Peggy Noonan

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.

This week saw a small and telling controversy involving a mural on the walls of Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles. The mural is big—400 feet long, 18 feet high at its peak—and eye-catching, as would be anything that “presents a colorful depiction of the rape, slaughter and enslavement of North America’s indigenous people by genocidal Europeans.” Those are the words of the Los Angeles Times’s Bob Sipchen, who noted “the churning stream of skulls in the wake of Columbus’s Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria.”

What is telling is not that some are asking if the mural portrays the Conquistadors as bloodthirsty monsters, or if it is sufficiently respectful to the indigenous Indians of Mexico. What is telling is that those questions completely miss the point and ignore the obvious. Here is the obvious:

The mural is on the wall of a public school. It is on a public street. Children walk by.

We are scaring our children to death. Have you noticed this? And we’re doing it more and more.

Last week of course it was Cho Seung-hui, the mass murderer of Virginia Tech. The dead-faced man with the famous dead-shark eyes pointed his pistols and wielded his hammer on front pages and TV screens all over America.

What does it do to children to see that?

For 50 years in America, whenever the subject has turned to what our culture presents, the bright response has been, “You don’t like it? Change the channel.” But there is no other channel to change to, no safe place to click to. Our culture is national. The terrorizing of children is all over.

Click. Smug and menacing rappers.

Click. “This is Bauer. He’s got a nuke and he’s going to take out Los Angeles.”

Click. Rosie grabs her crotch. “Eat this.”

Click. “Every day 2,000 children are reported missing . . .”

Click. Don Imus’s face.

Click. “Eyewitnesses say the shooter then lined the students up . . .”

Click. An antismoking campaign on local New York television. A man growls out how he felt when they found his cancer. He removes a bib and shows us the rough red hole in his throat. He holds a microphone to it to deliver his message.

Don’t smoke, he says.

This is what TV will be like in Purgatory.

It’s not only roughness and frightening things in our mass media, it’s politics too. Daily alarms on global warming with constant videotape of glaciers melting and crashing into the sea. Anchors constantly asking, “Is there still time to save the Earth? Scientists warn we must move now.” And international terrorism. “Is the Port of Newark safe, or a potential landing point for deadly biological weapons?”

I would hate to be a child now.

*   *   *

Very few people in America don’t remember being scared by history at least to some degree when they were kids. After Pearl Harbor, they thought the Japanese were about to invade California. If you are a boomer, you remember duck-and-cover drills. The Soviets had the bomb, and might have used it. I remember a little girl bursting into tears during the Cuban Missile Crisis when I was in grade school.

But apart from that, apart from that one huge thing, life didn’t seem menacing and full of dread. It was the boring 1950s and ‘60s, and the nice thing about a boring era is it’s never boring. Life is interesting enough. There’s always enough to scare a child.

But now it’s a million duck-and-cover drills, a thousand alarms, a steady drumbeat of things to fear.

Adults have earnest discussions about how more and more of our children are being prescribed antidepressants and antianxiety drugs. What do you think—could there be a connection here?

Why are we frightening our kids like this, with such insensitivity? Part of it is self-indulgence, part of it is profit, but not all of it is malevolent. Some of it is just mindless. Adults forget to think about kids. They forget what it’s like to be a kid.

ABC’s John Stossel is a person in media who knows. He did a piece recently on the public-service announcements warning about child abduction. He asked some children if the warnings worried them. Yes, they said. One little boy told him he worries every night “because I’m asleep and I don’t know what’s gonna happen.”

*   *   *

Children are both brave and fearful. They’ll walk up to a stranger and say something true that a grown-up would fear to say. But they are also subject to terrors, some of them irrational, and to anxieties. They need a stable platform on which to stand. From it they will be likely to step forward into steady adulthood. Without it, they will struggle; they will be less daring in their lives because life, they know, is frightful and discouraging.

We are not giving the children of our country a stable platform. We are instead giving them a soul-shaking sense that life is unsafe, incoherent, full of random dread. And we are doing this, I think, for three reasons.

One is politics—our political views, our cultural views, so need to be expressed and are, God knows, so much more important than the peace of a child. Another is money—there’s money in the sickness that is sold to us. Everyone who works at a TV network knew ratings would go up when the Cho tapes broke.

But another reason is that, for all our protestations about how sensitive we are, how interested in justice, how interested in the children, we are not. We are interested in politics. We are interested in money. We are interested in ourselves.

We are frightening our children to death, and I’ll tell you what makes me angriest. I am not sure the makers of our culture fully notice what they are doing, what impact their work is having, because the makers of our culture are affluent. Affluence buys protection. You can afford to make your children safe. You can afford the constant vigilance needed to protect your children from the culture you produce, from the magazine and the TV and the CD and the radio. You can afford the doctors and tutors and nannies and mannies and therapists, the people who put off the TV and the Internet and offer conversation.

If you have money in America, you can hire people who compose the human chrysalis that protects the butterflies of the upper classes as they grow. The lacking, the poor, the working and middle class—they have no protection. Their kids are on their own. And they’re scared.

Too bad no one cares in this big sensitive country of ours.

I saw an old friend on the Acela on the way to Washington, and he told me of the glum, grim faces at the station he’d left, all the commuters with newspapers in their hands and under their arms. This was the day after Virginia Tech. We talked about what was different this time, in this tragedy. I told him I felt people were stricken because they weren’t stricken. When Columbine happened, it was weird and terrible, and now there have been some incidents since, and now it’s not weird anymore. And that is what’s so terrible. It’s the difference between “That doesn’t happen!” and “That happens.”

Actually I thought of Thoreau. He said he didn’t have to read newspapers because if you’re familiar with a principle you don’t have to be familiar with its numerous applications. If you know lightning hits trees, you don’t have to know every time a tree is struck by lightning.

In terms of school shootings, we are now familiar with the principle.

Dennis Miller the other night said something compassionate and sensible on TV. Invited to criticize some famous person’s stupid response to a past tragedy, he said he sort of applied a 48 hour grace period after a tragedy and didn’t hold anyone to the things they’d said. People get rattled and say things that are extreme.

But more than 48 hours have passed. So: some impressions.

*   *   *

There seems to me a sort of broad national diminution of common sense in our country that we don’t notice in the day-to-day but that become obvious after a story like this. Common sense says a person like Cho Seung-hui, who was obviously dangerous and unstable, should have been separated from the college population. Common sense says someone should have stepped in like an adult, like a person in authority, and taken him away. It is only common sense that if a person like Cho leaves a self-aggrandizing, self-celebrating, self-pitying video diary of himself to be played by the mass media, the mass media should not play it and not publicize it, not make it famous. Common sense says that won’t help.

And all those big cops, scores of them, hundreds, with the latest, heaviest, most sophisticated gear, all the weapons and helmets and safety vests and belts. It looked like the brute force of the state coming up against uncontrollable human will.

But it also looked muscle bound. And the schools themselves more and more look muscle bound, weighed down with laws and legal assumptions and strange prohibitions.

The school officials I saw, especially the head of the campus psychological services, seemed to me endearing losers. But endearing is too strong. I mean “not obviously and vividly offensive.” The school officials who gave all the highly competent, almost smooth and practiced news conferences seemed to me like white, bearded people who were educated in softness. Cho was “troubled”; he clearly had “issues”; it would have been good if someone had “reached out”; it’s too bad America doesn’t have better “support services.” They don’t use direct, clear words, because if they’re blunt, they’re implicated.

The literally white-bearded academic who was head of the campus counseling center was on Paula Zahn Wednesday night suggesting the utter incompetence of officials to stop a man who had stalked two women, set a fire in his room, written morbid and violent plays and poems, been expelled from one class, and been declared by a judge to be “mentally ill” was due to the lack of a government “safety net.” In a news conference, he decried inadequate “funding for mental health services in the United States.” Way to take responsibility. Way to show the kids how to dodge.

The anxiety of our politicians that there may be an issue that goes unexploited was almost—almost—comic. They mean to seem sensitive, and yet wind up only stroking their supporters. I believe Rep. Jim Moran was first out of the gate with the charge that what Cho did was President Bush’s fault. I believe Sen. Barack Obama was second, equating the literal killing of humans with verbal coarseness. Wednesday there was Sen. Barbara Boxer equating the violence of the shootings with the “global warming challenge” and “today’s Supreme Court decision” upholding a ban on partial-birth abortion.

One watches all of this and wonders: Where are the grown-ups?

*   *   *

I wondered about the emptiness of the phrases used by the media and by political figures, and how pro forma and lifeless and cold they are. The formalized language of loss hasn’t kept up with the number of tragedies. “A nation mourns.” “Our prayers are with you.” The latter is both self-complimenting and of dubious believability. Did you really pray? Or is it just a phrase?

And this as opposed to the honest things normal people say: “Oh no.” “I am so sorry.” “I’m sad.” “It’s horrible.”

With all the therapy in our great therapized nation, with all our devotion to emotions and feelings, one senses we are becoming a colder culture, and a colder country. We purport to be compassionate—we must respect Mr. Cho’s privacy rights and personal autonomy—but of course it is cold not to have protected others from him. It is cold not to have protected him from himself.

*   *   *

The last testament Cho sent to NBC seemed more clear evidence of mental illness—posing with his pistols, big tough gangsta gonna take you out. What is it evidence of when NBC News, a great pillar of the mainstream media, runs the videos and pictures on the nightly news? Brian Williams introduced the Cho collection as “what can only be described as a multi-media manifesto.” But it can be described in other ways. “The self-serving meanderings of a crazy, self-indulgent narcissist” is one. But if you called it that, you couldn’t lead with it. You couldn’t rationalize the decision.

Such pictures are inspiring to the unstable. The minute you saw them, you probably thought what I did: We’ll be seeing more of that.

The most common-sensical thing I heard said came Thursday morning, in a hospital interview with a student who’d been shot and was recovering. Garrett Evans said of the man who’d shot him, “An evil spirit was going through that boy, I could feel it.” It was one of the few things I heard the past few days that sounded completely true. Whatever else Cho was, he was also a walking infestation of evil. Too bad nobody stopped him. Too bad nobody moved.

On Wednesday John McCain distinguished himself with a closely argued and eloquent address in which he spoke seriously and at length of his position on Iraq. He said America faces “an historic choice” with “ramifications for Americans not yet even born.”

“Many Democrats,” he said, view the war as “a political opportunity,” while Republicans view it as “a political burden.” But it is neither, he said. It is not a political question to be poll-tested but a challenge that bears on our continuance as a great nation. We must stay and fight and win.

“It may be standard-setting,” the Hotline said of the remarks the next day, “perhaps the most powerful plea a war supporter has . . . sent to the American people since the troop surge began. Has any other presidential candidate written a speech to persuade—importune—an audience to change their minds?”

You can agree or disagree with Mr. McCain, but where he stands is clear—and clarity these days, from our candidates, feels like a gift. As does certitude. He isn’t running from the war but owning it. A political rival might say, “He has no choice.” But there’s always a choice.

My larger point, however, is that he sounded like a serious man addressing a serious issue in a serious way. This makes him at the moment stand out.

*   *   *

There is a sort of stature gap in the presidential campaign so far, isn’t there? A lack of personal height among the candidates, a lack of the bearing that befits the office they seek.

Here was Rudy Giuliani this week in a speech in California. No one much noted it—he was lucky it was subsumed by the Imus wave. But this is how Mr. Giuliani opened a speech to citizens considering his candidacy for the American presidency. “Thank youse all very much for invitin’ me here tuh-day, to this meeting of the families from different parts’a California.”

He was imitating Marlon Brando in “The Godfather.” (The rendering comes from a Newsday report.) Actually the character of Don Corleone, as drawn by Mario Puzo, was possessed of a certain verbal elegance, but never mind. Mr. Giuliani’s imitation was clear enough to inspire in the audience a smattering of applause and, apparently, laughter.

Earlier in the week, in reaction to a spate of critical stories about his wife, Judith, he asked reporters to leave her alone: “I am a candidate. She’s a civilian, to use the old Mafia distinction.”

Ah. Can’t have enough candidates for president who whimsically employ the language of mobsters.

Rudy is No. 1 in the GOP polls, but he has been displaying the worst stature gap on the trail. He can’t see why his wife sets people’s teeth on edge; he can’t see why it would disturb us to have her at cabinet meetings; he assures us she actually won’t be at cabinet meetings. This was followed by his statement that of course he continues to be pro-choice on abortion, and yeah, actually, he’s probably also for taxpayer funding of abortion, but maybe not.

There is an embarrassing ad-hoc-ness, a bush-leagueness to this. It’s as if he hasn’t thought it through, as if he’s just deciding everything each day. But by the time you’re running for president you should have decided.

At the very least a major candidate should by now have absorbed and internalized that he is running for what is actually the presidency of the United States, and not, say, the Las Vegas City Council.

From Mike Huckabee this week, a similar contribution to the august nature of the endeavor. He said if Republicans don’t start judging the private lives of the Republican candidates for president they should just “apologize to Bill Clinton.” That’ll class things up. Mitt Romney at the same time was talking about shooting varmints with all the rifles he does or does not own.

None of these are as bad as what may be the worst moment in the entire campaign so far, that being Hillary Clinton’s adopting of a deep Southern drawl when she spoke at a church last month in Selma, Ala.

“Ah don’t feel no ways tarred, ah come too far. . . . And the chair of all the mares in the country, Mare Palmer from Trenton, New Jersey . . “

Oh my goodness. It was so embarrassing, so lead-footed and cynical, so patronizing. You know she was shocked that it didn’t go over because she’d seen her husband hop up his own accent and go with the sing-song cadences a hundred times in his career, a thousand times, and no one ever knocked him for it. But he was good at it. And he was, actually, a Southerner. He wasn’t adopting an entire new regional accent and calling it his own.

*   *   *

So what’s going on here? “Can’t nobody here play this game?” The presidency is an august office. Why are these candidates acting so small when the job they think they deserve is so big?

Maybe it’s just that people have less dignity these days, and so candidates do too. A few decades ago personal dignity became equated with stiffness and pretension. There was nothing in it for politicians anymore. (It all might have started in 1968, when Richard Nixon went on “Laugh-In” and said, “Sock it to me.” But that worked because he had actual personal dignity to spoof.) Maybe we’ve reached the point where anyone who’d run for president is almost definitionally strange. Maybe it’s that the candidates so far are just the kind of people who’d make it to the top of the greasy pole, scramblers by nature whose main talent is energy, not judgment.

But I have a different theory. I think it’s that all our candidates for president have met, or know well, too many former and sitting presidents. They’ve seen them up close, they know them, they have seen their flaws and mess and inadequacy. Knowing a lot of former presidents, and a lot of incumbents, will give you a too mortal sense of what the presidency is.

The problem with former presidents is that knowing them keeps you from being awed by the presidency. When you haven’t met them, you have a more austere and august sense of who they are, and what a president is.

Candidates on the trail today would be better off keeping as their template for the office Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln—the unattainable greats. It’s no good to just be thinking, At least I’m better than Clinton, at least I’m better than Bush.

Something to reach for even if you know it will exceed your grasp. But it’s good to be reaching upward, not stooping.

I will never forget the stunning Oct. 7, 1962, Time magazine cover that showed Franklin D. Roosevelt weeping, a shining tear snaking its way down his pale and sunken cheek as he surveyed the destruction wrought by the New Frontier—tax cuts, a Republican running Treasury. What an indictment of the Democratic Party; what a dirge for the New Deal.

Oh wait, that didn’t happen.

Well, I do remember the great Time cover of JFK sobbing as he looked down on a cartoon of dope-smoking hippies holding a banner that said “McGovern.” It was the summer of ‘72, and the little bubble over JFK’s head said “Amnesty, Acid, Abortion . . . that’s not A-OK!”

Oh wait, that didn’t happen either.

Could I be correct that they only front-page weeping Republicans, and only laud conservatives when they’re dead?

I refer of course to this past week’s Time magazine cover, which had a picture of Ronald Reagan with a tear drawn in, to illustrate a piece on the current Republican Party. Actually it was a good piece in that it suggested a simple truth: The portion of the Republican Party that is based in and lives off the American capital has lost its way. They used to stand for conservative principles and now they stand for—well, whatever it is they stand for. I’ve written the past few years that the modern Democratic Party has been undone in part by its successes, that it achieved what it worked for in terms of Social Security, the safety net and civil rights, and that a great coalition has now devolved into a mere conglomeration of interest groups. I don’t see why Time shouldn’t similarly indict the Republicans.

I think many of us would agree both parties seem like exhausted little volcanoes, and that they are driven more by hunger than belief.

The Time story turned the discussion again to Reagan and the shadow he casts, and that’s what people are talking about: What would Reagan think, what would Reagan do? So let’s posit the obvious. Reagan was great, a one-man hinge of history. He led and encouraged a national effort to rethink the relations of the individual and the federal establishment, to rethink what was owed to and legitimately expected of the state. He increased our security by increasing our strength and removing from the historical stage an evil ideology that had become an evil empire. “The Soviet Union fell.” It didn’t fall, somebody pushed it.

Here we should stop, for here things become confused. There seems to be a temperamental difference between the two parties regarding their heroes. Democrats are inspired by their greats (FDR, JFK) and spooked by their failures (McGovern, Carter). Republicans ignore their failures (who talks about Hoover?) and are spooked by their greats.

And when you’re spooked by someone, or have been beaten by someone, resentment creeps in.

Democrats look back and think Reagan was magic, or rather had some strange and secret magic. The smile, the charm, the humor—that’s why he looms! It was Mike Deaver and the balloons! It was his optimism! But Reagan never said he was optimistic. He wasn’t “optimistic,” he was faithful and practical. He said we could turn around the economy and beat communism. Then we did it. Which left everyone feeling optimistic.

Reagan should be an inspiration for every person in politics who stands for something at a cost and because it is right.

But he should inspire, he shouldn’t demoralize. Republicans should stop allowing the media to spook them with his memory. Democrats should stop resenting him and dreaming up new reasons behind his success.

*   *   *

For Republicans especially he should be a reorienting memory. He was modern conservatism. If they are for more government, more spending, a more imposing state, what are they?

For Democrats he should function as a reminder that ideas and philosophy count, that they give politics meaning.

Republicans should take heart from his memory but not be sunk in him or spooked by him. Life moves. Reagan’s meaning cannot be forgotten. But where does it get you if it’s 1885, and Republicans are pulling their hair out saying, “Oh no, we’re not doing well. We could win if only we had a Lincoln, but they shot him 20 years ago!” That’s not how serious people talk, and it’s not how serious people think. You face the challenges of your time with the brains and guts you have. You can’t sit around and say, “Oh what would Lincoln do?” For one thing it is an impractical attitude. Lincolns don’t come along every day. What you want to do with the memory of a great man is recognize his greatness, laud it, take succor from it, and keep moving. You can’t be transfixed by a memory. Hold it close and take it into the future with you.

Reagan himself wasn’t spooked by his predecessors. He wasn’t trying to emulate FDR, the giant of his youth. He just took some tricks from him. (You can use this thing called mass media to talk over the heads of power brokers directly to the people.) Reagan wasn’t trying to be Barry Goldwater or Robert Taft or JFK. He was just being Reagan. He thought that was enough.

It was.

In fairness, he didn’t deal with a mainstream media mischievously comparing him, to his disadvantage, with those who came before him. But the point still stands that the candidates this year should be who they are, and if they have any greatness in them, they should find it, and move us all by being themselves.

*   *   *

Should the media be in mourning that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is no Sam Rayburn? Maybe. One could argue Sam Rayburn lived in the real world and was a man of generally moderate views, at least for his time, who knew what he thought and why. But I can’t imagine it does Speaker Pelosi any good to wake up each morning knowing she’s no Sam Rayburn. And, interestingly enough, it doesn’t seem to serve anyone’s agenda to continually make the comparison. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, can call herself the JFK of the race all she likes, but that doesn’t make her look even remotely like that cool and ironic practitioner of politics. It makes her look like a ditzy poseur.

Doesn’t matter what you call yourself, matters who you are. Reagan wasn’t magic. He was serious, farsighted and brave about the great issues of his time. Republican candidates could try that. If they did, it would have a secondary benefit. They’d start respecting themselves instead of merely being full of themselves. This would help them stop being spooked.

It was a sparkling and unusual event, a dinner that was as interesting as a Democrat’s (the talk was culturally broad, if sober— “life is real and earnest”) and as handsomely done as a Republican’s (the flowers were white, crisp, so expertly arranged they seemed a natural outgrowth of the mirrored table. Life should be not only grumbled about but celebrated).

In New York, in the Second Gilded Age, the age of the thousand-dollar pizza, wealthy Democrats, when they entertain, seem careful not to have things too physically perfect. It might suggest they’re unserious, that their thoughts are not always focused on the oppressed. Wealthy Republicans, on the other hand, will go all out to make it lovely. “The oppressed? I make jobs for them!” As for being thought unserious, one senses it does not trouble them. They made money in the world; they correctly apprehended the lay of the land and moved. That serious enough for you?

We were marking a birthday. I was seated next to a politically experienced businessman, an acquaintance of many years. He kept talking about the presidential race. I asked who he’s supporting. He was surprised I had to ask. “Hillary,” he said.

I nodded. “Tell me why,” I said.

“I’ve known her for years,” he said. “I’m a loyal person.”

I waited for him to say more. But he didn’t.

“Your reason for backing her is that you’re loyal?”

“Yes,” he said.

As if that were enough.

I was puzzled. You’re loyal. So what? You have a virtue, good. But that doesn’t mean the person you’re loyal to should be my president. That’s not enough.

And I said this, in a more polite and less concise way.

Which made him defensive. “You should talk,” he said. “You were loyal to Reagan.”

“No, I wasn’t,” I said. “I agreed with him.” I didn’t know Reagan when I went to work with him; I only knew his views and philosophy and supported them. I wanted him to succeed because I wanted what he stood for to succeed. In time I came to feel personal loyalty. But agreement came first. And if, in his presidency, Reagan had turned into some surprising, weak, tax-raising, government-growing, soft-on-Soviets guy, I would have stopped backing him. I would have thought him very nice and a bit of a dope, like Jerry Ford. I wouldn’t feel I had to hold high his memory and meaning.

Loyalty has nothing to do with it, not if you’re serious.

Or rather personal loyalty has nothing to do with it.

*   *   *

But the loyal are all over the place this year. There is a blight of them, the old friends and colleagues and neighbors, the former roommates. They’re bundling from downtown to the Bronx. They’re leading the cheers in the audience.

The other night at a big Giuliani fund-raiser in midtown Manhattan, when he said, “and if I become the president—,” a woman standing in the middle of the audience jumped up and bellowed, “You will!” to great applause, and I thought: I bet she worked with him at Justice.

A few months ago I had coffee with a new acquaintance who’s a longtime friend of a Republican candidate. He wanted to tell me of his candidate’s virtues, offer insight. His guy was honest, a leader. They’d been young men together. He’d seen him up close.

I didn’t doubt his sincerity. But so far I didn’t see why the candidate’s virtues were dispositive.

Why, I asked, should he be president?

The man was surprised and said, “Well, he’s a great guy!”

What does he want to do as president? I asked. What exactly will he do?

The man blinked and looked away. “I want to think about that,” he said. He thanked me for bringing it up. In a half hour more of talk he never answered.

Why is the Personal Loyalty Blight a problem? One reason is the one Hannah Arendt pointed out, the obvious one. “Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.”

But another is that the personally loyal seem more powerful than ever. Money is more important than ever. A big war chest leaves a candidate able to intimidate and communicate. The war chest comes from money raisers. The money raisers are often the personally loyal. And the loyal are driven not by a seriousness about ideas, proposals or policies but by a seriousness about the candidate himself, and what the candidate will do for the contributor once he’s elected president. Ambassador Smith . . . No, FCC Chairman Smith . . . Smith, head of the American delegation told reporters . . .

It’s all human, and traditional, and understandable. But this year of all years it’s not enough. And it’s certainly not enough for the candidates. It’s never enough for them. There is the story of the politician who accused a follower of never being loyal. The follower was nonplussed. “But I always support you when I think you’re right,” he said. “Anyone can do that,” said the politician. “I want people who support me when I’m wrong.” They’re all like that. And they all have reason for being like that. They’re in a hard business.

*   *   *

In the past, personal loyalty has been more a Democratic thing than a Republican one. Democrats used to like politics more than Republicans, so it’s no surprise they’d like its practitioners more. Republicans used to be conservatives; conservatives think politics is a duty, not a joy.

Democrats took their leaders more seriously as personalities, as people. They emotionally invested more in them. FDR’s people gave themselves to the boss, and went on to write the wonderful compelling story: Franklin and Eleanor, he a flighty state rep, she a flutey-voiced duckling, both of them born to and comfortable in wealth, then illness, growth, personal drama; he gets sick and finds his strength, she becomes independent and finds her voice. How many books, films and made-for-TV movies have we seen of it? All written by Democrats, who were more eager to see the life as a reason for their loyalty.

Republicans used to be a cooler sort. They got excited by the philosophy, by what the guy would do in office. If he pleased them in these areas, they were more than happy to find he’d lived an interesting and inspiring life, and tell you about it in books.

It is better to see activists driven by philosophy than by personalities. Better to be faithful to the cause than to individuals with whom you merely have a history. Better to have fidelity to principles, and not to political figures, no matter how interesting or compelling they are.

Here is what has been said the past week or so that sparked argument: Bill Maher, on HBO, said a lot of lives would be saved if Vice President Cheney had died, and Ann Coulter, at a conservative political meeting, suggested John Edwards is a “faggot.”

She was trying to be funny and get a laugh. He was trying to startle and get applause.

What followed was the predictable kabuki in which politically active groups and individuals feigned dismay as opposed to what many of them really felt, which was grim delight. Conservatives said they were chilled by Mr. Maher’s comments, but I don’t think they were. They were delighted he revealed what they believe is at the heart of modern liberalism, which is hate.

Liberals amused themselves making believe they were chilled by Ms. Coulter’s remarks, but they were not. They were delighted she has revealed what they believe is at the heart of modern conservatism, which is hate.

The truth is many liberals were dismayed by Mr. Maher because he made them look bad, and many conservatives were mad at Ms. Coulter for the same reason.

I realized as I watched it all play out that there’s a kind of simple way to know whether something you just heard is something that should not have been said. It is: Did it make you wince? When the Winceometer is triggered, it’s an excellent indication that what you just heard is unfortunate and ought not to be repeated.

In both cases, Mr. Maher and Ms. Coulter, when I heard them, I winced. Did you? I thought so. In modern life we wince a lot. It’s not the worst thing, but it’s better when something makes you smile.

*   *   *

One of the clearest statements ever about the implied limits of legitimate political discourse was made by the imprisoned Socrates in his first dialogue with Crito, when he said, “That’s not nice.” Actually, it was your grandmother who said “That’s not nice.” She’s the one who probably taught you the wince. It is her wisdom, encapsulated in those three simple words, that is missing from the current debate.

We tie ourselves in knots trying to explain why it is, or why it isn’t, always or occasionally, helpful or destructive to use various epithets, or give full voice to our resentments. But the simple wisdom of Grandma—“That’s not nice”—is a good guide. (I should say that when I was a kid, grandmas were older people who had common sense. They had observed something of people, had experienced life directly, not only through books or TV. Almost all of them had religious faith, and had absorbed the teachings of the Bible. Almost all of them sat quietly at the kitchen table, and even when I was a kid they were considered old fashioned. They were often ethnic and had accents. As a matter of fact, all of them were.)

I think that as America has grown more academic or aware of education, the wisdom of Grandma has been denigrated. Or ignored. Or stolen and dressed up as something else. For instance, Rudy Giuliani’s success in cleaning up and reviving the city of New York is generally attributed to his embrace of what is called, in academic circles, the broken-window theory. It holds that when criminals see that even small infractions are met and punished, they will understand that larger infractions will be met and punished. It also holds that when neighborhoods deteriorate, criminals are emboldened. People from Harvard won great prizes for these insights.

But all of broken-windows theory comes down to what Grandma always knew and said: “Fix the window or they’ll think no one cares! When people think no one cares, they do whatever they want.” There was not a single grandmother in America circa 1750-2007 who didn’t know this. But no one wants to quote Grandma. She’s so yesterday. And her simple teachings have been superseded by more exotic forms of instruction.

*   *   *

Fifty years ago, no one speaking at a respected political gathering would say, would even think of saying that Adlai Stevenson is a faggot. Nor would Arthur Godfrey or Jack Paar have declared on their television shows that we’d be better off if Eisenhower died. Is our discourse deteriorating? Yes, it is.

Part of the reason is that Grandma had more sway in the public sphere 50 years ago, which is to say common sense and a sense of decorum had more sway. Another part is that privately people felt they had more room to think or say whatever they wanted without being shamed or shunned. It let the steam out. We think of the 1950s as buttoned up, but in a way America had more give then. Men were understood not to be angels.

Our country now puts less of an emphasis on public decorum, courtliness, self-discipline, decency. America no longer says, “That’s not nice.” It doesn’t want to make value judgments on “good” and “bad.” We have come to rely on censorship to maintain decorum. We are very good at letting people know that if they say something we don’t like, we’ll shame them and shun them, even ruin them.

But censorship doesn’t make people improve themselves; it makes people want to rebel. It tells them to toe the line or pay a price. People who are urged in the right direction and taught in the right direction will usually try to discipline and improve themselves from within. But they do not enjoy censorship from without. They fight back. They are rude in order to show they are unbroken.

This is human. And Grandma would have understood this, too.

*   *   *

I think the atmosphere of political correctness is now experienced by normal people—not people who speak on TV, but normal people—as so oppressive, so demanding of constant self-policing, that when someone says something in public that is truly not nice, not nice at all, they can’t help but feel that they are witnessing a prison break.

As long as political correctness reigns, the more antic among us will try to break out with great streams of Tourette’s-like forbidden words and ideas.

We should forbid less and demand more. We should exert less pressure from without and encourage more discipline from within. We should ask people to be dignified, hope they’ll be generous, expect them to be fair. When they’re not, we should correct them. But we shouldn’t beat them to a pulp. Because that’s not nice.

Wednesday night John McCain made it official. “I am announcing that I will be a candidate for president of the United States,” he told David Letterman, adding that this was actually an announcement that he will make a formal announcement in April. Best line of the night came from bandleader Paul Shaffer: “He’s doing the formal announcement on Leno.”

Why did he do the Letterman show? To get his name in the paper, or rather to get his name in the paper followed by the word “announces” as opposed to the word “over.” A year ago he was pretty much on top, the past few months he’s lost steam.

Why was he once so hot and now so not?

Politics is like show business: Nobody knows anything. Everyone’s guessing. Everyone’s waiting to find out. Then, when it’s over, they tell you at great and knowing length why it happened.

Maybe the McCain story is as simple as what he’s always known, what he was taught, and what he experienced in war: The more time you spend in the air, the more you get dinged.

*   *   *

Everyone knows his bio, but when you stop and look at it again, you realize it’s even more impressive, more moving, than you remember. John Sidney McCain III, born in the Panama Canal Zone on Aug. 29, 1936, third in a string of high-spirited men who would serve their country heroically. His father was active-duty Navy, his mother the daughter of an oil wildcatter in Texas and Oklahoma. Both Mr. McCain’s father (he liked subs) and grandfather (he liked ships) rose to the rank of admiral, the latter promoted posthumously from vice admiral in 1945.

John McCain III goes to Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Va., attends the U.S. Naval Academy (class of 1958), becomes an aviator (he likes planes), is sent to Vietnam in the spring of 1967, and, on his 23rd bombing mission, on Oct. 26, 1967, is shot down by a surface to air missile. He ejects, breaking both arms and legs, is captured, is sent eventually to the infamous Hanoi Hilton where he spends much of his imprisonment in solitary. He refuses special treatment as the son of an admiral, is beaten and tortured, as are the others.

On March 14, 1973—34 years ago this month—he is freed, along with almost 600 other American prisoners. He receives the Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart and Distinguished Flying Cross. He stays in the Navy, works as liaison on Capitol Hill, goes home to Arizona, and is elected to Congress from the First District, replacing John Jacob Rhodes. In 1986 he wins the Senate seat of Barry Goldwater. He is re-elected in landslides in 1992 and ‘98 and runs for president in 2000. His Straight Talk Express gets slammed at a South Carolina crossroads by a bullet train called The Inevitability of Bush. He is re-elected to the Senate in 2004 with 77% of the vote and runs now, again, for president.

What a life.

*   *   *

In all, as he came up, he would have been an organic conservative, schooled in the old American rigors of duty and honor, shaped in a world that was competitive, aware of the existence of evil. A world in which not to be a conservative was like announcing, “I don’t understand life.” His patriotism, the patriotism of his family, was acted out and lived, as opposed to put on like a hat, or merely claimed.

No one in modern national-level politics has a better life story than his. In retrospect it is almost amazing that it didn’t beat that of George W. Bush, who wryly admitted to friends and supporters in 2000 that he was “a little light on the résumé.”

But Americans don’t elect résumés, they elect men. Here some aspects of Mr. McCain’s highly individualistic nature hurt him. He is funny, quick, brave, colorful. He is emotional, has a temper, carries grudges, harbors resentments. If the latter set of traits were not true, the former set would have won the Washington political establishment. As it is he has a portion of it, but many were hired, for money, as political advisers. This is a traditional, but at this point old-fashioned, way to spend money. All the advisers disagree; all of them gossip to reporters; most of them can define a problem but not a solution; and again, most don’t know anything. They were born for cable, always an interesting place, but one where you pay little price for being wrong.

*   *   *

There is the sense in Mr. McCain that he came to believe his résumé gives him special latitude. George W. Bush in 2000 felt he had to seem down-the-line conservative (though this involved some head faking). He had to tell you who he was because you couldn’t see it by looking at his history. I suspect Mr. McCain knew no one could question his life, that it showed who he was, and so he could do what he wanted in terms of policy and not jeopardize his support. After all, his whole life was a testament to conservative principles, so he could go against general conservative thinking on campaign reform, on immigration. He could hang with the liberal boy journalists on the bus—”My base!” he jokingly, truthfully, called them in 2004.

In 2000 he felt he could take on Christian conservative leaders in the South. Bad timing. In 2000 they were at the peak of their 20 years of power. Now their followers are tired and questioning after a generation of political activism. And many leaders seem compromised—dinged after all that time in the air. Mr. McCain could rebuke them now and thrive. Instead he decided to attempt to embrace them.

And there is Iraq. The war was generally popular from 2002 through roughly 2006, and Mr. McCain won broad credit from conservatives for standing with the president. But now that support, heightened by the surge debate, is costing him, not only with the general public but in a subtle way, I think, with Republicans. Republicans don’t abandon a Republican president in time of war, and they have a special relationship with this president, a simple admiration for who he is. At the same time, they don’t precisely want another W. for president, another man who seems just as convinced, stubborn, single-minded, invested.

One suspects Mr. McCain knows this but is stuck where he’s stuck and stands where he stands. What is his promise, his potential? It’s that he’s John McCain. In a changing world, he is a constant. He’s earned it. His promise is that he’s Moe Greene—he made his bones when the rest of them were out chasing cheerleaders.

Republicans and conservatives have been trying to sink Mrs. Clinton for years, but she keeps bob-bob-bobbing along. “Oh those Clinton haters, what’s wrong with them?”

Only a Democrat could hurt her, and a Democrat just did. Hollywood titan David Geffen, who now supports Barack Obama, this week famously retagged the Clintons as an Ivy League Bonnie and Clyde. Bill is “reckless,” Hillary relentless—”God knows, is there anybody more ambitious than Hillary?” In an interview that seemed like an audience, with the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd, Mr. Geffen said, “Everybody in politics lies, but they do it with such ease, it’s troubling.” In this he was, knowingly or unknowingly, echoing Bob Kerrey, the former Nebraska senator, who said in 1996 of the then-president, “Clinton’s an unusually good liar. Unusually good. Do you realize that?” Mr. Kerrey suffered for the remark and was shunned within his party for a while, but didn’t retract.

In her column Ms. Dowd labeled the campaign operation “Hillary Inc.” but Mr. Geffen got closer to the heart of it: It is the Clinton “machine” and it “is going to be very unpleasant and unattractive and effective.”

He’s probably about to find out how true that is.

Mr. Geffen should be braced for a lot of bad personal box office—negative press, searching profiles, strained relations. We’re probably about to see if the Clinton Machine can flatten him. Little doubt it will try. John Dickerson wrote in Slate this week of Bill Clinton’s generously sharing his campaign wisdom: “Your opponent can’t talk when he has your fist in his mouth.” Among some Democratic political professionals this kind of talk is considered tough and knowing, as opposed to, say, startlingly belligerent and crude.

But the outcome of the Geffen-Clinton episode is worthy of watching because it is going to determine whether it is remembered as the moment in the 2008 campaign when it became clear you are allowed to criticize Hillary—or as the moment it became clear you are not.

*   *   *

Howard Wolfson, Mrs. Clinton’s spokesman and an emerging dark prince among political operatives—he is, in the strange way of Washington, admired by journalists for his ability to mislead them—quickly responded with a challenge: If Mr. Obama is a good man, he’ll renounce Mr. Geffen and give back the money he contributed in his famous Hollywood fund-raiser. This was widely considered a brilliant move. Is it? Now everyone who follows politics even cursorily will have to have an opinion on whether Mr. Obama should apologize, which means they’ll have to know exactly what Mr. Geffen said, which, again, boiled down, is: I’ve known them intimately for almost 20 years, and they’re bad people and bringers of trouble. It’s good for Mrs. Clinton that America is going to spend the weekend discussing this? It’s good that Mr. Geffen’s comments, which focused on the area on which she is most touchy and most vulnerable—the character issue—will be aired over and over again? Mr. Wolfson might have been better off with, “We’re sorry to hear it, as Mrs. Clinton thinks the world of David.”

Mrs. Clinton has never gone after a fellow Democrat quite the way she’s going after Mr. Obama, and it’s an indication of how threatened she is not only by his candidacy but, one suspects, his freshness. He makes her look like yesterday. He makes her look like the old slash-and-burn. I doubted he could do her serious damage. Now I wonder.

What Mrs. Clinton is trying to establish is this: to criticize her—to speak of her critically as a human being, as a person with a record and a history and a style and attitudes—is, ipso facto, to be dirty, and low, and destructive. To air and raise questions about who she is, how she operates, and what can be inferred from her past actions is by definition an unjust act.

But Americans have always—always—looked at and judged the character and personality of their candidates for president. And they have been right to do so. It mattered that Lincoln was Honest Abe, Washington had no personal lust for power, that FDR was an optimist and a manipulator, that Adams was a man of rectitude and no small amount of stubbornness. These facts, these aspects of their nature, had policy implications and leadership implications. They couldn’t be more pertinent. They still are.

*   *   *

At the Democratic forum in Carson City, Nev., on Tuesday, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked Mrs. Clinton if Mr. Obama should renounce Mr. Geffen’s remarks. She answered, “I want to run a positive campaign” and referred to “the politics of personal destruction.” Every time she gets in a spot, she pulls that one out. And for good reason: It has always worked. It works because it confuses people. Is this the boys beating up the girl? Are they sticking her pigtails in the ink well? Is Geffen mean? If Obama is nice, shouldn’t he make sure everyone is nice?

It’s not so much a diversion as a non sequitur. Mrs. Clinton is like the little girl who steals the boy next door’s candy and hits him on the head with a hammer. He runs, “Mommy, she stole my Snickers and hit me on the head!” She turns to the mother, hammer in hand, and gestures at the boy. “This . . . is the politics of personal destruction.”

As I say, it’s always worked in the past. The question is, will it work in the future? One senses one thing that is new.

In the Nevada forum Mrs. Clinton had a hard act to follow when she came on after Sen. Chris Dodd, who spoke with energy and concentration, and whose look is striking, sort of Old American Ethnic in a Brooks Brothers suit. He’s like a cardinal with his thick white hair and furious eyebrows. He hit the crowd’s erogenous zones on Iraq, and took a hard shot at Mrs. Clinton: “Why is it so hard to say you’re sorry?”

Mrs. Clinton came out after him, and amid the Geffen flap, so it’s not surprising that she was a little off her game. She spoke the way she speaks—”renew the promise of America . . . give people the services and support they need . . . hardworking families”—but the flat voice seemed flatter, more grating. She seemed diminished by the fact that the event hadn’t been built around her, didn’t star her, wasn’t arranged by her. There were other people there, other candidates on the stage, and she looked like she was in a contest for a change.

Usually Mrs. Clinton is a tough little tank, but on Tuesday she seemed less large, less formidable. If only for a moment, less inevitable.

“Why do you think everyone is obsessing on the presidential race so early?” The question came from a friend who works in magazines. I told her I’d been thinking about the exact same thing. We’re barely less than two years out and yet paying attention to presidential politics as if it were October 2008.

Part of the reason is structural: A technological revolution spawned a media revolution; new media is determined to win the day, old media is desperate to keep up. Large investments are at stake. Competition forces its own dynamism; everyone’s filing, live, on cable, on the Internet, from Manchester, N.H., or Ames, Iowa. The chatter is everywhere.

In 1959 Teddy White stood in the snow by himself in New Hampshire and got to . . . reflect. Now ten thousand Teddys flood the zone. Of course they’re reduced to counting Barack Obama’s nose hairs. Actually they’re reduced to scrambling over each other for the sound bite from the man on the street when they know, actually, that there is no man on the street anymore in terms of . . . innocence, ingenuousness, “my first time seeing a speech by a guy who could be president!” Every voter’s a vet.

The most dismaying thing I’ve noticed the past 10 years on television is that ordinary people who are guests on morning news shows—the man who witnessed the murder, the housewife who ran from the flames—speak, now, in perfect sound bites. They also cry on cue. They used to ramble, like unsophisticated folk, and try to keep their emotions to themselves. Anchors had to take them in hand. “But what happened then?” Now the witness knows what’s needed, and how to do it. “And when she didn’t come home, Matt, I knew: this is not like her. And I immediately called the authorities.”

Why does this dismay? Because it’s another stepping away from the real. Artifice detaches us even from ourselves.

*   *   *

Earlier this week I heard a minister quote a spiritual genius: “All the problems in the world are caused by man’s inability to sit quietly in a room by himself.” We’re restless and need action, which in a modern media world means information. We need the busy buzz—the Internet, TV, instant messages, magazines and newspapers, the beeps and boops and bops. Rudy’s up in Iowa. Hillary’s stuck. We want to be among the first to have this information and the first to share it. And we want it not because it’s crucial but because it distracts us from the crucial. It takes our minds away from what is most important. Who you are, for instance, or what we are about. It’s a great relief not to think about the important. It’s a relief to focus on factoids.

And there’s this: By obsessing on the presidential race—and I mean here not only journalists and editors and professional schmoozers but normal humans—by turning our attention to the contests for the nomination and focusing on it and pondering how our neighbors experience Edwards or McCain, we help convince ourselves that the next guy can solve it all. The next president will save us. That’s why it’s so important, because the next president will turn it all around. We like thinking this. And I don’t blame us. I like thinking it too. Even though I know it isn’t true. Because our next president will not have magical powers.

But that’s not a manageable thought. What’s manageable is knowing how Rudy’s doing in Ames.

That’s our problem, the observer’s problem. What about the observed? What is the greatest problem with and for the candidates who are running so far?

There are many. Having journalists set up boot camp among your nose hairs is one. It is hard to be observed and real. But here’s a bigger problem: You remember the story, from Genesis, of the famished brother who gave up his birthright for food. “He sold his soul for a mess of pottage.” The problem in national politics this year is the number of candidates of whom it could plausibly said, “He sold his soul for a pot of message.” He became something else, adopted new views, took stands the opposite of what he’d taken in the past, because he thought that if he didn’t he could not win a base in the base. (“He” here includes “she.”) Candidates take new views to create a new message. You “sell your soul” to put on the policy skin media professionals fashion for you. In this way you make yourself into someone else. (And it’s not as if the strategists will like you for your flexibility. Once I asked a political professional if he’d come to like and care about the candidates he’d worked with, and he barked the old Cynical Strategist’s line, “Rule one: Never fall in love with the meat!”)

*   *   *

The discomfort felt by candidates who do this must be great. And echoes into the body politic. Does he mean what he’s saying here? When he said the opposite three years ago, did he mean that? Maybe he was lying three years ago and is telling the truth now. Does that make me like him more or less? If he repositions himself now will he reposition himself later?

These questions leave us scratching our heads.

The problem is not that people don’t change their minds. They do. And it’s not that they don’t have a right to change their minds. They do. But it’s understood as a sincere act only when it is explained—when a change in stance is accompanied by an explanation about a change in thinking, in approach, in weighing new data or old truths.

Otherwise it’s confusing, and mildly disheartening. A pragmatist might say it shouldn’t be. After all, if a candidate is pro-choice in 2004 and pro-life in 2007, at least you know one thing: He won’t be changing his mind again! Everyone gets to change his mind once, but on the big issues you only get one bite of the apple.

But it must be uncomfortable to walk around in a skin that isn’t really your own. It must be really damaging to your soul, if you have a soul, and not just appetites, or a rugged, rocky little sense of what you deserve.

Maybe the candidates would do themselves good by leaving the trail a few days and trying to sit quietly in a room, by themselves, with no distractions, and think about big things, such as who they are.