Peggy Noonan

During the past week’s heat wave—it hit 100 degrees in New York City Monday—I got thinking, again, of how sad and frustrating it is that the world’s greatest scientists cannot gather, discuss the question of global warming, pore over all the data from every angle, study meteorological patterns and temperature histories, and come to a believable conclusion on these questions: Is global warming real or not? If it is real, is it necessarily dangerous? What exactly are the dangers? Is global warming as dangerous as, say, global cooling would be? Are we better off with an Earth that is getting hotter or, what with the modern realities of heating homes and offices, and the world energy crisis, and the need to conserve, does global heating have, in fact, some potential side benefits, and can those benefits be broadened and deepened? Also, if global warning is real, what must—must—the inhabitants of the Earth do to meet its challenges? And then what should they do to meet them?

You would think the world’s greatest scientists could do this, in good faith and with complete honesty and a rigorous desire to discover the truth. And yet they can’t. Because science too, like other great institutions, is poisoned by politics. Scientists have ideologies. They are politicized.

All too many of them could be expected to enter this work not as seekers for truth but agents for a point of view who are eager to use whatever data can be agreed upon to buttress their point of view.

And so, in the end, every report from every group of scientists is treated as a political document. And no one knows what to believe. So no consensus on what to do can emerge.

If global warming is real, and if it is new, and if it is caused not by nature and her cycles but man and his rapacity, and if it in fact endangers mankind, scientists will probably one day blame The People for doing nothing.

But I think The People will have a greater claim to blame the scientists, for refusing to be honest, for operating in cliques and holding to ideologies. For failing to be trustworthy.

*   *   *

The other day ABC News’s Internet political report, The Note, argued that President Bush, in his then-upcoming veto statement and other presentations, had better be at the top of his game if he wants his party to hold on to Congress in 2006. “[Mr. Bush] is going to need to be focused and impressive, not easy pickings for the Rich-Krugman-Dowd-Stewart axis.”
As I read I nodded: That’s exactly true. What was significant is that The Note did not designate as Mr. Bush’s main and most effective foes Pelosi, Dodd, Reid, Biden, et al. Mr. Bush’s mightiest competitors are columnists and a comedian with a fake-news show.

This is one reason the media is important. (Not “are important.” Language evolves; usage changes; people vote with their tongues. It’s not the correct “return to normality”; it’s the incorrect “return to normalcy.” It’s not “the media are” it’s “the media is.” People see the media as one big thing.)

One big reason the media is important is that they change things. And they lead. On 9/11 itself it was the media—anchors, reporters, crews sent to the scene, analysts—that functioned, for roughly 10 hours, as the most visible leaders of the United States. The president was on a plane; the vice president was in the bunker and on the phone. It was on-air journalists who informed, created a seeming order, and reassured the public by their presence and personas and professionalism.

So they’re important. But very recently it seems to me they’re important because it is from the media that Mr. Bush’s most effective opposition—attacks on his nature and leadership, attacks on his policies—comes. Among the Democrats an op-ed columnist has more impact than a minority leader.

It is common wisdom that newspapers are over. But when the most powerful voices against a powerful president at a crucial time are op-ed jockeys, newspapers are not over. Or perhaps one should say paper may be over, but news is not.

*   *   *

Ralph Reed lost this week in his race for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor of Georgia. This strikes me as significant in several ways.
I always thought the question about Mr. Reed is: Is he a Christian who went into politics, or a politician who went into Christianity? Was he sincere and driven by a desire to have a positive impact on public policy, or a mover driven by a desire to get a piece of the action as American Christians, disaffected from a Democratic Party that had grown wildly insensitive to, and in fact disdainful of, their values, started to become a force in the Republican Party? Maybe one or the other, maybe both, maybe both but to different degrees.

I once overheard him say to a friend, a year ago, that if “they” didn’t stop him as he ran for his first public office, he would be “unstoppable.” “They” was the political left. He expected a rough race, but he seemed optimistic. What struck me though was the word “unstoppable.” I realized: He means if he wins, he’ll run for governor and then president. He sounded like a mover. And he didn’t seem sincere, not in any sweet, “this is what I believe” way.

I think he’d grown enamored of being an insider, a top and big-time operative in Republican politics and within the White House. When he spoke of the White House, he said “we.”

When I first met and interviewed him it was 1994, and he was part of the Gingrich revolution. He looked like a daguerreotype of one of the boy generals of the Civil War, his dark hair slicked back and his collar too big for his neck. But he had an air of command.

When I read some of the emails he’d sent to lobbyist friends—”I need some corporations, I need some moolah,” that kind of thing—I thought: Ick. This is a man suffering from a case of advanced insiderism. This is a guy who thinks it’s cool to be cynical.

Anyway, his defeat this week came at the hands not of “them,” of the left, but of conservative voters on the ground in Georgia. His loss seems to me another sign of one of those quiet changing of the guards in professional politics. Quietly an older generation recedes, quietly a newer one rises.

Good. We need new.

*   *   *

It is always a delight when you’re a writer not to write things you later judge to be idiotic, or, to be charitable to oneself, flawed. But last week I’d no sooner seen my column online than I disagreed not with its assertions and arguments but, I suppose, with its tone. And not only tone, but its incompleteness.

My argument was that things in politics, the policy issues we face, are too complicated. That you no sooner bone up on Iraq than you must bone up on stem cells and Putin and the history of marriage. And that having to have views on these things puts too much pressure on politicians, who after all are not Plato. And yet daily they make decisions that are above their pay grade, and above most everyone else’s too.

I said this trend tends to favor liberalism, and that if you’re of a conspiratorial bent you’d even think they did it on purpose to so muddy the waters that no one could swim, no one could break through to the top, everyone would be caught in the weeds as the current tugs left.

I do wish I’d been explicit in saying: I believe liberals in fact enjoy the complexity, not only because they love government—love to obsess on it, and think it is the last best hope of man on Earth—but because complexity justifies big government. Big complex question. Big complex response. Laws and rumors of laws.

Conservatives don’t live for government and don’t love it, either. They like other things. They think government is a necessity and a potential evil. This is because they know human nature, and they know humans run governments. Ergo extremely flawed and even damaged people are governing us. Ergo don’t give them a big sandbox to play in; keep it as small as possible. That way their depredations will be, by definition, limited.

This point of view—humans are imperfect, governments even more so—is not inherently pessimistic but rather optimistic about other things: life, faith, relationships, gardens. A conservative politician who does not enjoy gardening, reading, taking a walk or seeing a play more than governing is a human warning sign: Don’t go there.

*   *   *

I also wish I’d said that if we have to have such complicated issues addressed by law, it is better politicians do it than the courts. Politicians, being as flawed and imperfect as you, me and all newspaper columnists, are at least answerable in a direct and measurable way to the people they represent. The people on the ground in America who vote them in and out.

People punish and reward them for the stands they take. So politicians have to at least seem in touch with the common wisdom back home. The other day 236 congressman out of 433 voted for a constitutional amendment to codify society’s wishes that marriage in America be defined, as it has been through recorded history, as something that takes place between a more or less adult man and a more or less adult woman. The House members voted this way for various reasons and with various motives, but one, in many cases, would be this: The people back home would make them pay if they didn’t.

There is more often than not a lot of wisdom in the people back home. Certainly more than we have seen the past half century on the bench, which as we all know is a problem, because judges in America are pretty much answerable to no one. Thus we get decisions—Kelo, anyone?—that, right or wrong, lack even the saving grace of reflecting a common human wisdom.

I note here what is to me a mystery. It is that people with lower IQs somehow tend, in our age, to have a greater apprehension of the meaning of things and the reality of life, than do our high-IQ professionals, who often seem, in areas outside their immediate field, startlingly dim. I don’t know why intellectuals—or cerebralists or eggheads or IQ hegemonists—seem to miss the most obvious things, floating on untethered by common sense. If you talk to a brilliant scholar at a fine university about social policy, chances are he will say with honest perplexity that he cannot understand—really cannot understand—why people would not want men to marry men, or women women. I wish there were a name for this, for the cluelessness of the more intellectually accomplished, the simpler but truer wisdom of those who are often less lettered and less accomplished.

But I have strayed from my point, which is that in the midst of the increasing complexity we should limit as much as possible what is decided by government, limit its power, and have some actual sympathy for politicians who have to master the arcane subject matter. Better they make decisions than our black-robed masters.

I am thinking about the huge and crushing number of issues we force politicians to understand and make decisions on. These are issues of great variety, complexity, and even in some cases, many cases in a way, unknowability.

All of us, as good citizens, feel that we must know something about them, study them, come to conclusions. But there are too many, and they are too complicated, or the information on them is contradictory, or incomplete.

For politicians it is the same but more so. They not only have to try to understand, complicated and demanding questions, they have to vote on them.

We are asking our politicians, our senators and congressmen, to make judgments, decisions and policy on: stem cell research, SDI, Nato composition, G-8 agreements, the history and state of play of judicial and legislative actions regarding press freedoms, the history of Sunni-Shiites tensions, Kurds, tax rates, federal spending, hurricane prediction and response, the building of a library annex in Missoula, the most recent thinking on when human life begins, including the thinking of the theologians of antiquity on when the soul enters the body, chemical weaponry, the Supreme Court, U.S.-North Korean relations, bioethics, cloning, public college curriculums, India-Pakistan relations, the enduring Muslim-Hindu conflict, the constitutional implications of McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform, Homeland security, Securities and Exchange Commission authority, energy policy, environmental policy, nuclear proliferation, global warming, the stability of Venezuela’s Chavez regime and its implications for U.S. oil prices, the future of Cuba after Castro, progress in gender bias as suggested by comparisons of the number of girls who pursued college-track studies in American public high schools circa 1950 to those on a college-track today, outsourcing, immigration, the comparative efficacy of charter and magnet schools, land use, Kelo, health care, HMO’s, what to do with victims of child abuse, the history of marriage, the nature and origin of homosexuality, V-chips, foreign competition in the making of computer chips, fat levels in potato chips, national policy on the humanities, U.N. reform, and privacy law.

And that was just this week.

Just seven days in the modern political world.

Lucky for us our congressmen and senators are smart as Einstein, good as Mother Teresa, knowledgeable as Henry Kissinger times Robert Kaplan, and wise as Solomon.

Oh wait.

We are asking too much. Of ourselves and of the mere mortals who lead us.

With their areas of responsibility defined as the world, the universe and the cosmos, is it any wonder our politicians and network anchors—our most visible American leaders—tend to act like they have attention deficit disorder? In their professions attention deficit disorder is a plus.

*   *   *

Why are we asking so much of them? Because everything comes down to law and law comes down to politicians. Because everyone’s watching, and trying to pin everyone else down—“But Congressman, the little girl lived in your district and all the local authorities had been alerted, don’t you think your office should have done something about the daily abuse to which she was being subjected?”

And yet this is all good for politicians. Because it’s good for business. Yes they are overwhelmed and yes they are out of their depth—how could they not be?—but the endless number of questions on which they must legislate leads to an endless number of lobbyists and groups willing to give them money and support in return for a vote.

The Increasing Complexity of Everything is good for liberalism (government should be vital, large, demand and bestow much) and not conservatism (government should be smaller, less powerful, less demanding of the treasure and liberty of the citizenry). When everything is a big complicated morass, regular normal people, voters, constituents, become intellectually disheartened. They can also lose sight of core principles. A leftist who is Machiavellian in his impulses just might look at the lay of the land and think, Good, snow ’em under, they’ll get confused. Keep hitting them with new issues and they’ll start to make mistakes. They may stop us on gun control, but while they’re busy fighting that we’ll get Congress to mandate limits on CEO pay.

One feels as a voter not argued into agreement or persuaded into support but complicated into submission.

How do politicians themselves feel about it? I would like to think many of them, and I know some of them, occasionally have a drink with friends at night and let out their surprise and dismay. “I’m just a guy who loved politics! I buy my suits at Moe’s Big and Tall! I’m not a theologian, I’m not a scientist! Don’t make me make these decisions! I’m stupider than you understand!”

That turns into: “I’m not Plato! I’m not Socrates! Do you really want me to pretend I am?”

*   *   *

But a lot voters do seem to want them to pretend to higher wisdom than they possess.

Which leads politicians to the third stage of surprise and dismay: “I just made American public policy on stem cell research, telling Harvard and Yale doctors what to do. Am I not Plato? Would you not like to kiss my hand?”

This is the ego generated by people of whom impossible demands are made.

What is the answer to all this? I don’t know. But there must be one, even though it’s probably complicated. I have only three thoughts. One: It is good to keep in mind, at such a time, that we must let as many questions devolve into the private sphere as possible. Not all can but many can, and on so many issues it’s better to err on the side of individual freedom than the authority of the state. Two, in making big decisions do not lose simple common sense, which is common human sense, which is, for instance: If you start to clone humans it will have an ugly end. Three: Do not let go of your faith. Do not lose it. In the age in which too much is demanded of the slim wisdom of politicians, it is our only hope, and theirs.

All deaths are sad, and some are shocking and sad. Ken Lay’s this week was both, though I don’t suppose it should have been a shock.

Putting aside all judgments and conclusions, all umbrage, outrage and indignation, and all debates on who was most responsible for the Enron scandal—putting all those weighty and legitimate concerns aside—isn’t it obvious that Ken Lay died of a broken heart? We forget that people do, or at least I forget, but they do.

His life was broken and would never be healed. Or if it was to be healed it would happen while he was imprisoned, for the rest of his life, with four walls to look at. All was wreckage around him. He died, of a massive coronary. But that can be another way of saying broken heart.

Is this Shakespearian in the sense of being towering and tragic? I don’t know. I think it’s primal and human. And I think if we were more regularly conscious of the fact that death through sadness happens we’d be better to each other. I’m thinking here of a friend who reflected one day years ago, I cannot recall why, on how hard people are on each other, how we’re all complicated little pirates and more sensitive, more breakable, than we know.

He said—I paraphrase—”It’s a dangerous thing to deliberately try to hurt someone because it’s not possible to calibrate exactly how much hurt you’re doing. You can’t know in advance the extent of the damage. A snub can leave a wound that lasts a lifetime, a bop on the head with a two-by-four will be laughed off. One must be careful. We’ll always hurt others by accident or in a passion but we mustn’t do it with deliberation.”

We are human beings, and to each other we are not fully knowable. There’s a lot of mystery in life. The life force can leave before we even know it’s withdrawing.

*   *   *

On TV Wednesday, on cable news, they weren’t calling him “CEO scam artist” but, literally, on CNN, “beleaguered businessman.” They didn’t know how to play the story. To rehearse, on the day of his death, the allegations against Lay and the jury verdict—guilty of fraud and conspiracy—would be . . . ungracious, lacking. But to ignore the scandal—which is after all the reason he is famous, the reason we are reporting his death—is journalistically incoherent. Reporters tried to find a middle ground. Lay came from nowhere, rose high, messed up, fell.
Fair enough.

But part of what happened to him, one of the interesting parts of the sad story, is that it is an illustration of the changing nature of scandal. There has been a huge change in the impact scandal now has on a human life in the modern world.

Once you could get in terrible trouble and just vamoose and find a place to hide. You could lam it, lay low, start over. You could reinvent yourself. You could cross an ocean and go to another continent and begin again.

You could leave the scandal behind you.

You could create a new life by creating a fiction. It is 1794 and you are in fact a farmer’s son from Normandy who stole a purse. But you’ve just arrived in Philadelphia and have taken to announcing that you’re a member of the French nobility fleeing the revolution. And they believe you! You work in a store, own a store, found a chain. In time you are the sober scion of an old main line family. Or it’s 1930 and you’re a socialite who caused a scandal, so you go to the hills of Umbria and begin to call yourself the widow Jones.

You could hide or start over. As late as the 1950s a Blanche Dubois could have confidence her tale of lost love would be believed. She could rely on the kindness of strangers.

But no one’s quite a stranger anymore.

Now, with modern media, there’s no place to hide. In the age of Google there’s an endless pixel trail.

You can’t disappear and start over because you can’t disappear.

And—I’m serious—there’s a sadness to this, a less human, less rich, more constricted and constricting quality to modern life because of it.

*   *   *

The modern media age has leveled the trees behind which people used to hide. If Ken Lay had been found not guilty and gone to live on the most obscure street in the third biggest town in Chad, you know what they’d say as he walked by. “That’s the guy that headed the company that stole the money.” They have CNN there. They have it everywhere.
Too bad. People need second chances, and thirds, and fourths.

The answer? There is no answer. The lesson is not, “Human beings will have to have fewer scandals and embarrassments,” because human beings can’t have less scandals and embarrassments. They’re human. They’ll do what humans do.

The only relief in this area will be here: when every embarrassment is famous for a day and every scandal known worldwide for a week, they’ll all start to blend into a big blur. And you can hide in a blur for a while.

Today I would like to depart from what I perceive as the common wisdom on several people and issues.

Hillary Clinton. Media people keep saying, as Hillary gears up for her presidential bid, that her big challenge in 2008 will be to prove that she is as tough as a man. That she could order troops to war. That she’s not girly and soft.

This is the exact opposite of the truth. Hillary doesn’t have to prove her guy chops. She doesn’t have to prove she’s a man, she has to prove she’s a woman. No one in America thinks she’s a woman. They think she’s a tough little termagant in a pantsuit. They think she’s something between an android and a female impersonator. She is not perceived as a big warm mommy trying to resist her constant impulse to sneak you candy. They think she has to resist her constant impulse to hit you with a bat. She lacks a deep (as opposed to quick) warmth, a genuine and almost phenomenological sense of rightness in her own skin. She seems like someone who might calculatedly go to war, or not, based on how she wanted to be perceived and look and do. She does not seem like someone who would anguish and weep over sending men into harm’s way.

And in this, as president, she would be deeply unusual. LBJ felt anguish; there are pictures of him, head in hands, suffering. Bush the Elder wept as he talked, with Paula Zahn, about what it was to send men to war. Bush the Younger would breastfeed the military if he could. Hillary is like someone who would know she should be moved but wouldn’t be because she couldn’t be because . . . well, why? That is the question. Maybe a lifetime in politics has bled some of the human element out of her. Maybe there wasn’t that much to begin with. Maybe she thinks that if she wept, the wires that hold her together would short.

*   *   *

The flag burning amendment is a bad idea, and will not prove, in the end, politically wise or fruitful to any significant degree. Three reasons. One is that the American people can sense, whether they support a constitutional ban or not, that they’re being manipulated. They know supporters are playing with their essential patriotism for political profit. They know opponents are, by and large, taking their stand for equally political reasons. They can sense when everyone’s posturing. It’s not good, in the long term, when people sense you’re playing with their deepest emotions, such as their love of country.

Second, nobody thinks America is overrun with people burning flags, so the amendment does not seem even to be an exotic response to a real problem. There are a lot of pressing issues before the Congress, and no one thinks this is one of them. Voters know it’s hard to do a risky thing like define marriage as a legal entity that can take place only between an adult human male and an adult human female. That actually would take some guts. It’s easy—almost embarrassingly so—to make speeches about how much you love the flag.

Third, Americans don’t always say this or even notice it, but they love their Constitution. They revere it. They don’t want it used as a plaything. They want the Constitution treated as a hallowed document that is amended rarely, and only for deep reasons of societal or governmental need. A flag burning amendment is too small bore for such a big thing. I don’t think it will come up as a big issue every even numbered year. I think it’s going to go away. There’s too much else that’s really needed.

*   *   *

Once the New York Times was extremely important, and often destructive. Now it is less important, and often destructive. This is not a change for the worse.
The Times is important still because of its influence on other parts of the media: Other journalists, knowing the great resources of the Times, respecting its air of professionalism (which is sometimes not an air but the thing itself), key their own decisions on news coverage to the front and opinion pages. If you’re a blogger or a talk-show lion, you key some of the things you talk about to the Times. It’s still important.

But it’s not what it was. Once it was such a force that it controlled the intellectual climate. Now it’s just part of it. Seventy years ago its depiction of Stalin’s benignity left a generation confused, or confounded. Fifty years ago, when the Times became enamored of a romantic young revolutionary named Fidel, the American decision-making establishment believed what it read and observed in comfort as an angry communist dictatorship was established 90 miles off our shore. The Times’ wrongheadedness had huge implications for American statecraft.

The Times is still in many respects an extraordinary daily achievement. The sheer size and scope of its efforts is impressive—the Sunday paper is big as a book every week, and costs a lot less.

But it is not what it was and will never be again. It was hurt by its own limits—a paper of and from an island off the continent, awkward in its relationship with and understanding of the continent. It was and is hurt by its longtime and predictable liberalism. Predictable isn’t fun. It doesn’t make you want to get up in the morning, tear the paper off the mat and open it with a hungry snap. It was hurt by technology—it lost its share of what was, essentially, a monopoly. And it’s been hurt by its own scandals and misjudgments. The Times rarely seems driven by an agenda to get the news first, fast and clear; to get the story and let the chips fall. It often seems driven by a search for information that might support its suppositions. Which, again, gets boring. The Times never knows what’s becoming a huge national issue. It’s always surprised by what Americans are thinking.

In a way the modern Times is playing to a base, the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and the redoubts of the Upper West Side throughout America: affluent urban neighborhoods and suburbs. The paper plays not to a region but a class.

But one senses the people who run the Times now are not so much living as re-enacting. They’re lost on the big new playing field of American media, and they’re reenacting their great moments—the Pentagon papers, the Watergate days. They’re locked in a pose: We speak truth to (bad Republican) power. Frank Rich is running around with his antiwar screeds as if it’s 1968 and he’s an idealist with a beard, as opposed to what he is, a guy who if he pierced his ears gravy would come out.

This is the imagery that comes to you when you ponder the Times. It’s the imagery that comes unbidden when you ponder the national security stories they’ve been doing. They’re all re-enacting. They’re acting out their own private drama in which they bravely stand up to a secretive and all-powerful American government.

I think it’s personal drama in part because there’s no common sense in it. Common sense tells you that when the actual physical safety of Americans is threatened by extremists who’ve declared a holy war, and when those extremists have, or can get, terrible weapons that can kill thousands or tens of thousands or more, and when the American government is trying to keep them from doing what they’d like to do, which, again, is kill—then you’d think twice, thrice, 10 times before you tell the world exactly how the government is trying, in its own bumbling way, which is how governments do things, to keep innocent people safe and bad guys on the run.

It is kind of crazy that the Times would do two stories that expose, and presumably hinder, the government’s efforts. But then it strikes me as crazy that every paper that has reported the latest story—that would include The Wall Street Journal—would do so. Based on the evidence that has become public so far, the Journal, like the Times, and the Los Angeles Times, seems to me to have made the wrong call. But to me it is the New York Times, of all papers involved, that has most forgotten the mission. The mission is to get the story, break through the forest to get to a clear space called news, and also be a citizen. It’s not to be a certain kind of citizen, and insist everyone else be that kind of citizen, and also now and then break a story.

Forgetting the mission is a problem endemic in newsrooms now. It’s why a lot of them do less journalism than politics. When you’ve forgotten the mission you spend your days talking about, say, diversity in the newsroom. You become distracted by tertiary issues. (Too bad. The news doesn’t care the color or sex of the person who finds it and reports it.) You become not journalistic and now and then political, but political and now and then journalistic.

It’s sad. Though I guess if you’re the Times you take comfort in the fact that even though you’re not as important as you used to be, you’re just as destructive as ever.

*   *   *

I am fascinated by Barbara Walters’s opening statement on “The View” yesterday, regarding the departure of Star Jones. I am fascinated not because it was open to being read between the lines, but begged to be read between the lines. As in:

“If you were watching the program yesterday, you would have heard Star announce that she’s leaving THE VIEW and will not be on the program next fall. She gave us no warning. And we were taken by surprise.”

She tried to get control of the story. That was a mistake. I am Barbara Walters and I control the story.

“But the truth is that Star has known for months that ABC did not want to renew her contract and that she would not be asked back in the fall. The network made this decision based on a variety of reasons which I won’t go into now.”

When she lost weight, her face got scary.

“But we were never going to say this. We wanted to protect Star. And so we told her that she could say whatever she wanted about why she was leaving and that we would back her up. We worked closely with her representatives and we gave her time to look for another job. We hope she would announce it on the program and leave with dignity.”

We told her to come up with a lie and promised to spin it with her. This is how you show loyalty in modern America. Some thanks!

“‘The View’ helped make Star a star and Star helped make ‘The View’ the success that it is.”

Good luck on “The E! True Hollywood Story” with Debbie Metapopolis or whatever her name was.

Everyone should stop spinning. Because America is now a country composed of people who know better than anything how to deconstruct spin. It’s our great national talent.

It has occurred to me that both parties increasingly dislike their bases, but for different reasons and to different degrees. By both parties I mean the leaders and representatives of the Democrats and Republicans in Washington. I believe I correctly observe that they feel an increasing intellectual estrangement from and impatience with the activists who people their base of support.

And this is something new.

In the past, Republican leaders in Washington bowed either symbolically or practically to the presumed moral leadership and cleanness of vision of the people back home. They understood the base wanted tax cuts and spending cuts, and for serious reasons. The base had deep qualms about abortion. The base intuitively recoiled from big government: They knew the best arrangement was maximum possible power to the individual and limited, policed, heavily checked power to the state. Or, as some back home might have put it, Don’t put your faith in governments, which are made by men; put your faith in individuals, who are made by God.

Republican leaders in the capital bowed to this wisdom—if not in their actions, at least quite often in their hearts.

Now they seem to bow less. They know the higher wisdom on such issues as immigration. They feel less fealty to the insights of the base. They know more than the base, are more experienced than the base, have a more nuanced sense of reality. And as for conservative social issues groups, the politicians resent those nagging, whining pushers-for-the-impossible who are always threatening to stay home or go elsewhere. (Where?)

Some Washington Republicans have been in leadership so long they’ve learned—they’ve learned too well!—that politics is the art of the possible. It is. But this is not an excuse to be weak, or ambivalent, or passive, or superior.

*   *   *

On the Democratic side, it is not just as bad but worse. They don’t only think they’re more sophisticated than their base, more informed and aware of the complexities. I believe they think their base is mad.
You can see their problem in their inability to get a slogan. Which, believe me, is how they think of it: a slogan. “Together for a Better Future.” “A Future With Better Togetherness.” Today for a better tomorrow, tomorrow for a better today.

A party has a hard time saying what it stands for only when it doesn’t know what it stands for. It has trouble getting a compelling slogan only when it has no idea what compels its base. Or when it fears what compels it.

I got a sense of the distance between Democratic leaders and the base a few years ago when I met up with a Democrat who was weighing a run for the party’s 2004 nomination. He hadn’t announced but was starting to test the waters, campaigning out of state.

I mentioned to him that the press gives a great deal of attention to the problems of Republican leaders and their putative supporters on the ground in America, but I was interested in the particular problems a D.C. Democrat has with his party’s base.

His eyebrows went up in the way people’s eyebrows go up when they’re interested in what they’re about to say. He said—I write from memory; it was not an interview but a conversation—that he was getting an education in that area. He said when he spoke before local Democratic groups they were wildly against the war in Iraq and sometimes booed him when he spoke of it. It left him startled. He had supported the president for serious reasons: He thought Saddam a bad actor who likely had weapons of mass destruction. He wanted to talk about it, but they didn’t want to hear him. They were immovable.

But there was something else. He didn’t say it, but something in his manner suggested he thought they were . . . just a little crazy.

I thought of him the other day when I saw Howard Dean say something intemperate on TV. I actually can’t remember what it was, one intemperate Dean statement blending into another as they do. I was standing near a small screen with recent acquaintances, all of them relatively nonpolitical, and as I watched Mr. Dean speak I blurted, “Why does he say things like that?” A middle-aged woman—intelligent, professional—answered, “Because he thinks they’re stupid.”

He thinks who’s stupid? I asked. The press? “His party,” she said. We both laughed because it sounded true.

But today I’m thinking that’s not quite it. Howard Dean is actually the most in touch with his base of all D.C. Democrats because he speaks to them the secret language of Madman Boogabooga. Republicans are racist/ignorant/evil. This is actually not ineffective. It’s a language that quells the base and would scare the center if they followed it more closely, but they can’t because it’s not heavily reported because “Dean Says Something Crazy” is no longer news.

*   *   *

I watched the Senate debate on Iraq yesterday. I happen to respect the Democrats’ attempts to debate the war, argue it out, bring it again to the floor of Congress. I am impressed that the majority of them seem to oppose calling for a date-certain pullout. There was a lot of administration-bashing, some strange rhetorical sallies. But bottom line they seemed to be saying that while new management for the war is desirable, declaring “it’s over, we’re tired, we’re gone” is not.
This struck me as essentially sane, and as I watched I wondered if these Democrats would take major hits from the base because of it. Or if John Kerry, who is pushing for a declared date certain for withdrawal, would greatly benefit.

Here is my read on a lot of Democratic senators: They think they know more than their base and they think they’re more—how to put it?—stable in their view of the world than their base. In their hearts, in fact, they don’t really like their base. (They like—they love—the old base: old union guys who drink Schlitz and voted for FDR and JFK. But today those old union guys are mostly dead, dying or Republican.)

Democratic leaders in Washington are in a worse position than Republican leaders in Washington. Neither likes their base, really, and both think they are smarter. But the Democrats think, deep down, that their base is barking mad. The Republicans don’t. They just think their base is a bore.

The Democratic Party is that amazing thing, out of power for six years and yet exhausted. They’re pale, tired and unready. Too bad, since it’s their job to be an alternative, not an embarrassment.

This week Democratic members of Congress and other elected officials unveil their ‘New Direction for America,’ the party’s declaration of its reason for being. It said it stands firmly and unequivocally, without fear or favor, unwaveringly and with grit for . . . reducing the cost of student loans. And making prescription drugs less expensive. And raising the minimum wage. Etc.

This is not a philosophy but a way—an inadequate way, but a way—of hiding the fact that you don’t have a philosophy.

*   *   *

One can argue about why the Democratic Party no longer seems to have a reason for being. I believe the reason is this: They have achieved what they set out to achieve in 1932, when the modern Democratic Party began. They got what they asked for, achieved what they fought for. They got a big government that offers a wide array of benefits and assistance; they got a powerful federal establishment that collects and dispenses treasure, that assumes societal guidance. They got Social Security and Medicare. They got civil rights (much murky history there, the Southern Democratic lions of the U.S. Senate having retarded the modern civil rights movement from 1940 through 1964; still, by the late ‘60s Democrats came to seem to own the issue, and that hasn’t changed). They got what they stood for. They went on, in the 1970s and ‘80s, to stand for things about which Americans showed they had doubts and ambivalence: abortion, the modernist social agenda. By the time the Democrats ran out that string, they got tagged for the cost of their dreams. Big government is expensive, and the American people didn’t enjoy being forced to pay, through high taxes, for the pleasure of being pushed around.

Also the Democrats, since 1968, hate war. But that’s not really a philosophy. No one likes war, or no one who’s normal. The real difference is between those who think war is bad and must never be fought and those who think it’s bad but sometimes must be fought. The vast majority of voters are in the latter camp.

A second reason the Democratic Party has trouble knowing what it stands for, and thus articulating its purpose, is that it is so spooked by polls, focus groups and past defeats that it’s afraid to take any vivid and differentiating stands, and seeks refuge in the muck of small issues. But small issues are small. And in this case don’t even offer a philosophical pattern. ‘We stand for lower college loan costs and better prescription drug benefits.’ That’s something you’d die on the battlefield for, isn’t it?

*   *   *

Which gets us to what is being called one of the most interesting races to watch this year, in Virginia, where Reagan-era Navy secretary James Webb last night won the Democratic nomination to run against Republican senator and expected presidential contender George Allen. I like George Allen and I’m a conservative, but in the Reagan administration I admired Jim Webb, and I admire his books, especially ‘Born Fighting.’

On the face of it, the Webb-Allen contest looks like something new. It’s being painted as that, and maybe it is, but I’m not sure.

Mr. Webb is running on his biography. Nothing wrong with that. Lincoln sold Lincoln’s, having his men parade rails he’d supposedly split through the halls of the 1860 Republican Convention. Mr. Webb’s bio is classic conservative: service to country, pride, personal heroism. The combat boots he wore in Vietnam were used as model and inspiration by the sculptor of the statue of the war’s great grunts at the Vietnam memorial. (Mr. Allen often wears cowboy boots. I bet combat boots versus cowboy boots becomes an iconographic signature of the campaign.)

Mr. Webb is an artist (novelist, essayist) and warrior. This is an unusual combination and a beautiful one. But he does not seem to think politically, which can be a drawback when you go into politics.

He is campaigning as the antiwar candidate—he has opposed Iraq since the runup, as Mr. Allen has supported it. But if Mr. Webb is only an antiwar candidate who on other issues—the social issues, taxes—cleaves to standard Democratic positions, then he’s not something new, he’s something old.

Mr. Webb says he is ‘pro-choice’ on abortion, ‘pro-gay rights,’ and ‘pro-Second Amendment.’

I don’t doubt the sincerity of his views. I’ve never met a career military man who was a conservative on social issues. I think they tend to see questions such as abortion and marriage as essentially uninteresting, private and not subject to the movement of machines. (Connected to this, I suspect Mr. Webb will benefit to some degree by the high number of military retirees in Virginia. They’re always assumed to be hawks on Iraq. From personal experience I’d say a high percentage have been dubious about the war, many from the beginning.)

To be an antiwar Democrat who’s a liberal on social issues is not something new in the Democratic Party. It’s the same old same old with a new biography. Or so it seems to me.

It is true that Mr. Webb has said he supports the Second Amendment, and much is being made of this. But that doesn’t strike me as significant, or rather it strikes me as significant only in what it underscores: The Democratic Party has lost on the right to bear arms. They know it. It’s why they don’t speak of gun control anymore on the national stage. It used to be one of their primary issues. They went as far as they could in terms of control—licensing, background checks, etc.—but on what was once their obvious desire to make private gun ownership in America illegal, the Democratic Party has, in the past dozen years, quietly, almost soundlessly, caved in.

That leaves taxes. From his Web site it’s not clear where Mr. Webb stands. He wants our tax system to be ‘fair,’ but in no way does he wave the anti-costly-government, antitax banner.

Mr. Webb has interesting and important things to say about the war, and we’ll find out if that is the No. 1 issue in Virginia, and how Virginians come down on it, in the coming months. But in terms of domestic policy, of all other nonwar policy, he sounds to me like Nancy Pelosi with medals.

At the end of the day elections are not only about personalities, not even primarily about them, but about issues. Mr. Webb’s issues seem standard-issue.

*   *   *

Let me close with something that I thought had the sound of the future in it. I was at a Manhattan Institute lunch this week at which Rudy Giuliani spoke. He impressed the audience of 200 or so, which was not surprising as it was his kind of group, urban-oriented thinkers drawn not to ideology but to what works and will help in the world. (I am a longtime supporter.) At one point he was asked about national education policy. Mr. Giuliani said he wanted more national emphasis on choice. He spoke of it as a civil rights issue, and told stories to illustrate the point.

Then—this is the part with the sound of the future in it—he laid out the reasons both parties have failed to push the ball forward. The Democrats fear the teachers unions and the educational establishment. The Republicans are heavily represented in and by suburban and country areas, which tend to have good schools, tend to be happy with them, and are wary of a movement they fear might take something from them. And so the students who need the most help, city kids who would benefit the most from creativity, are held captive to a failed public-education monopoly.

His candor was refreshing. Mr. Giuliani’s approach was nonpartisan in the best sense—i.e., not fuzzy but frank. It wasn’t Public schools want to be free; it was This is what will help, this is why it isn’t happening, this is why we have to make it happen. That didn’t sound like the same old same old. It didn’t sound like the past.

A thought today about complexity and politics.

The American people right now are not in a mood to trust any political plan, proposal or policy that seems complicated—highly involved, technical, full of phased-in elements and glide paths and Part C’s.

They are against complexity not because they don’t think life is complex. They know it’s complex. They know it because they live it every day. They assume public policy issues are also complicated. They know there are facts they don’t know, which probably have to be factored in as policy is developed. But more and more they recoil from complicated, lengthy, abstruse proposals.

Why?

Because they think—they assume, at this point, reflexively—that slithery, slippery professional politicians are using and inventing complications to obfuscate and confuse. They think politicians are using complexity to create great clouds in which they can make their escape, like a cartoon character, like Road Runner.

They think modern politicians hide in complexity. They think politicians evade responsibility with it. We can’t do the right thing, it’s too complicated! Americans don’t trust “comprehensive plans,” because they don’t trust the comprehensive planners.

This, I think, is the essential problem with Congress’s immigration proposals. All the phased-in-partial-assimilation-glide-paths-to-guest-worker-status stuff seems like a big 500-page con. It’s all too complicated to be understood by anyone who’s not a tenured political science professor with a second degree in accounting.

What people will trust, and understand, is this: We will close the border tomorrow, and then figure it out from there.

*   *   *

People resist complicated proposals for realistic reasons.

First, they have a natural and healthy skepticism toward the political class. They think the Senate and House are in effect using public anxiety about our collapsed borders to sneak in—I use that term deliberately—their own party-favoring addendums and amendments. People sense Washington is using public concern as a plaything to get what will serve the political class.

Second, people know that while much of life is complicated, some of it is simple, such as what you can see with your eyes. They would believe a bill that closed the borders worked when they saw that it worked. They will know when the border has been closed. No one will be coming across it. It will be adequately patrolled. Those seeking illegal entry will be turned away.

No one, on the other hand, believes he will be able to know with certainty whether a phased-in guest-worker plan is working in the short term, or the long term either. They’ll only know if it was a disaster after the disaster is done. And they will have to rely for some of their data on government figures—about which they will be dubious, for one of the great modern American understandings is that statistics don’t lie but liars use statistics.

And the third reason is they know everyone in Washington is not trustworthy in terms of basic normal human commitment on the immigration issue. They’re not reliable.

*   *   *

The other day Rep. Tom Tancredo won a straw vote. A small vote, but, as Tom Tancredo is not exactly a longtime famous Republican party leader, it was interesting. Why would Republican voters choose Mr. Tancredo? Because they know where his heart is on immigration: Stop it, now. It’s where he’s been for years. He was out there alone on the issue. Now some have joined him. But you know where his heart is and his position is clear.
The irony is that this makes Mr. Tancredo one of the few among Republicans who would be given some leeway by his voters in fashioning an ultimate immigration plan. Why? Because they know he’d be doing his best. Because he means it. They know this because of his past: He was doing his best when there was nothing in it. He’s committed to getting as much progress as possible. Which means his supporters would give him flexibility. They’d even allow him to get complicated. “If he gets complex, you must have to.”

Democrats have the same problem on the same issue—who believes a word Hillary Clinton says when she speaks of immigration?—and on more.

Democrats use complexity as a thing to hide behind when they talk about taxes. Republicans can say, and can mean, “I hate taxes and will cut them.” Democrats can’t say that, because they don’t hate taxes and in fact will raise them. Though they will not say it. They will say, “Tax cuts on the top 10% of income earners are nonprogressive and unhelpful, and I will cut their tax cut, or hike their taxes, and in turn make commensurate cuts on the taxes of the most deserving lower income taxpayers, though not in a way that will negatively impact the deficit.”

When voters hear this they know exactly what it means: We will raise taxes.

*   *   *

What is the answer to the public’s skepticism about complexity, and a modern leader’s need to look at complicated problems in a way that sometimes involves complicated solutions?

Mr. Tancredo knows. Ronald Reagan knew. Mean it.

Reagan’s overhaul of the tax system in 1986 was rather complicated. It wasn’t complicated for tax policy, but it was complicated for normal humans trying to figure out what they owe. Why did Reagan’s base support a complicated plan? Because they knew Reagan meant it. They knew Reagan hated taxes, built his career in part on opposing high taxes, pushed for lower taxes, had cut them in his career. They trusted Reagan to get the best deal he could. The base did not doubt his sincerity. They didn’t think he was using the tax issue to finagle advantages for his party. Because he wasn’t.

It has been said in politics that sincerity is everything, and once you can fake it you can do anything. But people can tell when you’re faking sincerity—on immigration, on taxes, on our very safety as a nation. Faking it isn’t working anymore.

Message to political leaders: You better mean it, or they’ll never let you do your phased-in multitiered comprehensive plan anymore

Absent sincerity, the future is simplicity.

Something’s happening. I have a feeling we’re at some new beginning, that a big breakup’s coming, and that though it isn’t and will not be immediately apparent, we’ll someday look back on this era as the time when a shift began.

All my adult life, people have been saying that the two-party system is ending, that the Democrats’ and Republicans’ control of political power in America is winding down. According to the traditional critique, the two parties no longer offer the people the choice they want and deserve. Sometimes it’s said they are too much alike—Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Sometimes it’s said they’re too polarizing—too red and too blue for a nation in which many see things through purple glasses.

In 1992 Ross Perot looked like the breakthrough, the man who would make third parties a reality. He destabilized the Republicans and then destabilized himself. By the end of his campaign he seemed to be the crazy old aunt in the attic.

The Perot experience seemed to put an end to third-party fever. But I think it’s coming back, I think it’s going to grow, and I think the force behind it is unique in our history.

*   *   *

This week there was a small boomlet of talk about a new internet entity called Unity ’08—a small collection of party veterans including moderate Democrats (former Carter aide Hamilton Jordan) and liberal-leaning Republicans (former Ford hand Doug Bailey) trying to join together with college students and broaden the options in the 2008 election. In terms of composition, Unity seems like the Concord Coalition, the bipartisan group (Warren Rudman, Bob Kerrey) that warns against high spending and deficits.

Unity seems to me to have America’s growing desire for more political options right. But I think they’ve got the description of the problem wrong.

Their idea is that the two parties are too polarized to govern well. It is certainly true that the level of partisanship in Washington seems high. (Such things, admittedly, ebb, flow and are hard to judge. We look back at the post-World War II years and see a political climate of relative amity and moderation. But Alger Hiss and Dick Nixon didn’t see it that way.) Nancy Pelosi seems to be pretty much in favor of anything that hurts Republicans, and Ken Mehlman is in favor of anything that works against Democrats. They both want their teams to win. Part of winning is making sure the other guy loses, and part of the fun of politics, of any contest, of life, can be the dance in the end zone.

But the dance has gotten dark.

Partisanship is fine when it’s an expression of the high animal spirits produced by real political contention based on true political belief. But the current partisanship seems sour, not joyous. The partisanship has gotten deeper as less separates the governing parties in Washington. It is like what has been said of academic infighting: that it’s so vicious because the stakes are so low.

*   *   *

The problem is not that the two parties are polarized. In many ways they’re closer than ever. The problem is that the parties in Washington, and the people on the ground in America, are polarized. There is an increasing and profound distance between the rulers of both parties and the people—between the elites and the grunts, between those in power and those who put them there.

On the ground in America, people worry terribly—really, there are people who actually worry about it every day—about endless, weird, gushing government spending. But in Washington, those in power—Republicans and Democrats—stand arm in arm as they spend and spend. (Part of the reason is that they think they can buy off your unhappiness one way or another. After all, it’s worked in the past. A hunch: It’s not going to work forever or much longer. They’ve really run that trick into the ground.)

On the ground in America, regular people worry about the changes wrought by the biggest wave of immigration in our history, much of it illegal and therefore wholly connected to the needs of the immigrant and wholly unconnected to the agreed-upon needs of our nation. Americans worry about the myriad implications of the collapse of the American border. But Washington doesn’t. Democrat Ted Kennedy and Republican George W. Bush see things pretty much eye to eye. They are going to educate the American people out of their low concerns.

There is a widespread sense in America—a conviction, actually—that we are not safe in the age of terror. That the port, the local power plant, even the local school, are not protected. Is Washington worried about this? Not so you’d notice. They’re only worried about seeming unconcerned.

More to the point, people see the Republicans as incapable of managing the monster they’ve helped create—this big Homeland Security/Intelligence apparatus that is like some huge buffed guy at the gym who looks strong but can’t even put on his T-shirt without help because he’s so muscle-bound. As for the Democrats, who co-created Homeland Security, no one—no one—thinks they would be more managerially competent. Nor does anyone expect the Democrats to be more visionary as to what needs to be done. The best they can hope is the Democrats competently serve their interest groups and let the benefits trickle down.

*   *   *

Right now the Republicans and Democrats in Washington seem, from the outside, to be an elite colluding against the voter. They’re in agreement: immigration should not be controlled but increased, spending will increase, etc.

Are there some dramatic differences? Yes. But both parties act as if they see them not as important questions (gay marriage, for instance) but as wedge issues. Which is, actually, abusive of people on both sides of the question. If it’s a serious issue, face it. Don’t play with it.

I don’t see any potential party, or potential candidate, on the scene right now who can harness the disaffection of growing portions of the electorate. But a new group or entity that could define the problem correctly—that sees the big divide not as something between the parties but between America’s ruling elite and its people—would be making long strides in putting third party ideas in play in America again.

“The first note was clear and absolutely certain. There was no question or stumbling in this bugle. It swept across the quadrangle positively, held a fraction of a second longer than most buglers hold it. Held long like the length of time, stretching away from weary day to weary day. . . . This is the song of the men who have no place, played by a man who has never had a place, and can therefore play it. Listen to it. You know this song, remember?”

For novel readers who care about war and warriors who cared about novels, a great memory is the picture, seen in tens of millions of imaginations, and finally in a film, of Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt playing taps at Schofield Barracks, 25 miles from Honolulu, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, in James Jones’s great novel, “From Here to Eternity.” It was published 55 years ago and sold three million copies, and it is on my mind today because I’m thinking about the taps we will all hear this Monday, Memorial Day, at ceremonies and in cemeteries throughout the country. When I hear it I’m going to think of what my father always said when he heard taps. “Play it, Prewitt,” he’d say. Because that character was like men he’d known in the American army of World War II.

*   *   *

It is good that we have this day to remember heroes, to think again of those who over the centuries put themselves in harm’s way for our country, for us. It is good that we remember, and take inspiration from, tales of valor, of flags carried uphill, like the one carried by the intrepid young First Lt. Arthur MacArthur, during a Union charge in the Civil War (he would go on to become a lieutenant general and the father of a son named Douglas), and heavily defended positions taken by a lone soldier, like Sgt. Alvin York in World War I. It’s good to remember the simple human potential for bravery that lives within all of us, and that in some is fully tapped and met with brilliant, unforgettable actions.

The starkest description of the meaning of what the members of the armed services do, and have done, is the simple observation that freedom of speech was not secured for us by editors, readers and writers, but by soldiers who gave their lives to win it and would give their lives to defend it.

But thinking of “From Here to Eternity” has me thinking of the old American Army of the 20th century, the Depression era, peacetime army that Jones captured as no one else ever had. It was an unspectacular thing, that Army, or seemed so until December 1941. Jones’s Pvt. Prewitt was a lost Southern boy who found a home in that Army. He and his friend Angelo Maggio of New York “could live better Inside.”

They came from little, had no money, had received indifferent public educations, and the 1930s Army they joined was neither racially integrated, gender-neutral nor adequately funded. The great divide, the caste system, was between officers and enlisted men. The latter were given training and discipline and were left with a passionate and passionately mixed attitude toward the institution that made them part of something as it chipped away at their individuality, that employed them and enslaved them, that made them men and often treated them like children.

When James Jones himself joined the Army, in 1937, a young man whose options seemed limited, he wrote back home, “This place is hell. They herd you around like cattle; they order you around like dogs; they work you like horses; and they feed you like hogs.” In the 1953 film of the novel, directed by Fred Zinnemann, the first shot after the credits is of men marching in brisk formation. But all you can see are their boots on a dusty field, perfect but anonymous.

They were not, the men of the peacetime, Depression-era Army, especially respected by the public they served.

*   *   *

Our current Army is very different. Our people respect it, and its members are comparatively well-educated, largely middle-class, highly professional, and integrated in race and sex. Chances are good its members will be thanked when they return home from wherever they are—Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, elsewhere. It is a good thing we finally appreciate them, a good thing we, as a society, give them the honor they deserve. There are heroes among them, and their exploits too will be spoken of this Monday, and in Memorial Days of the future.

So here’s to them. May they flourish and be safe. Here’s to the heroes down the ages who did valorous, death-defying, death-ignoring things. And, this Monday, here’s to someone else. Here’s to the uncelebrated of the armies of the past, to all the men who went unlauded, who wanted to serve brilliantly, who didn’t always quite make it or didn’t quite get the call, who were replacement troops never sent to the front, whose service was comparatively undistinguished or unrecognized, but who were there, and did their job, and for us. And that’s enough. Here’s to them, and to their fictional counterparts Prewitt and Maggio, and all those who once found a home in the army.

What was missing in the president’s approach the other night was the expression, or suggestion, of context. The context was a crisis that had gone unanswered as it has built, the perceived detachment of the political elite from people on the ground, and a new distance between the president and his traditional supporters. The president would have done well to signal that he knew he was coming late to the party, as it were; that he’d come to rethink his previous stand, or lack of a stand, and had begun to consider whether there was not some justice in the views, and alarm, of others.

Without an established context the speech seemed free-floating: a statement issued into the ether, unanchored to any particular principle and eager to use, as opposed to appreciate, whatever human sentiment flows around the issue of immigration. It was a speech driven by an air of crisis, but not a public crisis, only a personal and political one.

To acknowledge what he apparently thinks are the biases of the base, he used loaded words like “sneak”—illegal immigrants “sneak across the border”—as if to establish his populist bona fides. This was, not to put too fancy a rhetorical term on it, creepy, and managed to be offensive to everyone.

What was needed was a definitive statement: As of this moment we will control our borders, I’m sending in the men, I’m giving this the attention I’ve given to the Mideast.

Once that is done, all else follows. “Comprehensive solution” seems like code for “some day we may do something”. No one believes in comprehensive solutions. They believe in action they can see. No one believes in the wisdom of government, but they do believe it has a certain brute power.

*   *   *

The disinterest in the White House and among congressional Republicans in establishing authority on America’s borders is so amazing—the people want it, the age of terror demands it—that great histories will be written about it. Thinking about this has left me contemplating a question that admittedly seems farfetched: Is it possible our flinty president is so committed to protecting the Republican Party from losing, forever, the Hispanic vote, that he’s decided to take a blurred and unsatisfying stand on immigration, and sacrifice all personal popularity, in order to keep the party of the future electorally competitive with a growing ethnic group?

This would, I admit, be rather unlike an American political professional. And it speaks of a long-term thinking that has not been the hallmark of this administration. But at least it would render explicable the president’s moves.

The other possibility is that the administration’s slow and ambivalent action is the result of being lost in some geopolitical-globalist abstract-athon that has left them puffed with the rightness of their superior knowledge, sure in their membership in a higher brotherhood, and looking down on the low concerns of normal Americans living in America.

I continue to believe the administration’s problem is not that the base lately doesn’t like it, but that the White House has decided it actually doesn’t like the base. That’s a worse problem. It’s hard to fire a base. Hard to get a new one.

*   *   *

Speaking of the detachment of the elites, the second big news of the week—in some ways it may be bigger—is the apparent critical failure of “The DaVinci Code.” After its first screening in Cannes, critics and observers called it tedious, painfully long, bloated, grim, so-so, a jumble, lifeless and talky.

There is a God. Or, as a sophisticated Christian pointed out yesterday, there is an Evil One, and this may be proof he was an uncredited co-producer. The devil loves the common, the stale. He can’t use beauty; it undermines him. “Banality is his calling card.”

I do not understand the thinking of a studio that would make, for the amusement of a nation 85% to 90% of whose people identify themselves as Christian, a major movie aimed at attacking the central tenets of that faith, and insulting as poor fools its gulled adherents. Why would Tom Hanks lend his prestige to such a film? Why would Ron Howard? They’re both already rich and relevant. A desire to seem fresh and in the middle of a big national conversation? But they don’t seem young, they seem immature and destructive. And ungracious. They’ve been given so much by their country and era, such rich rewards and adulation throughout their long careers. This was no way to say thanks.

I don’t really understand why we live in an age in which we feel compelled to spoof the beliefs of the followers of the great religions. Why are we doing that? Why does Hollywood consider this progressive as opposed to primitive, like a pre-Columbian tribe attacking the tribe next door for worshiping the wrong spirits?

“The DaVinci Code” could still triumph at the box office, but it has lost its cachet, and the air of expectation that surrounded it. Its creators have not been rewarded but embarrassed. Good. They should be.