Peggy Noonan

The story as I was told it is that in the early years of her prime ministership, Margaret Thatcher held a meeting with her aides and staff, all of whom were dominated by her, even awed. When it was over she invited her cabinet chiefs to join her at dinner in a nearby restaurant. They went, arrayed themselves around the table, jockeyed for her attention. A young waiter came and asked if they’d like to hear the specials. Mrs. Thatcher said, “I will have beef.”

Yes, said the waiter. “And the vegetables?”

“They will have beef too.”

Too good to check, as they say. It is certainly apocryphal, but I don’t want it to be. It captured her singular leadership style, which might be characterized as “unafraid.”

She was a leader.

Margaret Thatcher would no more have identified herself as a woman, or claimed special pleading that she was a mere frail girl, or asked you to sympathize with her because of her sex, than she would have called up the Kremlin and asked how quickly she could surrender.

She represented a movement. She was its head. She was great figure, a person in history, and she was a woman. She was in it for serious reasons, not to advance the claims of a gender but to reclaim for England its economic freedom, and return its political culture to common sense. Her rise wasn’t symbolic but actual.

In fact, she wasn’t so much a woman as a lady. I remember a gentleman who worked with her speaking of her allure, how she’d relax after a late-night meeting and you’d walk by and catch just the faintest whiff of perfume, smoke and scotch. She worked hard and was tough. One always imagined her lightly smacking some incompetent on the head with her purse, for she carried a purse, as a lady would. She is still tough. A Reagan aide told me that after she was incapacitated by a stroke she flew to Reagan’s funeral in Washington, went through the ceremony, flew with Mrs. Reagan to California for the burial, and never once on the plane removed her heels. That is tough.

The point is the big ones, the real ones, the Thatchers and Indira Gandhis and Golda Meirs and Angela Merkels, never play the boo-hoo game. They are what they are, but they don’t use what they are. They don’t hold up their sex as a feint: Why, he’s not criticizing me, he’s criticizing all women! Let us rise and fight the sexist cur.

When Hillary Clinton suggested that debate criticism of her came under the heading of men bullying a defenseless lass, an interesting thing happened. First Kate Michelman, the former head of NARAL and an Edwards supporter, hit her hard. “When unchallenged, in a comfortable, controlled situation, Sen. Clinton embraces her elevation into the ‘boys club.’ “ But when “legitimate questions” are asked, “she is quick to raise the white flag and look for a change in the rules.”

Then Mrs. Clinton changed tack a little and told a group of women in West Burlington, Iowa, that they were going to clean up Washington together: “Bring your vacuum cleaners, bring your brushes, bring your brooms, bring your mops.” It was all so incongruous—can anyone imagine the 20th century New Class professional Hillary Clinton picking up a vacuum cleaner? Isn’t that what downtrodden pink collar workers abused by the patriarchy are for?

*   *   *

But even better, and more startling, people began to giggle. At Mrs. Clinton, a woman who has never inspired much mirth. Suddenly they were remembering the different accents she has spoken with when in different parts of the country, and the weird laugh she has used on talk shows. A few days ago new poll numbers came out—neck and neck with Barack Obama in Iowa, her lead slipping in New Hampshire. There is a sense that Sen. Obama is rising, a sense for the first time in this election cycle that Mrs. Clinton just may be in a fight, a real one, one she could actually lose.

It’s all kind of wonderful, isn’t it? Someone indulged in special pleading and America didn’t buy it. It’s as if the country this week made it official: We now formally declare that the woman who uses the fact of her sex to manipulate circumstances is a jerk.

This is a victory for true feminism, in its old-fashioned sense of a simple assertion of the equality of men and women. We might not have so resoundingly reached this moment without Mrs. Clinton’s actions and statements. Thank you, Mrs. Clinton.

A word on toughness. Mrs. Clinton is certainly tough, to the point of hard. But toughness should have a purpose. In Mrs. Thatcher’s case, its purpose was to push through a program she thought would make life better in her country. Mrs. Clinton’s toughness seems to have no purpose beyond the personal accrual of power. What will she do with the power? Still unclear. It happens to be unclear in the case of several candidates, but with Mrs. Clinton there is a unique chasm between the ferocity and the purpose of the ferocity. There is something deeply unattractive in this, and it would be equally so if she were a man.

*   *   *

I wonder if Sen. Obama, as he makes his climb, understands the kind of quiet cheering he is beginning to garner from some Republicans, and from those not affiliated with either party. They see him as a Democrat who could cure the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton sickness.

I call it that because it seems to me now less like a dynastic tug of war than a symptom of deterioration, a lazy, unserious and faintly corrupt turn to be taken by the oldest and greatest democracy in the history of man. And I say sickness because on some level I think it is driven by a delusion: “We will be safe with these ruling families, whom we know so well.” But we won’t. They have no special magic. Dynasticism brings with it a sense of deterioration. It is dispiriting.

I am not sure of the salience of Mr. Obama’s new-generational approach. Mrs. Clinton’s generation, he suggests, is caught in the 1960s, fighting old battles, clinging to old divisions, frozen in time, and the way to get past it is to get past her. Maybe this will resonate. But I don’t think Mrs. Clinton is the exemplar of a generation, she is the exemplar of a quadrant within a generation, and it is the quadrant the rest of us of that generation do not like. They came from comfort and stability, visited poverty as part of a college program, fashionably disliked their country, and cultivated a bitterness that was wholly unearned. They went on to become investment bankers and politicians and enjoy wealth, power or both.

Mr. Obama should go after them, not a generation but a type, the smug and entitled. No one really likes them. They showed it this week.

The story isn’t that the Democrats finally took on Hillary Clinton. Nor is it that they were gentlemanly to the point of gingerly and tentative. There was an air of “Please, somebody kill her for me so I can jump in and show high minded compassion at her plight!”

Barack Obama, with his elegance and verbal fluency really did seem like that great and famous political figure from his home state of Illinois—Adlai Stevenson, who was not at all hungry, not at all mean, and operated at a step removed from the grubby game. Mr. Obama is like someone who would write in his diaries, “I shall point out Estes Kefauver’s manifold inconsistencies, then to luncheon with Arthur and Marietta.”

The odd thing is it’s easier to be a killer when you know exactly what you stand for, when you have a real philosophy. The philosophy becomes a platform from which you can strike without ambivalence. Mr. Obama seems born to be mild. But still, that’s not the story.

Nor is it that John Edwards seems like a furry animal on a wheel, trying so hard, to the point he’s getting a facial tic, and getting nowhere, failing to get his little furry paws on his prey, not knowing you have to get off the wheel to get to the prey. You have to stop the rounded, rote, bromidic phrases, and use a normal language that cannot be ignored.

The story is not that Mrs. Clinton signaled, in attitude and demeanor, who she believes is her most dangerous foe, the great impediment between her and an easy glide to the nomination. Yes, that would be Tim Russert.

The story is that she talked about policy. Not talking points, but policy. In talking about it she seemed, for the first time, to be revealing what’s inside.

It was startling. It’s 1993 in there. The year before her fall, and rise.

I spent a day going over the transcripts so I could quote at length, but her exchanges are all over, it’s a real Google-fest. Here, boiled down, is what she said.

Giving illegal immigrants drivers licenses makes sense because it makes sense, but she may not be for it, but undocumented workers should come out of the shadows, and it makes sense. Maybe she will increase the payroll tax on Social Security beyond its current $97,500 limit, to $200,000. Maybe not. Everybody knows what the possibilities are. She may or may not back a 4% federal surcharge on singles making $150,000 a year and couples making $200,000. She suggested she backed it, said she didn’t back it, she then called it a good start, or rather “I support and admire” the person proposing such a tax for his “willingness to take this on.”

She has been accused of doubletalk and she has denied it. And she is right. It was triple talk, quadruple talk, Olympic level nonresponsiveness. And it was, even for her, rather heavy and smug. Her husband would have had the sense to look embarrassed as he bobbed and weaved. It was part of his charm. But he was light on his feet. She turns every dance into the polka. And it is that amazing thing, a grim polka.

*   *   *

But the larger point is that her policy approach revealed all the impulses not of the New Centrism but the Old Leftism. Her statements were redolent of the 1990s phrase “command and control.” They reflect a bias toward the old tax-raising on people who aren’t rich, who aren’t protected, the old “my friends and I know best, and we’ll fill you dullards in on the details later.”

For a few years now I’ve thought the problem for the Democrats in general but for Mrs. Clinton in particular is not that America is against tax increases. They’ve seen eight years of big spending, of wars, of spiraling entitlements. They’ve driven by the mansions of the megarich and have no sympathy for hedge fund/movie producer/cosmetics empire heirs. They sense the system is rigged toward the heavily protected. They sense this because they’re not stupid.

The problem for Mrs. Clinton is not that people sense she will raise taxes. It’s that they don’t think she’ll raise them on the real and truly rich. The rich are her friends. They contribute to her, dine with her, have access to her. They have an army of accountants. They’re protected even from her.

But she can stick it to others, and in the way of modern liberalism for roughly half a century now one suspects she’ll define affluence down. That she would hike taxes on people who make $150,000 a year.

But those “rich”—people who make $200,000 and have two kids and a mortgage and pay local and state taxes in, say, New Jersey—they don’t see themselves as rich. Because they’re not. They’re already carrying too much of the freight.

What Mrs. Clinton revealed the other night was more than an unfortunate persona. What I think she revealed was that her baseline thinking has perhaps not changed that much since the 1990s, when she was a headband wearing, power suited, leftist-who-hadn’t-been-wounded-yet. It seemed to me she made it quite possible to assume you know who she’ll be making war on. And this—much more than the latest scandal, the Chinatown funny money and the bundling—could, and I think would, engender real opposition down the road. The big chink in her armor is not stylistic, it is about policy. It is about the great baseline question in all political life: Whose ox is being gored?

*   *   *

A quick word here on why the scandals I refer to above do not deter Mrs. Clinton’s rise. There are people who’ve made quite a study of her life and times, and buy every book, from the awful ones such as Ed Klein’s to the excellent ones, such as Sally Bedell Smith’s recent “For Love of Politics,” a carefully researched, data-rich compendium on the Clintons’ time in the White House.

People who’ve studied Mrs. Clinton often ask why her ethical corner cutting and scandals have not caught up with her, why the whole history of financial and fund-raising scandals doesn’t slow her rise.

In a funny way she’s protected by her reputation. It’s so well known it’s not news. It doesn’t make an impression anymore. People have pointed out her ethical lapses for so long that they seem boring, or impossible to believe. “That couldn’t be true or she wouldn’t be running for president.” This thought collides with “And we already know all this anyway.” Her campaign uses the latter to squash the latest: “old news,” “cash for rehash.”

I’ve never seen anything quite like this dynamic work in modern politics. But the other night, for the first time, I had the feeling maybe it isn’t going to work anymore, or with such deadening consistency.

“I love chicks that have been intimate with IED’s,” he announced to his fellow soldiers sitting in the chow tent in Camp Falcon in Baghdad. “It really turns me on—melted skin, missing limbs, plastic noses.” The soldiers laughed so hard they almost fell from their chairs. They enjoy running over dogs in Bradley Fighting Vehicles, luring them in and then crushing their bones as they whelp. When a soldier comes upon a mass grave, he picks up a human skull, places it merrily on his head, and marches around.

This is from the now-famous “Baghdad Diaries,” in The New Republic, carrying the byline of soldier-writer Scott Thomas. They are an attempt to capture the tragedy and dehumanization of war, how it coarsens men in ways that you, safe in your bed, cannot fathom. They are a lost generation, battered by war, and struggling, with the real weapons of war’s survivors—mordant wit, pitiless humor, the final surrender to nihilism—to survive in a world they never made. Do I overwrite? Do I sound like an idiot? I’m just trying to fit in.

To read the Thomas pieces was, simply, to doubt them. And to wonder if its editors had ever actually met a soldier on his way to or from Iraq, or talked to any human being involved in the modern military.

The diaries appear to be another case of journalistic fabulism. This week came word, via the published transcript of a telephone conversation between “Thomas,” who is actually Scott Thomas Beauchamp, and his editors. It is actually painful to read. The editors almost plead with him to stand by his work, after months of critics’ picking them factually apart. He won’t do it. He doesn’t want to talk to “the media.” He’s said enough.

*   *   *

Everyone in journalism thought first of Stephen Glass. I actually remember the day I read his New Republic piece on the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington in 1997, a profile of young Republicans as crude and ignorant pot-smoking alcoholics in search of an orgy. It, um, startled me. After years of observation, I was inclined toward the view that there’s no such thing as a young Republican. More to the point, I’d been to the kind of convention Mr. Glass wrote about, and I thought it not remotely possible that the people he painted were real. I also thought: Man, this is way too convenient. The New Republic tends to think Republicans are hateful, and this reporter just happened to be welcomed into the private world of the most hateful Republicans in history.

On the Thomas stories, which I read not when they came out but when they began to come under scrutiny, I had a similar thought, or a variation of it. I thought: That’s not Iraq, that’s a Vietnam War movie. That’s not life as it’s being lived on the ground right now, that’s life as an editor absorbed it through media. That’s the dark world of Kubrick and Coppola and Oliver Stone, of the great Vietnam movies of the ’70s and ’80s.

If that’s what you absorbed during the past 20 or 30 years, it just might make sense to you, it would actually seem believable, if a fellow in Iraq wrote for you about taunting scarred women, shooting dogs, and wearing skulls as helmets. This is the offhand brutality of war. You know. You saw it in a movie.

If you’d had a broader array of references, and were less preoccupied by the media that is the great occupying force in our own country, and you were the editor of the Thomas pieces, you might have said, “Whoa.” Just whoa.

*   *   *

I’ll jump here, or lurch I suppose, to something I am concerned about that I think I am observing accurately. It has to do with what sometimes seems to me to be the limited lives that have been or are being lived by the rising generation of American professionals in the arts, journalism, academia and business. They have had good lives, happy lives, but there is a sense with some of them that they didn’t so much live it as view it. That they learned too much from media and not enough from life’s difficulties. That they saw much of what they know in a film or play and picked up all the memes and themes.

In terms of personal difficulties, they seem to have had less real-life experience, or rather different experiences, than their rougher predecessors. They grew up affluent in a city or suburb, cosseted in material terms, and generally directed toward academic and material success. Their lives seem to have been not crowded or fearful, but relatively peaceful, at least until September 2001, which was very hard.

But this new leadership class, those roughly 35 to 40, grew up in a time when media dominated all. They studied, they entered a top-tier college, and then on to Washington or New York or Los Angeles. But their knowledge, their experience, is necessarily circumscribed. Too much is abstract to them, or symbolic. The education establishment did them few favors. They didn’t have to read Dostoevsky, they had to read critiques and deconstruction of Dostoevsky.

I’m not sure it’s always good to grow up surrounded by stability, immersed in affluence, and having had it drummed into you that you are entitled to be a member of the next leadership class. To have this background in the modern era is to come from a ghetto, the luckiest ghetto in the world, a golden ghetto beyond whose walls it can be hard to see. There’s much to be said for suffering, for being on the outside or the bottom, for having to have fought yourself up and through. It can leave you grounded. It can give you real knowledge not only of the world and of other men but of yourself. In some ways it can leave you less cynical. (Not everything comes down to money.) And in some ways it leaves you just cynical enough.

*   *   *

Journalistically, I was lucky enough to work at CBS News when it was still shaped by the influence of the Murrow boys. They knew and taught that “everyone is entitled to his own opinions”—and they had them—”but not his own facts.” And I miss the rough old boys and girls of the front page, who’d greet FDR with “Snappy suit, Mr. President,” who’d bribe the guard to tell them what the prisoner said on the way to the chair, and who were not rich and important but performed an extremely important social function.

They found out who, what, where, when, why. And they would have looked at the half-baked, overcooked junior Hemingway of Scott Thomas Beauchamp and said, “That sounds like a buncha hooey.”

Where do things stand now with Hillary Clinton? What is her trajectory almost a year since it became clear she was running for the presidency?

Some time back I said she doesn’t have to prove she is a man, she has to prove she is a woman. Her problem is not her sex, as she and her campaign pretend. That she is a woman is a boon to her, a source of latent power. But to make it work, she has to seem like a woman.

No one doubts Mrs. Clinton’s ability to make war. No close or longtime observer has ever been quoted as saying that she may be too soft for the job. Instead one worries about what has always seemed her characterological bellicosity. She invented the War Room, listened in on the wiretaps, brought into the White House the man who got the private FBI files of the Clintons’ perceived enemies.

This is not a woman who has to prove she’s tough enough and mean enough; she is more like a bulldozer who has to prove she won’t always be in high gear and ready to flatten you. In private, her friends say—and I have seen it to be true—that she is humorous, bright, interested in the lives of others. But as a matter of political temperament and habit of mind, she is neither patient, high minded nor forbearing. Those who know Mrs. Clinton well, and my world is thick with them, have qualms about her toughness, not doubts.

But she is making progress. She is trying every day to change her image, and I suspect it’s working. One senses not that she has become more authentic, but that she has gone beyond her own discomfort at her lack of authenticity. I am not saying she has learned to be herself. I think after a year on the trail she’s learned how to not be herself, how to comfortably adopt a skin and play a part.

Her real self is a person who wants to run things, to assert authority, to create systems and have people conform to them. She is not a natural at the outsized warmth politics demands. But she is moving beyond—forgive me—the vacant eyes of the power zombie, like the Tilda Swinton character in ‘‘Michael Clayton.’’ The Boston Globe, dateline Manchester, N.H.: ‘‘Clinton is increasingly portraying herself more as motherly and traditional than as trailblazing and feminist.’’ In a week of ‘‘Women Changing America’’ events Mrs. Clinton has shared tales of Chelsea’s childhood and made teasing references to those who are preoccupied by her hairstyles and fashion choices. On ‘‘The View’’ she joked of her male rivals, ‘‘Well, look how much longer it takes me to get ready.’’ This was a steal from JFK’s joke about Jackie when she was late for an appearance: ‘‘It takes her longer to get ready, but then she looks so much better.’’

Her fund-raising emails have subject lines like, ‘‘Wow!’’ and ‘‘Let’s make some popcorn!’’ Her grin is broad and fixed. She is the smile on the Halloween pumpkin that knows the harvest is coming. She’s even putting a light inside.

In New York this week she told a women’s lunch that ‘‘we face a new question—a lot of people are asking whether America is ready to elect a woman to the highest office in our land.’’ She suggested her campaign will ‘‘prove that America is indeed ready.’’ She also quoted Eleanor Roosevelt: ‘‘Women are like tea bags—you never know how strong they are until they get in hot water.’’

*   *   *

Mrs. Clinton is the tea bag that brings the boiling water with her. It’s always high drama with her, always a cauldron—secret Web sites put up by unnamed operatives smearing Barack Obama in the tones of Tokyo Rose, Chinese businessmen having breakdowns on trains after the campaign cash is traced back, secret deals. It’s always flying monkeys. One always wants to ask: Why? What is this?

The question, actually, is not whether America is ‘‘ready’’ for a woman. It’s whether it’s ready for Hillary. And surely as savvy a campaign vet as Mrs. Clinton knows this.

Who, of all the powerful women in American politics right now, has inspired the unease, dismay and frank dislike that she has? Condi Rice, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein? These are serious women who are making crucial decisions about our national life every day. They inspire agreement and disagreement; they fight and are fought with. But they do not inspire repugnance. Nobody hates Barbara Mikulski, Elizabeth Dole or Kay Bailey Hutchison; everyone respects Ms. Rice and Ms. Feinstein.

Hillary’s problem is not that she’s a woman; it’s that unlike these women—all of whom have come under intense scrutiny, each of whom has real partisan foes—she has a history that lends itself to the kind of doubts that end in fearfulness. It is an unease and dismay based not on gender stereotypes but on personal history.

*   *   *

But here’s why I mentioned earlier the latent power inherent in the fact that Hillary is a woman.

It is true that 54% of the electorate is composed of women, and that what feminist sympathies they have may be especially enlivened this year by a strong appeal. It is not true that women in general vote in anything like a bloc, but it is probably true—I think it is true—that they share in a general way some rough and broad sympathies.

One has to do with what it is to be a woman in the world. To be active on any level in the life of the nation is to be immersed in controversy. If you are a woman, the to and fro, the fights you’re in, will to some extent be sharpened or shaped by what used to called sexism. There isn’t a woman in America who hasn’t been patronized—or worse—for being a woman, at least to some degree, and I mean all women, from the nun patronized by the bullying bishop to the congresswoman not taken seriously by the policy intellectual to the school teacher browbeaten by the school board chairman to the fare collector corrected by the huffy businessman. It happens to every woman.

Conservative women tend not to talk about it except to each other, and those conversations are voluble and pointed. They don’t go public with their complaints because they’re afraid it will encourage liberals to pass a law, and if you wanted more laws, or thought laws could reform human nature and make us all nice, you wouldn’t be a conservative. Their problem is sharpened by the fact that some conservative men are boorish and ungentlemanly to show how liberated they are. But I digress.

Or rather I don’t. The point is there are many women who will on some level be inclined to view Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy through the lens of their experience as women, and there is real latent sympathy there if she could tap it, which is what she’s trying to do.

But first, or more important, she will have to credibly and persuasively address what it is in her history—in her—that inspires such visceral opposition. That would be quite something if she did, or even tried.

Fred Thompson gives “a very incoherent and not very concise stump speech,” peaked months ago, and is the campaign’s “biggest dud.” Mitt Romney has “an authenticity problem”; he is “almost too mechanical about the issues.” John McCain faces “enormous hurdles,” and the “irony” of his quest is that he may just be repeating 2000. Mike Huckabee has “the obvious problems—being from Hope, Ark., and quite frankly having the last name Huckabee.” The craven Republicans are “terrified about losing the presidency after losing Congress.” All this comes from Terry McAuliffe, longtime Democratic Party mover, maven and moneyman, who’s obviously hoping for a Democratic win.

Only kidding. It comes from Mr. McAuliffe’s new podium partner on the Washington speech circuit, longtime Bush operative Dan Bartlett, recently departed after years as White House communications director. Mr. Bartlett has taken the old place of Ed Gillespie, the lobbyist, who used to appear with Mr. McAuliffe and is now back at the White House in Mr. Bartlett’s old job. This is why the late Drew Pearson called his column “Washington Merry-Go-Round.”

They serve and rarely leave. So often people work in government and make it more of a swamp; then they leave and become mosquitoes living off the pond scum, buzzing off the surface, eating well, issuing their little stings.

I am harsh. But it’s something I often wonder: Why don’t people in Washington go home anymore? I’m reading Michael Korda’s serene and gracious tribute to Dwight Eisenhower, “Ike: An American Hero,” and stopped dead at this part. The day his White House successor, JFK, was inaugurated, “in the middle of a heavy snowstorm, [Ike] and Mamie left quietly and unobtrusively . . . grateful that they were no longer the focus of attention, and drove the eighty miles to Gettysburg.” Oh for those days. And that sort.

*   *   *

Now, you wouldn’t think an adviser who helped steer a president to a sundered base, a flattened party and some of the lowest approval ratings since such polling began, would feel free to be so critical of others in politics. Profound modesty as to the depth of one’s own savvy might be in order.

But maybe Mr. Bartlett’s attitude illustrates a larger reality. The Bush people don’t seem to spend much time on loyalty to the party per se, only to their guy. Who after all is looking out for the Republican nominees, for the group of them? They are the future of the party. The Washington GOP apparatus is focused on the president, on asserting the brilliance of his legacy and, at this point, I’m sure, as in the Clinton days, on making sure he has a nice and well-funded presidential library. But who is looking out for his presumptive heirs? Why, for example, are they forced into debates that seem almost designed to diminish them? Having as moderator a preening cable jockey does nothing to enhance their stature. It is a recipe for sadness. Why don’t the Republican campaigns—the Republican establishment—try to get moderators of calm stature? Ted Koppel, for one, is an old-school broadcaster; he makes you look classy because he’s classy; he lends it to you as he asks you questions. What does Chris Matthews lend? Why not Keith Olbermann? Or Al Franken?

I am wondering if the Washington GOP establishment fails to look after these things because they don’t really think there’s life after Bush, or even care all that much. They think the next president is a Democrat. A lot of them will do lobbying for a living. Better learn to get along! And so the candidates swim with an anvil around their necks.

One of the few candidates Mr. Bartlett had nothing bad to say about was Rudy Giuliani, which suggests to me what I hear from those who visit the White House may be true: The president has decided it’s Rudy. He also told a friend that when the primary is over, he’ll campaign hard for the nominee. Here I imagine the candidates for once speaking in unison: Oh, please don’t!

Something I’d call the Twenty Percent Rule seems to exist in presidential polling. No matter what a president does, he gets to keep 20% approval. You could break into the Watergate hotel while having sex with an intern and keep them. The 20% is made up of the immovable, intractable base—those who fell for you early and hard and won’t quit, who hate the media so much that if they hate you they’ll love you, who are certain the incumbent is abused by history and its recent minor players, who stick because of this issue or that. And that 20%, by definition highly engaged in politics, always votes in the primaries.

Every candidate needs them. At the very least, no one wants to inspire their enmity. I asked a veteran conservative political professional what the candidates can do. He said, “No need to trash Bush by name. Run as Sarkozy focusing on the future. Those tired of Bush will see the distancing. Those enamored will assume the candidates love Bush. Say something nice about the Bush tax cuts or Supreme Court appointments. Bushies just need to hear something nice.”

The GOP challengers, no matter how they feel about Mr. Bush, can’t knock him, because that would infuriate the president’s 20% in Iowa, New Hampshire and elsewhere.

The exception is Ron Paul, who seems to have no fear of criticizing anybody, and, this week, John McCain, who in the debate had some sharp words for the current reality: “The American people no longer have trust or confidence in our government. Our failure at Katrina, our failures in Iraq, our failures to get spending under control. And we’ve got to restore that trust and confidence.” That sounded like the beginning of a little rebellion.

*   *   *

I suspect the Republican establishment knows all this, but I am not sure it concerns them overmuch. Why should it? If you are an absolute Bush partisan, you probably don’t really want a Republican to follow him and potentially, in decisions if not in words, rebuke him. That would be the worst thing, not being followed by Hillary or Obama. If the latter happens, the outgoing administration can—and will—blame the loss on lax candidates, on a party that wasn’t sufficiently inclusive, on congressional scandals, on immigration. “If only they’d followed our lead!”

They’ll be fine. The party may be defeated, the conservative coalition that raised them high sundered, but they’ll be all right. Which is important, because more than the president’s legacy is involved. Their very personal legacy is involved. No one wants to have worked for the biggest embarrassment in modern American political history. You won’t be burning up the public speaking trail with Terry McAuliffe that way.

Barack Obama has a great thinking look. I mean the look he gets on his face when he’s thinking, not the look he presents in debate, where they all control their faces knowing they may be in the reaction shot and fearing they’ll look shrewd and clever, as opposed to open and strong. I mean the look he gets in an interview or conversation when he’s listening and not conscious of his expression. It’s a very present look. He seems more in the moment than handling the moment. I’ve noticed this the past few months, since he entered the national stage. I wonder if I’m watching him more closely than his fellow Democrats are.

Mr. Obama often seems to be thinking when he speaks, too, and this comes somehow as a relief, in comparison, say, to Hillary Clinton and President Bush, both of whom often seem to be trying to remember the answer they’d agreed upon with staff. What’s the phrase we use about education? Hit Search Function. Hit Open. Right-click. “Equity in education is essential, Tim . . .”

You get the impression Mr. Obama trusts himself to think, as if something good might happen if he does. What a concept. Anyway, I’ve started to lean forward a little when he talks.

But he doesn’t stand a chance, right? His main competitor, Mrs. Clinton, is this week’s invincible. She broke through 50% for the first time in a big national poll—53% saying they would support her, a full 33 points more than Obama. Her third quarter fund raising beat everyone else’s. “It’s all over but the voting,” said Rep. Tom Petri, who will probably get pummeled a bit by the campaign for premature triumphalism. But he only said what a lot of people are starting to think.

*   *   *

Some Democrats seem proud they already know who their candidate is, unlike those messy Republicans who haven’t been able to resolve the issue. But should it be resolved before people vote?

Has the Democratic Party noticed it actually has some impressive candidates? They should not be written off, and when you think about it, it’s weird that they’re being written off. Joe Biden used to seem mildly giddy, vain but in a small way, not a big and interesting way. (Big is LBJ: Ah will impose mah will. Small: Where’s my hair-sculpting gel?) But it has been 35 years since he became a figure in Washington, and in the past few years in particular he has been ahead of his peers on Iraq—ahead with warnings, ahead with tripartite thinking, ahead with a seriousness and sobriety about the fix we’re in. He is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and he’s been reading daily threat reports for a long time. He is impressive. Why don’t the Democrats notice?

Chris Dodd is the head of the Senate Banking Committee, and nothing if not sophisticated. In the post-9/11 world, sophisticated is not so bad. He’s been in the Senate 27 years. In earlier years his thinking on government, his assumptions about what can and should be expected of it, veered from the utopian to the world-weary, and were sometimes both at once. But if you listen to him and watch him in debate, you might legitimately conclude this is a candidate who understands how it all works and what time it is. He’s one of the grown-ups.

Anybody notice?

*   *   *

Mr. Obama’s experience, as we all know, is as limited as Mrs. Clinton’s, which is to say limited indeed. She has held elective office for only 6 1/2 years. Before that she was first lady of Arkansas and then first lady of the United States. He has held national office for only 3 1/2 years, and before that was a state legislator for eight years. But he has impressed people, and not with money, résumé or clout but something rarer, natural gifts. That’s not nothing. Big talent is rare, and deserves consideration.

And yet the Democrats remain in their Hillary trance.

Not all, of course. Each candidate has his band of supporters, his little base. Mr. Obama is fortunate to have one with the grace and vigor of Ted Sorensen, John F. Kennedy’s great staffer and speechwriter, who told me this week, “I am supporting Obama.” He has known and liked the other main candidates, has “no objection to a female commander-in-chief and no ill feelings stemming from the Clinton stains on the escutcheon of the White House.” But Mr. Obama is “the one serious potential nominee of the Democratic Party who is most likely to win” and most likely “to end the tragic occupation of Iraq on terms compatible with our country’s best interests and traditional values.”

When I asked if his support was connected in any way to the idea of breaking away from the Bush-Clinton-Bush rotation, he said, “Above all, I believe this country needs change, and continuing the 20-year hold on the White House of the same two families is not my idea of change.”

*   *   *

That to me gets to the heart of the problem and the heart of The Trance. Mrs. Clinton is so far ahead so early on for the same reason Mr. Bush was so far ahead so early on in 2000, and after only six years as governor, with no previous offices behind him.
It is the nature of modern politics. A political family gains allies—retainers, supporters, hangers-on, admirers, associates, in-house Machiavellis. The bigger the government, the more ways allies can be awarded, which binds them more closely. Your destiny is theirs. Members of the court recruit others. Money lines spread person to person, company to company, board to board, mover to mover.

The most important part is the money lines. Power is expensive. The second most important part is the word “winner.” The Bushes are winners; the Clintons are winners. We know this, they’ve won. The Bushes are wired into the Republican money-line system; the Clintons are wired into the Democratic money-line system. For a generation, two generations now, they have had the same dynamics in play, only their friends are on the blue team, not the red, or the red, not the blue.

They are, both groups, up and ready and good to go every election cycle. They are machines. There are good people on each side, idealists, the hopeful, those convinced the triumph of their views will make our country better. And there are those on each side who are not so wonderful, not so well-meaning, not well-meaning at all. And some are idiots, but very comfortable ones.

Is this good for our democracy, this air of inevitability? Is it good in terms of how the world sees us, and how we see ourselves? Or is it something we want to break out of, like a trance?

It would be understandable if they were families of a most extraordinary natural distinction and self-sacrifice. But these are not the Adamses of Massachusetts we’re talking about. You’ve noticed, right?

You don’t want to judge Christ by Christians, someone once said. He is perfect, they are not.

In a similar way you don’t want to judge capitalism by capitalists, or the legitimacy of democracy by the Democrats, or the vitality of our republic by the Republicans. You have to take the thing pure and in itself, while allowing for the flaws and waywardness of its practitioners.

I say this because here in America we have reached a funny pass. People are doing and saying odd things as if they don’t know the meaning of the thing they say they stand for. In particular I mean we used to be proud of whom we allowed to speak, and now are leaning toward defining ourselves by whom we don’t speak to and will not allow to speak. This is not progress.

Conservatives on campus are shouted down. A crusader against illegal immigration is rushed off the stage at Columbia University. Great newspapers give ad breaks to groups with which they feel an ideological affinity, but turn away ads from those they do not, such as antiabortion groups. And they call this a business.

So much silencing. It seems so weak, so out of keeping with who we are. We love the tradition of free speech in America, but you don’t want to judge its health by what we’ve done with it lately, or to it.

*   *   *

In 1960 the premier of the Soviet Union came and spoke in the United States. Nikita Khrushchev was our sworn enemy, and a vulgarian—sweaty faced, ill educated, dressed in a suit just off the racks from the Gulag Kresge’s. I was a child, but I remember the impression he made. He took off his shoe and banged it, literally, on the soft beige wood of a desk at the U.N., as he fulminated. His nation had nuclear weapons. They were aimed at us.

The new Cuban dictator, Fidel Castro, was there too. He was young and bearded and dressed in camouflage; he too, soon, would have missiles pointed at us. He not only went to the U.N. and spoke to the world, he refused to stay at the Waldorf and sweetly chose instead a hotel in Harlem to show his solidarity with America’s oppressed. The Americans there seemed to get the joke, and welcomed him with laughter. They knew he was playing them. But then they’d been played before.

Khrushchev’s trip and Castro’s were all about propaganda, all about sticking it to Uncle Sam. And here’s what happened: Nothing. Their presence hurt our country exactly zero percent. In fact it raised us high, reminding the world we are the confident nation that lets its foes speak uncensored. As an adult nation would.

*   *   *

You know where I’m going. Is it necessary to say when one speaks of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that you disapprove of him, disagree with him, believe him a wicked fellow and are not amused that he means to have missiles aimed at us and our friends? If it is, I am happy to say it. Who, really, isn’t?

But this has been our history: to let all speak and to fear no one. That’s a good history to continue. The Council on Foreign Relations was right to invite him to speak last year—that is the council’s job, to hear, listen and parse—and Columbia University was well within its rights to let him speak this year. Though, in what is now apparently Columbia tradition, the stage was once again stormed, but this time verbally, and by a university president whose aggression seemed sharpened by fear.

There were two revealing moments in Ahmadinejad’s appearance. The first is that in his litany of complaint against the United States he seemed not to remember the taking and abuse of American diplomatic hostages in 1979. An odd thing to forget since he is said to have been part of that operation. The second was the moment when he seemed to assert that his nation does not have homosexuals. This won derisive laughter, and might have been a learning moment for him; dictators don’t face derisive from crowds back home.

It was like the moment in 1960 when Khrushchev’s motorcade stalled on Third Avenue and a commuter walked by and gave him the finger. Actually I don’t know there was such a moment, but knowing Americans I’m sure there was. Talking and listening to the wicked is the way we always operated in the long freak show that was 20th-century world leadership. And I’m sure before.

If Jefferson had dined only with those who’d been a force for good in the world, Jefferson would often have dined alone. If we insist only good and moral leaders talk to us, we’ll wind up surrounded by silence. In fact, if we insist we talk only to those whose good deeds have matched their high aspirations, we won’t always be on speaking terms with ourselves.

*   *   *

Domestically, the Democratic presidential candidates appear only before supportive groups. They don’t speak to antitax groups and talk about their own assumptions regarding tax policy. They don’t go to traditional values groups.

It’s all very controlled. And it’s unworthy of a great nation. When people say the campaign feels artificial, that’s what they mean. It’s not John Edwards’s hairspray or Hillary Clinton’s makeup. It’s that they give every sign of being afraid to speak and listen to those who haven’t been patted down by thought-cops for unacceptable views.

The Republicans are the same. An invitation to debate on Univision, the Spanish-language network? They have scheduling conflicts. What about the Log Cabin Republicans? No time right now.

How unserious.

If you, candidate A, have clear and serious reasons for desiring the wave of millions a year illegally over the border to stop, you should be able to talk to Hispanic groups and audiences about it. You go straight to them and appeal to their patriotism, fairness and common sense. Why? Because they’re patriotic and fair and have common sense. It is a compliment to show you know this.

Will some of them boo? Yes, of course. So what? Too bad. That’s the price you pay for being truthful at a tough time. And in America it’s always a tough time.

The staffs, gurus and handlers of all the candidates are always afraid their guy will get booed. But do they realize how tired we are of hearing the tepid applause that follows the predictable pander?

I know they’re all always eager to laud Ronald Reagan. But Reagan began his fall 1980 campaign in the South Bronx, and argued his case with people on the street. After he was elected, he pleaded for peace in letters to Leonid Brezhnev. Too bad he wasn’t tough enough. Oh wait.

I think the problem is not coming from normal Americans but from our leadership class, our academics and political leaders. The new fearfulness has resulted in new foreign policy: “Let’s not speak to Buffy.” Great. How’s that working for ya?

There is the story about a puffed-up political figure, or maybe it was a movie star, who came out with a memoir and began the requisite tour. A reporter cornered him at a cocktail party: “Did you write this book yourself?”

“Write it?” the man said. “I didn’t even read it.”

This crossed my mind while reading Alan Greenspan’s memoir, in which the war for Iraq was all about oil, though the wise have long been prohibited from sharing this insight with the common folk. In interviews, Mr. Greenspan now corrects that: He meant the war seemed to him, though he cannot claim it did to others in power, driven primarily by American dependence on foreign energy.

In the book he fiercely opposes the Bush tax cuts. He feared the budget surpluses enjoyed in 2000 would be transformed into long-term deficits. He worried that entitlement spending would leave “a very large hole in future budgets.” Not facing this was “a failure.” He disdains the Great Pork Spree of the ‘00s. The unifying idea that governed Bush White House economic thinking—”deficits don’t matter”—was, simply, wrong. Mr. Greenspan found it a “struggle” to accept that this is what the Republican Party had come to. Scrambling for political dominance became the party’s great goal. “The reality was even uglier”: They would spend and spend “to add a few more seats to the Republican majority.”

This is all strongly, and clearly, stated.

But when the tax cuts, and the impact of spending, were being debated, Mr. Greenspan allowed his congressional testimony to be interpreted as supportive of the Bush plan. And he did this even though he had been warned in advance by those who’d seen his testimony that it would be seen as an endorsement of the tax plan.

Indeed his testimony—airy vaporizing about long-term trends—was quickly seized on by the White House and its congressional supporters as support for their approach. Mr. Greenspan describes himself—literally, in an aside he seems to find witty—as “shocked, shocked” that politics is going on in Washington, and his words are being twisted.

But he never quite cleared it up, not at the time. He does it now, with the book, and after the advance. As a writer I am in passionate support of large advances, but $8.5 million to tell the American people what he should have told them when his views might have had an impact?

*   *   *

In the book he seems to brag about how artfully and deliberately obscure his public statements were, all those orotund stylings marked by barely penetrable syntax, passive voice and oblique phraseology. Somehow they seem less amusing in retrospect. Maybe their very obscurity allowed partisans to twist his words into whatever shape they wanted. And maybe that was sort of OK with him.

The book has merits—it is blessedly lucid on how the Fed works and how Fed-heads think—but there is within it a great disconnect. I was thinking about this when I got a note from a former U.S. senator who groused about “the phenomena of high-level public officials ‘bravely speaking out’ after they have left office.” He scored Mr. Greenspan as “perfectly free to have spoken out about the need for the President to veto more spending bills on numerous occasions when he was testifying in public.” My correspondent says Mr. Greenspan’s “total silence” while in office does not exactly qualify as “bravely speaking out.”

The former senator has a point. It can be summed up as: Now you tell us? It doesn’t take courage to speak clearly when no one can hurt you. It takes guts to be candid when candor can earn powerful enemies.

U.S. government officials owe the people who pay them, and who have raised them high—that would be the American taxpayer—real-time wisdom. They owe us their best thinking. Sometimes this is uncomfortable. But that’s the price you pay for the car and the honors and the security detail and the special U.S. Army jet that flies you home, alone, across the Atlantic, on the day after 9/11.

*   *   *

Mr. Greenspan was reappointed for a three-year term by President Clinton in 2000. He allowed himself to be painted as a supporter of the Bush tax cuts in 2001. He was reappointed by President Bush in 2003. Mr. Bush is now deeply unpopular. Mr. Greenspan, retired and selling a book, has discovered Mr. Bush’s deep flaws. The timing is all so convenient.

One wouldn’t suggest a quid pro quo in Mr. Greenspan’s testimony and subsequent reappointment. He had to some degree tangled with presidents in the past. But it is likely true that Mr. Greenspan would not have wanted to give the president reasons to hesitate, and it would also be true to say that Mr. Bush did not want a reason, for Mr. Greenspan was respected and the markets liked him. Or until this week when he gave the impression his own personal long-term economic planning involves keeping bars of gold under the porch with a dog named Butch—sorry, I mean highly fungible physical entities embodying real and symbolic value next to an exuberant canine.

So to suggest a quid pro quo would be vulgar. And in any case who could say? At that level, the game is played without words or even winks. It’s played through feints, silences, symbols, vague words. Then a handshake and off we go.

Long ago in a book called “What I Saw at the Revolution,” I wrote that I was dismayed by White House memoirs whose underlying message was, “If only they’d listened to me, the fools!” I didn’t want to do that, and in my case I couldn’t. Sometimes if they’d listened to me they’d have been wrong indeed. Mr. Greenspan is an “If only they’d listened to me” man. He should have added, “And they might have if I’d been clear.”

*   *   *

There has been a certain bite in the Bush White House memoirs, as if they were written by men who felt they’d been badly ragged around and could finally get back. Mr. Greenspan convincingly—well, who could doubt it now?—asserts that the White House discouraged independent thinking and instead emphasized “loyalty and staying on message.” This he says is what did in Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, who also argued that deficits matter.

When Gen. Eric Shinseki told Congress, before the Iraq war, that postinvasion troop levels should be “something in the order of several hundred thousand soldiers,” his views were called “outlandish” by administration officials. He was bureaucratically undercut, and he limped to retirement. When economic adviser Larry Lindsay told this newspaper the war would likely cost up to four times what the administration asserted, he was sacked.

Early and brutal examples were made of those who did not echo the party line. Perhaps Mr. Greenspan was watching, or rather observing certain trends.

The deeper story is not that those who’ve been silenced have often come forward to speak in harsh terms. The deeper story is that the Bush White House hurt itself by using muscle to squelch alternative thinking—creative thinking, independent judgments—that would, in retrospect, have benefited them. Big spending became a scandal. So did not enough troops, and the financial cost of the war. It was this tendency that led to the administration’s gym-rat reputation, all muscle and no brains.

We are at a new point in the American experience of the Iraq war. It is also a decisive one: We have to decide, now, what to do. Stay. Go. Stay in a certain way, or at a certain size. But the mood of the moment, the mood of many Americans, is at odds with one of the demands of decision making.

Big decisions require a certain spirit, a certain do or die—the faith and wildness to roll the dice, throw ‘em, watch and roll again. That’s gambling, of course, not decision making, but many big decisions are to some degree a gamble. Our president must think this, for he so often doubles down. The Decider is The Gambler.

I was thinking this week about how the mood now, among normal people and political figures, is so different from the great burst of feeling that marked the early days of the war—the 17 days to Baghdad, the unstoppable Third Infantry Division, the dictator’s statue falling. The relief that Saddam didn’t use poison gas, as he had against the Kurds, that he collapsed like an old suitcase and got himself out of Dodge. There was a lot of tenderness to those days, too—the first tears at the loss of troops, the deaths of David Bloom and Michael Kelly. Still, the war seemed all triumph, a terrible swift answer to what had been done to us on 9/11.

Then occupation, the long slog, the beginning of bitterness. They thought they could do a war on the cheap? They thought shock and awe would stun ancient enmity into amity? And the puzzlements. Sometimes you looked at the war and wondered, Is Washington’s plan here that good luck began this endeavor and good luck will continue? But how can you lean so much on luck! At this point, about 18 months ago, Americans started thinking, It’s strange to assume good news. Bad news happens. Those guys in Washington must never have faced a foreclosure.

The American people are not impatient, but they are practical. They have a sense of justice and duty to which appeals can be addressed; they will change themselves to better themselves; and they are very proud of their country. But they have sacrificed in Iraq. And they didn’t do it to make it worse. It’s not that the U.S. hasn’t won quickly. It’s that the people of the U.S. can’t see a path to winning.

And so last week spirits on all sides and among all sorts of players were relatively low, and statements seemed less like a debate than a sigh. But great nations can’t sit around sighing, and all of us know this.

At the end of last week it seemed we knew the immediate future—the administration will get what it asked for, more time—but had no greater sense of long-term outcomes.

*   *   *

In a way, David Petraeus won the day when MoveOn.org came forth with its famous “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” ad. They shot themselves in the foot and deserve to be known by their limp. Republicans enacted fury (Thank you, O political gods, for showing the low nature of our foes!), and Democrats felt it (Embarrassed again by the loons!). No one—no normal American—thinks a U.S. Army four-star came back from Iraq to damage our democracy by telling lies.

Gen. Petraeus’s testimony was dry, full of data points and graphs. He gave the impression that everything he said was, to the best of his considerable knowledge, true. One sensed that like good witnesses everywhere, he was not saying everything he thought.

He was earnest, unflappable, and low-key to the point of colorless. Maybe he figures things are colorful enough. I felt relief that he was not wearing his heart on his sleeve or talking about our guys and gals. It was very Joe Friday: Just the facts, ma’am.

He clearly had a point of view, and it was, not surprisingly, in line with the administration’s. But I think the appearance of independence and straight dealing that was necessary to his credibility was lessened by the White House’s attempts to associate itself with him in the weeks leading up to his appearance.

The level of sophistication and seriousness shown by Sens. Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John McCain and Chris Dodd was equal to the moment, and seemed to me patriotic. They were probing, occasionally strict, always respectful. At one point Gen. Petraeus was asked by Sen. John Warner if Iraq has made America safer and said, “Sir, I don’t know actually. I have not sat down and sorted out in my own mind.” Later, invited to expand on this by Sen. Evan Bayh, he said he’d been surprised by Mr. Warner’s question and added that “we have very, very clear, very serious national interests” in Iraq.

That of course is the great question. History will answer it.

An unspoken part of the larger story is that Gen. Petraeus backed up the argument that our troops have been stretched painfully thin, and the postsurge presence cannot, practically, be maintained. Thus a seeming illogic in the general’s presentation: For the first time in years we’re making progress, therefore we should reduce troop levels to the same point at which we made no progress.

In seeming to stand pat and at the same time lower temperatures by bowing to public pressure and reducing troop levels, the administration has made a virtue of necessity. This was not unshrewd.

As for the president’s speech on Thursday night, it managed to seem both wooden and manipulative, which is a feat. For days conservative commentators had warned that the president should leave the week where it was, and not put on it his distinctive stamp. They were right. He said “the character of our people” is being revealed as we choose whether to back the Iraq endeavor. He said he would “explain” recent events there. He said the mission “will evolve.” It will. It has.

*   *   *

One felt at the end of the week that Iraq will continue as a long and ongoing story, that it is unlikely that we will find a perfect moment to leave, that it will always be too soon, the situation too delicate. It will always seem a place perched on a precipice over a canyon.

One sensed too that Iraq will in fact be issue No. 1 to be faced by the next president, whoever he or she is. That individual, in January 2009, will likely be faced by mischief makers of all stripes throughout the capital, with a question that is an artificial construct. “Did he see the mission through?” Or “Did he lose Iraq?” The latter would be most unjust, because we never had Iraq. We haven’t found it, in spite of our best efforts, because the people of Iraq never found it. And it was their nation to find. This seemed clearer than ever this week, which was part of the reason for the sighing.

This week the Republican candidates for the presidency tried to make it new again. Summer’s over, autumn’s here, they’re relaunching. I think they pretty much succeeded. Their debate Wednesday night had sparks and fire. And a new candidate moved in.

So while Barack Obama struggles with a big question of his candidacy—how to draw deep blood from Hillary Clinton without fatally endangering his future in the party and earning the enmity of its power brokers; and Mrs. Clinton figures out each day how to slow him and stop him but not right now squish him like a bug, which would highlight a reputation for ruthlessness and embitter a portion of the base—a look at the Republicans in what was a Republican week.

The debate was full of fireworks about Iraq, about its essentials—the rightness of the endeavor, and what should rightly be done now. From the libertarian Ron Paul a blunt argument against the war: We never should have gone in and we should get out. “The people who say there’ll be a blood bath are the same ones who said it would be a cakewalk. . . . Why believe them?” His foreign policy: “Mind our own business, bring our troops home, defend our country, defend our borders.” After Mr. Paul spoke, it seemed half the room booed, but the other applauded. When a thousand Republicans are in a room and one man of the eight on the stage takes a sharply minority viewpoint on a dramatic issue and half the room seems to cheer him, something’s going on.

*   *   *

Ron Paul’s support isn’t based on his persona, history or perceived power. What support he has comes because of his views. As he spoke, you could hear other candidates laughing in the background. They should stop giggling, and engage in a serious way.

Mike Huckabee, and for this I ♥ Huckabee, shot back that history will judge whether we were right to go in, but for now, “we’re there.” He echoed Colin Powell: We broke it, now we own it. “Congressman, we are one nation. We can’t be divided. . . . If we make a mistake, we make it as a single country, the United States of America, not the divided states of America.” David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network says he doesn’t know why Mr. Huckabee isn’t in the top tier. I wonder too. Maybe he is and we don’t know it.

John McCain seems liberated by loss. Once he was the front-runner, then he was over. Unburdened by the pressure to do well, he has rediscovered the pleasures of the trail. The other day when a student was impertinent, he pleasantly responded, “Thanks for the question, you little jerk.” It reminded me of the time Mayor Rudy Giuliani told an insistent radio caller who pressed for the legalization of ferrets that he probably cared about the issue because he was insane.

In the debate, Mr. McCain was spirited—we stay and fight in Iraq, “otherwise we face catastrophe and genocide in the region.” Fox News’s focus group said he won. As he retools, he should speak of Reagan in 1976, when he was washed up in South Carolina and said, “I’m taking this all the way to the convention, and I’m going even if I lose every damn primary between now and then.”

Mitt Romney is—well, he continues to seem like someone who’s stepped from the shower and been handed a dress shirt by his manservant George. He’s like a senior account executive on “Mad Men.” Still the most focused and disciplined of all the Republicans, he did fine the other night. But he should get shirt-sleeved, dig deeper, get to his purpose. He had the best quips about Fred Thompson’s decision to get in, telling reporters, “Why the hurry? Why not take a little longer to think this over? From my standpoint, if he wants to wait until January or February, that would be ideal.”

Rudy Giuliani proved it is possible to bang the gong too much on leading New York City. Enough already, we heard you, move on. Then come back to it in a few months and make it new again. For now, can he be thoughtful about foreign affairs? Not forceful, not pugnacious, not rote, but thoughtful. No one knows quite what he thinks, as opposed to feels.

Duncan Hunter was there. So was Tom Tancredo, who shouldn’t be. When you can’t compellingly break through with the issue that most roils the base, and on which you were a leader and in agreement with the roiled, then you should admit it didn’t work, and leave. But whom he throws his support to—who he decides has an immigration stand he can back—might have some significant impact on primary voters.

*   *   *

For Fred Thompson, spurning the debate and announcing on Leno was rude and shrewd. He loped on like a long, tall, folksy fella and got a good burst of applause from the audience when he said he was running. The Web video was fine, the 60-second commercial unveiled Wednesday too self-consciously presidential. A young journalist brutally remarked to me of the makeup and lighting, “He looks like a skull on a Disney pirate ride.”

He faces three big challenges. He has come in saying, essentially, I’m not the other guys. That’s good, but raises the questions: Who are you? And the reason you’re running for president would be . . .?

Second challenge: You can come to the rescue only when someone calls “Help!” You can save the drowning guy only when he falls through the ice; you can’t do it when he’s skating by and giving you a friendly nod. Three and six months ago, the Republican Party was looking at its slate of candidates and shouting, “Help!” Since then, the candidates have been out there making an impression, getting known, declaring their stands. They’ve found supporters.

Is the party still yelling “Help!”? Is it falling through the ice?

A third challenge, I think, is a certain dissonance in Mr. Thompson’s persona. He seems preoccupied, not full of delight that he’s at the party. John McCain has been having sly fun with the idea of Mr. Thompson’s sluggishness. When asked why Mr. Thompson didn’t come to the debate, Mr. McCain said “Maybe we’re up past his bedtime.”

I felt this week, and to my surprise, that the campaign was focusing itself, tightening in some way, getting serious. The next Republican debate, the first one with Mr. Thompson, is Sept. 17, in New Hampshire. The first real voting, in Iowa and New Hampshire, is in only four months. For all our complaints about the endless campaign, this one may catch us short. It may get decided when we aren’t watching—knowing, as everyone told us, that we had plenty of time to start paying attention. This could move quickly. Got to watch now.