Has ever a story suffered from so gross a surfeit of pointless analysis as Bill Clinton’s trip to North Korea? Tired megalomaniac dictator trades ego-stroking photo op with former US president for two US hostages. From the American point of view: why not? Cheap at the price. But what more is there to say? Precisely nothing. Watching cable news and especially CNN give this topic blanket coverage and colour commentary from all hands, for lack of anything else to report in a slow week, was sometimes almost harrowing. My favourite moment was when they broadcast the transmission test image from North Korean TV. What do they mean by those vertical bands? Gripping.

And still it goes on. Here’s Fox on the Clintons-psychodrama angle. And this morning’s NYT opines:

We do not know the details of Mr. Clinton’s meetings, but we hope they lead to future talks. That poses a challenge for Mr. Obama: while he must pursue this opening, he must not be so desperate for a deal that he lets North Korea set all the terms. He struck the right note when he told MSNBC on Wednesday that Mr. Clinton’s mission had not eased the need for North Korea to alter its behavior if it wants a “path to better relations.”

A pivotal moment, all right.

Brookings’ Darrell West takes an optimistic view.

Obama already has demonstrated much greater political effectiveness than Clinton. The new president is more popular than Clinton was at the six-month point. In mid-July, 1993, for example, Clinton had a 41 percent approval rating in the Gallup poll, much lower than Obama’s most recent rating of 56 percent.

Four of the five relevant congressional committees actually have passed health care reform, which is not something Clinton was able to achieve. Obama’s leadership style of delegating specific policy decisions to Congress has led to committee approvals and given himself maximum room for bargaining and negotiation at the end of the legislative process.

When you look at public opinion polls, there is little evidence that opposition scare tactics are working. Sixty-six percent of Americans in a recent CBS News/New York Times survey favored a “government administered” public health insurance option. This is despite private insurance industry anguish over a public option. And 55 percent believe the federal government should guarantee health insurance for all Americans. Critics who claim America should not expand the role of the government are losing that argument with the general public.

Even more striking are poll numbers revealing that voters have much greater confidence in Obama on health care than congressional Republicans. For example, 55 percent of Americans say Obama has better ideas about reforming health care, compared to only 26 percent who think that of congressional Republicans.

All good points.

Where I’m less sure is here:

If Democrats lose health care reform, the biggest victims will be Blue Dog Democrats. Since many of them represent conservative areas, they will be the ones swept out of office if liberals are disillusioned by failure and stay home in the 2010 elections. Moderate members who oppose health care reform because they worry about specific provisions should understand they have more to fear from failure than success in passing comprehensive reform.

I’m guessing that the Blue Dogs have a highly developed sense of where their electoral interests lie. I’d trust their judgment on that, if on nothing else. On the other hand, there’s no denying that the outright failure to pass a measure would be a disaster for the president and his party. It’s very hard to believe that a deal cannot be scrabbled together to avoid that outcome.

Richard Posner wonders how tightly Obama is bound by his campaign promise not to raise taxes “by one cent” for people earning less than $250,000.

The President is a lawyer. Lawyers are masters of equivocation. Perhaps what has been taken off the table is just increases in income tax rates until the economy recovers from the current depression. Perhaps the door has been left ajar for other forms of tax increase, such as a federal value-added tax; cutting deductions (which do not affect the nominal tax rate); and increasing federal income tax rates in a year or two, when (one hopes) the Gross Domestic Product will have returned to its trend line.

Obama cast the commitment more widely than income taxes.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama said over and over that the middle class — which he defined as anyone making less than $250,000 — would not face any tax increase.

“If you make under $250,000, you will not see your taxes increased by a single dime. Not your income tax. Not your payroll tax. Not your capital gains tax. No tax,” he said at a campaign event in 2008.

Perhaps, as Posner mentions, there is more scope for evasion on the timing, though so far as I know Obama never limited his promise to the duration of the recession.

Certainly middle-class taxes need to rise. That much is beyond dispute. And in fact Obama is already chipping away at the commitment. Taxes would rise at firms that did not provide health insurance under reform proposals he has endorsed. True, that would be a rise in the employer’s tax rather than the employee’s, but that is of no real significance: take-home pay would fall just the same. The individual penalty for failing to comply with a health insurance mandate is also a kind of tax. So is the rise in energy prices under cap and trade, another policy he has endorsed.

In the end, he is going to have to break his promise explicitly and the sooner he comes clean about that the better. My advice (see here and here, for instance) would be, wrap it up in comprehensive tax reform. Put the whole broken tax code on the table. My biggest fear for the US economy is that he will spend too long, ultimately in vain, trying to keep his word. That way lies fiscal ruin.

As I say below, an interesting possibility. The more I think about it, the more plausible it seems. This column for National Journal (the link expires in a month) is about last week’s US-China talks. It mainly discusses other aspects of economic diplomacy, and only touches on climate change at the end. I’ll have to come back to it.

Americans are a proud people who do not care to be bossed around. So are the Chinese. Hence [so far as most points of contention are concerned], the greater the diplomatic pressure, the less the progress. Restraint and respect will likely be more conducive to good policy than attempts to muscle the other side — and this runs both ways.

The important exception to this is climate change. In the cases I just discussed, the mutuality of interests is exaggerated. The key to sensible policy is for the national interest to guide it. Climate change is different. There, forgive the expression, we really do sink or swim together. Whatever Al Gore may say, U.S. action on carbon emissions is going to bring little benefit to the United States unless India and China act too. Cooperation on this between the two countries is going to be vital — the difference between success and failure.

The good news is that the prospects for this necessary cooperation are better than you might suppose. In fact, the United States might find that in China it has an ally. China has been reluctant to commit itself to internationally agreed-upon targets for carbon reductions — but so has the United States. And the reasoning on each side is not that different. Skepticism about the mechanics of agreements like the failed Kyoto accord is exacerbated by an elevated sensitivity to infringements of sovereignty. It seems to me, as a European, that China and the United States understand each other pretty well on that topic.

Together, the United States and China could conceivably push for an international emissions-control system that is more flexible than Kyoto, putting greater emphasis on investments in new clean technologies and less on punitive sanctions against existing industries. If they chose to get together on this, the game would be up for other approaches. It is, at least, an interesting possibility.