After someone with measles coughs or sneezes, the virus lingers for up to two hours after that person walks away.

"The thing about measles is that it's extremely contagious," said Anne Schuchat, director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. "Somebody could get measles without ever having been in the office at the same time as the first child."

The CDC Thursday announced a series of measles outbreaks between January and April 25 that resulted in 64 measles cases in the United States — the highest number reported in the same time period since 2001. Officials blame a spike in the number of travelers bringing measles in from Israel and Europe. Once in the United States, measles has been able to take hold because more and more people are choosing not to get vaccinated, Schuchat said.

Eleven of the U.S. residents who contracted measles were between the ages of 5 and 19 years old.

"My suggestion would be that summer camps oblige all foreign students to be immunized," said Dr. William Schaffner, chairman of the department of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University's School of Medicine in Tennessee.

His words are in keeping with the state's self-perception. Politicians, business titans, academics and environmental activists proudly point to four decades of environmentally conscious public policy – while maintaining a dynamic economy, arguably the eighth-largest on the planet, with a gross state product of more than $1.6 trillion.

In truth, the state's energy leadership is a mirage. Decades of environmental policies have made it heavily dependent on other states for power; generated crippling costs; and left the state vulnerable to periodic electricity shortages. Its economic growth has occurred not because of, but despite, those policies.

Since the early 1970s, California has instituted new efficiency standards for appliances and the construction of new buildings. It mandated aggressive conservation programs and required a certain percentage of the state's electricity to come from renewable sources like wind and solar, which it has subsidized. It implemented far-reaching regulations on emissions from car tailpipes and from stationary sources like factories. And it has moved to shut down the state's nuclear facilities.

For a time, it worked. Since the mid-1970s, California's economy has grown while per-capita energy consumption stayed flat – an astounding fact, considering that such consumption has increased by roughly 50% elsewhere in the country over the same period.

But consider the story of the Rancho Seco Nuclear Generating Station. Opened in 1975, it was capable of generating over 900 megawatts (MW) of electricity, enough to power upward of 900,000 homes. Fourteen years after powering up, the nuclear reactor shut down, thanks to fierce antinuclear opposition. Eventually, the facility was converted to solar power, and today generates a measly four MW of electricity. After millions of dollars in subsidies and other support, the entire state has less than 250 MW of solar capacity.

And, of course, the senator's speech does share one quality with Cooper Union, Gettysburg, the FDR Inaugural, Henry V at Agincourt, Socrates' Apology, etc.: It's history. He said, apropos the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, that "I could no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother." But last week Obama did disown him. So, great-speech-wise, it's a bit like Churchill promising to fight them on the beaches and never surrender, and then surrendering a month and a half later, and on a beach he decided not to fight on.

It was never a great speech. It was a simulacrum of a great speech written to flatter gullible pundits into hailing it as the real deal. It should be "required reading in classrooms," said Bob Herbert in the New York Times; it was "extraordinary" and "rhetorical magic," said Joe Klein in Time – which gets closer to the truth: As with most "magic," it was merely a trick of redirection.

Obama appeared to have made Jeremiah Wright vanish into thin air, but it turned out he was just under the heavily draped table waiting to pop up again. The speech was designed to take a very specific problem – the fact that Barack Obama, the Great Uniter, had sat in the pews of a neo-segregationist huckster for 20 years – and generalize it into some grand meditation on race in America. Sen. Obama looked America in the face and said: Who ya gonna believe? My "rhetorical magic" or your lyin' eyes?

That's an easy choice for the swooning bobbysoxers of the media. With less impressionable types, such as voters, Sen. Obama is having a tougher time. The Philly speech is emblematic of his most pressing problem: the gap – indeed, full-sized canyon – that's opening up between the rhetorical magic and the reality. That's the difference between a simulacrum and a genuinely great speech. The gaseous platitudes of hope and change and unity no longer seem to fit the choices of Obama's adult life. Oddly enough, the shrewdest appraisal of the senator's speechifying "magic" came from Jeremiah Wright himself. "He's a politician," said the reverend. "He says what he has to say as a politician. … He does what politicians do."