Peggy Noonan

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.

This column, and the world, have been very serious lately. Let’s take a not-too-solemn look at postelection players.

Warren Beatty has been all over the news as the leader of the anti-Schwarzenegger forces in California. He has emerged, and good for him. He’s been making heavily covered speeches and shadowing GOP rallies along with his wife, Annette Bening, a truly great actress. But Wednesday Beatty told reporters, “I don’t want to run for governor.” Which left me scratching my head. This is politics, not showbiz. It has nothing to do with what you want. If you’re serious you move forward, whether you’re in the mood or not. You really don’t want it? Then get out of the way! Get off the stage, let someone else stand there. The Democrats of California need a leader, not a handsome fly buzzing ‘round their heads.

Beatty is used to the rhythms of Hollywood, where you can ponder a movie for years. He’s famous for doing so. He was pondering making a movie about John Reed for more than a decade before he made “Reds.” I got this from the just published biography of Beatty by Suzanne Finstad. It’s a good book and almost hilariously touching. Good because it takes a serious, fact-rich look at a serious artist, hilarious because in the writing of it the author obviously fell in love with her subject. At any rate she got spun like a top. She’s probably still spinning; she’s probably in the waters off Malibu causing tidal wives as we speak. But I digress. Beatty understands the showbiz-politics nexus but doesn’t understand the politics-politics nexus. In politics, opportunities suddenly present themselves. Pols gamble—it’s part of the game. They throw the dice, they don’t stand there holding them over the table and talking game theory.

Arnold Schwarzenegger continues to be lucky in his foes but unlucky in outcomes. (I know him slightly, like him personally, and once gave him small assistance, gratis, in a tribute to George H.W. Bush.) He’s a living illustration at the moment of How Quickly It All Changes. Two years ago when he was elected governor Chris Matthews spoke of seeing a young boy so dazzled at the sight of the Terminator and his then famous bus that the kid broke from a crowd, touched the bus with his hand, and danced away with excitement. That, said Matthews, is star power. It was.

But with each day a star is in politics he loses some of his star-glow, and if he doesn’t gain, each day, an equal amount of leader-glow he begins to experience a steady diminution of personal power. Ronald Reagan, as California governor, made the transit from star-glow to leader-glow. He did it by doing big things successfully. Schwarzenegger’s stuck. He just lost four ballot questions out of four. Being on local news every night can make your presence more brilliant or more banal. For Schwarzenegger right now it’s having the effect of kryptonite. (Mr. Beatty, please note.)

Are you watching Trent Lott? He’s playing an interesting game. Just under three years ago he lost his Senate leadership post, but he’s no longer acting as if he’s concussed. He seems like someone who’s thought it all through. He appears to have little respect for his colleagues in the Senate GOP Conference, or at the White House for that matter. And of course he has reason to feel disdain: No one stood by him when he got nailed for saying the kind of things Bobby Byrd would say on a good day. (This column knocked him hard, too.)

When Lott stepped forward this week to say he thought the latest national security leak probably came not from Democrats but from his Republican colleagues I thought: Hmmm. This guy has set himself as the man from Mississippi who works for Mississippi. He no longer has to carry the party on his shoulders; he no longer has to be the leadership, or to be protective of his colleagues. What he has is freedom; what he’s taking is an opportunity to enhance his national standing with unfettered truth-telling. Or at least the telling of what he believes is true. This is better than party leadership. It’s a pretty wonderful position to be in, free of the need to show solidarity, brotherhood or even team-playerhood.

*   *   *

Bob Novak did a column this week saying John McCain’s fund-raising has been slowed because of the concern of potential donors that he’s too old to run for president in 2008. I don’t believe it. In a solid year of hearing people talk about the ‘08 possibles, I have never heard anyone say McCain is too old. Nor have I heard anyone do the weaselly I have a feeling people think he’s too old. McCain is 69. He always seems bouncy and bantamy, in part because of the tight way he holds his mouth, like someone who’s trying to keep something wildly interesting from popping out of it.

But he is also not too old because every adult in America seems to have decided over the past 10 years that everyone’s age has been officially pushed back a decade. Decades have been redefined. When we were kids, 50 was old. Now it’s not. Sixty was even older; now it’s the beginning of age. Seventy was semiancient, now it’s hale maturity. Eighty is still antique, but that will change.

I have been thinking lately, by the way, of this: When they ran against each other for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, George W. Bush was the conservative and McCain the moderate maverick. Now, five years later, who looks more conservative? McCain, who worries about spending, regulation and immigration, or Bush? Funny how things change.

Jon Corzine comes across as a tired professor. He doesn’t seem sharp or divisive. He seems mildly befuddled. There was a great moment in his debate with Republican Doug Forrester when he was asked if New Jersey should lower the drinking age to 18. Corzine paused, lowered his head, and sputtered, “I think it is 18, isn’t it?” It made you laugh and made you like him. It will soon be common wisdom that Corzine’s former wife’s attack made him governor. I suspect we will soon be reading essays claiming that a high percentage of American voters have been divorced, or have endured the pain of a loved one’s divorce, with all the attendant bitterness and vindictiveness, and that these people ultimately felt sympathy for Corzine.

But I doubt it. I suspect Forrester’s backing of Corzine’s former wife’s charges gave Forrester a small boost, but not enough to be decisive. New Jersey is a Democratic state and a big media state. Corzine was a Democrat willing to spend $40 million. New Jersey continues to be blithely uninterested in charges of personal or professional corruption, assuming that politics itself is corrupt and draws a certain kind of practitioner. They’re like Southerners who used to support Huey Long and Edwin Edwards, only without the dizzy assumption that all will be well. They too say, “Come on baby, let the good times roll,” only with a certain pessimism, and dour expressions. This makes them, to me, quite loveable.

Mike Bloomberg won in a landslide in New York City. No one is surprised, least of all Bloomberg. He said in his victory speech, “Nothing can stop us now,” a remark that I experienced as vaguely threatening. He will probably find new places to ban smoking. Standing behind him on the podium was his beautiful lady friend, Diana Taylor, and as she beamed in her intelligent and ladylike way at the back of his head I thought, Why doesn’t he marry that girl? She works hard for New York and obviously adores him. If he does not ask her to marry him by New Year’s, she should do commercials against him.

“The conservative screamers who shot down [Harriet] Miers can argue that they were fighting only for a ‘qualified’ nominee. . . . But whatever the rationale, the fact is that they short-circuited the confirmation process by raising hell with Bush. . . . A cabal of outsiders—a lynching squad of right-wing journalists, self-sanctified religious and moral organizations, and other frustrated power-brokers—[rolled] over the president they all ostensibly support.”
—David Broder, Washington Post, Nov. 2

*   *   *

Nothing like the calming tones of The Dean to bring context and a needed sense of perspective to the proceedings. In his comments on Sunday’s “Meet the Press” and in his post-Miers Meaning of It All column yesterday, Mr. Broder was like someone who sat down at a table hungry, got served only Democratic talking points, swallowed them whole and quick, and is now burping them out in all directions.

I write of it because he is important, and because I think his imagery is a bit—maybe the polite word is “heightened”—not because he misunderstands the Miers drama, though he does, but perhaps for other reasons.

Briefly: Mr. Broder says Bush got “rolled” by his own supporters in the Miers fiasco. But he did not. He got defeated by them. He made a bad choice, and they resisted. The White House fought back; conservative thinkers fought back even harder; Republican senators did not back the White House; the White House retreated, rethought and renominated.

This is not a scandal; it’s a story—and a surprising one in ways Mr. Broder doesn’t understand. The story is that the president didn’t dig in. He was, for once, supple. He rolled with the punches. That’s the “rolling” that occurred. And it’s not a disaster, it’s promising.

Conservatives like the Bush who’s tough, flinty and determined. They don’t like the Bush who’s like Paul Newman in “Hud,” the T-shirt-wearin’, longneck-suckin’ package-store cynic who wants what he wants when he wants it. Tough Bush won. You have to be tough to take it on the chin and keep walking.

Mr. Broder seems to suggest the conservative beast is sated and they’ve settled down because they’ve proved Mr. Bush can be easily defeated. Actually conservatives have quieted down in spite of the myriad issues on which they disagree with the president—spending, the growth of the federal government, immigration—for reasons having to do with a certain maturity and seriousness. They are pre-eminently aware that there are three years to go in this presidency, and it does no one any good, at such a time as this, to have America led that long by a weak and wounded president.

And so they are trying to rally to him. They pronounced Sam Alito good. They have declared all wounds healed. This is hopeful. “The wish is father to the thought.” They want all wounds healed. But my view is that, Ernest Hemingway notwithstanding, very few things are stronger at the broken places. The break is being reset. Walking will at first be tentative, and perhaps full of hops. Strutting will be out of the question. New progress is quite possible but if it happens it will be because the president was not brittle but supple, and absorbed what happened to him.

*   *   *

As for Judge Alito, he appears to be a serious man with a nice mother from a good place (Trenton, N.J.). It is good to see nominees who come from America and who are not creatures of Washington. His record is now being aired; soon he will be questioned in public. Everyone seems to agree that both sides, right and left, are now forced by the media environment to respond within 24 hours to a nominee to the high court—”He’s the end of the world as we know it!” “He’s a brilliant man and an incredibly wise choice!” Halos and devil’s forks must be put in place quickly. But I’ll wait and keep reading. I wonder if we all shouldn’t. The men and women on the high court have way too much power and way too much impact on daily American life. When we can wait, when the nomination is legitimately debatable, why not wait to support and denounce when we have the information to do so?

I end with a small observation that touches back on David Broder. We have all talked the past year or so about blogs and the Internet and how both change the politico-media environment. But I think part of the story has not been noted. At least I haven’t seen it noted.

With most of the thinking people in America—most of those who respond to and have thoughts on what is happening politically—on the Internet, there is a great deal of discussion on all issues. The barbaric yawp is all over the place and it’s colorful, sharp and funny, sometimes dumb and sometimes rather dark and disturbed. The Internet is quick as mercury and anonymous if you want it to be. People post things they wouldn’t necessarily want their names on; they say things they wouldn’t necessarily want to defend to their colleagues, friends and neighbors.

That people sometimes do this on impulse, after perhaps the third Grey Goose, leads to and I think encourages a certain polarity in our discourse. It leads to heightened drama, heightened language and extreme thinking. Unpondered thoughts are put forward in unmediated language. Fine—this is all part of the fun—but it is not without implications.

I have noticed that our pundits—our columnists and speakers on TV, our known voices on the Internet, our bloggers and compulsive thought-sharers—have begun to heighten their own tones, express their thoughts more extremely and dramatically, just to break through the clutter. And make an impression. And compete. They have to compete—the Net isn’t going away and the Net is free. If you’re paid for opinions, they’d better break through. The Internet ups the ante on everything.

At any rate this might explain some of the recent language, imagery and poses of writers and pundits of previously august institutions, and previously august editorial pages, and of even so measured a voice as that of David Broder, who has been called The Dean for good reason.

*   *   *

A good woman was honored this week and I want to add to it. I watched the funeral of Rosa Parks all afternoon Wednesday, and it was so beautiful, so moving and rich with feeling, that at points it filled my eyes with tears. What preaching. It was old school, with the Holy Spirit. I wish I could have been there and touched her small coffin.

The Rev. Bernice King, daughter of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., was ringing: “It was the Christ in her that was sitting in that seat.” Bill Clinton’s remarks were brief, true and tender. What was said of Teddy Roosevelt is usually true of Mr. Clinton: He thinks himself the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral. But yesterday he did not think so. He just talked about that crucial moment when a young black woman refused to give her seat on a bus to a white man. And what that moment meant. (The only jarring note was Gov. Jennifer Granholm of Michigan, who spoke with strange intensity and was dressed in an odd black getup with dramatic neck scarf. She was like a Wicca priestess in search of a coven. My imagery has perhaps become heightened.)

It was a wonderful moment in my life a dozen years ago when I met Rosa Parks, a small, old woman. I got to tell her of my admiration. She was patient, nodded; she’d heard it all before but understood people want to say it. She was gracious and nice.

Once, 30 years ago next spring, I was introduced to an old man who kindly rose from his seat in the office in which he was visiting a friend. I put out my hand and we shook and smiled and the friend said, “Peggy, this is Jesse Owens.” I was so taken aback to walk into a room and suddenly meet greatness that I said, “Oh my gosh!” and we started to laugh.

He was used to it; he knew who he was. He ran in front of Hitler and showed him what’s what. She wouldn’t move to the colored section and showed ‘em what’s what. They were great Americans who helped their country. I am lucky to have touched their hands.

It is not so hard and can be a pleasure to tell people what you see. It’s harder to speak of what you think you see, what you think is going on and can’t prove or defend with data or numbers. That can get tricky. It involves hunches. But here goes.

I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think it’s a subtext to our society. I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can’t be fixed, or won’t be fixed any time soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with “right track” and “wrong track” but missing the number of people who think the answer to “How are things going in America?” is “Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination.”

I’m not talking about “Plamegate.” As I write no indictments have come up. I’m not talking about “Miers.” I mean . . . the whole ball of wax. Everything. Cloning, nuts with nukes, epidemics; the growing knowledge that there’s no such thing as homeland security; the fact that we’re leaving our kids with a bill no one can pay. A sense of unreality in our courts so deep that they think they can seize grandma’s house to build a strip mall; our media institutions imploding—the spectacle of a great American newspaper, the New York Times, hurtling off its own tracks, as did CBS. The fear of parents that their children will wind up disturbed, and their souls actually imperiled, by the popular culture in which we are raising them. Senators who seem owned by someone, actually owned, by an interest group or a financial entity. Great churches that have lost all sense of mission, and all authority. Do you have confidence in the CIA? The FBI? I didn’t think so.

But this recounting doesn’t quite get me to what I mean. I mean I believe there’s a general and amorphous sense that things are broken and tough history is coming.

*   *   *

Let me focus for a minute on the presidency, another institution in trouble. In the past I have been impatient with the idea that it’s impossible now to be president, that it is impossible to run the government of the United States successfully or even competently. I always thought that was an excuse of losers. I’d seen a successful presidency up close. It can be done.
But since 9/11, in the four years after that catastrophe, I have wondered if it hasn’t all gotten too big, too complicated, too crucial, too many-fronted, too . . . impossible.

I refer to the sheer scope, speed and urgency of the issues that go to a president’s desk, to the impossibility of bureaucracy, to the array of impeding and antagonistic forces (the 50-50 nation, the mass media, the senators owned by the groups), to the need to have a fully informed understanding of and stand on the most exotic issues, from Avian flu to the domestic realities of Zimbabwe.

The special prosecutors, the scandals, the spin for the scandals, nuclear proliferation, wars and natural disasters, Iraq, stem cells, earthquakes, the background of the Supreme Court backup pick, how best to handle the security problems at the port of Newark, how to increase production of vaccines, tort reform, did Justice bungle the anthrax case, how is Cipro production going, did you see this morning’s Raw Threat File? Our public schools don’t work, and there’s little refuge to be had in private schools, however pricey, in part because teachers there are embarrassed not to be working in the slums and make up for it by putting pictures of Frida Kalho where Abe Lincoln used to be. Where is Osama? What’s up with trademark infringement and intellectual capital? We need an answer on an amendment on homosexual marriage! We face a revolt on immigration.

The range, depth, and complexity of these problems, the crucial nature of each of them, the speed with which they bombard the Oval Office, and the psychic and practical impossibility of meeting and answering even the most urgent of them, is overwhelming. And that doesn’t even get us to Korea. And Russia. And China, and the Mideast. You say we don’t understand Africa? We don’t even understand Canada!

Roiling history, daily dangers, big demands; a government that is itself too big and rolling in too much money and ever needing more to do the latest important, necessary, crucial thing.

It’s beyond, “The president is overwhelmed.” The presidency is overwhelmed. The whole government is. And people sense when an institution is overwhelmed. Citizens know. If we had a major terrorist event tomorrow half the country—more than half—would not trust the federal government to do what it has to do, would not trust it to tell the truth, would not trust it, period.

It should be noted that all modern presidents face a slew of issues, and none of them have felt in control of events but have instead felt controlled by them. JFK in one week faced the Soviets, civil rights, the Berlin Wall, the southern Democratic mandarins of the U.S. Senate. He had to face Cuba, only 90 miles away, importing Russian missiles. But the difference now, 45 years later, is that there are a million little Cubas, a new Cuba every week. It’s all so much more so. And all increasingly crucial. And it will be for the next president, too.

*   *   *

A few weeks ago I was chatting with friends about the sheer number of things parents now buy for teenage girls—bags and earrings and shoes. When I was young we didn’t wear earrings, but if we had, everyone would have had a pair or two. I know a 12-year-old with dozens of pairs. They’re thrown all over her desk and bureau. She’s not rich, and they’re inexpensive, but her parents buy her more when she wants them. Someone said, “It’s affluence,” and someone else nodded, but I said, “Yeah, but it’s also the fear parents have that we’re at the end of something, and they want their kids to have good memories. They’re buying them good memories, in this case the joy a kid feels right down to her stomach when the earrings are taken out of the case.”
This, as you can imagine, stopped the flow of conversation for a moment. Then it resumed, as delightful and free flowing as ever. Human beings are resilient. Or at least my friends are, and have to be.

Let me veer back to the president. One of the reasons some of us have felt discomfort regarding President Bush’s leadership the past year or so is that he makes more than the usual number of decisions that seem to be looking for trouble. He makes startling choices, as in the Miers case. But you don’t have to look for trouble in life, it will find you, especially when you’re president. It knows your address. A White House is a castle surrounded by a moat, and the moat is called trouble, and the rain will come and the moat will rise. You should buy some boots, do your work, hope for the best.

*   *   *

Do people fear the wheels are coming off the trolley? Is this fear widespread? A few weeks ago I was reading Christopher Lawford’s lovely, candid and affectionate remembrance of growing up in a particular time and place with a particular family, the Kennedys, circa roughly 1950-2000. It’s called “Symptoms of Withdrawal.” At the end he quotes his Uncle Teddy. Christopher, Ted Kennedy and a few family members had gathered one night and were having a drink in Mr. Lawford’s mother’s apartment in Manhattan. Teddy was expansive. If he hadn’t gone into politics he would have been an opera singer, he told them, and visited small Italian villages and had pasta every day for lunch. “Singing at la Scala in front of three thousand people throwing flowers at you. Then going out for dinner and having more pasta.” Everyone was laughing. Then, writes Mr. Lawford, Teddy “took a long, slow gulp of his vodka and tonic, thought for a moment, and changed tack. ‘I’m glad I’m not going to be around when you guys are my age.’ I asked him why, and he said, ‘Because when you guys are my age, the whole thing is going to fall apart.’ “
Mr. Lawford continued, “The statement hung there, suspended in the realm of ‘maybe we shouldn’t go there.’ Nobody wanted to touch it. After a few moments of heavy silence, my uncle moved on.”

Lawford thought his uncle might be referring to their family—that it might “fall apart.” But reading, one gets the strong impression Teddy Kennedy was not talking about his family but about . . . the whole ball of wax, the impossible nature of everything, the realities so daunting it seems the very system is off the tracks.

And—forgive me—I thought: If even Teddy knows . . .

*   *   *

If I am right that trolley thoughts are out there, and even prevalent, how are people dealing with it on a daily basis?

I think those who haven’t noticed we’re living in a troubling time continue to operate each day with classic and constitutional American optimism intact. I think some of those who have a sense we’re in trouble are going through the motions, dealing with their own daily challenges.

And some—well, I will mention and end with America’s elites. Our recent debate about elites has had to do with whether opposition to Harriet Miers is elitist, but I don’t think that’s our elites’ problem.

This is. Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and at Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the rich and accomplished and successful of Washington, and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they’re living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they’re going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley’s off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.

I suspect that history, including great historical novelists of the future, will look back and see that many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives while they waited for the next chapter of trouble. And that they consciously, or unconsciously, took grim comfort in this thought: I got mine. Which is what the separate peace comes down to, “I got mine, you get yours.”

You’re a lobbyist or a senator or a cabinet chief, you’re an editor at a paper or a green-room schmoozer, you’re a doctor or lawyer or Indian chief, and you’re making your life a little fortress. That’s what I think a lot of the elites are up to.

Not all of course. There are a lot of people—I know them and so do you—trying to do work that helps, that will turn it around, that can make it better, that can save lives. They’re trying to keep the boat afloat. Or, I should say, get the trolley back on the tracks.

That’s what I think is going on with our elites. There are two groups. One has made a separate peace, and one is trying to keep the boat afloat. I suspect those in the latter group privately, in a place so private they don’t even express it to themselves, wonder if they’ll go down with the ship. Or into bad territory with the trolley.

We make presidents crazy. They receive endless encomiums from friends and staff telling them of their brilliance, their courage, their foresight. “God sent you to lead us.” And the authors of such statements aren’t always or even usually sucking up. They mean it. They’re excited, fervent, full of belief.

All a president has to do to get a standing ovation is walk into a room. He signs his name to a placard at a rally and it’s treated as a historic relic—“He touched it!”

At the same time a president can routinely pick up the newspaper or log onto the Internet and find himself referred to as Hitler, Stalin or, on a good day, Satan. We call presidents fool, coward, crook; we call them reckless and feckless.

It is all so extreme. And it is, even for the hardiest personality, disorienting.

The White House itself can be a disorienting place to work. You feel at once in charge of and at the mercy of, both powerful and besieged. You can flip a switch and get every anchorman on the line, every prime minister. You have private nicknames for famous people whom you privately spoof. But a hurricane comes and you’re over; a mistake is made and you’re yesterday. Some midtier aide in an unimportant agency messes up, and by the time it’s over a misjudgment became a scandal, a scandal became indictments, and indictments spur talk of impeachment, resignation, lame duckhood, crackup.

*   *   *

Faced with the you’re-an-angel/you’re-a-devil dichotomy, presidents tend to lean toward angel interpretations. They have to. When criticism is over the top, you take refuge in over-the-top approbation. Hubert Humphrey, veteran of presidential campaigns, liked to relax by looking at old scrapbooks containing complimentary magazine and newspaper profiles. Abe Lincoln died with a positive newspaper clipping in his wallet. They were human, intensely human beings involved in the passionate art of politics.
Which gets us to George W. Bush.

Once someone normally allied with the White House said some things that were highly critical of Mr. Bush, and the president quickly and publicly learned of them. Around this time an old friend of the president came to visit, and the president, still simmering, asked the friend what he thought of the criticism. The friend told Mr. Bush he thought the critic made some legitimate points.

Silence descended and Mr. Bush’s face turned stony.

“Six months on the sh— list?” said the friend.

“Three,” said the president.

When I heard this story I laughed with delight because it had the authentic sound of Bush. If he’s mad, you know. He doesn’t pretend and he doesn’t cover, and if anger is a flaw, well, we’re all human.

George W. Bush has guts. It’s the big thing his friends and supporters cherish in him. He will withstand the disapproval of the world to do what he thinks is right. He’ll do it when he’s wrong, too. He often has too many pots on the stove, but he can stand the heat and he will stay in the kitchen. He is an emotional man, and his emotions are readily accessible. When he becomes moved talking to soldiers and their families, he means it. He knows what men who put themselves in harm’s way are, and he knows what they’re owed. Other leaders know they can trust his word.

He’s stubborn. The smirk is sometimes real; he can be full of himself. He’s impatient and peremptory. He believes his read of a person is the read. He’s funny, and occasionally merry. My favorite example is what he said to Ozzy Osbourne at the White House Correspondents Association dinner in 2003. Mr. Osbourne had his new hit show and was hot as a pistol. He entered the dinner as the evening’s hottest guest. Cameras followed him. He stood at one point, gestured toward the dais and yelled to the president that he should grow his hair like him. “Second term, Ozzy!” Mr. Bush shot back.

Now Mr. Bush is in the first political crisis of his presidency, a crisis unusual, even perhaps unprecedented, in modern American politics, in that his own side has risen up and declared it no longer sees him as one of them. (It is comparable to what happened to Margaret Thatcher in 1990, when Conservative Party members turned on her. That rebellion was more personal than policy-based, but an old rule of politics pertains in both cases: Friends come and go but enemies accumulate.)

What should Mr. Bush do? He can follow what may be his first instinct, and his second one too, and make an even longer and more comprehensive “sh— list.” Or he can do something different, and yet in character.

*   *   *

It was 1986, and George W. Bush had just turned 40. An unhappy man he was. His life was going nowhere; he had been drinking too much and it was damaging all spheres of his life, including his family. This is where he showed his best stuff. He dug deep and got serious. As his father said years later, he “stood up, took responsibility, changed his life.” As W. later said, the evangelist Billy Graham had planted “a seed in my heart,” and the seed took hold. Mr. Bush stopped drinking and began to practice his faith. He became intensely regular in his life, more present for his family, more constructive in his habits. He subtended his anger. He seems to have decided it wasn’t helping him to wage a daily frontal attack on the world as it was. He focused his energies. He made himself a success in business with a baseball team, and then he entered politics and won the governorship, and later the presidency. Whatever family he came from, whatever advantages he had, it’s still kind of an amazing story.

And it couldn’t have been easy. When you change yourself, you have to be humble. You have to admit that change is necessary and previous paths have been dead ends. He had to take an unsparing look at himself, see what he didn’t like, what wasn’t admirable, and vow to change it. Then he had to do it every day. He had to judge what was ego sickness that needed ejecting and what was ego strength that needed enhancing. He did it. It was the making of him.

You see where I’m going. All presidents have personalities and all presidential personalities become at least somewhat disoriented by the very nature of the modern presidency. However. George W. Bush showed real humility when he made his big change 19 years ago, and one suspects it is whatever bedrock humility that remains behind the smirk that can help him turn his fortunes around now.

Once again there’s a family in crisis, and it’s conservatism. He can let it break up, or let it wither under his watch. Or he can change. Just as he learned at 40 that to keep his family he had to become part of something larger than himself, he should realize as he approaches 60 that he has to become part of something larger if he is to save his administration. And that “something larger” is a movement that has been building for half a century, since before Barry Goldwater. The president would be well advised to look at the stakes, see what’s in the balance, judge the strengths and weaknesses of his own leadership, and get back to the basics of conservatism. Which again would take humility.

The president is like anyone else: He can look back at the last few years and see that he’s made mistakes. Who hasn’t? Mistakes of judgment, mistakes of approach. Some of the mistakes in the president’s case would have grown out of human miscalculation. Others perhaps grew out of vanity, of a largeness of ego. It’s not hard to make a list. There were mistakes of judgment, such as Social Security. Mr. Bush decided to reform the bedrock entitlement of modern America in even though, while most thought reform important, few thought it urgent. Why would he do this? And in the middle of a war and an uncertain economic climate? I’m George Bush and I only do big things!

There were mistakes of . . . perhaps philosophy is the word. He will declare democracy now, for all the world, the end of history and the beginning of an era of endless bliss. Why? George Bush is a Texan, and Texans dream big.

He will make a series of decisions disappointing the very people who’ve stayed up all night working for him and literally praying for him, and do it at a time when a strong base is the only thing that scares off jackals of all kinds. Why? George Bush gambles big.

This is all human. But all these decisions can be questioned. In 1986, George W. Bush reached a crisis point in his life and changed what wasn’t working. He dug deep and got serious. He got humble. He questioned himself. He can do it again, and should.

It would be more constructive than a “list.” And considering all the names he’d have to compile, it would take less time.

I think I know what White House aides are thinking.

They’re thinking: This is the part of my memoir where we faced the daily pounding of our allies. They’re thinking: This is the “Churchill Alone” chapter. They’re thinking: He was like a panther in the jungle night. For five years he sat, watchful, still as marble, his eyes poised upon his prey. And then he sprang in a sudden burst of sleek-muscled focus, and when it was over his face was unchanged but for the scarlet ring of blood around his mouth. But enough about George Will. They’re thinking: That’s good, save it for later.

They’re thinking: This will pass.

They’re right. It will.

But they’re going to have to make that happen.

*   *   *

Can this marriage be saved? George W. Bush feels dissed and unappreciated: How could you not back me? Conservatives feel dissed and unappreciated: How could you attack me? Both sides are toe to toe. One senses that the critics will gain, as they’ve been gaining, and that the White House is on the losing side. If the administration had a compelling rationale for Harriet Miers’s nomination, they would have made it. Simply going at their critics was not only destructive, it signaled an emptiness in their arsenal. If they had a case they’d have made it. “You’re a sexist snob” isn’t a case; it’s an insult, one that manages in this case to be both startling and boring.

Is there a way out for the White House? Yes. Change plans at LaGuardia. Remember the wisdom of New York’s Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who said, “I don’t make a lot of mistakes but when I do it’s a beaut!”? The Miers pick was a mistake. The best way to change the story is to change the story. Here’s one way.

The full Tim McCarthy. He was the Secret Service agent who stood like Stonewall and took the bullet for Ronald Reagan outside the Washington Hilton. Harriet Miers can withdraw her name, take the hit, and let the president’s protectors throw him in the car. Her toughness and professionalism would appear wholly admirable. She’d not just survive; she’d flourish, going from much-spoofed office wife to world-famous lawyer and world-class friend. Added side benefit: Her nobility makes her attackers look bad. She’s better than they, more loyal and serious. An excellent moment of sacrifice and revenge.

The president would get to announce a better nominee—I’d recommend continuing the air of stoic pain—and much of the conservative establishment would feel constrained to go along. Some would feel the need to prove their eagerness to be supportive, and how thwarted their natural impulse to loyalty was by the choice of the unfortunate Harriet. They have a base too, which means they pay a price for marching out of lockstep. Mr. Bush will have an open field. He could even shove Alberto Gonzales down their throats! Or, more wisely and constructively, more helpfully and maturely, he could choose one of the outstanding jurists thoughtful conservatives have long touted: Edith Jones, Edith Clement, Janice Rogers Brown. (Before the Miers pick a man could have been considered, but to replace Ms. Miers now it will have to be a woman. Sometimes you just can’t add more layers to the story.)

Connected to this is the the modified Dan Quayle. When George H.W. Bush chose Mr. Quayle to be his vice presidential candidate, the 41-year-old junior senator from Indiana should have said, “Thanks, but I’m not ready. Someday I will be, but I have more work to do in Congress and frankly more growing to do as a human being before I indulge any national ambitions.” This would have been great because it was true. When his staff leaked what he’d said, a shocked Washington would have concurred, conceding his wisdom and marking him for better things. He’d probably have run for president in 2000. He could be president now.

The best way to do the modified Quayle comes from Mickey Kaus: “How about appointing Miers to a federal appeals court? She’s qualified. Bush could say that while he knows Miers he understands others’ doubts—and he knows she will prove over a couple of years what a first-rate judge she is. Then he hopes to be able to promote her. Semi-humilating, but less humiliating than the alternatives. And not a bad job to get. . . . Miers could puncture the tension with one smiling crack about being sent to the minors. The collective sigh of national relief would drown out the rest of her comments.” That’s thinking.

If Ms. Miers did what Mr. Quayle didn’t do—heck, she could wind up on the Supreme Court.

How can the White House climb down after 10 days of insisting Ms. Miers is the one? Mmmmm, sometimes you don’t climb down. Sometime you just let gravity do what it’s doing. You drop like an apple. Three days of silence and then the trip to LaGuardia.

*   *   *

The White House, after the Miers withdrawal/removal/disappearance, would be well advised to call in leaders of the fractious base—with heavy initial emphasis on the Washington conservative establishment—and have some long talks about the future. It’s time for the administration to reach out to wise men and women, time for Roosevelt Room gatherings of the conservative clans. Much old affection remains, and respect lingers, but a lot of damage has been done. The president has three years yet to serve. That, I think, is the subtext of recent battles: Conservatives want to modify and, frankly, correct certain administration policies now, while there’s time. The White House can think of this—and should think of it—as an unanticipated gift. A good fight can clear the air; a great battle can result in resolution and recommitment. No one wants George W. Bush turned into Jimmy Carter, or nobody should. The world is a dangerous place, and someone has to lead America.

An essential White House mistake—really a key and historic one—was in turning on its critics with such idiotic ferocity. “My way or the highway” is getting old. “Please listen to us and try to see it our way or we’ll have to kill you,” is getting old. Sending Laura Bush out to make her first mistake as first lady, agreeing with Matt Lauer that sexism is probably part of the reason for opposition to Ms. Miers, was embarrassingly inept and only served to dim some of the power of this extraordinary resource.

As for Ed Gillespie and his famous charge of sexism and elitism, I don’t think serious conservatives believe Ed is up nights pondering whiffs and emanations of class tension and gender bias in modern America. It was the ignorant verbal lurch of a K Street behemoth who has perhaps forgotten that conservatives are not merely a bloc, a part of the base, a group that must be handled, but individuals who are and have been in it for serious reasons, for the long haul, and often at considerable sacrifice. They don’t deserve to be patronized by people they’ve long strained to defend.

And next time perhaps the White House, in announcing and presenting the arguments for a new nominee to the high court, will remember a certain tradition with regard to how we do it in America. We don’t say, “We’ve nominated Joe because he’s a Catholic!” A better and more traditional approach is, “Nominee Joe is a longtime practitioner of the law with considerable experience, impressive credentials, and a lively and penetrating intellect. Any questions? Yes, he is a member of the Catholic church. Any other questions?”

That’s sort of how we do it. We put the horse and then the cart. The arguments for the person and then the facts attendant to the person. You don’t say, “Vote for this gal because she’s an Evangelical!” That shows a carelessness, an inability to think it through, to strategize, to respectfully approach serious facts—failings that, if they weren’t typical of the White House the past few months, might be called downright sexist.

It all depends on the hearings.

Barring a withdrawal of her nomination, it’s going to come down to Harriet Miers’s ability to argue her own case before the Senate Judiciary Committee. If the American people decide she seems like a good person—sympathetic, wise, even-keeled, knowledgeable—she’ll be in; and if not, not.

What everyone forgets about the case of Robert Bork in his confirmation hearings is that regular people watched him, listened to the workings of his fabulous and exotic mind, saw the intensity, the hunger for intellectual engagement, caught the whiff of brandy and cigars and angels dancing, noticed the unusual hair, the ambivalent whiskers, and thought, “Who’s this weirdo?” They did the same thing with Arthur Liman in the Oliver North hearings. I am not saying Americans are swept by the superficial. I am saying Americans pick things up, and once they’ve picked them up, they don’t easily put them down. Anyway, public opinion moves and then senators vote “no,” or not.

So the administration can turn this around. Or rather Ms. Miers can. In her favor: America has never met her, she’ll get to make a first impression. Working against her: But they’ll already be skeptical. By the time of the hearings she’ll have been painted as Church Lady. There’s a great old American tradition of not really liking Church Lady.

*   *   *

That having been said, the Miers pick was another administration misstep. The president misread the field, the players, their mood and attitude. He called the play, they looked up from the huddle and balked. And debated. And dissed. Momentum was lost. The quarterback looked foolish.
The president would have been politically better served by what Pat Buchanan called a bench-clearing brawl. A fractious and sparring base would have come together arm in arm to fight for something all believe in: the beginning of the end of command-and-control liberalism on the U.S. Supreme Court. Senate Democrats, forced to confront a serious and principled conservative of known stature, would have damaged themselves in the fight. If in the end President Bush lost, he’d lose while advancing a cause that is right and doing serious damage to the other side. Then he could come back to win with the next nominee. And if he won he’d have won, rousing his base and reminding them why they’re Republicans.

He didn’t do that. Why didn’t he? Old standard answer: In time of war he didn’t want to pick a fight with Congress that he didn’t have to pick. Obvious reply: So in time of war he picks a fight with his base? Also: The Supreme Court isn’t the kind of fight you “don’t have to pick.” History picks it for you. You fight.

The headline lately is that conservatives are stiffing the president. They’re in uproar over Ms. Miers, in rebellion over spending, critical over cronyism. But the real story continues to be that the president feels so free to stiff conservatives. The White House is not full of stupid people. They knew conservatives would be disappointed that the president chose his lawyer for the high court. They knew conservatives would eventually awaken over spending. They knew someone would tag them on putting friends in high places. They knew conservatives would not like the big-government impulses revealed in the response to Hurricane Katrina. The headline is not that this White House endlessly bows to the right but that it is not at all afraid of the right. Why? This strikes me as the most interesting question.

Here are some maybes. Maybe the president has simply concluded he has no more elections to face and no longer needs his own troops to wage the ground war and contribute money. Maybe with no more elections to face he’s indulging a desire to show them who’s boss. Maybe he has concluded he has a deep and unwavering strain of support within the party that, come what may, will stick with him no matter what. Maybe he isn’t all that conservative a fellow, or at least all that conservative in the old, usual ways, and has been waiting for someone to notice. Maybe he has decided the era of hoping for small government is over. Maybe he is a big-government Republican who has a shrewder and more deeply informed sense of the right than his father did, but who ultimately sees the right not as a thing he is of but a thing he must appease, defy, please or manipulate. Maybe after five years he is fully revealing himself. Maybe he is unveiling a new path that he has not fully articulated—he’ll call the shots from his gut and leave the commentary to the eggheads. Maybe he’s totally blowing it with his base, and in so doing endangering the present meaning and future prospects of his party.

Whatever the answer, history is being revealed here by the administration every day, and it’s big history, not small.

*   *   *

Back to Ms. Miers herself, and the merits of her nomination. What would she be like on the bench? I know the answer. So do you. It’s: Nobody knows. It’s all a mystery. In considering who will fill one of the most consequential power positions in the country we are all reduced to, “I like this, I don’t like that.”

I like it that she’s run a legal practice: that she has real-world experience, a knowledge of the flow of money in America, of how it’s made and spent. I don’t like it that she’s never written an interesting thing about a great issue. I like it that she taught Sunday school. I like it that she’s not Ivy League. I don’t like it that she’s obscure. I like it that she works so hard. But I don’t like it if she’s a drone. I like it that she’s a woman. It doesn’t matter much that she’s a woman. Etc.

I don’t think it’s important to show loyalty to the president by backing his decision. This choice will live beyond his presidency. It’s important to get a justice who will add to the wisdom of the court, who will make it more likely that America will get a fair hearing before the bench.

Would she? I don’t know, you don’t know, the president who appointed her doesn’t know. Presidents are always being surprised by what losers they put on the bench.

I wonder in fact if Harriet Miers knows what Harriet Miers will be like on the court. I am referring to more than the fact that if confirmed she will be presented with particular cases with particular facts that spring from a particular context and are governed, or not, by particular precedents. And I’m referring to more than the fact that people change, in spite of the president’s odd insistence that she won’t. People do, for good and ill. Sometimes they just become more so. But few are static.

No one can know how the experience of the court will affect someone—the detachment from life as lived by the proles, the respect you become used to, the Harvard Law Review clerks from famous families who are only too happy to pick up your dry cleaning and listen to the third recounting of your boring anecdote. Everyone wants you at dinner. You notice that you actually look quite good in black.

And you become used to the idea that unlike everyone else in the country, you have job security. A lifetime appointment. When people have complete professional security they are more likely in time to show a new conceit. I don’t know why this is, but I think it’s connected to the fact that they’re lucky, and it seems somehow hardwired in human nature that when people are lucky they come to think they deserve it: It’s not luck, it’s virtue. And since it’s virtue my decisions are by their nature virtuous. I think I’ll decree that local government, if it judges it necessary, can throw grandma out of the house and turn her tired little neighborhood into a box store that will yield higher tax revenues. Thus Kelo v. New London is born. I decree it.

But I’m thinking of something different. I’ve noticed that we live in an age in which judges and legal minds seem to hide their own judicial philosophy from themselves. And that might explain why a Harriet Miers has reached the age of 60 and no one seems to know what she thinks.

Having a philosophy is all too big and too dangerous—paper trails, insights inadequately phrased that come back to haunt. Lawyers with ambition seem to have become adept at hiding their essential intellectual nature from themselves. They break the law down into tiny chewable pieces and endlessly masticate them. They break it down into small manageable bits, avoiding the larger abstractions. It’s one of the reasons they’re so boring.

In a highly politicized climate it’s not really convenient for lawyers to know their deepest beliefs and convictions. Robert Bork, serious thinker and mature concluder, became bork, living verb. Or rather living past-tense verb.

Only reluctantly and only with time do lawyers now develop a philosophy. They get on the court, and reveal it to us day by day. And reveal it, one senses, to themselves.

*   *   *

And so the historical irony: Supreme Court justices are more powerful than ever while who and what they are is more mysterious than ever. We have a two part problem. The first is that no one knows what they think until they’re there. The other is that they’re there forever.

I find myself lately not passionately supporting or opposing any particular nominee. But I’d give a great deal to see Supreme Court justices term-limited. They should be picked not for life but for a specific term of specific length, and then be released back into the community. This would involve amending the Constitution. Why not? We’d amend it to ban flag-burning, even though a fool burning a flag can’t possibly harm our country. But a Kelo decision and a court unrebuked for it can really tear the fabric of a nation.

With the DeLay indictment and another Supreme Court nominee soon to be announced, the subject has moved on from Hurricane Katrina. But I’m still thinking about it.

News reports and common media wisdom this week suggested Katrina was actually a smaller story than we thought—fewer dead than had been feared, more hype than was helpful. But to me the impact of Katrina is growing bigger and more consequential. It was a watershed event that revealed, unforgettably, the inadequacy of government; the fragility of presidential reputations; the presence of fissures within the dominant party; and the incapacity of the opposition to be constructive in response to the event, or even to show the bare minimum political talent of effectively capitalizing on it.

But I think Katrina revealed something else: a change in the relation of the individual and those who would govern him.

*   *   *

David Brooks on “Meet the Press” Sunday said he thought Katrina had given rise to a greater public desire for “authority” and “order.” I found what he was saying typically thoughtful, but I differ with him. That difference gives rise to this piece.
I don’t think Americans are or have been, by nature, lovers of authority. When we think of the old America we think of house-raisings on the prairie and teeming cities full of immigrants, but a big part of the American nature can also be found in the story of Jeremiah Johnson, the mountain man who just wanted to live off by himself, unbothered and unmolested by people and their churches and clubs and rules. He didn’t like authority. He wanted to be left alone.

We live in the age of emergency, however, and in that age we hunger for someone to take responsibility. Not authority, but a sense of “I’ll lead you out of this.” On 9/11 the firemen took responsibility: I will go into the fire. So did the mayor: This is how we’ll get through, this is how we’ll triumph.

In New Orleans, by contrast, the mayor seemed panicked, the governor seemed medicated, and the airborne wasn’t there until it was there and peace was restored. Until then no one took responsibility. There was a vacuum. But nature abhors a vacuum, so rumors and chaos came in to fill it. Which made things worse.

No one took charge. Thus the postgame commentary in which everyone blamed someone else: The mayor fumbled the ball, the governor didn’t call the play, the president didn’t have a ground game.

*   *   *

No one took responsibility, but there was plenty of authority. People in authority sent the lost to the Superdome and the Convention Center. People in authority blocked the bridges out of town. People in authority tried to confiscate guns after the looting was over.

And they did things like this: The day before hurricane Rita hit Texas, last Friday, I saw on TV something that disturbed me. It was not the usual scene of crashing waves and hardy reporters being blown sideways by wind gusts. It was a fat Texas guy swimming in the waves off Galveston. He’d apparently decided the high surf was a good thing to jump into, so he went for a prehurricane swim. Two cops saw him, waded into the surf and arrested him. When I saw it the guy was standing there in orange trunks being astonished as the cops put handcuffs on him and hauled him away.

I thought: Oh no, this is isn’t good. This is authority, not responsibility.

You’d have to be crazy, in my judgment, to decide you were going to go swim in the ocean as a hurricane comes. But in the America where I grew up, you were allowed to be crazy. You had the right. Sometimes you were crazy and survived whatever you did. Sometimes you didn’t, and afterwards everyone said, “He was crazy.”

Last week I quoted Gerald Ford: “The government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” I was talking about money. But it applies also to personal freedom, to the rights of the individual, including his right to do something stupid as long as it’s legal, like swimming.

Government has real duties in disaster. Maintaining the peace is a primary one. But if we demand that our government protect us from all the weather all the time, if we demand that it protect us from rain and hail, if we make government and politicians pay a terrible price for not getting us out of every flood zone and rescuing us from every wave, we’re going to lose a lot more than we gain. If we give government all authority then we are giving them all power.

And we will not only lose the right to be crazy, we’ll lose the right to be sane. A few weeks ago when, for a few days, some level of government, it isn’t completely clear, decided no one should be allowed to live in New Orleans after the flood, law-enforcement officers went to the home of a man who had a dry house, a month’s supply of food and water, and a gun to protect himself. The police demanded that he leave. Why? He was fine. He had everything he needed. The man was enraged: It was his decision, he said, and he was staying.

It is the government’s job to warn and inform. That’s what we have the National Weather Service for. It is not government’s job to command and control and make microdecisions about the lives of people who want to do it their own way.

This sort of thing of course has been going on for a long time. In Katrina and Rita it just became more dramatically obvious as each incident played out on TV.

Governments always start out saying they’re going to help, and always wind up pushing you around. They cannot help it. They say they want to help us live healthily and they mean it, but it ends with a guy in Queens getting arrested for trying to have a Marlboro Light with his Bud at the neighborhood bar. We’re hauling the parents of obese children into court. The government has increasing authority over our health, and these children are not healthy. Smokers, the fat, drinkers of more than two drinks per night, insane swimmers in high seas . . .

We are losing the balance between the rights of the individual and the needs and demands of the state. Again, this is not new. It’s a long slide that’s been going on for a long time. But Katrina and Rita seemed to make the slide deeper.

It is hard for governments to be responsible, and take responsibility. It takes real talent, and guts. But authority? That’s easier. Pass the law and get the cuffs.

*   *   *

I want to mention the media’s part in this. This week it was their turn in the barrel. They reported rumors and hyped the event by going with every story that came by—rapes in the Superdome, people shooting at helicopters, armed gangs roving the streets, etc.
Rush Limbaugh is correct when he says what happened in New Orleans proves again that the famous filters of the MSM—the layers of editors they say protect them from the kinds of mistakes that can be made by bloggers and other lone cowboys of the information age—guarantee nothing in terms of the reliability of reportage.

But the media story has three parts.

Reporters on the ground in New Orleans deserve great credit. They were trying to get the story, trying to fill a vacuum—the vacuum left by government’s failure to take responsibility. Government officials were giving them incorrect information—it was the mayor of New Orleans himself who said there may be 10,000 dead. They were often in considerable personal danger. They were human, tough, hardy, imperfect and often heroic. They deserve our thanks.

Then there were the anchors who became upset as the story unfolded and showed their emotion on the air. This wasn’t bad until the end. When Anderson Cooper blasted a U.S. senator for verbal glad-handing it was not only refreshing, it was needed. But by the end the new indignation had degenerated, as such things do. When I last saw Soledad O’Brien I think she was berating a city councilman because someone left a Chihuahua in the Garden District. Now and then anchors remind you that you’ve swum with smarter porpoises.

But neither the rumor mongering nor the posing was really harmful, or harmful in a way that couldn’t be remedied. The worst part of TV in the hurricane coverage was the nonstop, wall-to-wall, relentless hammering of the viewers about the danger they were in if they were in . . . the path of the storm.

TV is there to be watched. Each network and channel succeeds if you watch. They try—they’re in business after all—to do everything they can to make you watch. They give you pretty reporters and bright human-interest stories. But they also try, when they get the chance, to terrify you. They try to terrify you into watching. Rita is on a flight path into the very heart of Galveston. The storm may drown Houston. If Port Arthur is submerged it will cause massive loss of life. All humans have been ordered by all levels of government to evacuate. Flee, I tell you! Run for your lives!

We will probably find out more people died of media-induced heart attacks than of Hurricane Rita itself.

If government cannot distinguish between authority and responsibility, media have trouble distinguishing between the helpful reporting of facts and the whipping up of fear.

The latter not only does not help, it hurts. Here’s one way: when you endlessly pound America with the idea that Armageddon is imminent, you’re pushing Americans to conclude that only something big can save them, something huge, something omnipotent—like government.

Which is only too happy to take authority. And only too likely to dodge responsibility.

TV people like to say they only report the story, they aren’t the story. But with their constant alarms and agitation they are contributing to a bad story. It is a story of a people who are encouraged to demand that the government make them safe, when the government will not make them safe, and the people know it deep in their hearts. Still, they give the government more authority in the hope that it will take responsibility.

The two cops who arrested the guy swimming in the waves before the hurricane hit Texas: they did it in front of cameras. They probably did it because of the cameras. Big media is watching. Big government has to act.

George W. Bush, after five years in the presidency, does not intend to get sucker-punched by the Democrats over race and poverty. That was the driving force behind his Katrina speech last week. He is not going to play the part of the cranky accountant—“But where’s the money going to come from?”—while the Democrats, in the middle of a national tragedy, swan around saying “Republicans don’t care about black people,” and “They’re always tightwads with the poor.”

In his Katrina policy the president is telling Democrats, “You can’t possibly outspend me. Go ahead, try. By the time this is over Dennis Kucinich will be crying uncle, Bernie Sanders will be screaming about pork.”

That’s what’s behind Mr. Bush’s huge, comforting and boondogglish plan to spend $200 billion or $100 billion or whatever—“whatever it takes”—on Katrina’s aftermath. And, I suppose, tomorrow’s hurricane aftermath.

*   *   *

George W. Bush is a big spender. He has never vetoed a spending bill. When Congress serves up a big slab of fat, crackling pork, Mr. Bush responds with one big question: Got any barbecue sauce? The great Bush spending spree is about an arguably shrewd but ultimately unhelpful reading of history, domestic politics, Iraq and, I believe, vanity.

This, I believe, is the administration’s shrewd if unhelpful reading of history: In a 50-50 nation, people expect and accept high spending. They don’t like partisan bickering, there’s nothing to gain by arguing around the edges, and arguing around the edges of spending bills is all we get to do anymore. The administration believes there’s nothing in it for the Republicans to run around whining about cost. We will spend a lot and the Democrats will spend a lot. But the White House is more competent and will not raise taxes, so they believe Republicans win on this one in the long term.

Domestic politics: The administration believes it is time for the Republican Party to prove to the minority groups of the United States, and to those under stress, that the Republicans are their party, and not the enemy. The Democrats talk a good game, but Republicans deliver, and we know the facts. A lot of American families are broken, single mothers bringing up kids without a father come to see the government as the guy who’ll help. It’s right to help and we don’t lose by helping.

Iraq: Mr. Bush decided long ago—I suspect on Sept. 12, 2001—that he would allow no secondary or tertiary issue to get in the way of the national unity needed to forge the war on terror. So no fighting with Congress over who put the pork in the pan. Cook it, eat it, go on to face the world arm in arm.

As for vanity, the president’s aides sometimes seem to see themselves as The New Conservatives, a brave band of brothers who care about the poor, unlike those nasty, crabbed, cheapskate conservatives of an older, less enlightened era.

*   *   *

Republicans have grown alarmed at federal spending. It has come to a head not only because of Katrina but because of the huge pork-filled highway bill the president signed last month, which comes with its own poster child for bad behavior, the Bridge to Nowhere. The famous bridge in Alaska that costs $223 million and that connects one little place with two penguins and a bear with another little place with two bears and a penguin. The Bridge to Nowhere sounds, to conservative ears, like a metaphor for where endless careless spending leaves you. From the Bridge to the 21st Century to the Bridge to Nowhere: It doesn’t feel like progress.

A lot of Bush supporters assumed the president would get serious about spending in his second term. With the highway bill he showed we misread his intentions.

The administration, in answering charges of profligate spending, has taken, interestingly, to slighting old conservative hero Ronald Reagan. This week it was the e-mail of a high White House aide informing us that Ronald Reagan spent tons of money bailing out the banks in the savings-and-loan scandal. This was startling information to Reaganites who remembered it was a fellow named George H.W. Bush who did that. Last month it was the president who blandly seemed to suggest that Reagan cut and ran after the attack on the Marine barracks in Lebanon.

Poor Reagan. If only he’d been strong he could have been a good president.

Before that, Mr. Mehlman was knocking previous generations of Republican leaders who just weren’t as progressive as George W. Bush on race relations. I’m sure the administration would think to criticize the leadership of Bill Clinton if they weren’t so busy having jolly mind-melds with him on Katrina relief. Mr. Clinton, on the other hand, is using his new closeness with the administration to add an edge of authority to his slams on Bush. That’s a pol who knows how to do it.

At any rate, when Republican officials start diminishing Ronald Reagan, it is a bad sign about where they are psychologically. In the White House of George H.W. Bush they called the Reagan administration “the pre-Bush era.” See where it got them.

Sometimes I think the Bush White House needs to be told: It’s good to be a revolutionary. But do you guys really need to be opening up endless new fronts? Do you need—metaphor switch—seven or eight big pots boiling on the stove all at the same time? You think the kitchen and the house might get a little too hot that way?

The Republican (as opposed to conservative) default position when faced with criticism of the Bush administration is: But Kerry would have been worse! The Democrats are worse! All too true. The Democrats right now remind me of what the veteran political strategist David Garth told me about politicians. He was a veteran of many campaigns and many campaigners. I asked him if most or many of the politicians he’d worked with had serious and defining political beliefs. David thought for a moment and then said, “Most of them started with philosophy. But they wound up with hunger.” That’s how the Democrats seem to me these days: unorganized people who don’t know what they stand for but want to win, because winning’s pleasurable and profitable.

But saying The Bush administration is a lot better than having Democrats in there is not an answer to criticism, it’s a way to squelch it. Which is another Bridge to Nowhere.

*   *   *

Mr. Bush started spending after 9/11. Again, anything to avoid a second level fight that distracts from the primary fight, the war on terror. That is, Mr. Bush had his reasons. They were not foolish. At the time they seemed smart. But four years later it is hard for a conservative not to protest. Some big mistakes have been made.

First and foremost Mr. Bush has abandoned all rhetorical ground. He never even speaks of high spending. He doesn’t argue against it, and he doesn’t make the moral case against it. When forced to spend, Reagan didn’t like it, and he said so. He also tried to cut. Mr. Bush seems to like it and doesn’t try to cut. He doesn’t warn that endless high spending can leave a nation tapped out and future generations hemmed in. In abandoning this ground Bush has abandoned a great deal—including a primary argument of conservatism and a primary reason for voting Republican. And who will fill this rhetorical vacuum? Hillary Clinton. She knows an opening when she sees one, and knows her base won’t believe her when she decries waste.

Second, Mr. Bush seems not to be noticing that once government spending reaches a new high level it is very hard to get it down, even a little, ever. So a decision to raise spending now is in effect a decision to raise spending forever.

Third, Mr. Bush seems not to be operating as if he knows the difficulties—the impossibility, really—of spending wisely from the federal level. Here is a secret we all should know: It is really not possible for a big federal government based in Washington to spend completely wisely, constructively and helpfully, and with a sense of personal responsibility. What is possible is to write the check. After that? In New Jersey they took federal Homeland Security funds and bought garbage trucks. FEMA was a hack-stack.

The one time a Homeland Security Department official spoke to me about that crucial new agency’s efforts, she talked mostly about a memoir she was writing about a selfless HS official who tries to balance the demands of motherhood against the needs of a great nation. When she finally asked for advice on homeland security, I told her that her department’s Web page is nothing but an advertisement for how great the department is, and since some people might actually turn to the site for help if their city is nuked it might be nice to offer survival hints. She took notes and nodded. It alarmed me that they needed to be told the obvious. But it didn’t surprise me.

Of the $100 billion that may be spent on New Orleans, let’s be serious. We love Louisiana and feel for Louisiana, but we all know what Louisiana is, a very human state with rather particular flaws. As Huey Long once said, “Some day Louisiana will have honest government, and they won’t like it.” We all know this, yes? Louisiana has many traditions, and one is a rich and unvaried culture of corruption. How much of the $100 billion coming its way is going to fall off the table? Half? OK, let’s not get carried away. More than half.

Town spending tends to be more effective than county spending. County spending tends—tends—to be more efficacious than state spending. State spending tends to be more constructive than federal spending. This is how life works. The area closest to where the buck came from is most likely to be more careful with the buck. This is part of the reason conservatives are so disturbed by the gushing federal spigot.

Money is power. More money for the federal government and used by the federal government is more power for the federal government. Is this good? Is this what energy in the executive is—”Here’s a check”? Are the philosophical differences between the two major parties coming down, in terms of spending, to “Who’s your daddy? He’s not your daddy, I’m your daddy.” Do we want this? Do our kids? Is it safe? Is it, in its own way, a national security issue?

*   *   *

At a conservative gathering this summer the talk turned to high spending. An intelligent young journalist observed that we shouldn’t be surprised at Mr. Bush’s spending, he ran from the beginning as a “compassionate conservative.” The journalist noted that he’d never liked that phrase, that most conservatives he knew had disliked it, and I agreed. But conservatives understood Mr. Bush’s thinking: they knew he was trying to signal to those voters who did not assume that conservatism held within it sympathy and regard for human beings, in fact springs from that sympathy and regard.

But conservatives also understood “compassionate conservatism” to be a form of the philosophy that is serious about the higher effectiveness of faith-based approaches to healing poverty—you spend prudently not to maintain the status quo, and not to avoid criticism, but to actually make things better. It meant an active and engaged interest in poverty and its pathologies. It meant a new way of doing old business.

I never understood compassionate conservatism to mean, and I don’t know anyone who understood it to mean, a return to the pork-laden legislation of the 1970s. We did not understand it to mean never vetoing a spending bill. We did not understand it to mean a historic level of spending. We did not understand it to be a step back toward old ways that were bad ways.

I for one feel we need to go back to conservatism 101. We can start with a quote from Gerald Ford, if he isn’t too much of a crabbed and reactionary old Republican to quote. He said, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.”

The administration knows that Republicans are becoming alarmed. Its attitude is: “We’re having some trouble with part of the base but”—smile—”we can weather that.”

Well, they probably can, short term.

Long term, they’ve had bad history with weather. It can change.

*   *   *

Here are some questions for conservative and Republicans. In answering them, they will be defining their future party.

If we are going to spend like the romantics and operators of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society;

If we are going to thereby change the very meaning and nature of conservatism;

If we are going to increase spending and the debt every year;

If we are going to become a movement that supports big government and a party whose unspoken motto is “Whatever it takes”;

If all these things, shouldn’t we perhaps at least discuss it? Shouldn’t we be talking about it? Shouldn’t our senators, congressmen and governors who wish to lead in the future come forward to take a stand?

And shouldn’t the Bush administration seriously address these questions, share more of their thinking, assumptions and philosophy?

It is possible that political history will show, in time, that those who worried about spending in 2005 were dinosaurs. If we are, we are. But we shouldn’t become extinct without a roar.

If you lived through 9/11 in New York you have nothing worthy of the city, its people, and the event worth saying that has not already been said, or, if you do opinions for a living and are relatively sane, has not been said by you. I will tell you only this. For something like four years 9/11 was for me a bruise in my heart. Someone would refer to it or I’d see a picture in a newspaper and I’d experience it as a pressing on the bruise, and I’d hurt. My feelings were immediately accessible and immediately there.

This year for the first time it is not a bruise but a scar—jagged, less open to remedy, comparatively numb. My heart has healed and is ever altered. There are about 30 million people in what we used to call the tristate area. That’s roughly 30 million people who one way or another saw what happened that day, the smoke was that high. I wonder if many of them feel as I do: a scar now, not a bruise. I am not sure of the meaning of that if they do, but I suspect there is meaning.

*   *   *

Life moves. Time for a quick appraisal of how Katrina and its aftermath changed the lay of the presidential land.

George W. Bush still enjoys a bright spot in terms of his foes. Liberal politicians continue to respond to the calamity with delighted anguish. Their critiques are attacks and their attacks are opportunistic. Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi have come across as pols coolly using the suffering of others to club the opposition. As for liberal pundits, some of them have taken on the ways of mere party operatives: Every event exists to be used. Frank Rich, Paul Krugman: if they were dead they’d be spinning in their graves.

What’s true in terms of the criticism?

“Katrina changed everything.” No it didn’t, but it changed a lot. It gave the administration its first indisputable domestic black eye. Roughly half the country has been attacking President Bush for an inadequate response and roughly half the country has been defending him by pointing the finger elsewhere or parsing the federal role in local emergency response. But no one is walking around saying, “Was this his best moment or what? A triumph!” Because no one thinks it was.

But a president can’t control everything! True. Federal power is and must be limited. But the White House made two big mistakes. The first was not to see that New Orleans early on was becoming a locus of civil unrest. When an American city descends into lawlessness, and as in this case that lawlessness hampers or prevents the rescue of innocents, you send in the 82nd Airborne. You move your troops. You impose and sustain order. You protect life and property. Then you leave. That’s what government is for. It’s what Republicans are for. The White House didn’t move quickly, and that was the failure from which all failure flowed. The administration was slow to see the size, scope, variations and implications of the disaster because it was not receiving and responding to reliable reports from military staff on the ground. Because they weren’t there. When the administration moved, it moved, and well. But it took too long.

Second, lame gazing out the window is mere spin, not action. Soulful looks from the plane are spin. The White House was spinning when it should have been acting. I do not agree with the critique that Mr. Bush should have done a speech with a lot of “emoting.” This is the kind of thing said by clever people who think everyone else is dumb. Bill Clinton felt everyone’s pain, and that is remembered as a joke. What was Mr. Bush supposed to do, criticize the hurricane and make it feel bad? Say that the existence of bad weather is at odds with the American dream? Hurricanes come, disasters occur; don’t talk, move. In this area the administration has gotten way too clever while at the same time becoming stupider.

What real damage has been done to the White House? It got dinged in three areas: competence, the myth of luck, and the ability to inspire fear.

On the competence issue, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is the poster child. It was the assumption of Republicans and others that in this, the age of emergency, the managerial competence and constitutional seriousness of the Bush administration was on the case, on the job and taking care of business. But FEMA was stacked with hacks. This has been absorbed by people and will linger as an issue.

As for the myth of luck, in Washington it comes down to this. When a president is lucky, Congress and the media think he’s lucky. It increases his power. When people see his power they think he’s powerful. Then something happens—an earthquake, a flood, a strange scandal. The myth of luck disappears. Foes in the media and on the Hill draw blood. They are startled when they see the blood, and go for more. Things become difficult for the administration. This happens one way or another with every presidency. It just happened here.

As for fear, it is important for a White House to inspire a certain amount, and this White House has been rather wickedly good at it. The administration has kept a lot of Republicans in line because they were afraid of the personal anger and flip-switching power of the president and his aides. They will be less afraid now. That’s not all bad. In fact, it’s good.

Didn’t Mr. Bush stop the criticism Tuesday when he said he accepts responsibility? To a degree. Tonight’s speech will help, too. But Tuesday’s statement was a day late and a buck short. When you say “I accept responsibility,” you are slyly complimenting yourself: I’m the kind of fellow who nobly accepts culpability. It’s more to the point and more effective to be straight and unvarnished: “The buck stops here. The blame is mine.” This has the added benefit of leaving people more likely to say, ‘Oh, don’t be so tough on yourself,” than, “Hey, you can be a lot tougher on yourself, Buddy.”

Is the Bush Era over? No, no, no. It has three more years. That’s a long time. History turns on a dime. There is much ahead, and potential for progress.

What about reports the President’s leadership style has grown detached and self-indulgent? This criticism is a standard one liberals have used about Republican presidents since Eisenhower. What they really mean in this case is that he’s grown more peckish and irritable. This, from this week’s Time magazine is, to old White House hands at least, not good news. “ ‘The first time I told him he was wrong, he started yelling at me,’ the aide recalled about a session during the first term. ‘Then I showed him where he was wrong, and he said, “All right, I understand. Good job.” He patted me on the shoulder. I went and had dry heaves in the bathroom.’ “ One hopes this is hyperbole. If not, it’s a bad sign. No president should have that effect on his aides, and no president should be surrounded by dry heavers.

Mr. Bush is famously flinty. I sometimes think of what a friend said of him years ago: There are two misconceptions about Mr. Bush; one is that he’s dumb, and the other is that he’s sweet. He puts great emphasis on personal loyalty, and personal loyalty is important. But when that preference becomes a governing ethos, you wind up surrounded only by loyalists. His father wound up surrounded by tennis players. This doesn’t help you govern.

It’s important, five years into a presidency, for a president to remember he’s probably no longer fully surrounded by aides who knew him when he was first running for governor and walking around in his shorts practicing speeches. The people who work for him now first saw him as a Time magazine cover. This can be fun—it’s a relief to awe someone when the rest of the world is beating your head in—but again, it doesn’t help govern.

Mr. Bush probably needed a humbling experience. He just got one. May he absorb, understand, keep the helpful lessons, ignore the unhelpful ones, and waste no time being mad. And may he reach out to some old wise heads on the Democratic side who can give him a read on how his honest critics view him.

Don’t all presidents ultimately get criticized for their inadequate personalities? Yes. And the criticism is always fair. All presidents have inadequate personalities, because there is no human personality equal to the demands of the modern presidency.

Can Mr. Bush dig out and move forward? Yes. He will start that process tonight in his speech. Some thought on the future will come from me next week, but here’s a teaser:

The Republican Party right now is torn. It has muscle tears you can’t see when you look at the body of the party, but they are there, and deepening. In the natural scheme of things the party would fight out its big issues in 2007, 2008 and 2009. Now I suspect the fight will begin sooner. And that’s good.

There’s much on the table that has to be addressed—immigration, spending, the size of government—including the very nature and purpose of modern conservatism. Getting serious about these questions will be helpful to the country, and helpful to those who begin this overdue heavy lifting. Why shouldn’t the president summon forth, ask the help of and highlight the presence of the governors, congressmen and senators who will soon enough be trying to run the party themselves? They’re coming anyway. Why not invite them? And work with them. And, as a side benefit, subtly get a little of the heat off your dramatic self?