Peggy Noonan

I want to revise and extend my remarks, as they say, from last week’s column on airport security. The reaction was great, but I have two reasons to amend. The first is that I didn’t really get to the heart of what is for me most offensive about airport security, and the second is that that thing, the most offensive part, connects to a larger, and I think more painful, fact of our culture.

Here is that larger fact: America has become creepy for women who think of themselves as ladies. It has in fact become assaultive.

I start with a dictionary definition, from American Heritage, not that anyone needs it because everyone knows what a lady is. It’s a kind of natural knowledge. According to American Heritage, a lady is a well-mannered and considerate woman with high standards of proper behavior. You know one, the dictionary suggests, by how she’s treated: “a woman, especially when spoken of or to in a polite way.” Under usage, American Heritage says, “lady is normally used as a parallel to gentleman to emphasize norms expected in polite society or situations.”

I would add that a lady need not be stuffy, scolding, stiff. A lady brings regard for others into the room with her; that regard is part of the dignity she carries and seeks to spread. A lady is a woman who projects the stature of life.

These definitions are incomplete but serviceable—I invite better ones—but keep them in mind as I try to draw a fuller picture of what it was like to be taken aside at an airport last week for what is currently known as further screening and was generally understood 50 years ago to be second-degree sexual assault.

I was directed, shoeless, into the little pen with the black plastic swinging door. A stranger approached, a tall woman with burnt-orange hair. She looked in her 40s. She was muscular, her biceps straining against a tight Transportation Security Administration T-shirt. She carried her wand like a billy club. She began her instructions: Face your baggage. Feet in the footmarks. Arms out. Fully out. Legs apart. Apart. I’m patting you down.

It was like a 1950s women’s prison movie. I got to be the girl from the streets who made a big mistake; she was the guard doing intake. “Name’s Veronica, but they call me Ron. Want a smoke?” Beeps and bops, her pointer and middle fingers patting for explosives under the back of my brassiere; the wand on and over my body, more beeps, more pats. The she walked wordlessly away. I looked around, slowly put down my arms, rearranged my body. For a moment I thought I might plaintively call out, “No kiss goodbye? No, ‘I’ll call’?” But they might not have been amused. And actually I wasn’t either.

I experienced the search not only as an invasion of privacy, which it was, but as a denial or lowering of that delicate thing, dignity. The dignity of a woman, of a lady, of a person with a right not to be manhandled or to be, or to feel, molested.

Is this quaint, this claiming of such a right? Is it impossibly old-fashioned? I think it’s just basic. There aren’t many middle-aged women who fly who haven’t experienced something very much like what I’ve described. I’ve noticed recently that people who fly have taken to looking away when they pass someone being patted down. They do this now at LaGuardia, in line for the shuttle to Washington, where they used to stare. Now they turn away in embarrassment.

They’re right to be embarrassed. It is to their credit that they are.

*   *   *

An aside with a point: I almost always talk to the screeners and usually wind up joking with them. They often tell me wonderful things. The most moving was the security woman at LaGuardia who answered my question, “What have you learned about people since taking this job that you didn’t know before?” She did an impromptu soliloquy on how Everyone Travels With the Same Things. She meant socks, toothbrush, deodorant, but as she spoke, as she elaborated, we both came to understood that she was saying something larger about. . .what’s inside us, and what it is to be human, and on a journey. One screener, this past Monday, again at LaGuardia, told me that no, she had never ever found a terrorist or a terror related item in her searches. Two have told me women take the searches worse than men, and become angrier.

But then they would, for they are not only discomforted and delayed, as the men. There is also the edge of violation.

Are the women who do the searches wicked, cruel? No, they’re trying to make a living and go with the flow of modernity. They’re doing what they’ve been taught. They’ve been led to approach things in a certain way, first by our society and then by their bosses. They’re doing what they’ve been trained to do by modern government security experts who don’t have to bother themselves with thoughts like, Is this sort of a bad thing to do to a person who is a lady? By, that is, slobs with clipboards who have also been raised in the current culture.

*   *   *

I spoke this week at a Catholic college. I have been speaking a lot, for me anyway, which means I have been without that primary protector of American optimism and good cheer, which is staying home. Americans take refuge in their homes. It’s how they protect themselves from their culture. It helps us maintain our optimism.

At the Catholic college, a great one, we were to speak of faith and politics. This, to me, is a very big and complicated subject, and a worthy one. But quickly—I mean within 15 seconds—the talk was only of matters related to sexuality. Soon a person on the panel was yelling, “Raise your hands if you think masturbation is a sin!,” and the moderator was asking if African men should use condoms, yes or no. At one point I put my head in my hands. I thought, Have we gone crazy? There are thousands of people in the audience, from children to aged nuns, and this is how we talk, this is the imagery we use, this is our only subject matter?

But of course it is. It is our society’s subject matter.

I was the only woman on the panel, which is no doubt part of why I experienced it as so odd, but in truth the symposium wasn’t odd, not in terms of being out of line with the culture. It was odd only because it was utterly in line with it.

Was the symposium the worst thing that happened to me this year? Oh no. It wasn’t even the worst thing that has happened to me this week. But I did experience it as to some degree violative of my dignity as a person. An adult. A woman. A lady.

And I have been experiencing a lot of things in this way for a while now.

Have you?

I experience it when I see blaring television ads for birth-control devices, feminine-hygiene products, erectile-dysfunction medicines. I experience it when I’m almost strip-searched at airports. I experience it when I listen to popular music, if that’s what we call it. I experience it when political figures are asked the most intimate questions about their families and pressed for personal views on sexual questions that someone somewhere decided have to be Topic A on the national agenda in America right now.

Let me tell you what I say, in my mind, after things like this—the symposium, the commercials, and so forth. I think, We are embarrassing the angels.

Imagine for a moment that angels exist, that they are pure spirits of virtue and light, that they care about us and for us and are among us, unseen, in the airport security line, in the room where we watch TV, at the symposium of great minds. “Raise your hands if you think masturbation should be illegal!” “I’m Bob Dole for Viagra.” “Put your feet in the foot marks, lady.” We are embarrassing the angels.

*   *   *

Do I think this way, in these terms, because I am exceptionally virtuous? Oh no. I’m below average in virtue, and even I know it’s all gotten low and rough and disturbed.

Lent began yesterday, and I mean to give up a great deal, as you would too if you were me. One of the things I mean to give up is the habit of thinking it and not saying it. A lady has some rights, and this happens to be one I can assert.

“You are embarrassing the angels.” This is what I intend to say for the next 40 days whenever I see someone who is hurting the culture, hurting human dignity, denying the stature of a human being. I mean to say it with belief, with an eye to instruction, but also pointedly, uncompromisingly. As a lady would. All invited to join in.

We are debating port security. While we’re at it, how about airport security? Does anyone really believe that has gotten much better since 19 terrorists hijacked four planes five years ago?

This week I flew to Florida and back to give a speech and got another up-close look at how well the Transportation Security Administration is running the show. And it’s clear that no one jokes about TSA screeners frisking grandma anymore, not because it isn’t still happening, but rather because it’s not even darkly funny anymore.

6:10 a.m., Tuesday two days ago, LaGuardia Airport. A long line of what appeared to be roughly a thousand people was snaking down a hall past newsstands and shops. Chaos and an hour wait to get through security. A woman in an airport security uniform patrolled on the left, curtly instructing us to move to the right. A cleaning crew on the right barked, “Coming through, move please!” We stood nervously wherever we wouldn’t be yelled at. No one tried to help us, to calm the fears of those about to miss their flights. There was a lot of yelling—”I need your ID open and faced forward! No, you must put that in the bin!” After 45 minutes I got to the first security checkpoint, where I was directed to stand aside for extra clearance. I walked to the rubber mat, stood spread eagled in the Leonardo position, arms out, legs out, as a sleepy stranger ran a wand around my body and patted me for bombs. “Now I know how a cow feels in a cattle pen,” I said. I told her how carelessly we’d been treated. She was surprised. No one told her there were a lot of people waiting in line.

*   *   *

I gave the speech that night, and returned the next morning to the West Palm Beach airport for the flight home. Here, at 9:30 a.m., it was worse. Again roughly a thousand people, again all of them being yelled at by airport and TSA personnel. Get your computers out. Shoes off. Jackets off. Miss, Miss, I told you, line four. No, line four. So much yelling and tension, and all the travelers in slump-shouldered resignation and fear. The fingers of the man in front of me were fluttered with anxiety as he grabbed at his back pocket for his wallet so the woman who checks ID would not snap at him or make him miss his flight.

This was East Germany in 1960. It was the dictatorship of the clerks, and the clerks were not in a good mood.

After a half hour in line I get to the first security point.

“Linfah,” says the young woman who checked my ID.

“I’m sorry?”

“Linfah.” She points quickly and takes the next person’s ID.

“I’m so sorry, I don’t understand.”

Now she points impatiently. How stupid could I be?

Line Five. Oh. OK.

Ahead of me, throwing bags in bins, is a young mother with a two or three year old girl. The mother is tense, flustered. Bags, bottles, a stroller to break down and get on the conveyer belt. A security agent yelling: “Keep your boarding pass in your hand at all times.” The little girl is looking up, anxious. All these yelling adults, and things being thrown. “My doll!” she says as her mother puts it quickly in a gray bin. “We’ll get it on the other side!” says the mother. She grabs her daughter’s hand roughly.

“Take off your sneakers!” a clerk yells.

The mother stops, hops, quickly removes her sneakers. Her daughter has already walked through the magnetometer and is wandering on the other side. She looks around: Where’s mommy?

Mommy gets her sneakers in a bin, on the belt, gets through the magnetometer.

I’m relieved. Her daughter holds her mother’s leg. They begin to walk on.

A TSA clerk shouts to another, “You didn’t check the sneakers. You have to put the sneakers through.”

The second clerk yells—“Your daughter has to go through again!”

The little girl is scared—What did I do wrong? I’m sorry, mommy.

The mother is tense, gets a look.

I lift my chin at the TSA agent, smile, and say softly, “Miss, that poor girl with the child, she is having a tough time. The little girl is scared and—”

“We are following procedures!” said the TSA agent. Her mouth was twisted in anger.

I nodded and said softly, “I know, I’m just saying—a little gentle in your tone.”

She looked at my ticket and smiled.

“You have been chosen by the computer for extra attention.”

“What?”

“You have been chosen by the computer for extra attention.”

*   *   *

I am almost always picked for extra screening. I must be on a list of middle aged Irish-American women terrorists. I know a message is being sent: We don’t do ethnic profiling in America. But that is not, I suspect, the message anyone receives. The message people receive is: This is all nonsense. What they think is: This is all kabuki. We’re being harassed and delayed so politicians can feel good. The security personnel themselves seem to know it’s nonsense: they’re always bored and distracted as they go through my clothing, my stockings, my computer, my earrings. They don’t treat me like a terror possibility, they treat me like a sad hunk of meat.

I don’t think most of us get extra screening because they think we are terrorists. I think we get it because they know we’re not. They screen people who are not terrorists because it helps them pretend they are protecting us, in the same way doctors in the middle ages used to wear tall hats: because they couldn’t cure you. It’s all show.

*   *   *

I boarded my plane. Settled in, took out my notebook, wrote my notes. I turned to the man next to me. “Did you have a bad time with security?”

His eyebrows went up and he shook his head. “It’s terrible,” he said, in an English accent. He and his fiancée had come for a few days to southern Florida, they’d had hassles coming and going. He said, with wonder, that he was a smoker, that he always carried a keepsake, a gold cigarette lighter. Before he’d left for Florida he’d emptied it so it wouldn’t light, and he showed it to the security people at the airport. They told him he couldn’t take it on the flight. He asked them to send it to him, they said they couldn’t, he’d have to go back to the ticket area and give it to them. But then he’d miss his flight. “It’s your problem,” they said. He wound up giving the lighter to an airline clerk. “An $800 lighter! Empty!” He didn’t know if he’d ever see it again. He said, “It’s hard when”—and he put out his hands and shook them—“you’re already a bit of nervous about flying!”

*   *   *

It is almost five years since 9/11, and since the new security regime began. Why hasn’t it gotten better? Why has it gotten worse? It’s a disgrace, this airport security system, and it’s an embarrassment. I’m sure my Englishman didn’t come away with a greater respect or regard for America.

So we’re all talking about port security this week, and the debate over the Bush administration decision to allow an United Arab Emirates company to manage six ports in the United States. That debate is turning bitter, and I wonder if the backlash against President Bush isn’t partly due to the fact that everyone in America has witnessed or has been a victim of the incompetence of the airport security system. Why would people assume the government knows what it’s doing when it makes decisions about the ports? It doesn’t know what it’s doing at the airports.

This is a flying nation. We fly. And everyone knows airport security is an increasingly sad joke, that TSA itself often appears to have forgotten its mission, if it ever knew it, and taken on a new one—the ritual abuse of passengers.

Now there’s a security problem. Solve that one.

The Dick Cheney shooting incident will, in a way, go away. And, in a way, not—ever. Some things stick. Gerry Ford had physically stumbled only once or twice in public when he became, officially, The Stumbler. Mr. Ford’s stumbles seemed to underscore a certain lack of sure-footedness in his early policies and other decisions. The same with Jimmy Carter and the Killer Rabbit. At the time Mr. Carter told the story of a wild rabbit attacking his boat he had already come to be seen by half the country as weak and unlucky. Even bunnies took him on.

Same with Dick Cheney. He’s been painted as the dark force of the administration, and now there’s a mental picture to go with the reputation. Pull! Sorry, Harry! Pull!

Can media bias be detected in the endless coverage? Sure, always. But it’s also a great story. A vice president of the United States shot a guy in a hunting accident, and no one on his staff told the press. That’s a story.

But as a scandal I’m not sure it has a big future. The vice president yesterday offered the facts as he observed and experienced them. “I’m the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry” is a pretty direct statement. His recounting of the decision on how to handle it in the press seemed to reflect only incompetence, not malevolence.

Right now in the White House they’re discussing how to help the vice president get through his problem. They’ve already tried the wearing of orange ties, an attempt to take the sting out of the incident by showing they don’t feel the sting. Duck! Ha ha!

*   *   *

But what are they thinking that they’re not saying? Here’s a hunch, based not on any inside knowledge but only on what I know of people who practice politics, and those who practice it within the Bush White House.

I suspect what they’re thinking and not saying is, If Dick Cheney weren’t vice president, who’d be a good vice president? They’re thinking, At some time down the road we may wind up thinking about a new plan. And one night over drinks at a barbecue in McLean one top guy will turn to another top guy and say, “Under the never permeable and never porous Dome of Silence, tell me . . . wouldn’t you like to replace Cheney?”

Why would they be thinking about this? It’s not the shooting incident itself, it’s that Dick Cheney has been the administration’s hate magnet for five years now. Halliburton, energy meetings, Libby, Plamegate. This was not all bad for the White House: Mr. Cheney took the heat that would otherwise have been turned solely on George Bush. So he had utility, and he’s experienced and talented and organized, and Mr. Bush admires and respects him. But, at a certain point a hate magnet can draw so much hate you don’t want to hold it in your hand anymore, you want to drop it, and pick up something else. Is this fair? Nah. But fair has nothing to do with it.

This is a White House that likes to hit refresh when the screen freezes. Right now the screen is stuck, with poll numbers in the low 40s, or high 30s.

The key thing is Iraq. George Bush cares deeply about Iraq and knows his legacy will be decided there. It has surely dawned on the White House that “Iraq” will not be “over” in the next two years. Iraq is a long story. What Dick Armitage or Colin Powell said about the Pottery Barn rule was true: If you break, it you own it, at the very least for the next few years.

George Bush, and so the men and women around him, will want the next Republican presidential nominee to continue the U.S. effort in, and commitment to, Iraq. To be a candidate who will continue his policy, and not pull the plug, and burrow through.

This person will not be Dick Cheney, who has already said he doesn’t plan to run. So Mr. Bush may feel in time that he has reason to want to put in a new vice president in order to pick a successor who’ll presumably have an edge in the primaries—he’s the sitting vice president, and Republicans still respect primogeniture. They will tend to make the common-sense assumption that a guy who’s been vice president for, say, a year and a half, is a guy who already knows the top job. Anyway, the new guy will get a honeymoon, which means he won’t be fully hated by the time the 2008 primaries begin.

This new vice president would, however, have to be very popular in the party, or the party wouldn’t buy it. Replacing Mr. Cheney would be chancy. The new veep would have to get through the Senate, which has at this point at least three likely contenders for the nomination, at least two of whom who would not, presumably, be amused.

Plus there’s more quiet anti-administration feeling in the party than is generally acknowledged, and the president’s men know it. A lot of people would find such a move too cute by half. The contenders already in line—and their supporters, donors, fans, staff and friends in the press—would resent it. Big time.

People wouldn’t like it . . . unless they liked it. How could they be persuaded to like it?

It would have to be a man wildly popular in the party and the press. And it would have to be a decision made by Dick Cheney. If he didn’t want to do it he wouldn’t have to. If he were pressed—Dick, we gotta put the next guy in here or we’re going to lose in ‘08 and see all our efforts undone—he might make the decision himself. He’d have to step down on his own. He’s just been through a trauma, and he can’t be liking his job as much now as he did three years ago. No one on the downside of a second term does, hate magnet or not.

*   *   *

Of course, all this is exactly like the sort of thing people blue-skied about in 1992, when George H.W. Bush was in trouble and a lot of people urged him to hit refresh by dumping Dan Quayle. He didn’t. George W. Bush loves to do what his father didn’t.
Who would it be? Someone who’s a strong supporter of Iraq, and, presumably, the Bush doctrine.

Who would that be? That’s what I suspect the president’s men are asking themselves. But silently.

Listen, I watched the funeral of Coretta Scott King for six hours Tuesday, from the pre-service commentary to the very last speech, and it was wonderful—spirited and moving, rousing and respectful, pugnacious and loving. The old lions of the great American civil rights movement of the 20th century were there, and standing tall. The old lionesses, too. There was preaching and speechifying and at the end I thought: This is how democracy ought to be, ought to look every day—full of the joy of argument, and marked by the moral certainty that here you can say what you think.

There was nothing prissy, nothing sissy about it. A former president, a softly gray-haired and chronically dyspeptic gentleman who seems to have judged the world to be just barely deserving of his presence, pointedly insulted a sitting president who was, in fact, sitting right behind him. The Clintons unveiled their 2008 campaign. A rhyming preacher, one of the old lions, a man of warmth and stature, freely used the occasion to verbally bop the sitting president on the head.

So what? This was the authentic sound of a vibrant democracy doing its thing. It was the exact opposite of the frightened and prissy attitude that if you draw a picture I don’t like, I’ll have to kill you.

It was: We do free speech here.

That funeral honored us, and the world could learn a lot from watching it. The U.S. government should send all six hours of it throughout the World Wide Web and to every country on earth, because it said more about who we are than any number of decorous U.N. speeches and formal diplomatic declarations.

*   *   *

A moment for a distinction that must be made. Some have compared Mrs. King’s funeral to the Paul Wellstone memorial. It was not like the Wellstone memorial, and you’d have to be as dim and false as Al Franken to say it was. The Wellstone memorial was marked not by joy but anger. It was at moments sour, even dark. There was famous booing.

The King funeral was nothing like this. It was gracious, full of applause and cheers and amens. It was loving even when it was political. It had spirit, not rage. That’s part of why it was beautiful.

It was also beautiful because, as the first speaker, Bishop Eddie L. Long, senior pastor of the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Ga., said in almost his first words, “This is a worship. This is a celebration. This is a moment that we give to honor God.”

It was a religious service in which no one was afraid to talk about God. “Praise the Lord,” and “Lord, we lift your name on high” and “How we love to sing your praises” rang through the room. Scripture was quoted, stories told. Blacks in America are not afraid to love Jesus the way they want to love him, to use the language and symbols they want to use. I want to kiss their hands for this. I also happen to honor the fact that, by and large, older blacks at least have not given way to 20th-century stoicism in their style of mourning. The Kennedys, who had too much experience with funerals, set the stoic style 40 years ago, and while it was elegant and moving in its own way, it left an entire nation thinking it was in rather poor taste to cry aloud and sob.

As for the speakers, no one has ever been or could be better than the Rev. Bernice King, who spoke of her mother’s love, her mother’s end, and the possible metaphorical meaning of the cancer that killed her.

The Rev. Joseph Lowery gave a beautiful poem about Martin being with Rosa in heaven and then finding out that Coretta was coming, and rushing to greet her at the pearly gates. Strike you as corny? Not me. It was beautiful because it was not only full of unselfconscious faith, it assumed unselfconscious faith on the part of the audience, and so was both an implicit compliment and a declaration of shared assumptions. The audience responded with amens and cheers. When he bopped the president over weapons of mass destruction, what seemed, on CNN, to be half the room stood and applauded.

When George Bush 41 followed him to the podium, he teased Mr. Lowery in a way that complimented his eloquence. People sometimes marvel at the grace of George H.W. Bush. He is a warm and gracious man, and he’s old enough to appreciate the humor in everything. He’s old enough to appreciate life. But it is also true that when you attack him or his son from the left he doesn’t get mad because in his heart he kinda thinks you’re right. Attack him from the right; you won’t be overwhelmed by his bonhomie then.

President Bush was fine, his eloquence of the formal kind. He needs to find the place between High Rhetoric and off-the-cuff plainspeak. He always does one or the other. But there’s a place in between, a place that’s not fancy and not common, that would serve him well if he could find it.

Bill Clinton was, as always, the master. Say what you will, he is the only politician in America with the confidence to call Episcopalians “the frozen chosen” and know everyone will laugh and take no offense. Amid all the happy bombast he was the one who pointed at the casket and said, “There’s a woman in there.” He talked about Mrs. King in good strong plain terms. Yes, he caused a quarter-second of awkwardness when he said of the beautiful Coretta that even at age 75 she still had the goods, but in moments of exuberance we all forget our own history.

The real news was how the Clintons used the funeral to unveil how they will run in 2008: Together, side by side, with beautiful hairdos. I haven’t seen them like this—both standing at the podium—since 1992, when they were new. In the years since, after the health-care failure and the Whitewater scandals, the West Wing attitude toward the president’s wife was a quiet and respectful “Get that woman off the podium!” Not anymore. All is new again. Mrs. Clinton has clearly been working on her public speaking, and attempted to use her hands as her husband uses his, now in an emphasizing arc, now resting on her chest. But his are large, long and elegant, and hers are puffed and grasping.

*   *   *

Both Clintons spoke in the cadence and with the imagery of the Bible. Mrs. Clinton’s first words, in which she referred to Mrs. King’s brave decision to continue her husband’s work after his murder, were steeped in religiosity. “As we are called, each of us must decide whether to answer that call by saying, ‘Send me.’” She ended with, “The work of peace never ends. So we bid her earthly presence farewell. We wish her Godspeed on her homecoming. And we ask ourselves, ‘Will we say, when the call comes, “Send me”?’”

Oh I think we will, Ms. Meanieface!

If you don’t understand that Mrs. Clinton was rehearsing her 2008 announcement speech, then you are a child and must go home and have a nice cup of cocoa.

This is what is coming: I have had a blessed life. And like so many people I could choose, after all these years, a life of comfort. Watch it from the sidelines, tend to my own concerns, watch the garden grow. But our nation calls out. And if we are to be Americans we must meet the call. “Send me.”

With Bill nodding beside her, his hands clasped prayerfully in front of him, nodding and working that jaw muscle he works when he wants you to notice, for just a second, how hard it is sometimes for him to contain his admiration.

God I love them.

*   *   *

Apart from its beauty, dignity and fight, Mrs. King’s funeral got me thinking about this: Did she know how much she was loved? It’s hard for a person to know that. If only she could have gone to her own funeral, she would have known. I wonder if it wouldn’t be good if somewhere along the way, just once in your life, you got to call your own funeral. Pick the church, the speakers, the music, sit in the pew, clap when they talk about how wonderful you were. Then afterwards have a long lunch and toast your memory. Then the next day you go to work as usual, but maybe in a different mood. I don’t see why we don’t do this. Is this a stupid thing to say? It’s allowed. I’ve got free speech.

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

What a snob.

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

Here he is on the insurgents in Iraq:

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

Deeper in his remarks:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I thought: But that’s the long term.

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

How does Judge Alito put up with this?

How does any nominee?

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

These are wise words.

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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