Peggy Noonan

It is late afternoon in Manhattan on the Fourth of July, and I’m walking along on Lexington and 59th, in front of Bloomingdale’s. Suddenly in my sight there’s a young woman standing on a street grate. She is short, about 5 feet tall, and stocky, with a broad brown face. She is, I think, Latin American, maybe of Indian blood. She has a big pile of advertisements in her hand, and puts one toward me. “MENS SUITS NEW YORK—40% to 60% Off Sale!—Armani, Canali, Hugo Boss, DKNY, Zegna. TAILOR ON PREMISES. EXCELLENT SERVICE LARGE SELECTION.” Then the address and phone number.

You might have seen this person before. She’s one of a small army of advertisement giver-outers in New York. Which means her life right now consists of standing in whatever weather and trying to give passersby a thing most of them don’t want. If this is her regular job, she spends most of her time being rebuffed or ignored by busy people blurring by. You should always take an advertisement, or 10, from the advertisement giver-outers, just to give them a break, because once they give out all the ads, they can go back and get paid. So I took the ad and thanked her and walked on.

And then, half a block later, I turned around. I thought of a woman I’d met recently who had gone through various reverses in life and now had a new job, as a clerk in the back room of a store. She was happy to have it, a new beginning. But there was this thing: They didn’t want to pay for air conditioning, so she sweltered all day. This made her want to weep, just talking about it. Ever since that conversation, I have been so grateful for my air conditioning. I had forgotten long ago to be grateful for it.

Anyway, I look back at the woman on the street grate. It’s summer and she’s in heavy jeans and a black sweatshirt with a hood. On top of that, literally, she’s wearing a sandwich board—MENS SUITS NEW YORK. Her hair is long and heavy, her ponytail limp on her shoulders. She’s out here on a day when everybody else, as she well knows—the streets are not crowded—is at a ballgame or the beach. Everyone else is off.

So I turned around and went back. I wanted to say something—I don’t know what, find out where she was from, encourage her. I said hello, and she looked at me and I patted her arm and said, “Happy Fourth of July, my friend.” She was startled and then shy, and she smiled and made a sound, and I realized: She doesn’t speak English. “God bless you,” I said, because a little while in America and you know the word God just as 10 minutes in Mexico and you learn the word Dios. And we both smiled and nodded and I left.

I went into Bloomingdale’s and wrote these words: “We must speak the same language so we can hearten each other.”

*   *   *

The question of whether America should have an “official language,” of whether English should be formally declared our “national language,” is bubbling, and will be back, in Congress, the next few sessions.

When you look at papers outlining the facts of the debate, things break down into dryness very quickly. Should “issues of language diversity” be resolved by imposing “linguistic uniformity”? This is like asking if the robots should speak logarithmically or algorithmically. There are few things you can rely on in this turbulent world, but one is the tendency of academics to use language poorly, even when discussing language.

But there’s something odd about the English question. It feels old-fashioned. Because we all know America has an official language, and a national language, and that it is English. In France they speak French, and in China they speak Chinese. In Canada they have two national languages, but that’s one reason Canada often seems silly. They don’t even know what language they dream in.

The real question, ultimately, is whether America wants to go that route. Should we allow America devolve into a nation of two official languages—in this case, following recent demographic trends and realities, English and Spanish?

We’ve never done that in more than 200 years. It would be radical, and destructive, to do it now.

We speak English here. It’s a great language, luckily, a rich one. It’s how we do government and business. It’s the language of the official life, the outer life, in America. As for the inner life of America, the language of the family, it would be just as odd to change longtime tradition there, which has always been: Anything goes. You speak what you came over speaking, and you learn the new language. Italian immigrants knew two languages, English and Italian. They enriched the first with the second—this was a great gift to all of us—and wound up with greater opportunities for personal communication to boot. Talk about win-win. And so with every group, from every place.

But in a deeper sense, we should never consider devolving from one national language down into two, or three, because if we do we won’t understand each other. And we’re confused enough as it is.

In the future, with the terrible problems we face, we are going to need to understand each other more and more, better and better. We’re going to need to know how to say, “This way” and “Let me help” and “stop” and “here.” We’re going to have to negotiate our way through a lot of challenges, some dramatic, some immediate, and it will make it all the harder, all the more impossible-seeming, if we can’t even take each other’s meaning, and be understood.

*   *   *

The only other debate I suppose we should really be having on languages is how to help our future generations learn more of them. (Mexican immigrants who speak Spanish and English have a leg up here, and will benefit from it.) We live in the world, and we want that world to understand us better. We want to understand it better, too. Europe is lucky: All those different cultures and languages are bundled up all close to each other and next to each other. They learn each other’s languages with ease. We have oceans to the left and right, and vastness. For us, or at least the older of us, learning another language is still a leap. As a nation we probably should leap more.

But on English as the language in which we live our shared national life, and share our culture, and our dreams, we should stay where we are. Which hasn’t, for 231 years now and counting, been a bad place to be.

Happy Fourth of July. To mark this Wednesday’s holiday, I share a small moment that happened a year ago in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. I was at a wake for an old family friend named Anthony Coppola, a retired security guard who’d been my uncle Johnny’s best friend from childhood. All the old neighborhood people were there from Clinton Avenue and from other streets in Brooklyn, and Anthony’s sisters Tessie and Angie and Gloria invited a priest in to say some prayers. About a hundred of us sat in chairs in a little side chapel in the funeral home.

The priest, a jolly young man with a full face and thick black hair, said he was new in the parish, from South America. He made a humorous, offhand reference to the fact that he was talking to longtime Americans who’d been here for ages. This made the friends and family of Anthony Coppola look at each other and smile. We were Italian, Irish, everything else. Our parents had been the first Americans born here, or our grandparents had. We had all grown up with two things, a burly conviction that we were American and an inner knowledge that we were also something else. I think we experienced this as a plus, a double gift, though I don’t remember anyone saying that. When Anthony’s mother or her friend, my grandmother, talked about Italy or Ireland, they called it “the old country.” Which suggested there was a new one, and that we were new in it.

But this young priest, this new immigrant, he looked at us and thought we were from the Mayflower. As far as he was concerned—as far as he could tell—we were old Yankee stock. We were the establishment. As the pitcher in “Bang the Drum Slowly” says, “This handed me a laugh.”

This is the way it goes in America. You start as the Outsider and wind up the Insider, or at least being viewed as such by the newest Outsiders. We are a nation of still-startling social fluidity. Anyone can become “American,” but they have to want to first.

It has had me thinking a lot about how people become American.

*   *   *

I don’t know that when my grandfather Patrick Byrne and his sisters, Etta and Mary Jane, who had lived on a hardscrabble little farm in Donegal, on the west coast of Ireland, felt about America when they got here. I don’t know if they were “loyal to America.” I think they were loyal to their decision to come to America. In for a penny, in for a pound. They had made their decision. Now they had to prove to themselves it was the right one. I remember asking Etta what she’d heard about America before she got here. She said, “The streets were paved with gold.” All the immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th century used that phrase.

When I was in college in the 1970s, I got a semester abroad my junior year, and I took a boat from England to Ireland and made my way back to Donegal. This was approximately 55 years after my grandfather and his sisters had left. There I met an old man who’d been my grandfather’s boyhood friend. He lived by himself in a shack on a hill and was grateful the cousins I’d found had sent me to him. He told me he’d been there the day my grandfather, then a young man, left. He said the lorry came down the lane and stopped for my grandfather, and that his father said goodbye. He said, “Go now, and never come back to hungry Ireland again.”

My grandfather had his struggles here but never again went home. He’d cast his lot. That’s an important point in the immigrant experience, when you cast your lot, when you make your decision. It makes you let go of something. And it makes you hold on to something. The thing you hold on to is the new country. In succeeding generations of your family the holding on becomes a habit and then a patriotism, a love. You realize America is more than the place where the streets were paved with gold. It has history, meaning, tradition. Suddenly that’s what you treasure.

A problem with newer immigrants now is that for some it’s no longer necessary to make The Decision. They don’t always have to cast their lot. There are so many ways not to let go of the old country now, from choosing to believe that America is only about money, to technology that encourages you to stay in constant touch with the land you left, to TV stations that broadcast in the old language. If you’re an immigrant now, you don’t have to let go. Which means you don’t have to fully join, to enmesh. Your psychic investment in America doesn’t have to be full. It can be provisional, temporary. Or underdeveloped, or not developed at all.

And this may have implications down the road, and I suspect people whose families have been here a long time are concerned about it. It’s one of the reasons so many Americans want a pause, a stopping of the flow, a time for the new ones to settle down and settle in. It’s why they oppose the mischief of the Masters of the Universe, as they’re being called, in Washington, who make believe they cannot close our borders while they claim they can competently micromanage all other aspects of immigration.

*   *   *

It happens that I know how my grandfather’s sister Mary Jane became an American. She left a paper trail. She kept a common-place book, a sort of diary with clippings and mementos. She kept it throughout the 1920s, when she was still new here. I found it after she’d died. It’s a big brown book with cardboard covers and delicate pages. In the front, in the first half, there are newspaper clippings about events in Ireland, and sentimental poems. “I am going back to Glenties . . .”

But about halfway through, the content changes. There is a newspaper clipping about something called “Thanksgiving.” There are newspaper photos of parades down Fifth Avenue. And suddenly, near the end, there are patriotic poems. One had this refrain: “So it’s home again and home again, America for me./ My heart is turning home again, and there I long to be./ In the land of youth and freedom beyond the ocean bars/ Where the air is full of sunlight, and the flag is full of stars.”

Years later, when I worked for Ronald Reagan, those words found their way into one of his speeches, a nod from me to someone who’d made her decision, cast her lot, and changed my life.

I think I remember the last time I told that story. I think it was to a young Mexican-American woman who was a speechwriter for Bill Clinton. I think she completely understood.

God bless our beloved country on the 231st anniversary of its birth.

Hillary Clinton doesn’t have to prove she’s a man. She has to prove she’s a woman.

She doesn’t have to prove to people that she’s tough enough or aggressive enough to be commander in chief. She doesn’t have to show she could and would wage a war. She has to prove she has normal human warmth, a normal amount of give, of good nature, that she is not, at bottom, grimly combative and rather dark.

This is the woman credited with starting and naming the War Room. Her staff has nicknamed her “The Warrior.” Get in her way and she’d squish you like a bug. This has been her reputation for 20 years. And it is her big problem. People want a president to be strong but not hard.

A longtime supporter of Mrs. Clinton’s spoke with candor some months back of her friend’s predicament. “We’re back where we were in ‘92—likability. Nothing has changed.”

Back then, when the Clintons were newly famous, their consultants were alarmed to find the American people did not believe Hillary was a mother. They thought she was a person with breasts in a suit. She had a briefcase and a latte and was late for the meeting, but no way did she have a child.

So the Clintons began to include their daughter, Chelsea, then 12, in campaign appearances. Which helped.

Where is Chelsea now? She’s trying to parallel park.

*   *   *

The Sopranos video the Clintons made and released this week was smart and well done. It was witty and it was, quite literally, daring. It addressed yet again the likability problem, but from a new angle.

Mrs. Clinton’s most effective means of communication is not the debate stage, the sit-down interview or the podium, where her speeches are both tinny and hectoring. Her most effective area is in short campaign videos. You have seen them—Mrs. Clinton seated on a couch, with soft lighting. She is dressed in a soft pastel sweater or jacket, with a mellow strand of pearls, and flowers in the background. The videos are always artfully edited—she can do many takes—and that’s why they look so good.

In the short Soprano film, Mrs. Clinton was beautifully made up and quietly dressed in slacks and sweater like a handsome suburban lady waiting for her man at a booth in a diner. He looked great too. Of all modern presidents, Bill Clinton was most made for the camera. And he can really act. He actually looked disappointed at being served carrots and not onion rings.

The film jokingly acknowledges what the Clintons well know: that a certain portion of the voting population sees them as . . . well, as gangsterish. As dark, and dishonest to a degree more extreme than is usual even in political figures. By putting these perceptions so colorfully on the table, they make fun of them. And they invite their foes to go too far, at just the right moment, a year before the 2008 presidential race really begins. This is a good time for the Clinton campaign to face the charge that they’re Tony and Carmella. In a year such comments will be old hat, “a rehash,” or, as one of her campaign aides said when asked for reaction on the recent Hillary biographies—it was the best staff line of the year—“Is it possible for you to quote me yawning?”

So, the Sopranos spoof wasn’t bringing up That Which Must Not Be Said. It was saying it and getting rid of it. (A piquant aspect: The bad guy in the video who eyeballs Mrs. Clinton really “is” a mobster, the actor who played Johnny Sack in “The Sopranos.” The Clintons’ enemies are the real gangsters!)

As an added benefit, the spoof probably got some people actually paying attention, if only for a second, to the fact that Mrs. Clinton has chosen a campaign theme song. To hear it you must go to her site.

Why would Hillary pick a song distinguished only by its schmaltzy averageness? Because she thinks it’s the kind of music a likable, feminine middle class woman would like? Because her consultants researched the exact number and nature of fans who go to Celine Dion’s show in Vegas each years, and determined they are the exact middle of America? Because it focus-grouped well? All of the above?

*   *   *

As for her attempts to appeal to centrists, two items deserve note. One is that Mrs. Clinton has taken, on the stump, to referring to herself as “born . . . in the middle of America in the middle of the century.” This is interesting because it’s word for word what George H.W. Bush said in 1988 when he introduced his choice of Dan Quayle. She has also taken to referring to herself as famous but unknown, which is exactly what was said of Vice President Bush the same year. Mrs. Clinton seems to have been studying 1988, which was the last time anyone won the presidency in a landslide.

But there is another side of the Clinton campaign, and I found some of it this week. It is a new Web site called HillaryIs44.com. It is rather mysterious. It does not divulge who is running the site, or who staffs it. It is not interactive; it has one informative voice, and its target audience seems to be journalists and free-lance oppo artists.

And it reads like The Warrior’s Id. Hillary “took on” a journalist this week and “beat him into submission.” Bloomberg has “stripped himself of allies” in “New York’s cutthroat politics.” “Expect stormy days ahead for Bloomberg,” who will wind up “lonely.” Republicans “will attempt to rip him to shreds.” “A May surprise announcement will be met with mounds of research accumulated over the next 11 months.”

In tone the site is very Tokyo Rose.

Encouraging readers to send in “confidential tips,” its primary target and obvious obsession is Barack Obama. “Senator Barack Obama (D-Rezko) is busy lately lying about President Bill Clinton” and “attacking entire communities.” “We have written extensively on Obama, and his indicted slumlord friend Antoin ‘Tony’ Rezko. We have repeatedly warned David Axelrod, Michelle Obama and Barack Obama that this story is not going away.” The Obama campaign is “still posing as innocents incapable of doing anything unsavory even as evidence mounts that unsavory is their favorite dish.” “Dirty Obama Smear” and “Obama’s Dirty Mud Politics” are two recent headlines.

This appears to be the subterranean part of Hillary’s campaign, the part that quietly coexists with the warm, chuckling lady playing the jukebox with her husband. It coexists with the Maya Angelou part, the listening tour part, the filmed parts.

It is the war room part. I suspect the site is a back door to that war room.

*   *   *

Politics ain’t beanbag. It is not, generally, an ennobling profession.

But if Mrs. Clinton’s aides want to understand better her likability problem, they should look at this site. It’s dark in there.

Go deeper.

That’s what I keep thinking as Americans fight the Washington establishment (the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, their big contributors) on immigration. Go deeper. Look at the real emotions driving the struggle as opposed to what politicians and the media claim are “the high emotions surrounding this issue.”

You know what I think is the American mood right now on immigration? Anti-immigration and for the immigrant. Against the abstract and for the particular.

We’re against gushing borders and illegal immigration, which is at this point even souring the general mood on legal immigration, because we don’t trust our bureaucrats to let in the people America needs. We don’t trust our bureaucrats and leaders to care a lot about America. (We assume that when senators are together, if someone says, “But what about America?” everyone laughs, and then the top senator says, dryly, “Your concern is duly noted. Next.”)

But that’s the abstract, “immigration.” In the particular—the immigrants we see and work with and know—we’re for them.

We’re asking for closed borders and pulling for newcomers.

And this isn’t ambivalence, and it isn’t confusion. It’s common sense plus humanity.

The White House is exploiting American alarm at uncontrolled borders to get its way. This of course has added to the sense of national alarm. They believe the alarm works for them: If you don’t pass our bill we’ll never control your borders—yes, “your”—and you’ll suffer! In the general air of agitation, anger festers. People feel powerless. Rage follows, and in this case I believe deep fissures will follow that.

What gets lost in the alarm, and will get lost in the fissures, is the old affection the whole country felt, and still feels, for its newcomers. Not shallow sentiment or softness but something more constitutional, more civic.

As in: I’m in Mass, or in the deli down the street, or the bathroom of a restaurant, and I see a Hispanic woman, obviously hardworking, obviously so far not lucky, not yet. This is what I think: Hi, Grandma. My grandmother was a bathroom attendant on the fifth floor of the A&S department store in downtown Brooklyn. She was an immigrant from Ireland.

When I see new Americans, I think I’m seeing her. And I am not alone. And I know what we feel, and it is not antagonism. It is some kind of old civic love, some kind of connection that echoes back, that doesn’t quite have a name but is part of who we are.

*   *   *

In New York last weekend we had the Puerto Rican Day Parade. I walked from midtown to uptown in the throngs. Babies, strollers, mommies, people dressed in red, white and blue. Puerto Ricans are citizens of the United States, but some of the people around me were new arrivals. On 86th Street, at the end of the parade, I saw a teenage girl in a silver-white gown. She’d just gotten off a float and was sitting on the curb. She looked like a Miss Universe contestant—brown skin, big eyes, beautiful. She looked like she wants to be Jennifer Lopez. This is a very American thing to want to be. Near her there was another girl in a gown. She was shorter, thicker, and had a tattoo on her arm of the American flag. I thought: She’ll be a Marine some day.

Some things were not good, not at all. A young man hurled an obscene epithet. He was that angry I wasn’t Latin, and he felt I should know. Another young man deliberately frightened a shopkeeper on Madison Avenue. When he walked by the store, he put out his arm as if he had a gun in his hand, aiming it at her. I was behind him. I looked at the woman as she flinched, and our eyes locked: This is bad.

We’re going to have to work on that young man, on both of them.

But we always have to work on young men, don’t we?

*   *   *

Lately in the immigration debate we have been discussing and debating statistics on such things as family breakdown, education levels, and criminality among Hispanic newcomers. This reminds me of a number of things, some of them perhaps to this day delicate. One is that among the immigrant Irish of the late 19th and early 20th centuries there were fairly high levels of dysfunction, family neglect, alcoholism. As for criminality, they didn’t call it the paddy wagon for nothing. My tribe was an obstreperous one. Many tribes are, at least the interesting ones. People are human and human is messy.

Another thought is that statistical breakdowns on our ethnic groups, Bell Curves and Reports on Out of Wedlock Birthrates, are not in themselves necessarily wrong, but there’s something rather rude about them. That is perhaps a sissy thing to say, but what I mean is this: If you have a mother and a father with a big family of kids it would be rude—and unhelpful, and not conducive to promoting peace—for the grown-ups to sit around the table at night and say to their children, “Joey, you’re the smart one,” and “Elizabeth is dumber and yet dogged,” and “Bobby here is our promiscuous one.” How exactly would that help? It’s not even “realistic”: Today’s reality can change. An academic might say, “I’m not their father.” Fair enough, but you’re a grown-up, and if you’re a grown-up, you’re in charge of America right now.

*   *   *

A little love would go a long way right now. We should stop putting newcomers in constant jeopardy by blithely importing ever-newer immigrants who’ll work for ever lower wages. The ones here will never get a sure foot on the next rung that way.

We should close the border, pause, absorb what we have, and set ourselves to “patriating” the newcomers who are here. The young of AmeriCorps might help teach them English. Those reaching retirement age, who happen to be the last people in America who were taught and know American history, could help them learn the story of our country. We could, as a nation, set our minds to this.

We shouldn’t be disheartened. So much good could be done once a Great Pause begins, once the alarm is abated.

What will we do about the 12 million here? Nothing radical. We’re not really a radical people, Americans.

Having no borders—that’s radical.

Saying, to the American people, in essence, Back my big bill or I will not close the borders, is radical.

Insisting on “all or nothing at all” is radical.

Leaving your country wide open in the age of terror is radical.

But America isn’t radical. If its leaders only knew! Our leaders are in need not only of wisdom but of faith. And, as always, love, as opposed to mere sentiment, and vanity, and pride.

“The Sopranos” wasn’t only a great show or even a classic. It was a masterpiece, and its end Sunday night is an epochal event. With it goes an era, a time.

You know the story, and if you don’t, you’ve absorbed enough along the way as you overheard people chat Monday morning around what we still call the water cooler and mean as the line at Starbucks. A New Jersey mobster with a family, a business and a therapist makes his way through life. It was a family drama that was a mob drama, but in some hard-to-put-your-finger-on way it was the great post-9/11 drama of our time.

“The Sopranos” first aired on HBO in 1999, but rewatching the first season, there’s an air of preamble to it, as if something were coming. Something was, and the show really got its shape and mood from what followed in September 2001. Sometimes this was subtle—Tony goes to his old uncle’s place upstate and suddenly thinks about going to live up there where it’s safe, where the birds fly on the lake. Sometimes it wasn’t—in the bar, he reads from a newspaper story about how unprotected the Port of Newark is. I remember this because at the time I’d begun to worry about the Port of Newark.

That kind of thing happened a lot with “The Sopranos.” It was real, Old Jersey real (Satriale’s butcher shop, not the mall) and primal. It was about big things, as all great drama is—the human hunger for dominance, for safety, for love; the desire to rise in the world; the need to belong to something, to be a Jet or a Shark, a Crip or a Blood, and have mates, homies, esteemed colleagues or paisans; how we process the hypocrisy all around us, in our families and among our friends, as we grow up; how we process hypocrisy in ourselves.

Because it was primal, its dialogue was pared to the bone and entered the language. You disrespecting the Bing? You wanna get whacked? And other famous phrases, many of them obscene.

*   *   *

The drama of Tony, the great post-9/11 drama of him, is that he is trying to hold on in a world he thinks is breaking to pieces. He has a sense, even though he’s only in his 40s, that the best times have passed, not only for the Italian mob but for everyone, for the country—that he’d missed out on something, and that even though he lives in a mansion, even though he is rich and comfortable and always has food in the refrigerator and Carm can go to Paris and the kids go to private school—for all of that, he fears he’s part of some long downhill slide, a slide that he can’t stop, that no one can, that no one will. Out there, he told his son and daughter, it is the year 2000, but in here it’s 1950. His bluster, his desperate desire to re-create order with the rough tools of his disordered heart and brain, are comic, poignant, ridiculous, human.

Tony became a new and instantly recognizable icon, and his character adds to American myth, to America’s understanding of itself. It’s a big thing to create such a character, and not only one but a whole family of them—Uncle Junior, Christopher, Carmella. This is David Chase’s great achievement, to have created characters that are instantly recognizable, utterly original, and that add to America’s understanding of itself. And to have created, too, some of the most horrifying moments in all of television history, and one that I think is a contender for Most Horrifying Moment Ever. That would be Adriana desperately crawling—crawling!—through the leaves in the woods as she tries to flee her lovable old friend Silvio, who is about to brutally put her down.

*   *   *

Here is a question that touches on the mystery of creativity, and I’ll probably put it badly because I can’t define it better than what I’m going to say. David Chase is the famous and justly celebrated creator of “The Sopranos,” the shaper of its stories. The psychological, spiritual and emotional energy needed to create a whole world, which is what he has done, is very great. It is a real expenditure, a kind of investment in life, a giving of yourself. You can’t do what he does without something like love. Not sentimentality or softness or sweetness, but love. And yet in a way, if you go by “The Sopranos,” Mr. Chase loves nothing. Human beings are appetite machines, and each day is devoted to meeting and appeasing those appetites. No one is good, there are no heroes, he sees through it all. The mental-health facility is a shakedown operation where they medicate your child into zombiehood and tell him to watch TV. Politicians are the real whores. The FBI is populated by smug careerists. In the penultimate show, a table full of psychotherapists top each other with erudite-seeming comments that show a ruthlessness as great as any gangster’s. I guess I’m asking where the energy for creativity comes when you see with such cold eyes.

Not that they’re unrealistic. They’re not. One of the reasons the show was so popular—one of the reasons it resonated—is that it captured a widespread feeling that our institutions are failing, all of them, the church, the media, the law, the government, that there’s no one to trust, that Mighty Mouse will not save the day.

In Mr. Chase’s world, everyone’s a gangster as long as he can find a gang. Those who don’t are freelancers.

And what he seems to be telling us, as the final season ends, is that all your pity for Tony, all your regard for the fact that he too is caught, all your sympathy for him as a father, as a man trying to be a man, as a man whose mother literally tried to have him killed, is a mistake. Because he is a bad man. He has passing discomfort but not conscience, he has passing sympathies but no compassion. When he kills the character who is, essentially, his son, Christopher, he does it spontaneously, coolly, and with no passion. It’s all pragmatism. He’s all appetite. Tony is a stone cold gangster.

*   *   *

There have been shows on television that have been, simply, sublime. In drama there was “I Claudius,” a masterpiece of mood and menace—“Trust no one!”— from which writers and producers continue to steal (see HBO’s “Rome.”) And PBS’s “Upstairs Downstairs.” A few others. “The Sopranos” is their equal, but also their superior: It is hard to capture the past, but harder to capture the present, because everyone knows when you don’t get it right. It takes guts to do today.

David Chase did, and he made a masterpiece. I’ll be watching Sunday night, but I’ll wake up that morning with a blue moon in my eyes.

What political conservatives and on-the-ground Republicans must understand at this point is that they are not breaking with the White House on immigration. They are not resisting, fighting and thereby setting down a historical marker—”At this point the break became final.” That’s not what’s happening. What conservatives and Republicans must recognize is that the White House has broken with them. What President Bush is doing, and has been doing for some time, is sundering a great political coalition. This is sad, and it holds implications not only for one political party but for the American future.

The White House doesn’t need its traditional supporters anymore, because its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in the administration don’t even much like the base. Desperate straits have left them liberated, and they are acting out their disdain. Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place.

For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome. You don’t like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don’t like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad.

But on immigration it has changed from “Too bad” to “You’re bad.”

The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic—they “don’t want to do what’s right for America.” His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, “We’re gonna tell the bigots to shut up.” On Fox last weekend he vowed to “push back.” Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want “mass deportation.” Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are “anti-immigrant” and suggested they suffer from “rage” and “national chauvinism.”

*   *   *

Why would they speak so insultingly, with such hostility, of opponents who are concerned citizens? And often, though not exclusively, concerned conservatives? It is odd, but it is of a piece with, or a variation on, the “Too bad” governing style. And it is one that has, day by day for at least the past three years, been tearing apart the conservative movement.

I suspect the White House and its allies have turned to name calling because they’re defensive, and they’re defensive because they know they have produced a big and indecipherable mess of a bill—one that is literally bigger than the Bible, though as someone noted last week, at least we actually had a few years to read the Bible. The White House and its supporters seem to be marshalling not facts but only sentiments, and self-aggrandizing ones at that. They make a call to emotions—this is, always and on every issue, the administration’s default position—but not, I think, to seriously influence the debate.

They are trying to lay down markers for history. Having lost the support of most of the country, they are looking to another horizon. The story they would like written in the future is this: Faced with the gathering forces of ethnocentric darkness, a hardy and heroic crew stood firm and held high a candle in the wind. It will make a good chapter. Would that it were true!

If they’d really wanted to help, as opposed to braying about their own wonderfulness, they would have created not one big bill but a series of smaller bills, each of which would do one big clear thing, the first being to close the border. Once that was done—actually and believably done—the country could relax in the knowledge that the situation was finally not day by day getting worse. They could feel some confidence. And in that confidence real progress could begin.

*   *   *

The beginning of my own sense of separation from the Bush administration came in January 2005, when the president declared that it is now the policy of the United States to eradicate tyranny in the world, and that the survival of American liberty is dependent on the liberty of every other nation. This was at once so utopian and so aggressive that it shocked me. For others the beginning of distance might have been Katrina and the incompetence it revealed, or the depth of the mishandling and misjudgments of Iraq.

What I came in time to believe is that the great shortcoming of this White House, the great thing it is missing, is simple wisdom. Just wisdom—a sense that they did not invent history, that this moment is not all there is, that man has lived a long time and there are things that are true of him, that maturity is not the same thing as cowardice, that personal loyalty is not a good enough reason to put anyone in charge of anything, that the way it works in politics is a friend becomes a loyalist becomes a hack, and actually at this point in history we don’t need hacks.

*   *   *

One of the things I have come to think the past few years is that the Bushes, father and son, though different in many ways, are great wasters of political inheritance. They throw it away as if they’d earned it and could do with it what they liked. Bush senior inherited a vibrant country and a party at peace with itself. He won the leadership of a party that had finally, at great cost, by 1980, fought itself through to unity and come together on shared principles. Mr. Bush won in 1988 by saying he would govern as Reagan had. Yet he did not understand he’d been elected to Reagan’s third term. He thought he’d been elected because they liked him. And so he raised taxes, sundered a hard-won coalition, and found himself shocked to lose his party the presidency, and for eight long and consequential years. He had many virtues, but he wasted his inheritance.

Bush the younger came forward, presented himself as a conservative, garnered all the frustrated hopes of his party, turned them into victory, and not nine months later was handed a historical trauma that left his country rallied around him, lifting him, and his party bonded to him. He was disciplined and often daring, but in time he sundered the party that rallied to him, and broke his coalition into pieces. He threw away his inheritance. I do not understand such squandering.

Now conservatives and Republicans are going to have to win back their party. They are going to have to break from those who have already broken from them. This will require courage, serious thinking and an ability to do what psychologists used to call letting go. This will be painful, but it’s time. It’s more than time.

Why do people want to come here? Same reasons as a hundred years ago. For a job. For opportunity. To rise. To be in a place where one generation you can be a bathroom attendant at a Brooklyn store and the next your boy can be the star of “Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour,” with everyone in the neighborhood listening on the radio, or, today, “American Idol,” with everyone watching and a million-dollar contract in the wings. To be in a place of weird magic where the lightning strikes. Boom: You got the job in the restaurant. Crack: Now you’re the manager. Boom: You’ve got a mortgage, you have a home.

“Never confuse movement with action,” said Ernest Hemingway. But America gives you both. What an awake place. And what a tortured and self-torturing one. Your own family will be embarrassed by you if you don’t rise, if you fall, if you fail. And the country itself is never perfect enough for its countrymen; we’re on a constant Puritan self-healing mission, a constant search-and destroy-mission for our nation’s blemishes—racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, out damn spots.

I asked myself a question this week and realized the answer is “Only one.” The question is: Have I ever known an immigrant to America who’s lazy? I have lived on the East Coast all my life, mostly in New York, and immigrants both legal and illegal have been and are part of my daily life, from my childhood when they surrounded me to an adulthood in which they, well, surround me. And the only lazy one I knew was a young woman, 20, European, not mature enough to be fully herself, who actually wanted to be a good worker but found nightlife too alluring and hangovers too debilitating.

But she was the only one. And I think she went home.

Everyone else who comes here works hard, grindingly hard, and I admire them. But it’s more than that, I love them and I’m rooting for them. When I see them in church (it is Filipino women who taught me the right posture for prayer; Central Americans helped teach me the Bible) I want to kiss their hands. I want to say, “Thank you.” They have enriched my life, and our country’s.

Naturally I hope the new immigration bill fails. It is less a bill than a big dirty ball of mischief, malfeasance and mendacity, with a touch of class malice, and it’s being pushed by a White House that is at once cynical and inept. The bill’s Capitol Hill supporters have a great vain popinjay’s pride in their own higher compassion. They are inclusive and you’re not, you cur, you gun-totin’ truckdriver’s-hat-wearin’ yahoo. It’s all so complex, and you’d understand this if you weren’t sort of dumb.

But it’s not so complex. The past quarter-century an unprecedented wave of illegal immigrants has crossed our borders. The flood is so great that no one—no one—can see or fully imagine all the many implications, all the country-changing facts of it. No one knows exactly what uncontrolled immigration is doing and will do to our country.

So what should we do?

*   *   *

We should stop, slow down and absorb. We should sit and settle. We should do what you do after eating an eight-course meal. We should digest what we’ve eaten.

We should close our borders. We should do whatever it takes to close them tight and solid. Will that take the Army? Then send the Army. Does it mean building a wall? Then build a wall, but the wall must have doors, which can be opened a little or a lot down the road once we know where we are. Should all legal immigration stop? No. We should make a list of what our nation needs, such as engineers and nurses, and then admit a lot of engineers and nurses. We should take in what we need to survive and flourish.

As we end illegal immigration, we should set ourselves to the Americanization of the immigrants we have. They haven’t only joined a place of riches, it’s a place of meaning. We must teach them what it is they’ve joined and why it is good and what is expected of them and what is owed. We stopped Americanizing ourselves 40 years ago. We’ve got to start telling the story of our country again.

As to the eight or 10 or 12 or 14 million illegals who are here—how interesting that our government doesn’t know the number—we should do nothing dramatic or fraught or unlike us. We should debate what to do, at length. Debate isn’t bad. There’s a lot to say. We can all join in. We should do nothing extreme, only things that are commonsensical.

Here is the truth: America has never deported millions of people, and America will never deport millions of people. It’s not what we do. It’s not who we are. It’s not who we want to be. The American people would never accept evening news pictures of sobbing immigrants being torn from their homes and put on a bus. We wouldn’t accept it because we have hearts, and as much as we try to see history in the abstract, we know history comes down to the particular, to the sobbing child in the bus. We don’t round up and remove. Nor should we, tomorrow, on one of our whims, grant full legal status and a Cadillac car. We take it a day at a time. We wait and see what’s happening. We do the small discrete things a nation can do to make the overall situation better. For instance: “You commit a violent crime? You are so out of here.” And, “Here, let me help you learn English.”

*   *   *

Let’s take time and find out if the immigrants who are here see their wages click up and new benefits kick in as the endless pool stops expanding. It would be good to see them gain. Let’s find out if it’s true that Americans won’t stoop to any of the jobs illegals do. I don’t think it is. Years ago I worked in a florist shop removing the thorns from roses. It was painful work and I was happy to do it, and I am very American. I was a badly paid waitress in the Holiday Inn on Route 3 in New Jersey.

The young will do a great deal, and not only the young. The dislike for Americans evinced by the Americans-won’t-do-hard-work crowd is, simply, astonishing, and shameful. It says more about the soft and ignorant lives they lived in Kennebunkport and Greenwich than it does about the American people.

Digest, absorb, teach. Settle in, settle down, protect our country.

Happy Memorial Day.

Having watched the second Republican debate the other night, it’s clear to me the subject today is Fred Thompson, the man who wasn’t there. While the other candidates bang away earnestly in a frozen format, Thompson continues to sneak up from the creek and steal their underwear—boxers, briefs and temple garments.

He is running a great campaign. It’s just not a declared campaign. It’s a guerrilla campaign whose informality is meant to obscure his intent. It has been going on for months and is aimed at the major pleasure zones of the Republican brain. In a series of pointed columns, commentaries and podcasts, Mr. Thompson has been talking about things conservatives actually talk about. Shouldn’t homeowners have the right to own a gun? Isn’t it bad that colleges don’t teach military history? How about that Sarkozy—good news, isn’t it? Did you see Tenet on Russert? His book sounds shallow, tell-all-y.

These comments and opinions are being read and forwarded in Internet Nation. They are revealing and interesting, but they’re not heavy, not homework. They have an air of “This is the sound of a candidate thinking.” That’s an unusual sound.

Most illustrative was what started this week as a small trading of barbs with provocateur Michael Moore, whose general and iconic dishabille is meant to show identification with the workingman, though in America workingmen bathe. Mr. Moore was back from Cuba, where he made a documentary on the superiority of Castro’s health care system. Mr. Thompson suggested Mr. Moore is just another lefty who loves dictators. Mr. Moore challenged Mr. Thompson to a health-care debate and accused him of smoking embargoed cigars. Within hours Mr. Thompson and his supposedly nonexistent staff had produced a spirited video response that flew through YouTube and the conservative blogosphere. Sitting at a desk and puffing on a fat cigar, Mr. Thompson announces to Mr. Moore he can’t fit him into his schedule. Then: “The next time you’re down in Cuba . . . you might ask them about another documentary maker. His name was Nicolás Guillén. He did something Castro didn’t like, and they put him in a mental institution for several years, giving him devastating electroshock treatments. A mental institution, Michael. Might be something you ought to think about.”

You couldn’t quite tell if Mr. Thompson was telling Mr. Moore he ought to think more about Cuba, or might himself benefit from psychiatric treatment. It seemed almost . . . deliberately unclear.

*   *   *

Right now Mr. Thompson has the best of both worlds, an air of fearlessness and nothing on the line. He hasn’t committed. He’s not in. He can take a chance and be himself because he’s not afraid, and he’s not afraid because he has nothing to lose.

He says he’ll get in if enough people ask him to. If they don’t, he’ll go someplace else and do something else. It’s not as if his speech fees would go down.

Why would he run now? Because he thinks there’s no one of greater stature on the field. Because he thinks he’s got a better, shrewder read of the base than the rest of them. Because he’s at an age where you throw the dice or know you never will. Because he thinks the one essential to modern presidential leadership, the one thing you must have now, in the age of terror, is the ability to communicate, and he reads himself as the best communicator. And because he’s at a point in his private life where it’s possible for him. He’s got a wife who’s got his back and two kids who’ve given him a second chance. Even in great careers it’s the private life that’s hardest to get right. He feels he has.

People speak of Mr. Thompson’s movie-star looks. But he’s not beautiful, he’s heavy and gray. What he has is bearing. He has the manner of someone who thinks a great deal of himself, and thinks it after long personal pondering of his good points, bad points, high points and low. He may or may not be correct in his conclusions, but I suspect they are part of his draw. I suspect people pick them up.

Is he anything beyond a standard Republican conservative? Will he have anything beyond a Mideast policy that consists of win in Iraq, support the surge, and oppose any timetable? Does he stand for any strategic thinking apart from what John McCain unconsciously but aptly characterized as “Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran”? On domestic issues, can Mr. Thompson go beyond standard conservative thought? I happen to be standard conservative myself, but sometimes old things need to be made new, the obvious needs to be made fresh.

Here are some things Mr. Thompson has going for him. He had eight years in the U.S. Senate, and then left in 2002 instead of sticking around and getting all the muck on him. He has a conservative record but a moderate persona. He seems nonradical, non-let’s-follow-the-banner-over-the-cliff. He’s a Southerner but modern. He has a great voice. (Voices matter. Ask Obama, who has one. Ask Hillary, who doesn’t.) He comes to a field that may soon start to feel tired. That to some extent already does. His relatively late entry suggests—suggests—his motives are serious, not just ego-related.

But Mr. Thompson’s challenges are real, too. He’ll have to show he’s serious—that he’s in it for big reasons and in it to the end. He’ll have to knock down the “low energy, gadfly, hops from thing to thing” charge, which has persisted so long that one assumes there’s something in it. He’ll have to show he’s not just a rote, pro forma conservative—a dumb conservative—but someone who knows times change, horizons shift. He has to show he has run something, or can run something. Romney ran a state, Giuliani a city. Mr. Thompson has run what—a career? Big whoop.

*   *   *

Most importantly for him, and for all the Republican candidates for that matter, Mr. Thompson will have to answer this question: What is he running to do? Why should the Republicans get another eight years, or four years, after all the missteps they’ve made? Isn’t conservatism, or Republicanism, or whatever you call it, just tired? Isn’t it over? Isn’t America just waiting for whatever will take its place?

Why shouldn’t liberalism get a shot? Could they mess up more? Why should we trust Republicans with foreign affairs?

If Fred Thompson can answer these questions, he’ll be showing he’s something new, and not just the newest candidate, or the latest face.

Who woke up Old Europe? France, Ireland and England this week showed us the future. They were the center of the new. It looked good. We can learn from them.

First Ireland, which Tuesday formalized a peace that most who love that country would not have thought possible in our lifetimes. And it was barely noticed, as sometimes happens with good news. But the Protestants and Catholics of Northern Ireland ratified a power-sharing agreement in which they will govern together and forswear violence. Everyone knew it was coming—the voters had backed it—yet the sight of it, the Ulstermen and Catholics standing together in the Stormont, and the words, took one’s breath away. Here is 81-year-old Ian Paisley, the Unionist firebrand whose life was shaped by his passionate advocacy for the Protestants and against the IRA. There was pain in the past, he said, but “that was yesterday. This is today. And tomorrow will be tomorrow. From the depths of my heart, I can say to you today that I believe Northern Ireland has come to a time of peace, a time when hate will no longer rule.”

What a way to mark the new century. What an example for the world. We learn what we already know and need always to be reminded: Breakthroughs can happen even in the oldest, most tortured conflicts. Hearts change. So much of Ireland’s energy the past hundred years, the past 500, has gone to conflict. What will that energy go to now? What will it make? It will be exciting to see.

*   *   *

In France it was a spirited political fight, one with meaning, purpose and perhaps promise. Socialist Ségolène Royal attempted to become the first female French president; Nicolas Sarkozy attempted to be the first serious conservative president in generations. At issue: how to make France modern, how to wake it up and make it new again. She said she could bring reform with “calm and serenity.” He said greater vigor is needed, and a break with the past: cut taxes, cut government, leave more room for markets. They were not Tweedledum and Tweedledumber.

It comes as a relief to admire France again, and not only or even primarily for the comparative wisdom of its choosing the conservative. It’s how they did it. A short and intense campaign between candidates who were impressive, interesting. Historic voter turnout. And the great debate, watched by 20 million people, who learned. In all this, France showed style, in the deepest sense of a manner, a spirit, an approach, revealing of character and aspirations.

The debate wasn’t guys in ties in a row, it was a man and a woman sitting face to face across a table. They were eyeball to eyeball, and you got to see who blinked. The moderators were modest, in the background, not the star. Even the two candidates were not the star. What they think and who they are was the star.

At one point, as they disagreed on the facts of the mainstreaming of exceptional children, Ms. Royal accused Mr. Sarkozy of “the height of political immorality” and of “lying.” She said she was “scandalized” and “very angry.” She meant to show her steel, puncture his imperturbability, and reveal his rumored dark temper. Look what happened:

Sarkozy: Calm yourself, Madame.

Royal: No, I will not calm down.

Sarkozy: You need to be calm to be president of the Republic. . . . I don’t know why Mrs. Royal, who is normally so calm, has lost her cool.

Royal: I have not lost my cool! I am angry, sometimes it is right and healthy to be angry. The president of the Republic should be angry at injustice.

Sarkozy: You fly off the handle very easily . . .

It was a clever flipping of intent: He showed her temper. Watching it, you could imagine unseen subtitles. I did not call you a liar, Monsieur Liarface. I did not call you emotional, Madame Hotflash.

Ms. Royal’s frustration, and the look she got when she realized she’d dug a hole, was as revealing as Mr. Sarkozy’s enjoyment of the inflicting of pain; he seemed to show a mild version of that great old word of French derivation, sadism.

*   *   *

Madame Royal is not Madame Rodham, France is not America, and too much is being made of the parallels with Hillary Clinton. But the French race might have shown a certain rough template for how to puncture Mrs. Clinton’s persistent air of inevitability, and for one big reason.

What Mr. Sarkozy had going for him in the debate is that he was not afraid of Ms. Royal because she was a woman. He was not undone by her femininity. American candidates seem much more awkward in this area. When up against a strong woman, male candidates don’t know what is appropriate and standard political aggression and what is ungentlemanly bullying.

Mr. Sarkozy was not afraid or tentative. He was poised. He seemed to think he was facing a formidable adversary, and it didn’t matter whether it was a man or a woman, it mattered that she was a socialist and socialism isn’t helpful. And so he approached her as a person who is wrong.

She was not afraid of the boy. He was not afraid of the girl. He granted her no particular mystique; she granted him no particular advantage. They were appropriate.

Mr. Sarkozy also did something with Ms. Royal that might be usefully remembered by Mrs. Clinton’s foes. Ms. Royal, when the unexpected happened—”Calm down!”—showed she wasn’t so good at improvising. She didn’t react with any tactical grace. This reminded me of Mrs. Clinton, who also seems unsure and unsteady when pushed off script or put at the mercy of happenstance. She can’t rely on her instincts, because deep down she knows her instincts are no match for her will. She’s not light on her feet. Her foes would do well to keep this in mind.

*   *   *

Finally, in England this week, Tony Blair gracefully announced the end of his Downing Street rule. He returned to his old district, Sedgefield, where he’d begun his career, and spoke of what he honestly felt he’d done right and what he knew he’d done wrong, or unsuccessfully. He spoke of the personal and yet higher context of his journey, as he called it. “Sometimes the only way you conquer the pull of power is to set it down.”

He leaves as he presided, with spirit and dignity, an example to American political figures and, one would hope, an inspiration.

So: peace, passion and a bit of profundity. It is good to see old Europe rock. A bow to their excellence is in order.

They stood earnestly in a row, combed, primped and prepped, as Nancy Reagan gazed up at them with courteous interest. But behind the hopeful candidates, a dwarfing shadow loomed, a shadow almost palpable in its power to remind Republicans of the days when men were men and the party was united. His power is only increased by his absence. But enough about Fred Thompson.

This is a piece about Thursday night’s Republican presidential debates, but first I would like to note that the media’s fixation with which Republican is the most like Reagan, and who is the next Reagan, and who parts his hair like Reagan, is absurd, and subtly undermining of Republicans, which is why they do it. Reagan was Reagan, a particular man at a particular point in history. What is to be desired now is a new greatness. Another way of saying this is that in 1960, John F. Kennedy wasn’t trying to be the next FDR, and didn’t feel forced to be. FDR was the great, looming president of Democratic Party history, and there hadn’t been anyone as big or successful since 1945, but JFK thought it was good enough to be the best JFK. And the press wasn’t always sitting around saying he was no FDR. Oddly enough, they didn’t consider that an interesting theme.

They should stop it already, and Republicans should stop playing along. They should try instead a pleasant, “You know I don’t think I’m Reagan, but I do think John Edwards may be Jimmy Carter, and I’m fairly certain Hillary is Walter Mondale.”

*   *   *

I return to the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Calif., Thursday night. It was an incomplete field that made its debut, but not an unimpressive one. For the first time, as I watched, I thought: Fred Thompson shouldn’t take forever to get in. History moves.

The debate was important because it offered a chance for each candidate to enter the national memory trove. For most normal humans, the presidential race is still a blur they catch from the corner of their eye as they walk through a room with the TV on, but if you’re running it’s better to make a blurry good impression than a blurry bad one.

The three front-runners had and have different challenges, long-term ones that can’t be resolved with a single debate. John McCain has to make himself new again, not just an old warrior working out old dreams but a fresh and meaningful choice. Rudy Giuliani has to make himself serious. America’s mayor needs ballast. What does he know? Is there wisdom there or only instinct? Mitt Romney has to show he is not just an intelligent and articulate operator who is chasing the next and logical résumé point for no particular reason beyond that it’s next, and logical.

The rest of the candidates had to show they’re here, and potentially a force.

Here’s how I saw it:

All the candidates save one, the obscure but intellectually serious Ron Paul, seemed to be trying to show they will not break with the Bush administration on the war, but that, at the same time, they each know a heck of a lot more than President Bush. There were criticisms of the administration’s handling of Iraq, with the first and strongest coming from Mr. McCain. Mike Huckabee had the most spirited explanation. The administration listened to “civilians in silk ties” rather than generals “with mud and blood on their boots.” On Iran, the candidates seemed in general to be indignant to the point of bellicosity.

If we view the proceedings in vulgar and reductive Who Won, Who Lost terms, and let’s, Mitt Romney won, Rudy Giuliani lost, and John McCain is still in. The moderator, Chris Matthews, seemed to think he was on “Hardball” and had to keep the pups, punks and rubes—that would be the candidates—in line. He cut them off—”Congressman, that’s time!”—and occasionally hectored. One of the stars was the buzzing clock. It interrupted all thought.

*   *   *

Mr. McCain seemed alert, and full of effort. Somehow he seemed both high-energy and creaky. He uncompromisingly supported fighting it out in Iraq. He also had the best line of the night. When Mitt Romney was tagged for saying catching Osama is not of pre-eminent importance—”It’s more than Osama bin Laden”—Mr. McCain quickly pounced. “I’ll follow him to the gates of hell.” Go, baby. But there was something “Poignant Echoes of the Past” about his performance. He didn’t make it new, but I think he made it more moving.

Mr. Giuliani seemed unsure at first, and was badly lit, or badly made up since he had the same lighting as everyone else. He did not make a strong impression until he spoke on abortion, and then it was a bad one. He seemed to support overturning Roe v. Wade and also not overturning it. Whatever. He shouldn’t be surprised by such questions, and should have enough respect to have thought it through. His New York riff seemed tired. His problem is the same as Hillary Clinton’s. Both of them do well by themselves. Both seem diminished when standing and vying with others. They are solo acts.

The statuesque Mr. Romney had a certain good-natured command, a presidential voice, and a surprising wiliness. He seemed happy to be there, and in the mysterious way that some people seem to dominate, he dominated. He had a quick witted answer when Mr. Matthews asked him if the Roman Catholic Church should deny communion to pro-abortion politicians. What, said, Matthews, would he say to the bishops? “I don’t say anything to Roman Catholic Bishops,” he said. “They can do whatever the heck they want!” He deftly flipped it into a church-state issue. He did some light-handed and audience-pleasing Clinton bashing, and was confident on stem-cell research. But he was weak on Iraq, predictable, like someone who knows the answer that polls right with the base. How can you be utterly banal about a war, and such a controversial one?

Sam Brownback seems a very nice and sleepy fellow who means it on the social issues. Jim Gilmore, Duncan Hunter and Tommy Thompson all got sort of jumbled together, and seemed to merge into one, “The Guy You Don’t Know and Don’t Think You Have To.” The disappointment was Tom Tancredo, who can be colorful and passionate on the stump, and not only on immigration, and who was expected by some to be the wildcard, the Mike Gravel of the GOP debate. He seemed hemmed in by the format, and looked as if he knew it, getting, halfway in, the disheartened look of a talk-show guest who just realized he left it in the green room.

Each had flubs and false moves. Something tells me it will all get more interesting, and not only because Fred Thompson will get in.