be made. Businesses, too -- like grocery chains and other retailers -- have profited by recycling thousands of tons of materials like cardboard each month.

But the drop in prices has made the profits shrink, or even disappear, undermining one rationale for recycling programs and their costly infrastructure.

"When the economy is good, and state universities are somewhat better funded, we raise tuition as little as possible," he said. "When the economy is bad, we raise tuition and sock it to families, when people can least afford it. That's exactly the opposite of what we need."

Joe and Chris Miller's fields were picked so clean Saturday that a second day of gleaning -- the ancient practice of picking up leftover food in farm fields -- was canceled Sunday.

"Overwhelmed is putting it mildly," Chris Miller said. "People obviously need food."

She said she expected 5,000 to 10,000 people would show up Saturday to collect free potatoes, carrots and leeks. Instead, an estimated 11,000 vehicles snaked around cornfields and backed up more than two miles. About 30 acres of the 600-acre farm 37 miles north of Denver became a parking lot.

Gleaming new Mercedes cars roll one by one out of a huge container ship here and onto a pier. Ordinarily the cars would be loaded on trucks within hours, destined for dealerships around the country. But these are not ordinary times.


For now, the port itself is the destination. Unwelcome by dealers and buyers, thousands of cars worth tens of millions of dollars are being warehoused on increasingly crowded port property.

And for the first time, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, and Nissan have each asked to lease space from the port for these orphan vehicles. They are turning dozens of acres of the nation's second-largest container port into a parking lot, creating a vivid picture of a paralyzed auto business and an economy in peril.

One thing Mr. Silver cannot predict: what happens now. He suspects that Nov. 4 was the height of his popularity, and that producers will not be phoning as frequently any time soon. Publishers have been calling about a book, and he will continue with FiveThirtyEight, using it to predict Congressional votes during the Obama administration -- if anyone cares.

"That's the paradox," he said. "You would think that you elect this guy and you want him to effect change, and then he gets elected, and people don't care about bills being passed."