Until a few years ago, the candidate and his wife, Michelle, were deep in debt. Together, they were carrying $120,000 in student loans they had taken on to pay for law school.

"We were making payments the size of a mortgage every month," Obama said.

Although Obama acknowledged that he and his wife were blessed to have enough income to service that debt, it wasn't until he wrote two best-selling books, "Dreams From My Father" and "The Audacity of Hope," that the couple were able to pay it all off.

Were he to become president, Obama said he would initiate reforms to address "the whole debt industry that has really got people in a financial hole they never dig themselves out of."

I believe that when Obama talks about his family's situation, he gets that we must move away from an economy driven by debt-laden consumers.

Nonetheless, the problems are so large and the changes needed to correct them are so deep and far-reaching -- requiring legislative reforms and shifts in people's financial behavior -- that even a self-proclaimed change-agent president would be sharply tested on this issue.

She believes he thinks we've got to "move away from an economy driven by debt-laden consumers," through "deep and far-reaching" change and "legislative reforms." But he wasn't that specific.

I ask not as an attack on Obama, but as a California voter opposed to the initiative. I would like his help. On the other hand, if he's really in favor of the ban, and he ought to stop letting his supporters think otherwise. I don't think his opposition would make that big a difference--the swing votes are older women and Latinos, aka Hillary voters.

His silence says a lot about his willingness to use his glamour to advance his presumed beliefs at the risk of losing popularity (not an altogether bad thing when I think about other issues). And the media's lack of interest in pressing the question says a lot about press bias. Surely an anti-marriage constitutional amendment in the nation's largest state is a more significant national issue than, say, whether the South Carolina capital building displays the Confederate flag, a question reporters have never dismissed as merely a state issue.

Noah Millman at The American Scene also wants to know. Steve Miller (who quotes an earlier post of mine) and his commenters have more at Independent Gay Forum.

All of which is great until you start to wonder how anyone in this business is going to get paid.

Aubrey de Gray will be speaking tomorrow (Friday) at 4:00 at UCLA's Royce Hall, as the kickoff to a weekend conference on extending healthy life. According to the website, advance registration is required, though I rather doubt they'll be turning people away.

I'm agnostic about the potential for radical life extension in my lifetime--my current interest is not-so-radical middle-age extension--but it's an interesting and important subject, and de Gray is a provocative speaker.

WHILE I believe in hope and change, I know some cynics (mostly die-hard Hillary Clinton supporters) who think Barack Obama taps into the same collective yearning as superheroes. He might as well be called Obama-man, political wonder boy, able to leap giant deficits in a single bound, vanquish scores of angry Iraqis merely by batting his doe eyes.

Obama-man has no past. Like all caped crusaders, he is a mysterious cipher, and yet a reassuring figure, like Superman or Spider-Man. And you all know that beautiful, lanky Michelle Obama would look great in her own spandex. Personally, I have more confidence in Obama, and I'd just like to say, what's the alternative? John McCain as the Incredible Hulk?

[Via the skeptical Fishbowl L.A., which needs to read my take on superhero glamour here and Obama's glamour here.]

"It's interesting and fascinating that this happened kind of quickly," said Ali LeRoi, who co-wrote "Head of State" with Rock. "At the time we did the movie, Barack was just beginning his rise in politics. Now he's like one of those great gadgets like the iPhone. Everyone is fascinated."

I think there's something to this analogy, and it doesn't suggest any deep concern for policy. If elected, Obama would be wrong to assume any kind of mandate beyond the glamour of his persona.

Last Monday, the state's laboratory field services group issued 13 cease-and-desist letters to genetic testing companies. Wired.com obtained a copy of the letters (pdf.) from two recipients. And a recent teleconference among regulatory officials confirms the seriousness of the department's intent.

"We [are] no longer tolerating direct-to-consumer genetic testing in California," Karen Nickles, Chief of Laboratory Field Services at the health department, told members of the Clinical Laboratories Advisory Committee on June 13.

Targeted companies include personal genomics startups 23andMe and Navigenics. These services are seen as the leading edge of a new type of health care in which consumers can use their genetic profile to tailor their medical and lifestyle choices. The established medical community, however, is wary of the technology arguing that the medical utility of some tests is unproven. Doctors also complain that direct-to-consumer services bypass them as the gatekeepers and analysts of medical information, which they worry could confuse consumers, not to mention cost them a billing event.

Read the rest, including a politically pointed lead and instructions on how to hear the phone call for yourself, here

The Get Smart premiere almost blocked my way to the restaurant where I was meeting Professor Postrel for dinner Monday night. I had to go around the block to this semi-open sidewalk.

Mr. Quinto, do you really think viewers will believe that Sylar is Spock?

And then they were all gone. (Click the photos to see larger versions.)

Assuming all the bling isn't meant as an ironic statement, this Escalade I recently saw parked in Westwood is probably owned by someone afraid of being mistaken for his (or her) poorer peers. My latest Atlantic column explains why conspicuous consumption is a sign of social insecurity.

But what explains why the one day I don't tote my camera with me I find the perfect illustration? A parking garage is no place for cell phone photography. You can't even see all the crystals on the Escalade's upper brake light strip.

ADDENDUM: On second thought, this isn't really a good illustration, since crystals on your car (as opposed to the diamonds they're imitating) don't really show much about wealth. They're more about taste--pleasure, rather than meaning.

That's the LAT's photo from the first gay wedding in southern California. Here's another from a nice gallery on LAist:

Neither quite captures what I saw on TV last night: a shot that made me think, "I didn't know Gloria Allred was a lesbian." I'd mistaken the couple's lawyer, who'd made it to the center of the screen, for one of the brides. (She's in the center between the brides at the top photo, on the left next to the crying bride in the second one.) She was even wearing a cream-colored wedding suit just like theirs. Tacky, tacky, tacky. It's their day. Even a publicity-hound lawyer should have the decency to wear something in, say, an attention-deflecting quiet blue.

UPDATE: The Advocate has as many pictures of Allred as it does of the happy couple (3 each, including one with all three of them). This is not just rude. It's bad politics. If you want to get Californians to vote against a state-constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, you should keep the obnoxious leftist lawyers out of sight and highlight the happy families--preferably with kids, mothers-in-laws, grandmas, siblings, etc. joining the celebration.

But Obama's trade-skeptical rhetoric is perfectly consistent with his record. Admittedly, it's a pretty short record. And maybe he doesn't mean what he's saying. Or maybe he does mean it, but could be talked out of it once in the White House. But maybe not! Really, who among us is in any position to say? But he's a charismatic guy, so people see what they want to see.

Obama is a charismatic guy--at least in the stage presence sense of charisma--but it isn't charisma that makes free-traders like the WaPo's Sebastian Mallaby think he's secretly on their side. It's glamour, and the difference has political implications.

Charisma is a personal quality that inspires followers to embrace the charismatic leader's agenda (an agenda that, in the original sense of the word charisma, is seen as divinely inspired.) Glamour, by contrast, encourages the audience to project its own yearnings onto the glamorous figure. So, in this case, Sebastian Mallaby imagines that Obama will find "a way of crawling back from his embarrassing talk of reopening NAFTA." Mallaby maintains his own views about what's good for economic growth; he doesn't defer to Obama's own vision.

When voters motivated by charisma disagree with the leader they've backed, they support him anyway and possibly even change their minds about the right policy course. When voters motivated by glamour disagree, they become disillusioned and angry.

I wrote more on charisma versus glamour here, giving Obama credit for not embodying political charisma. I certainly hope he doesn't.

That said, Barack Obama is a real candidate running for the real presidency, not a fictional character, and I am not optimistic about his world view. Dreams from My Father suggests a deep-seated belief that economic and social dynamism inevitably and unrelievedly produce chaos, disorder, and despair. Here's a heart-felt and disturbing passage:

Before we left, Angela asked about the possibility of part-time work for the youth in Altgeld [a housing project]. Mr. Foster looked up at her like she was crazy.

"Every merchant around here turns down thirty applications a day," he said. "Adults. Senior citizens. Experienced workers willing to take whatever they can get. I'm sorry."

As we walked back to the car, we passed a small clothing store full of cheap dresses and brightly colored sweaters, two aging white mannequins now painted black in the window. The store was poorly lit, but toward the back I could make out the figure of a young Korean woman sewing by hand as a child slept beside her. The scene took me back to my childhood, back in the markets of Indonesia: the hawkers, the leather workers, the old women chewing betelnut and swatting flies off their fruit with whisk brooms.

I'd always taken such markets for granted, part of the natural order of things. Now, though, as I thought about Altgeld and Roseland, Rafiq and Mr. Foster, I saw those Djakarta markets for what they were: fragile, precious things. The people who sold their goods there might have been poor, poorer even than folks out in Altgeld. They hauled fifty pounds of firewood on their backs every day, they ate little, they died young. And yet for all that poverty, there remained in their lives a discernible order, a tapestry of trade routes and middlemen, bribes to pay and customs to observe, the habits of a generation played out every day beneath the bargaining and the noise and the swirling dust.

It was the absence of such coherence that made a place like Altgeld so desperate, I thought to myself; it was that loss of order that had made Rafiq and Mr. Foster, in their own ways, so bitter. For how could we go about stitching a culture back together once it was torn? How long might that take in this land of dollars?

Longer than it took a culture to unravel, I suspected. I tried to imagine the Indonesian workers who were now making their way to the sorts of factories that had once sat along the banks of the Calumet River, joining the ranks of wage labor to assemble the radios and sneakers that sold on Michigan Avenue. I imagined those same Indonesian workers ten, twenty years from now, when their factories would have closed down, a consequence of new technology or lower wages in some other part of the globe And then the bitter discovery that their markets have vanished; that they no longer remember how to weave their own baskets or carve their own furniture or grow their own food; that even if they remember such craft, the forests that gave them wood are now owned by timber interests, the baskets they once wove have been replaced by more durable plastics. The very existence of the factories, the timber interests, the plastic manufacturer, will have rendered their culture obsolete; the values of hard work and individual initiative turn out to have depended on a system of belief that's been scrambled by migration and urbanization and imported TV reruns. Some of them would prosper in this new order. Some would move to America. And others, the millions left behind in Djakarta, or Lagos, or the West Bank, they would settle into their own Altgeld Gardens, into deeper despair.

Obama's memoir is not a policy tome or a campaign biography but an emotional journey. It does not offer alternatives, only bleak observations and predictions. It is pessimistic, conservative, nostalgic. The theme running through Dreams from My Father is the search for order, for stability, for roots in an undisturbed pre-modern culture. How that yearning for stasis translates into presidential policy is not clear, but I worry. But then I have no nostalgia for the order into which my grandparents were born--even though the old factories have moved away and people no longer grow their own food.

(In case you missed it, here's my article on Obama's glamour.)

On the way to his modest point, however, he repeats some all-too-common confusions about gas prices, traffic, and fuel efficiency. His column is worth addressing not because it's particularly bad (it isn't) or particularly influential (ditto), but because these confusions are so typical.

He starts by saying that "the more painful that things become at the pump, the more our political and business leaders will finally realize that they need to take steps, and soon, to wean us from our self-defeating oil jones." That's not how things actually work. In the real world, the more painful things become at the pump, the more drivers take steps to burn less gasoline, regardless of what political and business leaders do--and the more pressure political and business leaders are under to make those gas prices go down, so we won't have to change our driving behavior.

Like many people, Lazarus conflates his concerns about traffic congestion and gas prices. Both bumper-to-bumper traffic and $4.19-per-gallon make life unpleasant, and both have something to do with cars, but that doesn't mean fixing one problem will fix the other. Lazarus would like more fuel-efficient vehicles, which would address the expensive-gas problem; he just doesn't think we'll get them any time soon, because automakers "have to be dragged screaming and kicking into the future." But when the fuel-efficient future arrives, he'll discover that better gas mileage means more crowded roads. The more miles per gallon (or dollar) you get, the more you're willing to drive. The best thing for L.A. traffic is expensive gasoline, which is why I caught myself doing 75 mph coming back from downtown last Thursday afternoon.

Here's a cheat sheet:

Expensive gas = less driving = less congestion
More fuel efficiency = de facto cheaper gas = more driving = more congestion
More pain at the pump = Less pain on the roads (and vice versa)

Finally, $9 a day on gas???? You might think about moving closer to the office.