WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Obama’s Big Miscalculation.

Frank Fukuyama, no howling partisan, has tagged President Obama’s decision to circumvent Congress on immigration as a “bad call,” and while the President’s limited offer of a three-year temporary work authorization for people in the country illegally was not the worst or the most radical step he could have taken, Frank is right. This was the wrong step at the wrong time. At the very minimum, the President should have given the new Congress ninety days to act before going it alone. Failing to do so isn’t just a slap in the face of his Republican opponents; it is a slap in the face of the voters who no longer trust the President and his party on the big issues of national life.

If the new Congress proved unable or unwilling to act, the President’s step would have had at least an element of political legitimacy to it. As it is, this half-hearted, hobbled amnesty will likely join President Obama’s flawed health care law as a toxic legacy that will haunt the Democratic Party for years to come. Just as the President’s poor reputation was a millstone around the neck of many Democratic candidates in 2014, future Democratic candidates are going to run away from Obama’s memory, and their opponents will work to tag them with the heavy burden of a presidency that most Americans will want to forget. As a political brand, the name “Barack Obama” now risks drifting into Jimmy Carter territory and becoming a label that blights the prospects of the Democratic party and its candidates for years.

Moreover, as with the health care law, the President’s immigration policy doesn’t solve the underlying problems it addresses and makes the task of real reform more difficult. As often happens with our careful and deliberative President, he’s balanced so many concerns so nicely and split so many hairs so finely that the final product doesn’t get much done.

It’s almost as if he’s just not all that good at this Presidenting stuff.

WELL, WITH HILLARY IT’S MORE LIKE BEN-GAY AND GIN: Can any 2016 Democrat have that ‘new car smell’?

REPORTS THAT HE’LL BE REPLACED BY JONATHAN GRUBER ARE UNCONFIRMED: Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel To Resign. I’m no Hagel fan, but he’s been one of the less-incompetent members of the team. There have been signs that he was being marginalized for quite a while.

Perhaps as a favor to Hillary, Obama will offer the job to Jim Webb. Or maybe it would be a favor to Elizabeth Warren. . . .

GOOD: Criminal Justice Reform Brings Together Liberals, Conservatives.

AT AMAZON, Black Friday Deals in Movies & TV.

Plus, deals on Bosch Tools.

And, today only: up to 40% off on Baby Essentials.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Asians Get The Ivy League’s Jewish Treatment.

ELIANA JOHNSON: Rand Paul Hires McConnell Finance Director. Paul seems more comfortable with inside game than his father was, which is a big boost for his chances of being elected, of course.

LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Inspector General: 50% of IRS Employees With Outside Jobs Do Not Obtain Required Approval; 93% of Employee Computer Records Are Out of Date.

WELL, THAT’S BECAUSE THEY’RE DUMB: Michael Barone: Nobody is pushing Thomas Piketty’s policies to combat economic inequality. “America already has lots of economic redistribution. American voters evidently sense that more redistribution more would sap economic growth. They’re willing to throw a little to minimum wage earners, but they don’t want to kill the geese laying the golden eggs. Americans are not alone in feeling that way. You don’t see much demand for Piketty policies in other countries either.”

THIS IS SAD. Evelyn Rotier, matriarch of Rotier’s, dies at 94. I had lunch there the last time in was in Nashville, back in August.

SCIENCE: Women with workplace power are more depressed. Men, not so much.

Women with job authority — ones who have the ability to hire and fire people and influence over paychecks — also have significantly more symptoms of depression than women without this kind of power. At the same time, having job authority slightly decreased these symptoms in men.

The findings come from a study to be published in December’s Journal of Health and Social Behavior, authored by University of Texas at Austin sociologist Tetyana Pudrovska. While over the past few decades, there’s been an emphasis on getting more women into leadership roles, “surprisingly little empirical attention has been devoted to women’s experiences after they have obtained authority, and whether women automatically enjoyed the benefits on par with men,” Pudrovska said.

Hmm. We’ve already learned that women are on average less happy than they were in 1970. So perhaps this whole feminism project is about remaking society to suit the minority of women who are feminists, at the expense of the much greater number of women who are not.

UPDATE: From the comments:

I’ve seen many women succeed in the workplace, and it’s often because they married late or kids never happened (despite them wanting children). The long, uninterrupted career path is good for advancement but not necessarily happiness.

Likewise, this study was performed on Baby Boom women – the first wave to go into the workforce. The question is whether modern women would be just as depressed with leadership roles as previous women were, in an era wherein both men and women were not used to having woman bosses.

Good point — though on the female boss angle, preference for male over female bosses — especially among women — hasn’t declined.

Plus: “Feminism is a political herding mechanism for insecure women. It’s thus no surprise that (1) feminists tend to be insecure; and (2) they send messages that tend to enhance insecurity in other women.”

IF POLAND HAD NUKES, IT COULD SERVE AS A STABILIZING REGIONAL POWER IN THE FACE OF U.S. WEAKNESS: Finland feeling vulnerable amid Russian provocations.

YA THINK? Sharyl Attkisson: Faith In Government Has Declined Due To Obama Administration Lies.

YOU CAN’T JUDGE A MAN A FAILURE, EXCEPT IN REGARD TO WHAT HE’S TRYING TO ACCOMPLISH. Iran: Obama’s Biggest Failure Fails Again.

TMZ POLITICS SEEMS TO BE COVERING STUFF THAT OLD MEDIA WON’T:

Child rapist, Mr. Bean, aboard Air Force One with Barack Obama. #tcot pic.twitter.com/wY12m1qbC7

— TMZ Politics (@TMZ_Politics) November 22, 2014

Others are catching on:

@TMZ_Politics the child rapist and the Obama's are quite chummy – imagine the outrage if this was a republican donor pic.twitter.com/FdcRERfZDu

— RockPrincess (@Rockprincess818) November 22, 2014

Background here. I wonder how well he knows Bill Clinton?

Just think if MSM found a W. transcript on http://t.co/9VgpNTVcxv saying he's good friends w/ a child molester. #tcot pic.twitter.com/X2YtCXeZJ2

— TMZ Politics (@TMZ_Politics) November 23, 2014

Plus, Nancy Pelosi.

And a challenge:

Okay. @CNN journalists are hitting 'FAV' on all these Terry Bean posts. Let's see you actually report on it. #tcot

— TMZ Politics (@TMZ_Politics) November 23, 2014

Note: Not a verified TMZ account. . . .

MODERN MEDIA: Report: Bill Cosby’s Fixer at NBC Comes Forward. When it was Arkansas State Troopers, nobody believed this kind of story.

A COUPLE OF IDEAS FOR THE GOP IN RESPONDING TO OBAMA’S IMMIGRATION INITIATIVE: These would be embarrassing for Obama to veto, popular with the public, and a good idea anyway.

First, a much stricter prevailing-wage law for H1B visas, with big damages designed to make plaintiffs’ attorneys zero in on this area. You can import foreign help if you want, but you have to pay those Indian or Chinese software engineers the prevailing wage for American software engineers in Silicon Valley, rather than paying the pittance most companies pay now. (In one case, a Silicon Valley firm was paying $1.21 an hour.) There has been a lot of cheating on H1 visas, and this should help. The tech companies’ excuse for hiring immigrants is that they can’t find enough qualified Americans, not that they just want to pay sweatshop wages, though that excuse is bogus. Companies also draw out the H1B application process to keep workers under their thumbs and away from competitors, something called “handcuffing.” Maybe shortening the fuse on the application process there would be a good idea, too, or — again — creating damages that trial lawyers can exploit. (Most GOP types reflexively hate trial lawyers, but, like Kurt Schlichter, I think it’s better to have them working for you than against you). For more fun, make CEO’s and HR heads personally responsible for violations, a la Sarbanes-Oxley. . . .

Tech companies will hate this, but I don’t see any downside for Republicans in siding with employees against the super-wealthy of Silicon Valley. It might even split off some tech-industry support, dividing the Silicon Valley worker bees from the oligarchs. I have Democratic friends who work there and this is a really big issue among them. And who could be against paying a “living wage?” For added fun, have some hearings where fatcat Silicon Valley oligarchs are grilled about worker exploitation.

Second, a tax on remittances to Mexico and other countries from which we get a lot of illegal immigrants. Make it equal to the tax bracket of the average working American. Since they’re not paying taxes, it’s only fair for them to chip in while they’re earning money here. 25% sounds like a good number. And how can Obama veto a tax? Make him.

DAVID RIVKIN & ELIZABETH PRICE FOLEY: Obama’s Immigration Enablers: The administration’s Office of Legal Counsel endorsed a view of executive power never imagined by the Founders.

A few hours before announcing his new immigration policy, President Obama received an opinion blessing its legality from the Office of Legal Counsel. Regrettably, the OLC’s made-to-order legal analysis is shockingly flawed in five major respects.

First, the OLC justified the policy as a prioritization of government’s “limited resources.” But the executive order does more than prioritize. It rewrites existing law. Illegal immigrants won’t be deported if they aren’t a threat to national security, public safety or border security. Beyond these three categories, deportation may be pursued only if it serves an “important federal interest.”

Under current law, by contrast, anyone entering the U.S. illegally is a “deportable alien” who “shall, upon the order of the Attorney General, be removed.” The president’s policy transforms an entire category of aliens deemed deportable into two different categories, whereby some are deportable and some aren’t. This is a shift in kind, not merely degree.

A president prioritizing resources would do what previous presidents have done: enforce the entirety of immigration law, while allowing prosecutors to make case-by-case determinations. By announcing a global policy of nonenforcement against certain categories, Mr. Obama condones unlawful behavior, weakening the law’s deterrent impact, and allows lawbreakers to remain without fear of deportation. As he puts it, “All we’re saying is we are not going to deport you.” These individuals are no longer deportable, although Congress has declared them so. . . .

The OLC’s memo endorses a view of presidential power that has never been advanced by even the boldest presidential advocates. If this view holds, future presidents can unilaterally gut tax, environmental, labor or securities laws by enforcing only those portions with which they agree. This is a dangerous precedent that cannot be allowed to stand.

Well, we shall see.