Peggy Noonan

The president’s State of the Union Address will be little noted and not long remembered. There was a sense that he was talking at, not to, the country. He asserted more than he persuaded, and he chose to redeclare his beliefs rather than argue for them in any depth. If you believe, as he does, that the No. 1 priority for the American government at this point in history is to lead an international movement for political democracy, and if you believe, as he truly seems to, that political democracy is in and of itself a certain bringer of world-wide peace, than this speech was for you. If not, not. It went through a reported 30 drafts, was touched by many hands, and seemed it. Not precisely a pudding without a theme, but a thin porridge.

It was the first State of the Union Mr. Bush has given in which Congress seemed utterly pre-9/11 in terms of battle lines drawn. Exactly half the chamber repeatedly leapt to its feet to applaud this banality or that. The other half remained resolutely glued to its widely cushioned seats. It seemed a metaphor for the Democratic Party: We don’t know where to stand or what to stand for, and in fact we’re not good at standing for anything anyway, but at least we know we can’t stand Republicans.

There was only one unforgettable moment, and that was in a cutaway shot, of Hillary Clinton, who simply must do something about her face. When the president joked that two people his father loves are turning 60 this year, himself and Bill Clinton—why does he think constant references to that relationship work for him?—it was Mrs. Clinton’s job to look mildly amused, or pleasant, or relatively friendly, or nonhostile. Mrs. Clinton has two natural looks, the first being a dull and sated cynicism, the second the bright-eyed throaty chuckler who greets visiting rubes from Utica. The camera caught the first; by the time she realized she was the shot, she apparently didn’t feel she could morph into the second. This canniest of politicians still cannot fake benignity.

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Maybe she knew the habitués of the Daily Kos, and other leftwing Web sites, were watching. Conservatives are always writing about the strains and stresses within the Republican Party, and they are real. But the Democratic Party seems to be near imploding, and for that most humiliating of reasons: its meaninglessness. Republicans are at least arguing over their meaning.

The venom is bubbling on websites like Kos, where Tuesday afternoon, after the Alito vote, various leftists wrote in such comments as “F––– our democratic leaders,” “Vichy Democrats” and “F––– Mary Landrieu, I hope she drowns.” The old union lunch-pail Democrats are dead, the intellects of the Kennedy and Johnson era retired or gone, and this—I hope she drowns—seems, increasingly, to be the authentic voice of the Democratic base.

How will a sane, stable, serious Democrat get the nomination in 2008 when these are the activists to whom the appeal must be made?

Republicans have crazies. All parties do. But in the case of the Democrats—the leader of their party, after all, is the unhinged Howard Dean—the lunatics seem increasingly to be taking over the long-term health-care facility. Great parties die this way, or show that they are dying.

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On the subject of political passion Tom Shales, longtime TV critic of the Washington Post and possessor of occasional eloquence, wrote a piece this week that deserves comment. I don’t mean his State of the Union review, which began, “George Bush may or may not be the worst president since Herbert Hoover . . .” I mean his attack last Monday on “Flight 93,” the A&E television movie on that fated 9/11 flight. Mr. Shales said it was shameful that vulgar dramatizers would “exploit” the pain of those on the flight and those they left behind. Or as he put it, he had, innocent that he is, thought it “unthinkable” that “even the sleaziest producers” would “exploit any aspect of a nightmare that the nation had witnessed in horror.”

By exploit I think he means “remember.” There is nothing vulgar, low or unhelpful about remembering the particular heroism of Todd Beamer, Jeremy Glick and dozens of others. Their action—they stormed the cockpit that day, forced the plane down and kept it from hitting a Washington target, presumably the Capitol or the White House—was a moment of courage and sacrifice, and we all owe them a great deal. Imagine if the particular wound the hijackers meant to inflict had been successful that day. Imagine how much worse it would have been,

Remembering the men and women of Flight 93 isn’t a self-indulgence but a duty. One senses in the Shales review the sneaky little suggestion that those who would remember, and who would tell this story (based by the way on the surviving telephone and other harrowing tapes of that flight) are in fact being political. But one suspects it is Mr. Shales who is being political. Maybe he fears those stupid Americans will get all emotional if they revisit part of the horror of that day, and go out and do something bad. Let’s not speak of it lest the rabble be roused.

What a snob.

You wonder at the intemperance of angry young lefties and then think of the example set for them by exhausted old lefties.

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Wendy Wasserstein was a gifted artist and a fine person. The two do not always go together and it’s almost a relief when you find someone in whom they do. She was warm, brilliant and witty, and her work captured a part, a piece, of our era. Word that she was dying spread before word that she was sick, and the shock of it, when her lymphoma was reported in New York a few months ago, was like hearing that Michael Kelley had died.

The tragedy was sharpened by a sense of great work unfinished, of a life not ended but interrupted. Wasserstein’s plays were beloved of liberals who lauded her as spokeswoman of a modern feminist point of view. Fair enough, but she struck me as altogether cannier and more grounded than that, and more independent too.

I had a conversation with her a few years ago in which she told me of her concern at the increasing politicization of higher education. I was struck by the depth of her concern; she had clearly spent a lot of time observing, finding out the facts, and coming to conclusions. I thought later about why I was surprised and realized I had associated her, unjustly, with Frank Rich, who approaches such issues as academic freedom with a mixture of bile and cowardice: There is no politically correct censorship, and if there is the Evangelicals did it.

Wasserstein’s work had no cruelty and little fear. Her last play, “Third,” dealt with a left-wing professor who comes to question her own assumptions, and to wonder, even, if deep in her heart she does not harbor bigotries. This was the work of someone who wasn’t stuck, wasn’t cowed, who was in fact questioning, questing. It is sad to not see what that mind would have done in the future. Rest in peace.

Did you see President Bush’s remarkable meeting with voters on Tuesday at Kansas State University? It was like a window into the soul of his old popularity. He was friendly, funny and at times startlingly forthcoming. His remarks were revealing in terms of his way of looking at the world and reacting to what he sees. They were also revealing, I think, in terms of his emotionality. The heart-head nexus with Mr. Bush is strong. His language is emotional, and his thoughts seem to spring more and more from his feelings. Or, as he might put it, his gut. The headlines of course went to “Brokeback Mountain”—“I’d be glad to talk about ranching!”—but most interesting were his statements on democracy, and the fact that he continues to see himself as the leader of the world democratic movement.

Here he is on the insurgents in Iraq:

They understand the march of peace will be contagious. Part of my decision-making process is my firm belief in the natural rights of men and women; my belief that deep in everybody’s soul is the desire to live free. I believe there’s an Almighty, and I believe the Almighty’s great gift to each man and woman in this world is the desire to be free. This isn’t America’s gift to the world, it is a universal gift to the world, and people want to be free. And if you believe that, and if you believe freedom yields the peace, it’s important for the United States of America, with friends, to lead the cause of liberty.

Deeper in his remarks:

I’m just confident that if we don’t lose our will, and stay strong, and that as that liberty advances, people may look back . . . and say, you know, maybe they’re just right. Maybe America, that was founded on natural rights of men and women is a ticket for peace. Maybe that kind of view—that every person matters, that there are such things as human dignity and the basic freedoms that we feel, that becomes a huge catalyst for change for the better. These troops are defending you with all their might, but at the same time, they’re beginning to help change that world by spreading liberty and freedom.

Then, asked his views on the U.S. relationship with China:

One thing that matters to me is the freedom of the Chinese people. I think any time in the diplomatic arena, you want the President to be in a position where he can have a relationship where you can speak with candor and your words can be heard, as opposed to a relationship that gets so tense and so off-putting because of distrust. Nobody likes to be lectured in the public arena, let me put it to you that way. I don’t like it, and I’m sure other leaders don’t like it. And so I’ve worked hard to make sure that my personal diplomacy is such that I’m able to make certain points with the Chinese. . . .

Now, I went to church in China. And I was a little nervous, at first, frankly, about a licensed church. I wasn’t sure whether or not I was going to go to a church or not a church, and went—Laura and I went with a guy named Luis Palau. And I was impressed by the spirit I felt in the church. . . . I would hope that China will continue to move in the—or move in the direction of human dignity. I talked to him about, of course, the Dalai Lama; talked to him about the Catholic Church’s inability to get their bishops in. In other words, what I do is I press the freedom issue.

As I listened I thought several things, some of them conflicting.

I thought: His sentiments on political liberty are worthy of an American president. Of course we are on the side of freedom. That has been our historic meaning in the world: to be a beacon, an example, to prompt democratic dreams.

I thought: He obviously means it. He has internalized an ethos of world liberation.

I thought: Down the road our country will surely benefit from Mr. Bush’s full-throated, unambivalent and perhaps happily simplistic insistence on the spread of democracy throughout the world. In the long term America will benefit from a renewed sense among the world’s dissidents and democracy-bringers that America isn’t just another cynical big power player but a nation truly populated and led by those who love freedom.

I thought: But that’s the long term.

*   *   *

In the short term the president’s preoccupation seem somewhat at odds with the needs of the moment. And the problem is that we are living in what feels like an increasingly short-term world.

By that I mean the obvious: It can all turn on a dime. There is little sense of historical surefootedness. There is only a sense of walking unsurely on ice floes. In the old days—that would be 20 years ago—there were two great actors in the world, and in their own rough bottom line way they understood each other. America would not nuke Russia because it was not evil; Russia would not nuke America because it was not crazy. There was an ugly stability to it.

Now there are, as we all know too well, many actors, many groups, many insurgencies, many passions, many weapons. The world is not a stable place. In this world the president’s preoccupations and passions continue to seem to me jarring. It is as if he is applying the sound of the Reagan era to the realities of a world that is, at the moment, too fractured to be helped by it.

We want our president to love democracy and hold it high. But I would feel better if his preoccupations, and his public statements, had more to do with safety, homeland security and a heightened sense of the need for preparedness. I would like him to find Osama.

Another way of saying it is that Mr. Bush is romantic about history. That’s not always bad and can be good, but there’s a lot of weird romance out there these days, a lot of passion and pushing. Sometimes it’s better for the world when things are cooler, more-stony eyed.

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The president’s State of the Union Address comes Tuesday night. SOTUs are a paradox in that they’re always one of the president’s most important annual speeches, and they’re almost always boring. Why? We all know. The SOTU is the one chance each year that every agency gets to be mentioned by the president, to get its bragging rights proclaimed and its relevance declared. The president may be too busy to give much help to the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, but he can make up for it by unveiling and supporting the office’s plans each January. Same with Health and Human Services. Same with Commerce.

They all get their paragraph. The speech grows and grows, paragraph after paragraph, slab after slab of intellectual suet. By the end the speech runs an hour. By the end it’s usually lost its logical spine, the theme that holds it together top to bottom. (There’s always a White House aide who points this out. He points it out at the end of the staffing process, when the speech is done. He would have done it sooner, but he was too busy shoveling in the suet from Energy and Agriculture.)

None of this is terrible. It’s the way it is and always has been. The speech will be a success anyway. They always are. The president gets an hour of face time with the public. He looks good; he’s pumped; and every other thing he says gets applause, because congressmen want to show America they’re responsive and support their president and support new health initiatives. The more animated they are, the quicker on their feet, the quicker, they hope the cameras will find them, and linger. In the end the president’s numbers always go up.

But there’s also always a vague sense of missed opportunities.

How to make it better? One way would be to separate the speech from all the departmental specifics. Let the president share his views, intentions and beliefs, but issue a weighty addendum, one that is handed out the night of the speech, that includes all the boring stuff every department wants. Reporters will read it, thinking something hot must be buried in it. They’ll talk about it and publicize it for him. In the three days after the speech the administration can flood the cable zone with department heads who can talk about what their department is doing.

That way the president could establish an air of comprehensiveness without boring everyone to death. And he would make his face time more effective because it’s more memorable and compelling—a speech with a spine.

The theme? There are a lot of ways to go, but I hope to hear about the most immediate hope of every American: to be safe and secure in an increasingly stable world. That may be a dream, but there are paths even to dreams.

I don’t think Democrats understand that the Alito hearings were, for them, not a defeat but an actual disaster. The snarly tone the senators took with a man most Americans could look at and think, “He’s like me,” and the charges they made—You oppose women and minorities, you only like corporations and not the little guy—went nowhere. Once those charges would have taken flight, would have launched, found their target and knocked down any incoming Republican. Not any more. It’s over.

Eleven years ago the Democrats lost control of Congress. Then they lost the presidency. But just as important, maybe more enduringly important, they lost their monopoly on the means of information in America. They lost control of the pipeline. Or rather there are now many pipelines, and many ways to use the information they carry. The other day, Dana Milbank, an important reporter for the Washington Post, the most important newspaper in the capital, wrote a piece deriding Judge Alito. Once such a piece would have been important. Men in the White House would have fretted over its implications. But within hours of filing, Mr. Milbank found his thinking analyzed and dismissed on the Internet; National Review Online called him a “policy bimbo.”

Could Democratic senators today torture Clarence Thomas with tales of Coke cans and porn films? Not likely. Could Ted Kennedy have gotten away with his “Robert Bork’s America” speech unanswered? No.

And the end of the monopoly of course isn’t only in the news, it’s in all media. The other night George Clooney, that beautiful airhead, made a Golden Globe speech in which he made an off-color reference to Jack Abramoff. The audience seemed confused, as people apparently often are when George Clooney speaks. Once, his remark would have been news. Once, Marlon Brando stopped the country in its tracks when he sent Sacheen Littlefeather to make his speech at the Academy Awards. Once, Vanessa Redgrave did the same when she gave a speech about Palestinians, receiving in turn a rebuke from Frank Sinatra, who didn’t want some British broad telling us how to do our thing. Now, actors make their comments and it’s just another airhead involved in an oral helium release. “You don’t like it, change the channel,” network executives used to say. But that, as they knew, meant nothing: There were only three channels. Now there are 500. And more coming.

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You know who else experienced, up close and personal, the end of the information monopoly this week? Walter Cronkite. Once, he said America should leave Vietnam and the president of the United States said if we’ve lost him we’ve lost middle America. Now, Walter calls for withdrawal from Iraq and it occasions only one thing: stories about how once such a thing mattered. I saw Mr. Cronkite the other night. Frail, distinguished—big white eyebrows; soft, folded pink face—he looked like Dean Acheson grown very old. It was at a New York screening he hosted for a documentary called “Why We Fight,” a piece of antiwar propaganda that will likely soon be followed by a piece of pro-war propaganda. It was like ducking a Propaganda Punch that will be answered by another Propaganda Punch you’ll have to duck. Featured in the documentary is a former voice of God, Dan Rather, there to lend support to the enterprise.
What was sad about the documentary is that it did not explore what it asserted, that a military-industrial complex within the United States has more power and influence than is helpful or good. A lot of sophisticated Americans worry about this. “The military-industrial complex” is something we were warned of almost half a century ago by Dwight Eisenhower, a man who knew a few things about war and weaponry. We want our makers of weapons to be the best in the world; we do not want them to own congressmen who have an electoral stake in the pieces of weapons made in their districts. When every congressman has a piece of a project, we should worry. War should not be the health of the state.

We are in a time when the very diminution of the importance of network news leaves some old news hands to drop their guard and announce what they are: liberal Democrats. Nothing wrong with that, but they might have told us when they were in power. The very existence of conservative media—of Rush Limbaugh, of Fox, of the Internet sites—has become an excuse by previously “I call ‘em as I see ‘em/I try to be impartial” journalists to advance their biases. Actually, it’s more Fox than anything. The existence of a respected cable network that is nonliberal and non-Democratic (or that is conservative, or Republican, or neoconservative—people on the right have polite disagreements about this) is more and more freeing news outlets, encouraging them actually, as a potential business model, to be more and more what they are. Is this good? Well, it’s clearer. Then again Time magazine this week illustrated a story about Republicans in Congress with a drawing of a merry circus elephant surrounded by the Republican leadership. They were covered, I’m not kidding, in the elephant’s fecal matter. (It’s on page 23. Time will no doubt call it chocolate.)

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But where does this leave us? With our mass media busy with reluctant reformation . . . with the old network monopoly over and done . . . with something new, we know not what, about to take its place . . . with the Democratic Party adjusting to the loss of its megaphone . . . Where does that leave us? I think it leaves us knowing that, more than ever, the Republican Party—the party ultimately helped by the end of the old monopoly and the reformation of news media—must be a good party, a decent one, and help our country.

That it regain a sense of its historic mission. That it stop seeming the friend of the wired and return to being the great friend of Main Street, for Main Street still, in its own way, exists. That it return to basic principles on spending, regulation and state authority. That it question a foreign policy that often seems at once dreamy and aggressive, and question, too, an overreaching on immigration policy that seems composed in equal parts of naiveté and cynicism. That its representatives admit that lunching with lobbyists is not the problem; failing to oppose the growth of government—so huge that no one, really no one, knows what is in its budget—is. That they reduce the size and power of government. That they help our country.

Is that a sissy thing to say? Sorry. But today is the 25th anniversary of the coming to Washington of modern conservatism, and the rise to power of a Main Street romantic who was also a skeptic and an appreciator of human nature. Not a bad time to take stock.

Republicans in Washington struggle with scandal and speak of reform, and reformation. They would better think of words like regain, refresh, rebuild. If they don’t, if Republicans don’t choose to lead well, and seriously, and with principle, they should ask themselves: Who will? Seriously: Who will?

If everyone in America—the butcher down the block, the college professor, the car mechanic, the mother of two working at home, the CNN analyst—knows that the U.S. senators questioning Sam Alito are posing, are using their airtime to promote themselves and play to their base, then will anyone in America be impressed by what the senators say, or how they pose? Isn’t that like saying, “I know it’s all spin, but he spun me like a top!”?

If everyone in America—again, everyone—knows Judge Alito’s job is to reveal as little as possible about his true thoughts and convictions while coming across in the hearings as a well balanced, intelligent and experienced person, will anyone come away with a solid conviction, as opposed to a hunch, that Judge Alito will be an honest and reliable interpreter of the Constitution?

It is odd that in the age of big media, when everything is shown to us live, up close, and on a high-resolution screen, we still, in the pursuit of insight and knowledge, have to spend all our time reading between the lines.

I wish they would be, thought they could be, honest. “You are bad because you are not a liberal, and I am a liberal so I vote against you. Feh.” “Of course I think Roe v. Wade was badly thought through, and you probably admit as much yourself, Senator, in your private thoughts.”

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In a way, the whole manufactured issue of Princeton at least clears the air a little. Mr. Alito, in the late 1970s, apparently belonged to an alumni group that had taken issue with the liberalization that was at that time sweeping that university and others. Liberal senators are suggesting he didn’t want women or blacks admitted. Judge Alito says he doesn’t remember exactly why he joined Concerned Alumni of Princeton, or what issue or issues compelled his joining.

He was given the opportunity to note at the hearings that Princeton at the time was considering throwing ROTC off the campus. Wouldn’t Judge Alito, who was a cadet, likely have opposed such a move? But Judge Alito didn’t take the lifeline, responding with seeming candor, that he couldn’t say that was part of his thinking, he didn’t remember. I think he will beat back this issue with ease—Americans are used to charges like this and have been used to them for 30 years—and Judge Alito doesn’t seem remotely like a person who is or has been hostile to blacks, women or anyone else. As a young middle-class kid of Italian ancestry at an Ivy League school, his sympathies would likely have gone in the direction of anyone who felt that he was on the outside, not the inside.

But here’s where the issue clears some air. Either liberals like Ted Kennedy really believe that conservatives harbor deep in their hearts an animus toward women, and blacks, and Hispanics, and everyone who is not a white male, or liberals simply enjoy, for reasons that are cynical and perhaps also psychological (“The people I fight are bad; this buttresses my belief that I, in spite of what I know about myself, am good”), suggesting that conservatives are full of narrow-minded bigotry and hatred. Maybe a Republican senator could bring this question to the floor, and ask Pat Leahy or Mr. Kennedy. The thing is, it is a mystery: Do they really think that about us, or are they just playing games and jerking everyone around?

Also: wouldn’t it be nice if the senators suggesting bigotry apologized to Mrs. Alito for causing her distress? Oh, I wish they’d apologize to the country for causing it distress. Anyway, they made a mistake. Her tears presage his victory.

Let’s cause some senators distress. The great thing about Joe Biden during the Alito hearings, the reason he is, to me, actually endearing, is that as he speaks, as he goes on and on and spins his long statements, hypotheticals, and free associations—as he demonstrates yet again, as he did in the Roberts hearings and even the Thomas hearings, that he is incapable of staying on the river of a thought, and is constantly lured down tributaries from which he can never quite work his way back—you can see him batting the little paddles of his mind against the weeds, trying desperately to return to the river but not remembering where it is, or where it was going. I love him. He’s human, like a garrulous uncle after a drink.

In this, in the hearings, he is unlike Ted Kennedy in that he doesn’t seem driven by some obscure malice—Uh, I, uh, cannot, uh, remembuh why I hate you, Judge Alioto, but there, uh, must be a good reason and I will, um, damn well find it. When he peers over his glasses at Judge Alito he is like an old woman who’s unfortunately senile and quite sure the teapot on the stove is plotting against her. Mr. Biden is also unlike Chuck Schumer in that he doesn’t ask questions with an air of, With this one I’m going to trap you and leave you flailing like a bug in a bug zapper—we’re going to hear your last little crackling buzz any minute now!

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But what interests me most is Judge Alito, and his ability to just sit there and listen. To show nothing, like a stunned ox, or, as Sen. Dianne Feinstein put in on CNN, like a person with clear judicial demeanor.

How does he do it? This wonderful look of enforced blandness. It’s a low affect tour de force.

And it cannot be easy. When Mr. Biden says things like, “Try to follow me, Judge Alito,” as he goes on one of his long, sterile journeys, I wonder if Judge Alito has to control himself with an act of will. I wonder if he has an inner Regis Philbin, and wants to throw out his arms and say, “Follow you? If I follow you, we’ll both wind up lost!” When Mr. Biden says, “Now this is a somewhat subtle point,” I wonder if Judge Alito wants to say, “Joe, if it were a subtle point you wouldn’t be making it!”

This is the authentic sound, though not the authentic words, of Joe Biden, and this is what Judge Alito has to discipline himself not to respond to:

What if a fella—I’m just hypothesizing here, Judge Alito—what if a fella said, “Well I don’t want to hire you because I don’t like the kind of eyeglasses you wear,” or something like that. Follow my thinking here. Or what if he says “I won’t hire you because I don’t like it that you wear black silk stockings and a garter belt. And your name is Fred.” Strike that—just joking, trying to lighten this thing up, we can all be too serious. Every 10 years when you see me at one of these hearings I am different from every other member of Judiciary in that I have more hair than the last time. You know why? It’s all the activity in my brain! It breaks through my skull and nourishes my follicles with exciting nutrients! Try to follow me.

How does Judge Alito put up with this?

How does any nominee?

Must he sit there bland-faced and unmoving as they say what they say? Yes, of course. Judge Alito and the White House know they have to let these men talk. They don’t want the senators to feel resentful or frustrated. They know each senator feels he has to play to his base. They know the senators are, by nature, like Conair 2000 hairdryers: They just love to blow, and hard. Fwwaaaaahhhhhhhhh. And they know it is good, it is helpful, to let each senator reveal himself through his own words. I think senators feel that their words, when strung together, become little bridges. I think the White House feels that their words, when strung together, become little nooses.

*   *   *

But this one is all kind of over, isn’t it? It definitively ended when Mrs. Alito walked out in tears. But to me it seemed over on day one. The Democrats on the committee seemed forlorn in a way, as if they knew deep in their hearts that nobody’s listening. Two decades ago they could make their speeches and fake their indignation and accuse a Robert Bork of being a racist chauvinist woman hater and their accusations would ring throughout the country. But now the media they relied on have lost their monopoly. Everyone who’s fired at gets to fire back, shot for shot.

It’s all changed. Which is one reason Judge Alito will be confirmed, and another reason I like Joe Biden. He still has the old spirit—an ingenuous spirit, a crazy one, a stupid one. But spirit nonetheless.

The problem with government is that it is run by people, and people are flawed. They are not virtue machines. We are all of us, even the best of us, vulnerable to the call of the low: to greed, conceit, insensitivity, ruthlessness, the desire to show you’re in control, in charge, in command.

If the problem with government is that it is run by people and not, as James Madison put it, angels, the problem with big government is that it is run by a lot of people who are not angels. They can, together and in the aggregate, do much mischief. They can and inevitably will produce a great deal of injustice, corruption and heartlessness.

People in government—people in a huge, sprawling government—often get carried away. And they don’t always even mean to. But they are little tiny parts of a large and overwhelming thing. If government is a steamroller, and that is in good part how I see it, the individuals who work in it are the atoms in the steel. The force of forward motion carries them along. There is inevitably an unaccountability, and in time often an indifference about what the steamroller rolls over. All the busy little atoms are watching each other, competing with each other, winning one for their little cluster. And no one is looking out and being protective of what the steamroller is rolling over—traditions, shared beliefs, individual rights, old assumptions, whatever is being rolled over today.

This is essentially why conservatives of my generation and earlier generations don’t like big government. They don’t even like government. We know we have to have one, that it is necessary, that it can and must do good, that it has real responsibilities that must be met. Madison again, in Federalist 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.”

These are wise words.

But conservatives are not supposed to like big government. It’s not our job. We’re supposed to like freedom and the rights of the individual. (Individuals aren’t virtue machines either, but they’re less powerful than governments and so generally less damaging.) We’re supposed to be on the side of the grass the steamroller flattens.

*   *   *

Twenty-five years ago this month the conservative movement came to Washington, and much good came of its arrival. The argument against big government—its big taxing and big regulating, its bias toward a kind of enforced cultural conformity—was made again and again. The growth of government slowed, its demands to some degree beaten back.
The leadership of the Republican Party was now, in its avowed aims if not its daily practices, antigovernment. The party that was, in its daily operations if not always its avowed intentions, pro-government, the Democrats, remained in effective control of Congress and the courts.

There was progress in the 1980s. The steamroller slowed.

Eleven years ago this month came the Gingrich revolution and the Contract With America. That contract could be boiled down to these words: Stop the Steamroller. Take away its gas, make it smaller, term-limit it. Be on the side of the grass. This movement too did good work—it actually forced upon the federal government a balanced budget—but in the end results were mixed, as political results tend to be. The steamroller rolled on.

What followed was the trauma of the end of the Clinton years, the 2000 election, the Bush administration, and the historic rise in the antisteamroller party of a new operating assumption: that the steamroller will always be with us. And that if it is destined to become always and every year bigger, heavier and more powerful, then you might as well relax and learn how to run it, how to drive it and direct it. Make friends with the steamroller. Run it to your own ends and not the other team’s.

This was understandable, especially after 9/11. Defense is expensive; technology has its own demands; the stakes are high.

And yet. All other parts of the government grew. The size and force of it grew in ways that were not at all necessary or crucial.

And learning to accept the steamroller, learning to direct the steamroller, learning in fact to love the steamroller, can get you to some bad places. It can get you to Jack Abramoff. To more size, more action, more corruption. To flawed people who are essentially unaccountable and busy winning their own victories for their own cluster. “I got mine. You got yours?”

Political corruption is always more likely when you fall in love with the steamroller. Or if not loving it accepting it, being “realistic” about it, embracing it.

*   *   *

There’s a lot of talk among Republicans that since the Abramoff scandal involves politicians and staff on both sides of the aisle, the public will not punish the Republicans. This assertion is countered by the argument that while the public will likely see the story as one of government corruption, Congress and the White House are run by Republicans, so Republicans will pay the price. I think this is true, but I think it misses a larger point: In some rough way the public expects the party that loves big government to be pretty good at finagling government, playing with it, using it for its own ends. That’s kind of what they do. They love the steamroller, of course they love the grease that makes it run. But the anti-big-government party isn’t supposed to be so good at it, so enmeshed in it. The antigovernment party isn’t supposed to be so good at oiling the steamroller’s parts and pushing its levers. And so happy doing the oiling and pushing.

It isn’t good to love the steamroller. In the end it can roll right over you, and all you stand for, or stood for.

Is there a way for Republicans to go? Stop trying to fit in. Stop being another atom in the steel. It does no good trying to run a better steamroller. It won’t work. Steamrollers are not your friend.

The big story of the year happened last year, after every journalist in the world filed his biggest-story-of-the-year piece and went away for the holidays. That of course was the great tsunami. On this day one year ago the dimensions of the disaster had finally become clear. The tsunami is the story of 2005 not because it was shocking that natural disasters occur or that a quarter million people can die and many more be hurt in them—that information is well known to all adults. The great tsunami is the big story of 2005 because after it occurred the tired old heart of a tired old world responded with the energy and alacrity of the youthful and untired. Thousands went to help. We sent billions; we sent former presidents; we devoted air time and print. For a lot of people there may have been something reorienting in the drama: no matter what, we are all the same, and all together, fleeing the wave.

The second story, of course, is Hurricane Katrina. The same and different. Closer to home, not nearly as deadly in terms of numbers. Again it took days to understand the dimensions of the destruction, and again Americans stepped forward. But this time the political response, on the ground and in Washington, was not moving and rousing but inadequate and embarrassing. The fallout continues.

Third story: the death of Pope John Paul II and the rise of Benedict XVI. One of the longest pontificates in church history ends. Millions take to the streets and tell the Vatican to make him a saint. The Vatican is taken aback and elects Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who even 10 years ago was considered too old, too conservative, and too German to be pope. It is, still, the most amazing story of the year.

Fourth story: Iraq, which continued. From foes of the invasion, increased animus; from supporters, a determination matched by a certain privately expressed deflation. It is due not to fears the U.S. will leave under political pressure (President Bush has made clear to his country and the world that we will stay) or that we will be defeated on the ground (these insurgents will not beat this U.S. military) but that victory will not in the end prove helpful or even definable. That it was not an investment of five years or even 20 but of a century. That is where the doubt is: After all this blood and treasure, will it turn out to have made things better?

Fifth, the rise and fall and comeback of President Bush. He was triumphant in November 2004, seemed lost in the months afterward, made strategic mistakes (Social Security), had bad luck (Katrina), made bad judgments (Harriet Miers). A fight not with his base as much as with the thinkers and leaders of his party ensued. Issues that had simmered (spending, immigration) ignited.

But history moves quickly. His people hit reset; he announced a refocus. The economy is an almost unnoticed triumph. Christmas spending is up 10%. Iraq votes yet again, amid pictures of purple fingers. Mr. Bush’s numbers go up. He is dinged but not done. All will hinge on Iraq. History will say Bush was a dramatic and consequential president who broke through the wall of history and successfully reordered the most dangerous part of the world, or a dramatic and all-too-consequential president whose decisions yielded disaster. It’s like looking at Woodrow Wilson in 1919 and wondering, How is this going to go?

Are you a pessimist? Then you’re thinking Ecclesiastes: “Vanity, all is vanity.” An optimist? Think Lawrence of Arabia, at least in Robert Bolt’s screenplay: “Nothing is written.”

*   *   *

Those are five stories of a hard year. Let’s look into the crystal ball. In the absence of great movements—or the emotional and intellectual commitment great movements require—the 2006 American elections become what they usually are, a referendum on whether or not you like your local congressman. The result: a holding action on the part of the electorate. The Democratic Party continues as the dead man walking of American politics. It’s like a movie in which the spirit of a lively person enters the body of a dying person and revives it. They’re hoping Hillary can bring them alive, or Mark Warner, and they can jump out of bed and have adventures. The Republicans are not on their deathbed but they are in heavy therapy. What do we believe in? Why do we exist? What is our purpose? Must my life have meaning? Can’t I just enjoy it? The Democrats are worse than we are.
Patrick Fitzgerald’s work will be seen in retrospect as the great investigation that ended Washington’s long love affair with investigations. The nonfiction books of the year will be Rick Brookhiser’s “What the Founders Would Do” and Terry Teachout’s biography of Louis Armstrong. Bill Safire, whose traditional end-of-the-year column I’m attempting to ape, should come back to us with a big book. What I’d like to see from him: “What I’ve Learned, What I Know.”

Speaking of apes, “King Kong” is no klassic and does not at the end of the day beat “Narnia.” Pope Benedict will begin to find his stride, and more quickly after he removes Vatican image handlers.

Hillary Clinton will soon face the base, seeking to relieve the pressure of growing leftist resentment of her non-antiwar stance. She wins big in New York, but watch her in Hollywood: Will her 2008 fundraising forays be as successful as her husband’s were? Or does big-money Hollywood have Clinton fatigue? And don’t they think Mark Warner reminds them of Warren Beatty, only serious and with a record?

Katie Couric goes to the “CBS Evening News” and gets a talk show. Judy Miller becomes a columnist and blogger. She’ll win a Pulitzer Prize, but not until 2016.

We all criticize the mainstream media, regularly and with reason. More and more and day by day the MSM is showing us that its response to the popularity of conservative media and the rise of alternative news sources is to become less carefully liberal. What in the past had to be hidden is now announced.

This is not necessarily bad: it makes things better by making them clearer. I didn’t enjoy their ideological smuggling. Now they’re more like free-market people: Here are my liberal wares, if you want to buy them buy them, if not the Fox News stall is down the street, buy their faulty product and curses on you!

Fine with me, except that as a consumer of news I think they’re making a mistake. In a time of endless opinion, fact is king. Fact is rarer, harder to come by, more valuable. If only the MSM understood what money and power there are to be had from being famously nonideological, from being a famously reliable pursuer and presenter of fact. Wouldn’t it be great if that were the next new thing?

*   *   *

But let’s put old arguments aside. In the tension over bias a great deal can be lost. One of those things is just praise for work that comes from the MSM that is not only excellent and truthful but profoundly in the public interest. Work that is difficult and that demanded from the workers a level of professionalism that suggests a kind of love, maybe for the craft, maybe for the object of their efforts. Maybe both.

An example is a joint venture by Time and the Rocky Mountain News on the families of fallen servicemen in Iraq. Time gives it a beautiful spread on its Web site; the News provided the story and photos. Look at the level of craftsmanship, even art, from the editors, writer, photographer. Look at the work that went into it. It could not have been anything but a labor of love.

The Time version has been speeding all over the Web. The Rocky Mountain News version is more comprehensive in terms of text, and offers this comment from Maj. Steven Beck, the Marine who stood with Second Lt. Jim Cathey’s widow, Katherine, as his coffin was unloaded from the cargo hold of the commercial flight while everyone looked out the windows. He said, “See the people in the windows? They’re going to remember being on that plane for the rest of their lives. They’re going to remember bringing the Marine home. And they should.”

Reporter Jim Sheeler of the News was there on the tarmac with Maj. Beck and Mrs. Cathey. He looked at the people on the plane, and wrote, “Inside the plane they couldn’t hear the screams.” Photographer Todd Heisler took the pictures. They are powerful on their own, as is Mr. Sheeler’s reporting, and don’t require commentary.

I’d add only this. We’re lucky, aren’t we? Those who are not in the field fighting, those who are not at home worrying or mourning. We’re lucky.

All of us who are not in Iraq or Afghanistan are the people on the plane. We’re watching; we feel respect and regard. We are awed by what the men and women on the field are doing. But we are of course detached by distance. We are protected from what is happening on the ground. It was ever thus. Soldiers fight and soldiers die and people back at home, in their safety, think about but cannot know what it is like to be there on the field. We think about but do not know, most of us, what it is to lose someone there, on the field.

And all we can do is say thank you. And it couldn’t possibly be enough.

*   *   *

There’s a thing a reporter told me the other day that makes me want to say thank you, too. She’d gone to interview mothers in Ohio who’d lost sons in Iraq. The mothers were as varied as their sons had been in terms of experience, personality, views. Some of the mothers were very much in support of Iraq. Some were not. One of those who’d come to oppose the war started to speak, in her interview, of her opposition. She faltered. A pro-war mother encouraged her. She said something like, ‘We all have our right to our views, you go ahead, honey.’ The reporter was pierced by the tenderness of it, the fairness of it, the very Americanness of it. Once again: What a country.
One of the great and historic things about this war is that whatever you think of it, justified or not, the right decision or not, no one—no one—has decided it is right to emotionally abandon the fighters in the field. This, as we know, is different from what happened in Vietnam, when a generation of those who served were given in response the distanced disrespect of a certain portion of our country. Everyone feels bad about that, and should. But amazingly enough we seem to have learned from it. Almost everyone knows—and the very small number who don’t know at least know enough to go off and be quiet—that the men and women on the field are fighting for us, serving us, that they are putting themselves in harm’s way with courage, that they deserve to be patronized by no one, that they deserve honor from all.

This is a wonderful thing. On this December these men and women are a self-given gift to the nation. Thank you men and women of the armed forces of the United States of America. Merry Christmas to you, happy holidays; stay safe, come home.

Thank you. It’s small and not enough but it is so meant, and by all of us.

The four-part Iraq speech cycle on which the president has embarked, and that culminated yesterday in his remarks before the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, may well mark a turning in his public leadership of the war. His arguments on the war, and his assertions about what is happening on the ground and what is desired there, were more comprehensive, seemingly more candid, and thus more persuasive than he has been in the past 12 months. Coupled with today’s voting it may mark a real turning point.

One of the things I think the president communicated most effectively, if mostly between the lines, was the sense that some decisions a president faces don’t promise good outcomes no matter which way he comes down. These are decisions that carry deep implications, and promise real difficulty.

And one such was: To move on Saddam or not?
Do nothing about Saddam, or nothing that hasn’t been done before, and you keep in place a personally unstable dictator who has declared himself an avowed enemy of America, who will help and assist its foes at a crucial time, and who has developed and used in recent memory and against his own citizens weapons of mass destruction. Do nothing and you face the continuance of a Mideast status quo encrusted by cynicism and marked by malignancy.

But remove Saddam and you face the cost in blood and treasure of invasion, occupation and the erection of democracy. It’s all a great gamble. It could end with the yielding up of a new ruling claque as bad as or worse than the one just replaced. You could wind up thinking you’d bitten off more than you could chew and were trying to swallow more than you could digest.

No matter what Mr. Bush chose, what decision he made, he would leave some angry and frustrated. No matter what he did, the Arab street would be restive (it is a restive place) the left would be angry (rage is their ZIP code, where they came from and where they live), and Democrats would watch, wait, offer bland statements and essentially hope for the worst. Imagine a great party with only one leader, Joe Lieberman, who approaches the question of Iraq with entire seriousness. And imagine that party being angry with him because he does.

Mr. Bush chose to remove Saddam and liberate Iraq from, well, Saddam. And maybe more. Maybe from its modern sorry past. Pat Buchanan said a few months ago something bracing in its directness. He said a constitution doesn’t make a country; a country makes a constitution. But today, in the voting, we may see more of the rough beginnings of a new exception to that rule. News reports both in print and on television also seem to be suggesting a turn. They seem to suggest a new knowledge on the ground in Iraq that democracy is inevitable, is the future, and if you don’t want to be left behind you’d better jump in. One senses a growing democratic spirit. A sense that daring deeds can produce real progress.

‘Tis devoutly to be wished, and all of good faith must wish it.

*   *   *

In his speech yesterday the president said the obvious: that the intelligence received in the buildup to the war was faulty. He asserted that Saddam’s past and present history justified invasion nonetheless. This left me thinking again about a particular part of the WMD story. I decided my own position in support of invasion after Colin Powell warned the U.N. in dramatic terms of Saddam’s development of weapons that were wicked, illegal and dangerous to the stability of the world. It is to me beyond belief that he was not speaking what he believed to be true. And I believed him, as did others.

Later Howard Dean, that human helium balloon ever resistant to the gravity of mature judgment, said of the administration that they lied us into war. He left no doubt that he meant they did it deliberately and cynically. But there seems to me a thing that is blindingly obvious, and yet I’ve never seen it remarked upon. It is that an administration that would coldly lie us into Iraq is an administration that would lie about what was found there. And yet the soldiers, searchers and investigators who looked high and low throughout Iraq made it clear they had found nothing, an outcome the administration did not dispute and came to admit. But an administration that would lie about reasons would lie about results, wouldn’t it? Or try to? Yet they were candid.

Wouldn’t it be good if our serious journalists and historians looked into what happened to weapons that Saddam once used and once had? He abused weapons inspectors who came looking, acting like a man who had a great deal to hide. And wouldn’t it be good for our serious journalists and historians to look into exactly how it is that faulty intelligence, of such a crucial nature and at such a crucial moment, came to America and Britain? It is still amazing. Oh, for journalists and historians who would look only for truth and not merely for data that justify their politics and ideology.

*   *   *

I have been thinking about what hasn’t worked, in the year since the 2004, election about the president’s communication of his aims and efforts in Iraq. Or rather why it didn’t work, why it seemed unpersuasive, why his statements seemed more repetitive than memorable. The president’s focus was fractured, and by a number of things. By ill judgment—deciding Social Security was the new No. 1 issue. By bad luck—Katrina, etc. And by tone deafness, from “You’re doing a heck of a job, Brownie” to Harriet Miers. The Iraq picture got blurred. But when a political picture gets blurred, people wonder if the blurring isn’t deliberate and diversionary, a way of taking everyone’s eyes off the facts. Skepticism grows.

And there is I think another part. It is that this White House believes way too much in spin.
David Brooks noted last Sunday on “Meet the Press” that in private Bush aides are knowledgeable and forthcoming about the war—this is working, this isn’t, we made a mistake here and are fixing it in this way—but that in public they rely too much on platitudes and talking points.
It’s true. The Bush White House treats the message of the day as if it were the only raft in high seas. Hold, cling, don’t let go. Their discipline seems not persuasive but panicky.

They think their adherence to spin is sophisticated and ahead of the curve, but it is not. What is sophisticated is to know that the American people have been immersed in media for half a century and know when they’re being talked to by robots who got wound up in the spin shop. They are not impressed by rote repetition, cheery insistence or clunky symbolism. They see through it. When you have the president make a big speech and he’s standing under the sign that says VICTORY, the American people actually know you’re trying to send an unconscious message: Bush equals victory, Bush will bring victory, victory is coming. It’s not so much nefarious as corny.

There is the sense sometimes with this White House that they learned more from Bill Clinton than from Ronald Reagan. What did Mr. Clinton and his spinners and handlers and media mavens and compulsive line-givers teach us? “It’s all about Bill.” He’s the man, he’s at the center, he’s so brilliant. He had a tough childhood, he’s building a legacy, it’s Bill Bill Bill.

The Bush White House—and the president—have in the same way made Iraq a Bush drama. Bush won’t cut and run, Bush has personal relationships, Bush is like Harry Truman, Bush will hold to his word. Look, he’s landing on an aircraft carrier. It’s all about Bush.

Modern White Houses think the man has to be the emblem of the actions. But thinking this way is not helpful, not in any serious way, and the Bush White House should stop it. Because it’s mildly creepy; because it puts too much on your guy, which means he has to be lucky for everything to work, and nothing’s worse to rely on in politics than luck. And most important because it’s actually not about Bush, it’s about America.

Ronald Reagan fought a war, but he didn’t think it was about him, he thought it was about America. He didn’t think it was about his principles; he thought it was about America’s. He didn’t land on aircraft carriers; he built them.

This war isn’t about Bush, or shouldn’t be, or can’t be if it is to have meaning, and to end in success. It’s bigger than that. It’s bigger than him.

As Congress considers the Bush administration’s guest-worker plan, as Republicans try to figure out what their immigration philosophy is, and as political observers parse the implications of yesterday’s California House race, here are some small and human questions on immigration to the United States.

I recently found out through one of her daughters that my grandmother spent her first night in America on a park bench in downtown Manhattan. She had made her way from Ireland to Ellis Island, and a cousin was to meet the ship. It was about 1920. The cousin didn’t show. So Mary Dorian, age roughly 20, all alone, with no connections and no relatives interested enough to remember her arrival in the new world, spent her first night in America alone on a bench, in the dark, in a strange country. Later she found her way to Brooklyn and became a bathroom attendant at the big Abraham & Straus department store on Fulton Street. (It’s now a Macy’s. I buy Christmas gifts there.)

Two generations after my grandmother arrived, I was in the Oval Office of the American president saying, “I think you oughta.” And amazingly enough he was listening.

In two generations. Two.

What a country.

*   *   *

Am I proud of this? Sure. It’s the American way to point out that your people went from zero to 60, or will, or can. It’s the American way to acknowledge, too, that someone made the car you jumped into. There was an assembly line. My grandparents were ahead of me in that line, and the Founders were ahead of them.
Every time an American brags about where he came from and where he wound up, he’s really complimenting the guys on the line.

In my case before there was the car there was a ship. I do not know the name of the ship that took Mary Dorian to America, and yet it gave me my future. I know she wore an inspection card attached to her clothing. I have such a card, encased in plastic, on a table in my home. It is the card worn by Mary Dorian’s future husband’s sister, who came over at the same time.

It says at the top, “To assist Inspection in New York Harbour.” It notes dates, departure points, “Name of Immigrant.” On the side there’s a row of numbers that mark each day of what appears to have been a 10-day trip. Each day was stamped by the ship’s surgeon at daily inspection. You got the stamp if you appeared to be free of disease.

You know how the card looks? Thin. An old piece of paper that looks vulnerable. I guess that’s why I encased it in plastic, to keep it safe, because it’s precious.

*   *   *

Here is what is true of my immigrants and of the immigrants of America’s past:
They fought for citizenship. They earned it. They waited in line. They passed the tests. They had to get permission to come. They got money that was hard-earned and bought a ticket. They had to get through Ellis Island or the port of Boston or Philadelphia, get questioned and eyeballed by a bureaucrat with a badge, and get the nod to take their first step on American soil. Then they had to find the A&S.

They knew citizenship was not something cheaply held but something bestowed by a great nation.

Did the fact that they had to earn it make joining America even more precious?

Yes. Of course.

We all know it is so often so different now. Perhaps a million illegal immigrants come into the United States each year, joining the 10 million or 20 million already here—nobody seems to know the number. Our borders are less borders than lines you cross if you want to. When you watch videotape of some of the illegal border crossings on a show like Lou Dobbs’s—who is not a senator or congressman but a media star and probably the premier anti-illegal-immigration voice in the country—what you absorb is a sense of anarchy, an utter collapse of authority.

It’s not good. It does not bode well.

*   *   *

The questions I bring to the subject are not about the flow of capital, the imminence of globalism, or the implications of uncontrolled immigration on the size and cost of the welfare state. They just have to do with what it is to be human.
What does it mean that your first act on entering a country—your first act on that soil—is the breaking of that country’s laws? What does it suggest to you when that country does nothing about your lawbreaking because it cannot, or chooses not to? What does that tell you? Will that make you a better future citizen, or worse? More respecting of the rule of law in your new home, or less?

If you assume or come to believe that that nation will not enforce its own laws for reasons that are essentially cynical, that have to do with the needs of big business or the needs of politicians, will that assumption or belief make you more or less likely to be moved by that country, proud of that country, eager to ally yourself with it emotionally, psychologically and spiritually?

When you don’t earn something or suffer to get it, do you value it less highly? If you value it less highly, will you bother to know it, understand it, study it? Will you bother truly to become part of it? When you are allowed to join a nation for free, as it were, and without the commitment of years of above-board effort, do you experience your joining that country as a blessing or as a successful con? If the latter, what was the first lesson America taught you?

These are questions that I think are behind a lot of the more passionate opposition to illegal immigration.

*   *   *

There are people who want to return to the old ways and rescue some of the old attitudes. There are groups that seek to restore border integrity. But they are denigrated by many, even the president, who has called them vigilantes. The New Yorker this week carries a mildly snotty piece by a writer named Daniel Kurtz-Phelan in which he interviews members of a group of would-be Minutemen who seek to watch the borders with Mexico and Canada. They are “running freelance patrols”; they are xenophobic; they dismiss critics as “communists” and “child molesters.”
How nice to be patronized by young men whose place is so secure they have two last names. How nice to be looked down on for caring.

And they do care, that’s the thing. And pay a price for caring. They worry in part that what is happening on our borders can damage our country by eroding the sense of won citizenship that leads to the mutual investment and mutual respect—the togetherness, if that isn’t too corny—that all nations need to operate in the world, and that our nation will especially need in the coming world.

This is what I fear about our elites in government and media, who will decide our immigration policy. It is that they will ignore the human questions and focus instead, as they have in the past, only on economic questions (we need the workers) and political ones (we need the Latino vote). They think that’s the big picture. It’s not. What goes on in the human heart is the big picture.

Again: What does it mean when your first act is to break the laws of your new country? What does it mean when you know you are implicitly supported in lawbreaking by that nation’s ruling elite? What does it mean when you know your new country doesn’t even enforce its own laws? What does it mean when you don’t even have to become an American once you join America?

*   *   *

Our elites are lucky people. They were born in a suburb, went to Yale, and run the world from a desk. Which means this great question, immigration, is going to be decided by people who don’t know what it is to sleep on a bench. Who don’t know what it is to earn your space, your place. Who don’t know what it is to grieve the old country and embrace the new country. Who don’t know what it is to feel you’re a little on the outside and have to earn your way in to the inside. Who think it was without a cost, because it was without cost for them.

The problem with our elites as they make our immigration policy is not that they have compassion and open-mindedness. It is that they are unknowing and empty-headed. They don’t know, most of them, what others had to earn, and how much they, and their descendents, prize it and want to protect it.

I see you have a book out this week and intend to crassly devote your column to it.

All too true. The book is called “John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father.” I had hoped to promote it by embroiling myself in controversy and wish therefore to note at the outset that Maureen Dowd has mined new depths of shallowness, and Bob Woodward is, like those he judges for a living, interested primarily in spin. Mickey Kaus on the other hand is honest and actually becoming, overused word, indispensable. How am I doing?

Eh. Has this become the age of insult?

No, it’s the age of chatter. I think insults in general are more prevalent due to technology and the broadening and leveling of creative competition, but less piercing and less elegant than they once were. “That would depend on whether I embraced your principles or your mistress.” “The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.” “The only man who can strut while sitting down.” “I’ve forgotten more than you know.” We have become less literate as a society at the exact moment that opportunities to speak have become more available, and the quality of our putdowns and dismissals has suffered. With endless media there will be endless verbal roughness, but that fact, the sheer volume of it, almost dulls the edge of insult. It becomes a large negative blur. The name of my book is “John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father.”

What does that mean?

It means we all want a spiritual father. We’re all lonely for a father, for one who can lead as a father would. Even when you have a father you feel this, so big is the father’s role in human life. In terms of my spiritual development I found leadership that I needed in John Paul.

Let’s go back to rudeness and the censorious impulse. What they’ve said of Jack Murtha, that he’s a coward, isn’t that rude? And indicative of a sort of lowering of politics?

I think so. To call Jack Murtha a coward is exactly what we don’t need. It’s just wrong. We are a great nation at war. Everyone has the right to put forward his views, everyone has the right to argue. We’re America. That’s what we do. Donald Rumsfeld has a right to answer, as does the entire administration. It’s not wrong to have this debate. It shows the world who we are.

Isn’t Murtha just capitalizing on anti-Bush feeling? What’s behind that feeling, anyway?

Several things. One is that the usual to-and-fro between the administration and the Democratic opposition has been heightened and sharpened by the fact that for the first time Bush seems takeable. Another is that we’re in a high-stakes game in Iraq and no one knows what’s right and what will turn out to be wise and farsighted. Another is that the administration is staffed with exhausted people and they’re making the mistakes exhausted people make. (Bush doesn’t seem exhausted; he seems hale and hearty, but if he isn’t feeling a certain psychic exhaustion he’s missing the big picture.) And there is, also, the unique power of this administration to turn critics into enemies. They were lucky too long. They’ve been playing hardball on the Hill and in journalism for a long time. It’s catching up. You can talk about breaking eggs to make an omelet all you want, but in time the eggs add up, come together and call a protest march.

By the way, I think John Paul II lived, arguably, the greatest life of the 20th century, and I think his life was marked by more than the usual number of occurrences that seem fateful, even prophetic. He said of the coming century that it will either be one of great faith or one of little faith, but not something in between. There is also the interesting fact of those who seemed to know, along the way as he lived his life, that he was a man of great destiny. His predecessor, John Paul I, said he would be pope. The day he was made cardinal of Krakow, a little girl told him he would be pope. One of his best friends had an epiphany and told him he would someday lead the church. And there were of course the prophecies of saints that a light out of Poland would come at a crucial moment to head the church. It’s all uncanny. But I have noticed that the great are not uncommonly surrounded by those who have a presentiment of their destiny. Lincoln was like this.

What should Bush do now?

I have a view on what Washington itself should do. It should get serious. We have men and women in the field, on the ground, putting themselves in harm’s way for us, for our country, for our system, for the way we do things and what we are in history. They deserve—they require and have earned—our gravest sincerity and seriousness.

Democrats who are thoughtful and not just in it for the game should come forward and explain why they backed the Iraq invasion, and what has changed, what they feel is at stake, and what they feel will be the repercussions of unsteadiness or ambivalence or withdrawal, or what will potentially be gained by a declaration of mistake. Republicans should stop with the “How dare you question us at such a dramatic moment, what’s wrong with you?”

This is not a mere domestic political battle. We need a serious presentation, one not weighed down with slogans—I cannot tell you how tired people are of “They hate us because we’re free”—about what victory will look like, and mean, and be achieved, and what price we will pay for not achieving it. We need to hear, in statements that are not at all emotional or full of passive aggressive push-pull, how the world and the United States are better for our being there. And this is not too much to ask.

Why did you write your book?

Because the great deserve our loyalty. Because those who have added to life, who have inspired us and pointed to a better way, should be lauded and learned from. I think the inspiration to be gotten from a life well lived—spectacularly lived—is more important than ever these days. It’s important that we dwell on the good and, just as important, maybe more so, try to understand it. This makes us stronger rather than sapping us, as so much of the ebb and flow of news and argument tends to do. We need to be looking to good things.

We’re out of time. Thank you.

Thank you.