Top 20 Most Anticipated Games in 2012

2012 will be an eventful year for gaming enthusiasts with a wealth of exciting new games. This is a list of the 20 most anticipated games for PC and console that will be released in the coming year.

Here they are:


Final Fantasy XIII-2 (PS3)
A sequel to Final Fantasy XIII begins five years after the story of its predecessor ends. The game promises more dynamics and a darker athmosphere than before. Expected to be released on January 31.


Twisted Metal (PS3)
The new version of Twisted Metal allows you to destroy even more vehicles than ever before and will offer up to four players on one console or 15 players over the net. Expected to be released on February 14.



Syndicate (PC, PS3, Xbox 360)
The cyberpunk game Syndicate looks like a mix between Crysis and Deus Ex, but is a redesigned version of the old game that was first released in 1993. Scheduled to be released on February 21.


Uncharted: Golden Abyss (PS Vita)
Not many details about this game has been revealed yet, other than that it will be taking advantage of the touch pad motion censor of the new game console PlayStation Vita. Expected to be released on February 22.


Metal Gear Solid Snake Eater 3D (3DS)
This game was already presented at E3 last year. The game is a ported version of the PS2 version, which is considered to be one of the best in the Metal Gear series. Expected to be released sometime in February.


Xcom (PC, PS3, Xbox 360)
Xcom can be described as X-Files meets a tactics game. Previously known as X-com, but changed its name after a legal dispute with the developer. Expected to be released on March 6.


Mass Effect 3 (PC, PS3, Xbox 360)
Mass Effect 3 is the final chapter in the story of Commander Shepard’s struggle to save the galaxy from an alien invasion. To be released sometime in March.


Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm (PC)
The second chapter in the trilogy about Starcraft promises major changes in the ability to play against multiple people. Contains a total of 20 different missions and will probably be sold as an expansion pack. To be released sometime in the second quarter.


Minecraft (Xbox 360)
The game is considered by many to be the best ever and it is finally coming to the Xbox. The game also fully supports Kinect. Expected sometime in the second quarter.



Halo 4 (Xbox 360)
According to rumors, Halo 4 will be the first game of a trilogy, called Reclaim. To be released sometime in the second quarter of 2012.


Metal Gear Solid Rising (PS3, Xbox 360)
The highly anticipated sequel in the Metal Gear series will be released sometime next year, but no specific date has been announced. The game will reportedly focus more on action and combat techniques.

Bioshock Infinite (PC, PS3, Xbox 360)
Bioshock Infinite is a shooting game in a dream-like setting. It’s not a sequel to Bioshock or Bioshock II, but a completely separate game. Release date is still unknown, but it will be released some time next year.


Diablo III (PC)
A long-awaited sequel in the Diablo series from Blizzard. The game is said to contain a variety of news in terms of game tactics and the possibility of online gaming. Release some time during next year.]


Grand Theft Auto V (platforms unknown)
Another sequel to the controversial game Grand Theft Auto will be released sometime next year. But game developer Rockstar has not yet announced what platforms the game will be released on.


World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria (PC)
Blizzard and Dreamworks are working hard to release the fourth expansion pack for World of Warcraft. There is no official release date yet, other than sometime next year.


Max Payne 3 (PS3, Xbox 360)
After almost ten years it is time for a sequel to Max Payne 2. Many have plagiarized the playing style of Max Payne, but none have come close to the original. Will be released some time during next year.



Borderlands 2 (PC, Xbox 360, PS3)
The first version of Borderlands was a major hit in 2009. The sequel, which will be released sometime next year offers four new heroes, new weapons and a complete new story.



The Last Guardian (PS3)
This game was presented in 2009 at E3 and has been delayed several times. Team ICO now state that the game will be released sometime in 2012.



Hitman: Absolution (PC, PS3, Xbox 360)
Do not be fooled by the action movie this game is based on. The game Hitman had a lot of excellent puzzles to be solved. Among other things, you got penalty points if you hurt someone other than the target. The sequel promises a range of news, but no release date has been set yet.


Far Cry 3 (PC, PS3, Xbox 360)
In the third version of Far Cry, we leave the African savannah known from Far Cry 2 and we are back in the tropical jungle, like in the first game. No release date is set, other than sometime in 2012.

Top Games of 2012 (and Beyond) - 1UP

It used to be that you'd announce a game, and then continually delay it so that it doesn't come out for another two or three years. Nowadays, some publishers simply and purposefully announce (and even demo) games two or three years early. So as great as 2011 is looking, we are already looking forward to 2012 and, yes, even 2013. (Agent,BioShock: Infinite, Culture, Darksiders 2, Devil's Third, Final Fantasy Versus XIII, inSANE, Kingdom Hearts 3, Metal Gear Solid Rising, PC, PS3, Warhammer 40,000: Dark Millenium Online, Xbox 360)

Under the Name of a Senate Hopeful, Blog Posts on Sex and Drugs

As he travels New York trying to build support for a Senate candidacy, Marc Cenedella has impressed Republican leaders with his Ivy League credentials, his success in building a business and his promise to tap his wealth in the race. But there may be another side to Mr. Cenedella, the 41-year-old founder ofTheLadders.com, a popular job-search Web site.

Until recently, a Web site,blog.theladders.com/rock, bore Mr. Cenedella’s photograph and the title “The personal blog of Marc Cenedella.” It provided tips on polishing résumés, preparing for job interviews and the like. But it also had a number of entries containing random observations about sex, women and drugs.

The entries had headlines like “Sexy vs. Skanky,” “Dating Advice for Girly Girls,” “He Stole My Weed” and “High Quality Dope.”

In an entry titled “A New Holiday for Men,” there was a link to a separate site that designates March 14 as a special occasion on which women are encouraged to offer steak and oral sex “to show your man how much you care for him.”

Another entry linked to a site that purports to provide biblical justification for a man’s having more than one wife. “I wasn’t so sure about all this Bible stuff,” the entry accompanying the link said, “but I’m starting to cotton to it.”

Yet another entry was titled “Omarosa Jock Straps,” and had a link to an article about a possible clothing line bearing the name of Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth, the villain of “The Apprentice.”

Shortly after The New York Times asked a political adviser to Mr. Cenedella about the entries, the site was disabled.

After being provided screen shots and summaries of some of the site’s content by The Times, Mr. Cenedella’s representatives would not answer directly when asked repeatedly whether Mr. Cenedella posted the entries or the links.

Mr. Cenedella did not respond to requests for an interview made through his representatives.

His company released a statement Friday afternoon saying: “The site you are inquiring about (blog.theladders.com/rock) was not Marc’s actual blog, Cenedella.com. The site you saw was a maintenance staging site set up at blog.theladders.com/rock.” The statement also said that the “staging site contained testing content from a wide variety of sources, including spam from automatic spiders. We have since eliminated the potential for anyone to view the maintenance site.”

An adviser said the entries were from a site that Mr. Cenedella previously published called Stone, www.cenedella.com/stone, which the adviser said had multiple authors.

The Times was made aware of the entries by an opponent of Mr. Cenedella.

In recent months, Republicans have been looking for a candidate to take on SenatorKirsten E. Gillibrand, a first-term Democrat, believing that she may be vulnerable against the right challenger.

Several top Republicans believe that candidate could be Mr. Cenedella, who has not formally announced his candidacy but who has privately told people in the party that he is all but certain to run.

Nicholas A. Langworthy, chairman of the Erie County Republican Committee, came away impressed with Mr. Cenedella after the businessman met with donors, elected leaders and party officials in western New York this month.

“There are a lot of people within our party encouraged by his candidacy,” he said. “His overall life experience makes him an excellent candidate for the Senate.”

Part of Mr. Cenedella’s appeal within Republican circles is that he is a nonpolitician at time when voters seem weary of insiders. Republicans also believe that Mr. Cenedella’s business success allows him to present himself as the candidate most able to help the nation in these tough economic times.

More than all that, though, some Republicans are encouraged by another asset Mr. Cenedella brings: a big checkbook.

Indeed, as he travels the state meeting with party leaders, he has said that he would be willing to pay half of the costs of a statewide campaign with his own money, according to Republicans who have spoken to him about the matter.

That is a huge asset, given that a Senate race in New York could cost as much as $30 million to $40 million.

It is unclear what impact, if any, the online entries will have on Mr. Cenedella’s political plans.

Edward F. Cox, the chairman of the state Republican Party, said he could not comment without knowing more about the circumstances. “Who says what on a blog is complicated,” he said.

Dan Isaacs, the Republican chairman in Manhattan, also declined to comment on the matter beyond noting that the blog posts seemed out of character for Mr. Cenedella. “I’ve never heard him make any type of inappropriate comment or joke like that,” he said.

Mr. Langworthy, the Republican leader in Erie County, said he was satisfied when a political adviser to Mr. Cenedella recently told him that the offending entries stemmed from a hacking incident.

Mr. Cenedella, who is married, grew up in Fredonia, a small community in western New York. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale University before going to Harvard Business School, where he earned an M.B.A. In 2003, Mr. Cenedella founded TheLadders.com, which has some 4.5 million members, according to the site.

Mr. Cenedella would face competition if he entered the primary. George Maragos, the Nassau County comptroller, has announced that he is seeking the Republican nomination.

Talks With Taliban a Long Way Off, American Envoy Says

KABUL, Afghanistan — No peace talks with the Taliban this week: That was the short message on Sunday from the American envoy charged with starting those negotiations.

Stopping here in Kabul this weekend on his way to Qatar, where the insurgents are in the process of opening an office, the envoy, Marc Grossman, implicitly rejected reports that he planned to begin negotiations there this week. He made it clear that there was a long way to go.

Qatar still needs to talk to the Afghans about the proposed Taliban office, he said, and the United States needs to talk to Pakistan, which rebuffed Mr. Grossman’s plans to visit last week. Perhaps most telling, the Taliban still needs to clarify whether they actually intend to engage in peace talks, he said.

“The peace process is a comprehensive and large and complicated set of issues,” Mr. Grossman, the United States’ special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said in a news conference here on Sunday after meeting with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan.

He repeatedly reassured the Afghans that any peace talks would be “Afghans talking to Afghans.”

“Only Afghans can decide the future of Afghanistan,” he said.

What is obvious, however, is that the first steps are being taken by American officials, working through the Persian Gulf state of Qatar, and President Karzai’s aides had expressed concern that they might be sidelined.

The American envoy repeatedly emphasized that the Taliban have not explicitly said that they would participate in peace talks. While they have enthusiastically and publicly endorsed opening an office in Qatar, they have yet to clarify that it would be used for peace talks rather than, as some have feared, to enhance their international prestige while they wait out the American military withdrawal in 2014.

In addition, Mr. Grossman said, the Taliban would have to publicly renounce their links with international terrorists before talks could begin.

The Taliban also set a condition for opening an office in Qatar, saying that it would do so on the condition that the United States release Taliban prisoners from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Afghan officials have long advocated such a release as part of a peace process and on Sunday endorsed that idea. Deputy Foreign Minister Jawed Ludin went a step further, saying that Afghanistan would support the idea of transferring Taliban prisoners from Guantánamo to Qatar.

Illustrating how far apart the parties are, Mr. Grossman said the United States had not made any decision about releasing prisoners.

“This is an issue in the United States of law, something on which we would want to consult our Congress,” he said. “We have not made any decisions on this.”

Mr. Ludin also said the Afghan government had invited a Qatari delegation to Kabul, Afghanistan, to discuss the Taliban office, and Mr. Grossman seconded the idea of discussions between the Qataris and the Afghans.

Afghan officials had complained that Qatar had not only never consulted with them, buthad yet to open an embassy in Afghanistan.

Mr. Ludin and Mr. Grossman said that Pakistan’s participation was crucial to any peace process. Mr. Grossman sought to play down Pakistan’s refusal to meet with him during this trip, which had been billed as an effort to prepare for peace talks by talking with regional leaders. However, he said, echoing Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, “There really can’t be a comprehensive peace process unless Pakistan is part of it.”

He added, “I would be happy to meet them at any time or any place.”

Do Drones Undermine Democracy?

Washington

IN democracies like ours, there have always been deep bonds between the public and its wars. Citizens have historically participated in decisions to take military action, through their elected representatives, helping to ensure broad support for wars and a willingness to share the costs, both human and economic, of enduring them.

In America, our Constitution explicitly divided the president’s role as commander in chief in war from Congress’s role in declaring war. Yet these links and this division of labor are now under siege as a result of a technology that our founding fathers never could have imagined.

Just 10 years ago, the idea of using armed robots in war was the stuff of Hollywood fantasy. Today, the United States military has more than 7,000 unmanned aerial systems, popularly called drones. There are 12,000 more on the ground. Last year, they carried out hundreds of strikes — both covert and overt — in six countries, transforming the way our democracy deliberates and engages in what we used to think of as war.

We don’t have a draft anymore; less than 0.5 percent of Americans over 18 serve in the active-duty military. We do not declare war anymore; the last time Congress actually did so was in 1942 — against Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. We don’t buy war bonds or pay war taxes anymore. During World War II, 85 million Americans purchased war bonds that brought the government $185 billion; in the last decade, we bought none and instead gave the richest 5 percent of Americans a tax break.

And now we possess a technology that removes the last political barriers to war. The strongest appeal of unmanned systems is that we don’t have to send someone’s son or daughter into harm’s way. But when politicians can avoid the political consequences of the condolence letter — and the impact that military casualties have on voters and on the news media — they no longer treat the previously weighty matters of war and peace the same way.

For the first 200 years of American democracy, engaging in combat and bearing risk — both personal and political — went hand in hand. In the age of drones, that is no longer the case.

Today’s unmanned systems are only the beginning. The original Predator, which went into service in 1995, lacked even GPS and was initially unarmed; newer models can take off and land on their own, and carry smart sensors that can detect a disruption in the dirt a mile below the plane and trace footprints back to an enemy hide-out.

There is not a single new manned combat aircraft under research and development at any major Western aerospace company, and the Air Force is training more operators of unmanned aerial systems than fighter and bomber pilots combined. In 2011, unmanned systems carried out strikes from Afghanistan to Yemen. The most notable of these continuing operations is the not-so-covert war in Pakistan, where the United States has carried out more than 300 drone strikes since 2004.

Yet this operation has never been debated in Congress; more than seven years after it began, there has not even been a single vote for or against it. This campaign is not carried out by the Air Force; it is being conducted by the C.I.A. This shift affects everything from the strategy that guides it to the individuals who oversee it (civilian political appointees) and the lawyers who advise them (civilians rather than military officers).

It also affects how we and our politicians view such operations. President Obama’s decision to send a small, brave Navy Seal team into Pakistan for 40 minutes was described by one of his advisers as “the gutsiest call of any president in recent history.” Yet few even talk about the decision to carry out more than 300 drone strikes in the very same country.

I do not condemn these strikes; I support most of them. What troubles me, though, is how a new technology is short-circuiting the decision-making process for what used to be the most important choice a democracy could make. Something that would have previously been viewed as a war is simply not being treated like a war.

THE change is not limited to covert action. Last spring, America launched airstrikes on Libya as part of a NATO operation to prevent Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s government from massacring civilians. In late March, the White House announced that the American military was handing over combat operations to its European partners and would thereafter play only a supporting role.

The distinction was crucial. The operation’s goals quickly evolved from a limited humanitarian intervention into an air war supporting local insurgents’ efforts at regime change. But it had limited public support and no Congressional approval.When the administration was asked to explain why continuing military action would not be a violation of the War Powers Resolution — a Vietnam-era law that requires notifying Congress of military operations within 48 hours and getting its authorization after 60 days — the White House argued that American operations did not “involve the presence of U.S. ground troops, U.S. casualties or a serious threat thereof.” But they did involve something we used to think of as war: blowing up stuff, lots of it.

Starting on April 23, American unmanned systems were deployed over Libya. For the next six months, they carried out at least 146 strikes on their own. They also identified and pinpointed the targets for most of NATO’s manned strike jets. This unmanned operation lasted well past the 60-day deadline of the War Powers Resolution, extending to the very last airstrike that hit Colonel Qaddafi’s convoy on Oct. 20 and led to his death.

Choosing to make the operation unmanned proved critical to initiating it without Congressional authorization and continuing it with minimal public support. On June 21, when NATO’s air war was lagging, an American Navy helicopter was shot down by pro-Qaddafi forces. This previously would have been a disaster, with the risk of an American aircrew being captured or even killed. But the downed helicopter was an unmanned Fire Scout, and the story didn’t even make the newspapers the next day.

Congress has not disappeared from all decisions about war, just the ones that matter. The same week that American drones were carrying out their 145th unauthorized airstrike in Libya, the president notified Congress that he had deployed 100 Special Operations troops to a different part of Africa.

This small unit was sent to train and advise Ugandan forces battling the cultish Lord’s Resistance Army and was explicitly ordered not to engage in combat. Congress applauded the president for notifying it about this small noncombat mission but did nothing about having its laws ignored in the much larger combat operation in Libya.

We must now accept that technologies that remove humans from the battlefield, fromunmanned systems like the Predator to cyberweapons like the Stuxnet computer worm, are becoming the new normal in war.

And like it or not, the new standard we’ve established for them is that presidents need to seek approval only for operations that send people into harm’s way — not for those that involve waging war by other means.

WITHOUT any actual political debate, we have set an enormous precedent, blurring the civilian and military roles in war and circumventing the Constitution’s mandate for authorizing it. Freeing the executive branch to act as it chooses may be appealing to some now, but many future scenarios will be less clear-cut. And each political party will very likely have a different view, depending on who is in the White House.

Unmanned operations are not “costless,” as they are too often described in the news media and government deliberations. Even worthy actions can sometimes have unintended consequences. Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square bomber, was drawn into terrorism by the very Predator strikes in Pakistan meant to stop terrorism.

Similarly, C.I.A. drone strikes outside of declared war zones are setting a troubling precedent that we might not want to see followed by the close to 50 other nations that now possess the same unmanned technology — including China, Russia, Pakistan and Iran.

A deep deliberation on war was something the framers of the Constitution sought to build into our system. Yet on Tuesday, when President Obama talks about his wartime accomplishments during the State of the Union address, Congress will have to admit that its role has been reduced to the same part it plays during the president’s big speech. These days, when it comes to authorizing war, Congress generally sits there silently, except for the occasional clapping. And we do the same at home.

Last year, I met with senior Pentagon officials to discuss the many tough issues emerging from our growing use of robots in war. One of them asked, “So, who then is thinking about all this stuff?”

America’s founding fathers may not have been able to imagine robotic drones, but they did provide an answer. The Constitution did not leave war, no matter how it is waged, to the executive branch alone.

In a democracy, it is an issue for all of us.

Is Our Economy Healing?

How goes the state of the union? Well, the state of the economy remains terrible. Three years after President Obama’s inauguration and two and a half years since the official end of the recession, unemployment remains painfully high.

But there are reasons to think that we’re finally on the (slow) road to better times. And we wouldn’t be on that road if Mr. Obama had given in to Republican demands that he slash spending, or the Federal Reserve had given in to Republican demands that it tighten money.

Why am I letting a bit of optimism break through the clouds? Recent economic data have been a bit better, but we’ve already had several false dawns on that front. More important, there’s evidence that the two great problems at the root of our slump — the housing bust and excessive private debt — are finally easing.

On housing: as everyone now knows (but oh, the abuse heaped on anyone pointing it out while it was happening!), we had a monstrous housing bubble between 2000 and 2006. Home prices soared, and there was clearly a lot of overbuilding. When the bubble burst, construction — which had been the economy’s main driver during the alleged “Bush boom” — plunged.

But the bubble began deflating almost six years ago; house prices are back to 2003 levels. And after a protracted slump in housing starts, America now looks seriously underprovided with houses, at least by historical standards.

So why aren’t people going out and buying? Because the depressed state of the economy leaves many people who would normally be buying homes either unable to afford them or too worried about job prospects to take the risk.

But the economy is depressed, in large part, because of the housing bust, which immediately suggests the possibility of a virtuous circle: an improving economy leads to a surge in home purchases, which leads to more construction, which strengthens the economy further, and so on. And if you squint hard at recent data, it looks as if something like that may be starting: home sales are up, unemployment claims are down, and builders’ confidence is rising.

Furthermore, the chances for a virtuous circle have been rising, because we’ve made significant progress on the debt front.

That’s not what you hear in public debate, of course, where all the focus is on rising government debt. But anyone who has looked seriously at how we got into this slump knows that private debt, especially household debt, was the real culprit: it was the explosion of household debt during the Bush years that set the stage for the crisis. And the good news is that this private debt has declined in dollar terms, and declined substantially as a percentage of G.D.P., since the end of 2008.

There are, of course, still big risks — above all, the risk that trouble in Europe could derail our own incipient recovery. And thereby hangs a tale — a tale told by a recent report from the McKinsey Global Institute.

The report tracks progress on “deleveraging,” the process of bringing down excessive debt levels. It documents substantial progress in the United States, which it contrasts with failure to make progress in Europe. And while the report doesn’t say this explicitly, it’s pretty clear why Europe is doing worse than we are: it’s because European policy makers have been afraid of the wrong things.

In particular, the European Central Bank has been worrying about inflation — even raising interest rates during 2011, only to reverse course later in the year — rather than worrying about how to sustain economic recovery. And fiscal austerity, which is supposed to limit the increase in government debt, has depressed the economy, making it impossible to achieve urgently needed reductions in private debt. The end result is that for all their moralizing about the evils of borrowing, the Europeans aren’t making any progress against excessive debt — whereas we are.

Back to the U.S. situation: my guarded optimism should not be taken as a statement that all is well. We have already suffered enormous, unnecessary damage because of an inadequate response to the slump. We have failed to provide significant mortgage relief, which could have moved us much more quickly to lower debt. And even if my hoped-for virtuous circle is getting under way, it will be years before we get to anything resembling full employment.

But things could have been worse; they would have been worse if we had followed the policies demanded by Mr. Obama’s opponents. For as I said at the beginning, Republicans have been demanding that the Fed stop trying to bring down interest rates and that federal spending be slashed immediately — which amounts to demanding that we emulate Europe’s failure.

And if this year’s election brings the wrong ideology to power, America’s nascent recovery might well be snuffed out.

Showtime at the Apollo

FOR eight seconds, we saw the president we had craved for three years: cool, joyous, funny, connected.

“I, I’m so in love with you,” Barack Obama crooned to a thrilled crowd at a fund-raiser at the Apollo in Harlem on Thursday night, doing a seductive imitation as Al Green himself looked on.

The song would make a good campaign anthem: “Let’s stay together, lovin’ you whether, whether times are good or bad, happy or sad.” Don’t break up, turn around and make up.

Times have been bad and sad, and The One did not turn out to be a messiah, just a mortal politician who ruefully jokes that his talent is hitting the “sweet spot” where he makes no one happy, neither allies nor opponents.

The man who became famous with a speech declaring that we were one America, not opposing teams of red and blue states, presides over an America more riven by blue and red than ever.

The man who came to Washington on a wave of euphoria has had a presidency with all the joy of a root canal, dragged down by W.’s recklessness and his own inability to read America’s panic and its thirst for a strong leader.

In an interview with Fareed Zakaria for this week’s Time cover story, the president is maddeningly naïve.

Asked about his cool, aloof style and his unproductive relationship with John Boehner, Obama replied: “You know, the truth is, actually, when it comes to Congress, the issue is not personal relationships. My suspicion is that this whole critique has to do with the fact that I don’t go to a lot of Washington parties. And as a consequence, the Washington press corps maybe just doesn’t feel like I’m in the mix enough with them, and they figure, well, if I’m not spending time with them, I must be cold and aloof. The fact is, I’ve got a 13-year-old and 10-year-old daughter.”

Reagan didn’t socialize with the press. He spent his evenings with Nancy, watching TV with dinner trays. But he knew that to transcend, you can’t condescend.

The portrait of the first couple in Jodi Kantor’s new book, “The Obamas,” bristles with aggrievement and the rational president’s disdain for the irrational nature of politics, the press and Republicans. Despite what his rivals say, the president and the first lady do believe in American exceptionalism — their own, and they feel overassaulted and underappreciated.

We disappointed them.

As Michelle said to Oprah in an interview she did with the president last May: “I always told the voters, the question isn’t whether Barack Obama is ready to be president. The question is whether we’re ready. And that continues to be the question we have to ask ourselves.”

They still believed, as their friend Valerie Jarrett once said, that Obama was “just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”

As Kantor reports, when the president met with Democratic members of Congress who had lost their seats in the midterms because of an incoherent White House economic and jobs strategy, he did not seem to comprehend the anxiety that had spawned the Tea Party, or feel any regret. Jim Oberstar, who lost his long-held Minnesota perch, recalled Obama’s saying, “In the end, this is for the greater good of the country.”

Who knew, in the exuberance of 2008, that America was electing an introvert? And that one who touched so many felt above the touchy-feely-gritty parts of politics?

Asked last week by Piers Morgan how he got on with Obama, Jimmy Carter — one of two living Democratic ex-presidents — replied, “We don’t really have any relationship.” The Clintons have not been courted with dinners in the private residence either.

Kantor writes that the Obamas, feeling misunderstood, burrowed into “self-imposed exile” — a “bubble within the bubble” — with their small circle of Chicago friends, who reinforced the idea that “the American public just did not appreciate their exceptional leader.”

She reports that Marty Nesbitt indignantly told his fellow Obama pal Eric Whitaker that the president “could get 70 or 80 percent of the vote anywhere but the U.S.”

The Obamas, especially Michelle, have radiated the sense that Americans do not appreciate what they sacrifice by living in a gilded cage. They’ve forgotten Rule No. 1 of politics: No one sheds tears for anyone lucky enough to live at the White House. And after four or eight years of public service, you are assured membership in the 1 percent club.

The Obamas truly feel like victims. But Newt Gingrich, who campaigns by attacking the culture of victimization, plays one on stage. He soared at the Charleston CNN debate by brazenly proclaiming himself the victim of “the elite media protecting Barack Obama” (the same Obama who told Time he was victimized by the press). Newt’s gambit was a calculated way of deflecting attention from a charge by his second wife, Marianne, that the family values he preaches are hypocritical platitudes, given his cheating ways with two wives he divorced when they were ill.

Could 2012, remarkably, be a race between two powerful victims yearning to be lonely at the top?

A Good Candidate Is Hard to Find

THERE are 300 million people in the United States of America. There are millions of political activists, volunteers, organizers and would-be officeholders. There are hundreds of thousands of elected officials. Yet somehow, out of all this multitude, the Republican Party has been unable to find a candidate for the White House in 2012 who inspires anything but weary resignation from its voters.

What’s remarkable is how often this seems to happen. As weak as this year’s Republican field has proved, it’s not that much weaker than a number of recent presidential vintages, from the Democrats’ lineups in 1988 and 2004 to the Republican field in 1996. In presidential politics, the great talents (a Clinton, a Reagan) seem to be the exception; a march of Dole-Dukakis-Mondale mediocrity is closer to the rule.

The problem, perhaps, is that a successful presidential campaign calls on a trio of talents that only rarely overlap. Being a master politician in a mass democracy, in this sense, is a bit like being a brilliant filmmaker who’s somehow also a great economist, or a Nobel-winning scientist who writes best-selling novels on the side.

First, a great politician needs the gift of management. A would-be president has to be the C.E.O. of his or her campaign, with a flair for fund-raising, an eye for talent, and a keen sense of when to micromanage and when to delegate. This is the arm-twisting, organization-building, endorsement-corralling side of presidential politics, and not surprisingly it tends to favor insiders and deal-makers and old Washington hands.

But successful insiders and deal-makers are rarely comfortable with the more public, rhetorical, self-advertising side of politics. The great manager is unlikely to be a great persuader, capable of seducing undecided voters with his empathy, or inspiring them with what George H. W. Bush (who lacked it) called “the vision thing.” He’s also unlikely to be a great demagogue, capable of demonizing his enemies and convincing his supporters that they stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord. The manager can play these roles, but there will always be a hint of irony, a touch of phoniness, a sense that he’d much rather get back to the inside game.

Nor do the gifts of persuasion necessarily overlap with the gifts of demagoguery. Quite the reverse: The politician who’s good at reaching out to the unconverted is usually mistrusted by his own base, and the politician whose us-versus-them rhetoric inspires devotion among ideologues rarely finds it easy to pivot to a more transcendent, unifying style. If Jon Huntsman had a little more Sarah Palin in him, for instance, or Palin a bit more Huntsman, one of them might have been the 2012 Republican nominee. But their respective gifts are rarely shared in a single personality.

When a politician somehow hits the manager-persuader-demagogue trifecta, he can seem unstoppable. (See Roosevelt, Franklin, and his four terms in office.) But just going two for three is usually enough to create an immensely formidable candidate.

Both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, for instance, were great persuaders and great demagogues — they could woo with high-minded appeals one moment and twist the partisan knife the next — and that combination more than compensated for their weaknesses as managers. Dwight Eisenhower wasn’t much of a demagogue, but he excelled at playing the unifier in public and at organizational hardball behind closed doors. Richard Nixon’s appeal to voters’ better angels always felt forced, but he could out-organize and out-demonize just about anyone — at least until his paranoia infected his management style, and undid everything he’d built.

The losers of our presidential history, on the other hand, usually have only one gift out of three. They’re good managers, more often than not, whose organizations outlast demagogues and persuaders in the primaries but who can neither rally the base nor inspire the center in the general election. Thus Walter Mondale, victorious over Jesse Jackson and Gary Hart but crushed by Reagan; thus Bob Dole and Michael Dukakis; thus John Kerry in 2004.

This is the path that Mitt Romney, managerial to his core, seems to be treading in 2012. The question is what kind of opponent he’ll find waiting in November. In 2008, Barack Obama seemed to have almost F.D.R.-like gifts: He out-managed, out-inspired and out-demagogued both Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

But the presidency, unexpectedly, has exposed his limits as a communicator. Now when Obama demonizes, it seems clumsy; when he tries to persuade, it falls on deaf ears. Unlike Reagan and Clinton, the two masters, he seems unable to either bully or inspire.

What Obama has left, though, is the same capable, even ruthless organization that helped him over the top last time around. Maybe he’ll rediscover the old 2008 magic as well. But if not, the 2012 election is shaping up to be the most wearying sort of American presidential campaign: a clash of two managers, slogging their way toward a prize that a stronger candidate might have taken in a walk.

American Voters: Still Up for Grabs

A Washington Post-ABC News poll released on Friday found that two-thirds of Americans would consider voting for a third-party presidential candidate, while 48 percent definitely wanted a third party in the race. Now what does that tell you? It tells you that with the campaign about to go into full swing, as the president delivers his State of the Union address next week, voters are still casting about for a leader with a winning message. I can save both parties a lot of money. I am one of those voters, and I can tell you exactly for whom I want to vote — and I don’t think I’m alone.

I want to vote for a candidate who advocates an immediate investment in infrastructure that will create jobs and upgrade America for the 21st century — ultrafast bandwidth, highways, airports, public schools, mass transit — and combines that with a long-term plan to fix our fiscal imbalances at the real scale of the problem, a plan that could be phased in as the economy recovers.

On the latter point, I am talking about the Bowles-Simpson bipartisan deficit reduction plan — or something equally serious and with a chance of bipartisan support. President Obama has proposed smart infrastructure investments, but he has not paired them with a credible long-term deficit-reduction plan, and the only chance of passage in Congress is to have both. Mitt Romney is not even close.

Christina Romer, the former chairwoman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, put it best when she told this newspaper on Dec. 31 that the U.S. “faces two daunting economic problems: an unsustainable long-run budget deficit and persistent high unemployment. ... Over the next 20 to 30 years, rising health care costs and the retirement of the baby boomers are projected to cause deficits that make the current one look puny. At the rate we’re going, the United States would almost surely default on its debt one day. ... We already have a blueprint for a bipartisan solution. The Bowles-Simpson commission hashed out a sensible plan of spending cuts, entitlement program reforms and revenue increases that would shave $4 trillion off the deficit over the next decade. It shares the pain of needed deficit reduction, while protecting the most vulnerable and maintaining investments in our future productivity.

“But we can’t focus on the deficit alone,” added Romer. “Persistent unemployment is destroying the lives and wasting the talents of more than 13 million Americans. Pairing additional strong stimulus with a plan to reduce the deficit would likely pack a particularly powerful punch for confidence and spending.”

Second, I want to vote for a candidate who is committed to reforming taxes, and cutting spending, in a fair way. The rich must pay more, but everyone has to pay something. We are all in this together.

Third, I want to vote for a candidate who has an inspirational vision, not just a plan to balance the budget. People will sacrifice to make this country great again if they think you have a real plan for American success in the 21st century. And that plan is obvious. We’re not going to be about launching one big moon shot anymore. We need to be building a country where everyone in the world wants to come to launch their own moon shot — their own company, their own start-up — because we have the best immigration policies, regulations, schools and incentives. We can’t tax or cut our way to prosperity and jobs. We have to invent our way there. We need both more “Made in America” and “Imagined in America.”

Finally, I want to vote for a candidate who supports a minimum floor of public financing of presidential, Senate and House campaigns. Money in politics is out of control today. Our Congress has become a forum for legalized bribery. Americans are losing faith in the instruments of government because they think the game is rigged by big money — and they’re right.

Any candidate with that four-part agenda would win — and so would the country, because he would win with a mandate to do what needs doing.

“The people are so far ahead of the politicians,” says the Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg. His polling, he adds, shows that many Americans today “think that China, Germany and Brazil have strategies for success, and that we don’t. But they are looking for that. They are looking for a leader who will be really bold.”

People have been misled by months of crazy G.O.P. debates that make the country look so much more divided, small-minded and unwilling to sacrifice to fix our problems than it actually is. That’s why I’d bet anything that the first candidate who steps out of the cartoonish politics of destruction — “Romney is just a capitalist vulture. Obama is a Kenyan socialist” — and shocks the public by going radically responsible, radically honest, radically demanding and radically aspirational, along the lines above, will be our next president.

I hope it is Obama, because I agree with him on so many other issues. But if it’s Romney, he’d deserve to win. And, if by some miracle, both run that campaign, and the 2012 contest is about two such competing visions, then put every dollar you own in the U.S. stock market. It will go up a gazillion points.

Justices Say GPS Tracker Violated Privacy Rights

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday ruled unanimously that the police violated the Constitution when they placed a Global Positioning System tracking device on a suspect’s car and monitored its movements for 28 days.

A set of overlapping opinions in the case collectively suggested that a majority of the justices are prepared to apply broad privacy principles to bring the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches into the digital age, when law enforcement officials can gather extensive information without ever entering an individual’s home or vehicle.

Walter Dellinger, a lawyer for the defendant in the case and a former acting United States solicitor general, said the decision was “a signal event in Fourth Amendment history.”

“Law enforcement is now on notice,” Mr. Dellinger said, “that almost any use of GPS electronic surveillance of a citizen’s movement will be legally questionable unless a warrant is obtained in advance.”

An overlapping array of justices were divided on the rationale for the decision, with the majority saying the problem was the placement of the device on private property.

But five justices also discussed their discomfort with the government’s use of or access to various modern technologies, including video surveillance in public places, automatic toll collection systems on highways, devices that allow motorists to signal for roadside assistance, location data from cellphone towers and records kept by online merchants.

The case concerned Antoine Jones, who was the owner of a Washington nightclub when the police came to suspect him of being part of a cocaine-selling operation. They placed a tracking device on his Jeep Grand Cherokee without a valid warrant, tracked his movements for a month and used the evidence they gathered to convict him of conspiring to sell cocaine. He was sentenced to life in prison.

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overturned his conviction, saying the sheer amount of information that had been collected violated the Fourth Amendment, which bars unreasonable searches. “Repeated visits to a church, a gym, a bar or a bookie tell a story not told by any single visit, as does one’s not visiting any of those places in the course of a month,” Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg wrote for the appeals court panel.

The Supreme Court affirmed that decision, but on a different ground. “We hold that the government’s installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a ‘search,’ ” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor joined the majority opinion.

“It is important to be clear about what occurred in this case,” Justice Scalia went on. “The government physically occupied private property for the purpose of obtaining information. We have no doubt that such a physical intrusion would have been considered a ‘search’ within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment when it was adopted.”

When the case was argued in November, a lawyer for the federal government said the number of times the federal authorities used GPS devices to track suspects was “in the low thousands annually.”

Vernon Herron, a former Maryland state trooper now on the staff of the University of Maryland’s Center for Health and Homeland Security, said state and local law enforcement officials used GPS and similar devices “all the time,” adding that “this type of technology is very useful for narcotics and terrorism investigations.”

Monday’s decision thus places a significant burden on widely used law enforcement surveillance techniques, though the authorities remain free to seek warrants from judges authorizing the surveillance.

In a concurrence for four justices, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. faulted the majority for trying to apply 18th-century legal concepts to 21st-century technologies. What should matter, he said, is the contemporary reasonable expectation of privacy.

“The use of longer-term GPS monitoring in investigations of most offenses,” Justice Alito wrote, “impinges on expectations of privacy.” Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan joined the concurrence.

“We need not identify with precision the point at which the tracking of this vehicle became a search, for the line was surely crossed before the four-week mark,” Justice Alito wrote. “Other cases may present more difficult questions.”

Justice Scalia said the majority did not mean to suggest that its property-rights theory of the Fourth Amendment displaced the one focused on expectations of privacy.

“It may be that achieving the same result through electronic means, without an accompanying trespass, is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, but the present case does not require us to answer that question,” he wrote.

Justice Sotomayor joined the majority opinion, agreeing that many questions could be left for another day “because the government’s physical intrusion on Jones’s Jeep supplies a narrower basis for decision.”

But she left little doubt that she would have joined Justice Alito’s analysis had the issue he addressed been the exclusive one presented in the case.

“Physical intrusion is now unnecessary to many forms of surveillance,” Justice Sotomayor wrote.

She added that “it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties.”

“People disclose the phone numbers that they dial or text to their cellular providers; the URLs that they visit and the e-mail addresses with which they correspond to their Internet service providers; and the books, groceries and medications they purchase to online retailers,” she wrote. “I, for one, doubt that people would accept without complaint the warrantless disclosure to the government of a list of every Web site they had visited in the last week, or month, or year.”

Justice Alito listed other “new devices that permit the monitoring of a person’s movements” that fit uneasily with traditional Fourth Amendment privacy analysis.

“In some locales,” he wrote, “closed-circuit television video monitoring is becoming ubiquitous. On toll roads, automatic toll collection systems create a precise record of the movements of motorists who choose to make use of that convenience. Many motorists purchase cars that are equipped with devices that permit a central station to ascertain the car’s location at any time so that roadside assistance may be provided if needed and the car may be found if it is stolen.”

Gingrich Wins South Carolina Primary, Upending G.O.P. Race

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Surprising his rivals and scrambling the Republican race for the presidency, Newt Gingrich won the pivotal South Carolina primary Saturday, just 10 days after a distant finish in New Hampshire left the impression that his candidacy was all but dead.

It was a striking development in a months-long Republican nominating contest that has seen the restive base of conservative voters ping-pong among the alternatives to the party establishment’s favorite, Mitt Romney.

With late-night tallies showing Mr. Gingrich beating Mr. Romney by 12 percentage points, it was no small win. Exit polls showed Mr. Gingrich had done it with a formidable coalition of groups that have resisted Mr. Romney’s candidacy all election season long: evangelical Christians, Tea Party supporters and those who call themselves “very conservative.”

Mr. Gingrich now heads to Florida, where he faces a daunting test in seeking to capitalize on his new status as the candidate who poses a singular, insurgent threat to Mr. Romney. He used his victory speech to cast himself as the champion of the party’s anti-establishment wing, reprising his popular castigation of the news media and other “elites” while keeping his focus on the defeat of President Obama.

Standing beside his wife, Callista, as he addressed an exuberant crowd in Columbia, Mr. Gingrich attributed his victory to “something very fundamental that I wish the powers that be in the news media will take seriously: The American people feel that they have elites who have been trying for a half-century to force us to quit being American and become some kind of other system.”

Complimenting the other candidates, he repeated his criticism of Mr. Obama as the best “food stamp president” in history, saying he, by contrast, would be the “best paycheck president.”

The crowd greeted Mr. Gingrich with chants of “Newt can win,” their answer to the party establishment’s doubts about his ability to ultimately defeat Mr. Romney.

But for a night, at least, there was no arguing with the results.

Just 10 days before, Mr. Romney left New Hampshire as the presumed front-runner. He now moves on to the next fight claiming just one of the first three nominating contests, having been stripped last week of his incorrectly declared victory in the Iowa caucuses. That win was instead given to Rick Santorum, who placed third in South Carolina on Saturday.

“This race is getting to be even more interesting,” Mr. Romney, with circles under his eyes and an unfamiliar pallor after days of hard campaigning here, told his supporters in Columbia. “This is a hard fight because there is so much worth fighting for. We’ve still got a long way to go and a lot of work to do.”

But Mr. Romney still has a considerable advantage over Mr. Gingrich when it comes to money and organization, both of which will be vital in the expensive campaign state of Florida, which has its primary on Jan. 31. And Florida is different political terrain from South Carolina, where Mr. Gingrich had cultivated the Tea Party movement’s leaders since its start.

Mr. Romney and the “super PAC” supporting him have been advertising heavily in Florida for weeks, including on Spanish-language television. An analysis by Kantar Media/CMAG shows that Mr. Romney has spent at least $4 million on advertising there.

Mr. Romney’s team was expected to come into the state trumpeting major endorsements and reasserting his status as a favorite of the biggest names in Republican politics. But his hopes of landing the coveted endorsement of former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida were dashed when Mr. Bush said he would not make an endorsement. He told Bloomberg News that Mr. Romney, Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Santorum had all sought his support.

He called on the candidates to leave the “circular firing squad” of their rivalry and make sure that the tone of their debate did not alienate independent voters, especially onimmigration. And Mr. Romney should release his tax returns while competing in Florida, Mr. Bush said.

Mr. Gingrich and his supportive super PAC — which pounded Mr. Romney here relentlessly — have not advertised in Florida yet, though Mr. Gingrich has visited the state often. On one visit last week, he told Floridians that his plan was to win in South Carolina and then compete strongly there. It seemed unlikely then.

Mr. Gingrich seized on his South Carolina victory less than an hour after the polls closed.

“Thank you South Carolina! Help me deliver the knockout punch in Florida. Join our Moneybomb and donate now,” he wrote on his Twitter feed. His campaign placed a large ad on the Web site the Drudge Report, popular among conservatives, seeking donations as well.The super PAC supporting Mr. Gingrich, Winning Our Future, indicated it was ready to run advertisements in Florida arguing, among other things, that Mr. Obama would be able to eviscerate Mr. Romney in debates by holding his more liberal past positions against him.With a third-place finish here, former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, said he, too, would carry on to Florida.

It was a disappointing night for Mr. Santorum. He was hoping to use his newly declared victory in Iowa, and his expected appeal to religious conservatives in the state, to be the leading challenger to Mr. Romney.

Sounding very much like the campaign of Jon M. Huntsman Jr., after he came in third in New Hampshire — and dropped out several days later— Mr. Santorum’s aides said he would try to compete in several states in an effort to collect delegates and emerge as the true conservative alternative to Mr. Romney.

“We will go to Florida, and then we’re going to Arizona!” Mr. Santorum said at a rally here at The Citadel. “I’m going to go out and talk about how we’re going to have a Republican Party, a conservative movement, that makes sure that everyone in America has the opportunity to rise.”

The campaign of Representative Ron Paul of Texas, who came in fourth, has indicated that it intends to work only lightly in Florida and focus instead on races in the Western and Mountain states. In his concession speech in Columbia, Mr. Paul indirectly dismissed Mr. Gingrich as one of the also-ran candidates who have gone “up and then down, up and then down” in this contest since its start.

Mr. Gingrich intends to stay in front this time.

His victory represents a decisive revival for a candidacy that had been declared dead at least twice, and that came back to life in the last days before the primary here partly because of his commanding debate performances. His aides are using the debates as a selling point in their argument that Mr. Gingrich provides the best challenge to Mr. Obama.

His win effectively resets the nominating contest. Still, Mr. Romney’s aides remain confident that their advantages in Florida will deliver an important and re-energizing victory there.

But as Mr. Gingrich began to climb rapidly in polls this week, and Mr. Romney’s aides prepared for defeat, they said they would not be so bold as to predict an easy time in Florida, given how the momentum could affect the dynamic there. It is Mr. Gingrich who now has the momentum, and, they acknowledge, that could significantly alter the playing field in Florida.

If nothing else, the fact that just over half of South Carolina voters said in exit polls that they made up their minds at the last minute shows just how fluid and restive the Republican electorate remains — a troubling sign for Mr. Romney that Mr. Gingrich is now poised to capitalize upon.

And after being so confident just 10 days ago, the Romney campaign is now fighting not only the perception that Mr. Romney cannot consolidate broad support among conservative voters, but also at least one troubling fact: No Republican has gone on to win the party’s nomination without winning South Carolina since before 1980.

Exit polls showed two key factors in Mr. Romney’s loss: religion and viability. Pluralities of voters who said their priorities were Mr. Obama’s defeat in the fall or a nominee who shares their religious beliefs supported Mr. Gingrich, a Roman Catholic, over Mr. Romney, a Mormon. Over all, two-thirds of voters on Saturday considered themselves “conservative,” and 4 in 10 called themselves “very conservative,” larger percentages than did so in the New Hampshire primary.

Mr. Gingrich, according to exit polls, even beat Mr. Romney among groups that were believed to be solidly with Mr. Romney, chief among them women, debunking pre-primary day prognostications that news of his past marital problems would alienate female voters.

Speaking outside a polling station at the Hazel V. Parker Playground here in Charleston, Lynn Land, 61, said she decided to vote for Mr. Gingrich “at the very last second,” complimenting him for showing an ability to think on his feet at the debates. “He is a seasoned politician and will be able to debate Obama on an even level,” Mrs. Land said.