Peggy Noonan

Newt and Hillary pose on the Capitol steps showing a teasing delight in each other’s company as they back, together, a new health-care scheme. John McCain and Hillary pose laughing with reporters and showing bipartisan closeness as they leave together on a fact-finding trip to Alaska. I saw the latter picture yesterday on the news, remembered the former, and thought of a conversation with a group of conservatives from throughout the country a few weeks ago.

The subject turned to the growing friendship between the Bush seniors and Bill Clinton. They had famously bonded big-time during their tsunami fund-raising efforts, and Barbara Bush is reported now to call Mr. Clinton “son.” Mr. Clinton has been up to Kennebunkport this summer to play golf with his fellow former president, go boating, and have a private dinner.

In our conversation someone called the growing chumminess “creepy” and asked what I thought of it. I said I found it creepy too. What, I was asked, did I think was behind it? Why are Mr. Bush senior and Mr. Clinton so publicly embracing each other, yukking it up for the cameras and complimenting each other?

Because it serves their individual needs and interests, I said. They both get real benefit out of it while appearing to be ignoring their own interests. That’s a great twofer.

*   *   *

What does Democrat Bill Clinton get out of cultivating the Republican Bushes? He gets public approval from a man most of the country sees as personally upstanding. When Mr. Bush puts his arm around Mr. Clinton, he confers his rectitude. Democrats won’t mind it, and independent voters will like it. In receiving the embrace of the patriarch of such a famously Republican family, Mr. Clinton looks like someone who is, by definition, nonradical, mainstream, not too unacceptably odd and grifter-ish. Big bonus: Mr. Clinton knows that when he receives Mr. Bush’s affectionate approval, his wife, who will soon be running for president, also seems by extension to be receiving it. This is good for her. Both Clintons pick up some positive attention from on-the-ground Republicans. This is good too.

What does the elder Mr. Bush get out of it? He burnishes his reputation for personal generosity and a certain above-it-all nonpartisanship. He shows he’s not narrow like a conservative, but national like a great leader. This has a spillover effect on his son, the incumbent president. The more his father embraces the foe, the more embracing the current President Bush looks. By publicly declaring his closeness with Mr. Clinton, Mr. Bush senior demonstrates a high minded interest in political comity and a rejection of mere party politics, unlike the low little people who are inspired by animus and always getting het up about their little issues. Would a former president Pat Buchanan hug a former president Clinton? Huh, go dream.

So Mr. Clinton does it because it’s good for himself and for his wife’s prospects. Mr. Bush does it because it’s good for himself and his son.

Are their motives purely selfish? No, just mostly. Both Mr. Bush and Mr. Clinton are in their own ways men of sentiment and emotion. In the old British phrase, they’re both wets. Neither was driven unvaryingly in his political life by deep philosophical conviction. Both operated within a philosophical reality; they were surrounded by and supported by those with a philosophy, and each tried always to get to what was practical and polled well. Both like to like people; they enjoy admitting they’re softies. Both no doubt share the view that a great democracy cannot operate in a healthy manner when the members of its political parties hate each other. Both feel some attachment to the kind of beyond-mere-partisanship sentiments that are pleasing to one’s inner David Broder. And both have been presidents. They know what the job is and share the bond of having been there.

*   *   *

But they’re missing something, I think. It is the kind of reserve coupled with an eschewal of the merely petty demonstrated by the old pros of the past. Eisenhower supported JFK after the Bay of Pigs, but without the creepy yukking it up, and in a way that put the emphasis on the importance of the presidency and not the sweetness of Ike. The old soldier stood with the unsteady junior officer who’d been duly elected, and said he supported the president’s leadership. He didn’t hug him, smooch, or call him ducky. He didn’t suggest he found him personally endearing. As far back as Adams and Jefferson that was the style: public support where possible, privately expressed grumbling here and there, and, at the end, when it was possible, private declarations of appreciation, respect and affection. The historians found it, in the letters. They didn’t write each other subtly self-serving love letters in the national newspapers. And they could have.

They were serious men who stood for serious things. And they had serious supporters who were not to be trifled with.

What bothers me about the fervid friendship of the Bushes and Mr. Clinton—and the media celebration of it—is the faint whiff of superiority, a sense they radiate that all those slightly icky little people running around wailing about issues—tax reform, the relation of the individual to the state, the necessary character of a president—and working the precincts are somehow . . . a little below them. There is an air of condescension toward that grubby thing, belief. Those who hold it are not elevated, don’t quite fit into the high-minded nonpartisan brotherhood. When in fact the people doing the day-to-day work of democracy, and who are in it because they are impelled by deep belief and philosophy, are actually not below them at all, and perhaps above them. Not that they’re on the cover of People hugging, but at least they’re serious.

It is the suggestion, or the suspicion, that these men have grown close because they are not serious, were never quite serious, that grates. That makes one wonder. That leaves some Republicans, and I have to assume more than a few Democrats, scratching their heads when they see Newt smiling with Hillary, and John McCain giggling with Hillary. It leaves you wondering: Why are these people laughing?

In New York right now the sun is soft, not searing; the humidity just high enough that you feel like you’re walking through pleasantly warm gelatin as you walk along the streets. A good time for a general political overview, I say. Let’s start with the Bushes.

President Bush is under pressure from various parts of his constituency, but there is little sign he’s noticed. Among conservatives there is rising frustration over immigration, government spending and the gradual, slow-mo, day-by-day redefining of what modern conservatism is and what the Republican Party stands for that has taken place during the Bush presidency. That is in fact the big, largely unspoken fact of the Bush presidency.

This will be argued over and may be at least partially resolved in 2007 and 2008, as individual Republicans choose which Republican contenders for the presidency to back. It will be an orderly process, because Republicans are orderly people. But if Republicans lose the presidency in 2008, things will get less polite. There will be an intraparty fight over what to do about America’s borders, what to do about dramatically rising spending, what to do about the growth of government, how or if to lower deficits, what path to take on taxes, where we are going in foreign affairs. That’s how Republicans will spend the Hillary Clinton years if we get the Hillary Clinton years: in a great big donnybrook.

But while Republicans are on the verge of a great struggle, the president continues to be supported and appreciated among the Republican base. I have talked to all kinds of Republicans this summer, and for all their questioning, the base is his.

How could this be? How could the reason for a coming party battle—George W. Bush himself—be the continuing object of unified party support?

*   *   *

There are many reasons. In a 50-50 nation, you back your guy. Tepid support won’t do. If it weren’t for Mr. Bush you’d have John Kerry, or some other avatar of a party led by a man, Howard Dean, who now freely admits his party doesn’t know what it stands for. Or rather, as he puts it, the Democratic Party needs “a message.” Well yes. They also need clear belief, a known philosophy, and a reason for being.

At any rate, this is no time for ambivalence, confusion and weak national leadership. Mr. Bush is a vivid figure who summons vivid reactions. Republicans may not always agree with his decisions, but they think they understand his thinking: In a time of high stakes and war you don’t spend your political capital on secondary items like spending, which can always be revisited.

As for immigration, Mr. Bush and Karl Rove are not up against a tougher Democratic Party. They believe what Democratic political professionals believe: that he who owns the Latino vote owns the future. Washington’s bipartisan establishment attitude toward immigration is: Don’t upset Mexican-Americans. This is a dangerous game. It only works as long as it works. If a group of young Arab terrorists crosses the border illegally and takes out Chicago with a suitcase bomb, Mexican-Americans will be exactly as angry as every other American group, and will vote to fire those in power.

Mr. Bush as a person, as an individual, is as attractive to Republicans as he is unattractive to Democrats. Republicans like him because he seems like a normal guy—business, family, sports, Top 40 on the iPod. Democrats hate him for this—how common, how plebian; he’d have more elevated tastes if he were a more elevated man. Republicans like him for the one way in which he is obviously extraordinary: When he says it he means it, and if he promises it he’ll do it. Democrats see this as evidence of derangement: He doesn’t change his mind because he thinks he’s God’s other son, and in any case he can’t think clearly enough to change his mind. Republicans see it more this way: As a West Point official said to me in passing, “He’s got two of ’em.”

Democrats try to tag Mr. Bush as lazy, but that will never work. He seems like an activist who’s actively engaged. Every time cable news does a “Bush Is on Vacation in Crawford” headline they’re forced to follow it with a clip of the speech Mr. Bush just made. In any case liberals are always trying to call Republican presidents lazy. They did it with Eisenhower and Reagan too. It never helps the liberal cause. They don’t know half the country would be relieved to have a lazy president as he’d do less and make us less nervous.

And there is Iraq. Republicans on the ground do not believe Mr. Bush & Co. lied to get us into war. They believe he had reason to believe what he believed, and to move. Saddam had had weapons of mass destruction and used them on the Kurds. It wasn’t a huge leap to think he still had them, and would use them again. In any case the die is cast. Republicans are practical. They will continue to back Iraq as long as they think victory (the creation of a stable, nonterrorist Iraqi government) is achievable. If they come to think it’s not, they’ll peel off until they’re gone.

*   *   *

But I think Mr. Bush’s continued popularity with his base, and actually with a lot of Americans who don’t quite say this to themselves, is the bookend effect.

In the national imagination Mr. Bush’s presidency started on the day of 9/11/01. After a few unsure hours he did what he had to do. I’m a loving man but I’ve got a job to do. . . . I can hear you, and soon the people who knocked down these buildings will hear you. . . . Al Qaeda is to terrorism what the Mafia is to organized crime.

We’ve been though a lot since then—code red and code orange, war and rumors of war, Homeland Security, reports of hidden terror cells, attacks on Spain and London. And yet—the other bookend: For all the fear and even terror of those days four years ago, for all the reports of Mideastern-looking men videotaping structures across America, for all the talk of plastic sheeting and fill-the-house-with-enough-water-for-three-months—for all that, America has not been attacked on its soil again. We have not been airplaned, nuked, bio’d or suitcase bombed.

That’s the otherbook end. It started with terror and has ended with no-terror-since.

That’s a big reason his base is still with him, and that’s why a lot of Americans, when you come right down to it, are with him.

Those are the bookends. And the great question of course is: Will the second bookend hold? Every fact of our domestic political future rests on the answer to that.

*   *   *

A word on Mrs. Bush. Everyone knows she is popular and admired, but I don’t think it’s been sufficiently noted that Laura Bush, in almost five years as first lady, has never made a mistake. She has not struck a false note or made a single misstep. This is remarkable. And our country has never seen anything like it.
Most first ladies five years in have made themselves look foolish at some point, or have been made to look foolish. Jackie Kennedy was the focus of sniping over her taste for luxury and long vacations, and was not loved until she was a widow. Lady Bird Johnson, with her well meaning, slightly clueless earnestness, was regularly lampooned. I remember someone doing an imitation of her in which she took the stage and introduced “My two semi-beautiful daughters.” No one much liked the tightly wound Rosalyn Carter, and no one much disliked her. Nancy Reagan was reviled as a Hollywood airhead until she was reviled as a secret Machiavellian. Hillary Clinton was hated in many corners, and not only because she chose to interpret her husband’s election to the presidency as her elevation to a co-presidency. That was only part of it. When they made fun of her changing hairstyles it was because she seemed not to be in search of a good look but trying on new blond helmets in which to grimly wade forward like Brunhilde.

Even Barbara Bush, probably the most liked of recent first ladies, got tagged as the Gray Fox or the Velvet Hammer. She was called tough as a boot and tagged as sharp-tongued. But no one has ever laid a glove on Laura. It is as if she were born to be first lady—easygoing, gently humorous, demure, ladylike. It takes enormous reserves of emotional discipline to sustain graciousness, to do the job right, to so disarm the press with what must be called, vulgarly but inescapably, natural class.

She has never embarrassed our country. Of how many leaders or their spouses can that be said?

Well done. Well and amazingly done. Someone should do a monograph on what it is she did and how it is she did it. And it should of course be noted that she is another reason for her husband’s popularity with his base, and outside of it, too.

It’s summer, the country’s traveling, and the great pleasure to be had from leaving home is meeting and falling in love with a place you’ve never been to. I end that sentence with a preposition to segue into my favorite story this summer of cultural tensions and differences as navigated by two American women. A Southern lady sees a vacationing society lady from the Northeast. The Southern lady is gregarious: “Where y’all from?” Society lady is put off: “I’m from a place where they don’t end sentences with a preposition.” Southern lady smiles, nods her head: “Beg your pardon. Where y’all from, bitch?”

It’s fun to see cultures collide, because that’s one of the ways you know they still exist. America continues to be full of differentness, in spite of the samening effect of national media. (I made up samening. It refers to the tendency of different, small and localized pockets of culture to take on the ways and values of national culture as it is imposed by television, music and movies.)

Local survives. Particular and distinctive survive. Especially in West Virginia.

*   *   *

I have just been there for the first time, and it is a jewel of a state. It is like an emerald you dig from a hill with your hands.

You know when you’ve passed into it from the east because suddenly things look more dramatic. You get the impression you’re in a real place. All around you are mountains and hills and gullies, gulches and streams. The woods wherever I went were thick and deep. From Morgantown to Ballengee a squirrel can jump from tree to tree. It is a tall state—the hills, trees and mountains—and shadowy-dark, with winding roads, except for where it’s broad and beige and full of highway, courtesy of Robert Byrd. The highways are perfect looking, unstained by wear and tear, and not many people seem to use them.

There are little churches in every town, where the highest thing is the steeples, and road signs with exhortations to follow Jesus, and big crosses made of white wood on the side of the road. The ACLU would do well not to come here and do their church-state thing. Three hours into our drive west, a police car drove by, and someone mentioned that was the first one he’d seen since we crossed the state line. Someone else said, approvingly, “Everyone keeps a gun in West Virginia. Crime is low.” Later I would be told it has the lowest violent crime per capita in the United States. It is very nice, when traveling, to see your beliefs and assumptions statistically borne out.

Few people I met seemed interested in politics. I got the impression they see is as something dull and faraway, as a normal person would. I was in the southwest corner of the state, in the Fayetteville area of Fayette County, named for the Marquis de Lafayette. When I asked a man tending the grass in front of the statue of Lafayette on the courthouse lawn why they left the “La” off, he said he didn’t know but “maybe it was a little lah dee dah.” West Virginia has a town named Artie and a town named Bud.

When you are from the Northeast, the talk always goes inevitably to the niceness of the people. “They’re real,” as a new resident of Charleston, the state capital, told me. People are nice in the Northeast, too, but there seems a particular dignity and humility to West Virginians. Because it has been left so alone by history, so hard to get to and get out of, West Virginia’s people seem to be largely what they were, of Scots-Irish descent, and have remained vividly so.

After a week I told a longtime resident of Charleston that the people I was meeting were kind and easygoing, but something tells me you don’t want to get them mad. “You are correct,” she said. She was a tall and gallant lady who was a veteran of state politics. She told me of a meeting years ago when she went to a high official with the United Mine Workers to ask him for support as she ran for office. She was a Democrat and supported the UMW but had reservations about large parts of its recent agenda. The UMW official told her, “I know you are better educated than I am, and I am willing to believe you are smarter than I am, but I am not willing to believe that I am wrong about everything and you are right about everything.” She said she got thinking about that and concluded he had a point. He didn’t support her. She won anyway.

*   *   *

We went to a little old coal-mining town, where we visited what used to be the company store and is now an antique shop. I saw the scrip with which the operators paid the miners. I thought scrip was paper money, but it’s thin metal ovals like quarters and nickels, with the number of the mine the miner works in stamped through. In a side room was a picture of the company store as it had been circa 1900. The whole right side of the store was a long polished bar, with rows of whiskey bottles along the walls. This in a place that was relatively impoverished. The other half of the store sold dry goods.

You can see the whole beginning of the Ladies Christian Temperance Union right in this picture, I thought: Maybe Prohibition was a Protestant movement and not a Catholic one in some part because the Catholics of the East weren’t paid in scrip but with green money, so an edge of coercion—We’ll work you to death and then force you to pay high prices for our whiskey as you pour out your woes—and the resentment coercion brings, was missing.

At the store the man behind the counter was friendly, intelligent and missing an eye. He had no artificial eye, no eye patch, just a red space where the eye would be. When I asked his name he said, “Jack, but my friends call me One Eye.” I nodded at this information and remembered what a friend told me. He works with a local man who was complaining about his lazy brother-in-law who’s on welfare. “He wouldn’t take a job in a pie factory!”

And there was the New River. They aren’t sure why it’s called the New and think Lewis and Clark were surprised to come upon its broad gray power, its falls and whitewater, and called it New because its existence was news to them. It cuts through the bottom of a great Appalachian gorge. Its beauty is as striking as the Hudson, only with more trees and wildness and rafts bouncing down the rapids. On River Day once a year the bungee jumpers and parachutists come. The New River is alive.

One night we went to an outdoor restaurant overlooking the gorge and ate pork chops and macaroni mustard chicken, and a waitress told us people are buying up the land nearby and prices are going up.

They’re buying up the land in a lot of West Virginia from what I could see, and why wouldn’t they, with so much natural beauty and beautiful people? But having just come upon it as an outsider, I don’t want more outsiders like me to come. This feeling was echoed by a doctor from India who has worked for many years at a local hospital. He told me the state is changing and about to change more. It used to be a long and dangerous trip to Washington on narrow, winding roads, but now it’s all been paved and broadened, and now more people can get in and more people can get out. “It used to be impossible,” he said. He both welcomed and mourned this. He is a modern man and appreciates change and the good it can bring, but he didn’t want his pocket of authenticity—he’s the one who called it “a jewel”—to change.

I read local periodicals and history magazines. I couldn’t get enough of the great mining wars of the early 20th century, about the operators and union men and the nonunion workers and hired detectives and the shots in the night. I read about and heard about the Civil War battles fought down the road. Lee was here. The friend whose house I stayed in had a collection of almost a hundred Indian arrowheads dug up from the backyard. The Shawnee had been here, too. Shawnee warriors had made these sharp flint heads of gray and blue and black, had held them in their hands, and I was inspecting them closely just six inches away, in the year 2005.

*   *   *

And I rediscovered the legend of John Henry, the steel-driving man. When I was in grade school in New York they taught us the ballad of John Henry, and I had thought of it over the years but never learned his story.

When the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad was being built in the mountains just after the Civil War (last week I walked on its old tracks), the work crews were worked hard. The most famous worker was John Henry, a steel driver who hammered spikes into the mountainside to make space for sticks of dynamite that would blow away mountain to make room for the tracks. The steel driver and the man who placed and turned the spikes had to work with speed and split-second precision. The men laying down the tracks worked to their rhythm. Words came out of this, out of the rhythm of the hit and the hammer and haul, and the words became chants and poems and folk songs, and they spread from the tracks to the town and then out to the country.

John Henry was a young man, black, about 6-foot-2, 190 pounds of muscle. He is said to have been a former slave, and might have been a convict assigned to manual labor. His might and capacity were becoming famous throughout Appalachia when something new happened. During the blasting of the Big Bend Tunnel in the mountains near the town of Talcott, a rival crew captain brought in a steam drill. He said a machine would pound steel better than a man. John Henry vowed to beat it; nothing’s better than a man. And so the contest commenced.

There are many versions of the ballad of John Henry—early versions, folk versions, chain-gang versions, Grand Ol’ Opry. I like this one:

When John Henry was a little baby
Sittin’ on his mama’s knee
He picked up a hammer and a little piece of steel,
and said, “This’ll be the death of me,”
Lord, Lord, this’ll be the death of me.

The captain says to John Henry
“Gonna bring a steam drill ’round
Gonna take that steam drill out on the job
Gonna whop that steel on down,”
Lord, Lord, gonna whop that steel on down.

John Henry told the captain,
“A man ain’t nothing but a man,
Before I let your steam drill beat me down,
I’ll die with a hammer in my hand.”

Sun shine hot and burnin’
Wasn’t no breeze at all
Sweat ran down like water down a hill
The day John Henry let his hammer fall,

John Henry went to the tunnel
And they put him in the lead to drive
The rock so tall and John Henry so small
He laid down his hammer and he cried
Lord Lord, he laid down his hammer and he cried.

John Henry started on the right hand,
That steam drill started on the left—
“Before I’d let this steam drill beat me down,
I’d hammer myself to death,”
Lord Lord, I’d hammer myself to death.

John Henry said to his shaker,
“Shaker, why don’t you sing?
I’m throwin’ twelve pounds from my hips on down,
Just listen to that cold steel ring,”
Lord Lord, listen to that cold steel ring.

Oh the cap’n said to John Henry,
“I believe this mountain’s sinkin’ in”,
John Henry said to his captain, “Oh my,
That’s nothin’ but my hammer suckin’ win’”
Lord lord, aint nothin’ but my hammer suckin’ win’

That man that invented the steam drill
Thought he was mighty fine.
John Henry drove his hammer fourteen foot
And the steam drill only made nine.

John Henry was hammerin’ the mountain,
And his hammer was striking fire,
He drove so hard till he broke his pore heart
And he laid down his hammer and he died,
Lord Lord, he laid down his hammer and he died.

They took John Henry to a hillside,
He looked to the heavens above;
He said, “Take my hammer and wrap it in gold,
And give it the girl I love,”
Lord, Lord, Give it to the girl I love.

Well they took John Henry to the white house,
And they buried him deep in the sand,
And every locomotive come a roarin’ by
Says “There lies a steel drivin’ man”
Lord lord, there lies a steel drivin man.

No one knows exactly how much of the story of John Henry is true. But it’s a wonderful country that makes such men, and if he wasn’t real it’s a wonderful country that makes such stories. Thank you, West Virginia, of reminding me of this one, and others.

What’s wrong with them? That’s what I’m thinking more and more as I watch the news from Washington.

A few weeks ago it was the senators who announced the judicial compromise. There is nothing wrong with compromise and nothing wrong with announcements, but the senators who spoke referred to themselves with such flights of vanity and conceit—we’re so brave, so farsighted, so high-minded—that it was embarrassing. They patted themselves on the back so hard they looked like a bevy of big breasted pigeons in a mass wing-flap. Little grey feathers and bits of corn came through my TV screen, and I had to sweep up when they were done.

This week comes the previously careful Sen. Barack Obama, flapping his wings in Time magazine and explaining that he’s a lot like Abraham Lincoln, only sort of better. “In Lincoln’s rise from poverty, his ultimate mastery of language and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat—in all this he reminded me not just of my own struggles.”

Oh. So that’s what Lincoln’s for. Actually Lincoln’s life is a lot like Mr. Obama’s. Lincoln came from a lean-to in the backwoods. His mother died when he was 9. The Lincolns had no money, no standing. Lincoln educated himself, reading law on his own, working as a field hand, a store clerk and a raft hand on the Mississippi. He also split some rails. He entered politics, knew more defeat than victory, and went on to lead the nation through its greatest trauma, the Civil War, and past its greatest sin, slavery.

Barack Obama, the son of two University of Hawaii students, went to Columbia and Harvard Law after attending a private academy that taught the children of the Hawaiian royal family. He made his name in politics as an aggressive Chicago vote hustler in Bill Clinton’s first campaign for the presidency.

You see the similarities.

*   *   *

There is nothing wrong with Barack Obama’s résumé, but it is a log-cabin-free zone. So far it also is a greatness-free zone. If he keeps talking about himself like this it always will be.

Mr. Obama said he keeps a photographic portrait of Lincoln on the wall of his office, and that “it asks me questions.”

I’m sure it does. I’m sure it says, “Barack, why are you such an egomaniac?” Or perhaps, “Is it no longer possible in American politics to speak of another’s greatness without suggesting your own?”

Even so sober an actor as Bill Frist has gotten into the act. This is the beginning of his Heritage Foundation speech yesterday:

You might have been wondering these last few months: Why would a doctor take on an issue like the judicial confirmation process? About 10 years ago, I set aside my medical career to run for the Senate. But I didn’t set aside my compassion. I didn’t set aside my character. And I sure as heck didn’t set aside my principles. I got into politics for the same reason I got into medicine. I wanted to help people. And I wanted to heal. I just felt that, in politics, I could help and heal more than one patient at a time.

I admire Bill Frist, but can you imagine George Washington referring in public, or in private for that matter, to his many virtues? In normal America if you have a high character you don’t wrestle people to the ground until they acknowledge it. You certainly don’t announce it. If you are compassionate, you are compassionate; if others see it, fine. If you hold to principle it will become clear. You don’t proclaim these things. You can’t, for the same reason that to brag about your modesty is to undercut the truth of the claim.

*   *   *

And there are the Clintons. There are always the Clintons. The man for whom Barack Obama worked so hard in 1992 showed up with his wife this week to take center stage at Billy Graham’s last crusade in New York. Billy Graham is a great man. He bears within him deep reservoirs of sweetness, and the reservoirs often overflow. It was embarrassing to see America’s two most famous political grifters plop themselves in the first row dressed in telegenic silk and allow themselves to become the focus of sweet words they knew would come.

Why did they feel it right to inject a partisan political component into a spiritual event? Why take advantage of the good nature and generosity of an old hero? Why, after spending their entire adulthoods in public life, have they not developed or at least learned to imitate simple class?

How exactly does it work? How does legitimate self-confidence become wildly inflated self-regard? How does self respect become unblinking conceit? How exactly does one’s character become destabilized in Washington?

The Supreme Court this week and last issued many rulings, and though they were on different issues the decisions themselves had at least one thing in common: They seemed to reflect a lack of basic human modesty on the part of many of the justices. Many are famously very old, and they have been together as a court for a very long time. One wonders if they have lost all understanding of how privileged they are to have lifetime sinecures of power and authority. Do they have any sense anymore of common human wisdom, of the normal human arrangements by which Americans live?

Maybe a lot of them aren’t bothering to think. Maybe Ruth Bader Ginsburg is no longer in the habit of listening to arguments but only of watching William Rehnquist, and if he nods up and down she knows to vote “no,” and if he shakes his head she knows to vote “yes.” That might explain some of the lack of seriousness in the decisions. Local government can bulldoze Grandma’s house because it’s in the way of a future strip mall that will add more to the tax base? The Ten Commandments can appear on public land but not in a courthouse, but Moses, who received the Ten Commandments can appear in the frieze of the House but he’ll be sandblasted off the Supreme Court? Or do I have that the other way around?

What are they doing? All this hair splitting, this dithering, this cutting and pasting—all this lack of serious and defining principle. All this vanity.

Perhaps Justice Ginsburg or Justice Stevens will retire soon and write a memoir: Like Jefferson I held to principle, and like Lincoln I often lacked air conditioning. But in my intellectual gifts I’ve always found myself to be more like Oliver Wendell Holmes . . .

*   *   *

What is in the air there in Washington, what is in the water?

What is wrong with them? This is not a rhetorical question. I think it is unspoken question No. 1 as Americans look at so many of the individuals in our government. What is wrong with them?

I have read the Hillary book by Ed Klein, which has been heavily dumped on by conservatives, and understandably. In terms of political impact it is not a takedown but a buildup. Dick Morris says its sensational charges will only “embolden” her. They will certainly tend to inoculate her against future and legitimate criticism and revelations. The book is poorly written, poorly thought, poorly sourced and full of the kind of loaded language that is appropriate to a polemic but not an investigative work.

Here are some significant things about Mr. Klein’s book: It comes from an establishment journalist who’s had his professional ticket punched at the New York Times magazine and Newsweek. He has no conservative bona fides; he says he is and appears to be essentially apolitical. This is an anti-Hillary book by the MSM. It has been heavily promoted not by a conservative publication but by Vanity Fair magazine, which published a big fat juicy chapter in its famous “Deep Throat” issue. Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair’s editor, is the author of an anti-Bush book, passionately opposed to Iraq, and no one’s idea of a wing-nut. (Mr. Carter also bought serialization rights of Gail Sheehy’s book on Hillary, which managed to be both accusatory and politically sympathetic.) Previous successful Hillary books were written by Barbara Olson, Joyce Milton, Dick Morris and me, righties all, and David Brock, who had not a philosophy but employers. The Klein book looks to be a big success in terms of sales (350,000 first printing). This suggests there is a big market for a Hillary biography.

Mr. Klein’s problem is that he assumes the market is conservative and conservatives are stupid. They’re not, actually. They want solid sourcing and new information that is true.

*   *   *

Here is something good about the book. Klein treats Hillary as if she were a man. Remember the stories that said Dan Quayle was a cocaine salesman? That George W. Bush was a coke-sniffing, girl-chasing lush? That John F. Kennedy was a coke-sniffing, girl-chasing cynic? That Lyndon B. Johnson had a roving eye and held meetings with aides as he sat on the toilet? This is hard-guy politics: Run for office and we’ll throw everything we can that will stick and things that won’t stick too. Mr. Klein’s book is in this tradition. It treats Hillary as she has claimed she wants to be treated: not as a special case but like everyone else; not as a minority, not as a woman. Mr. Klein isn’t scared by her sex.

Mr. Klein’s central theme is not original. Hillary Rodham, committed left-wing operative and college radical, recognizes the raw talent and promise of the crude, yearning, cynical and attractive Bill Clinton. She marries him, and each receives something from the arrangement. She ties her wagon to a star and will rise to power with him; he receives ideological ballast, which he perceives as moral ballast, from a woman his equal in ambition and his superior in self-governance.

They rise. He compulsively chases women and is politically popular if unserious; she makes money, networks and burnishes their movement credentials. She knows of his philandering and looks the other way. They achieve the presidency and come in time to be seen as main-chancing Ivy League grifters.

He is a sentimental liberal who’ll do what he has to do to maintain his viability in the system; she is his ideological soul, and somewhat zany in her assumption that the United States of America elected her as co-president and desires her to redesign its medical system. They both have a degree of genuine human charm. He was truly warm, at least for a while and at least until he got bored. She was genuinely funny, with a quick wit and an ability to listen.

In the presidency he floundered and she flailed. Then he moderated and she disappeared. Then he embarrassed the country, she joined or led the coverup, they were found out, and she emerged as a patient, loving wife who stood by her man. (For those who’d enjoy an excellent fictional gloss on their story, see Charles McCarry’s “Lucky Bastard.”)

This is, essentially, the story Mr. Klein tells. It has been told before and will be told again.

But he ignores the Rosetta stone of Hillary studies, the senior college thesis she wrote on leftist organizer Saul Alinsky and how to change the American political culture, which her alma mater, Wellesley College, obligingly continues to suppress on her request. There is little on the Rose law firm. There are canned and seemingly cut-and-paste cameos of Hillary aides who are shady and bad because they are Hillary aides.

There is a certain disconnect. Mr. Klein famously suggests again and again that Hillary is, was or will be homosexual. He dwells on this, it seems, to further bolster the charge that the Clinton marriage was from day one a political deal and not a serious and traditional emotional bond. But he also seems to suggest a serious romantic relationship with Vince Foster.

*   *   *

The real problem with Hillary biographies is that the picture they paint, if it is true, is difficult for a normal person to believe. No one could be that bad. No one who has risen so high in American politics could possibly be that bad. To believe is to go to a dark place.

And the charges seem so at odds—so utterly at odds—with the nice, smiling woman who calls abortion a tragedy and enjoys speaking of how much she prays. This is the problem all Hillary biographers have: It’s too grim to believe. To believe that her story as presented by the books so far is true is to believe that she has clung to a premeditated plan for 40 years, that she is ruthless in the pursuit both of her own ambitions and of a deep and intractable leftist political agenda. And that she found her equal in a partner sufficiently hardhearted to stick with the plan, and the secrecy, and the weirdness. It’s too over the top. It seems hard to believe, not because it isn’t true but because it isn’t likely, usual, expected. It isn’t the kind of biography we are used to in our leaders. That is her great advantage.

What is needed is a big and serious book by respected reporters who can dig, think and type, and whose sourcing standards are high and unimpeachable. Will that happen? It would be big if it did. This book is not that book.

You know what would be fun, and actually helpful? If in the latest struggle over funding for public television, people said what they know to be true.

The argument, once again, is about whether PBS has a liberal bias. There are charges and countercharges, studies, specific instances cited of subtle partiality here and obvious side-taking there. But arguing over whether PBS is and has long been politically liberal is like arguing over whether the ocean is and has long been wet. Of course it is, and everyone knows it.

Not just Republicans, but Democrats. I doubt you could find a Democratic senator who, forced to announce the truth, standing at the gates of heaven and being questioned by St Peter, would not, on being asked, “By the way, is PBS liberal?” answer, “Of course.” Or, “Yes, but don’t tell Tom Delay I knew.”

Just about every Democrat on the Hill, and in the newsrooms of our country and the faculty lounges, knows that PBS in general reflects a liberal worldview. That’s why they like it. That’s why they want to keep it.

The Democratic Party naturally desires to retain or increase public funding of a television network whose overall and reflexive tendency is to persuade viewers to see the world as liberals see it. They say this is a First Amendment issue, an anticensorship issue, a Big Bird issue, and some of them mean it. But mostly they’re trying to keep a particular building on the liberal plantation up and operating.

The Republican Party naturally opposes and resents such funding. Why should they underwrite the opposition? Why should they force taxpayers to fund it? They say this is an issue of elemental justice, and many really mean it. But animating some of them, I think, is a certain spirit of destruction. If you are a conservative and have watched the past 30 years of PBS documentaries and talk shows, chances are you are angry, legitimately, and looking to apply a little punishment. Or a lot.

*   *   *

Conservative argue that in a 500-channel universe the programming of PBS could easily be duplicated or find a home at a free commercial network. The power of the marketplace will ensure that PBS’s better offerings find a place to continue and flourish.

This I doubt. Actually I’m fairly certain it is not true. And I suspect most people on the Hill know it is not true.

We live in the age of Viacom and “Who Wants to Be a Celebrity,” not the age of Omnibus and “Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts.” A lot of Democrats think that left to the marketplace, PBS will die. A lot of Republicans think so too, but don’t mind.

At its best, at its most thoughtful and intellectually honest and curious, PBS does the kind of work that no other network in America does or will do. Sumner Redstone is never going to pay for an 11-hour miniseries called “The Civil War”; he’s not going to invest money and years of effort into a reverent exhumation of the rich loam of American history. Les Moonves is not going to do “Nova.” Bob Iger is not going to OK a three-part series on relativity theory. Jeff Zucker isn’t going to schedule a calm, unhurried adult drama like “Masterpiece Theatre.” They live in a competitive environment.

Such programming would be expensive, demanding, and a ratings disaster. It would earn Les Moonves the title, “former CBS chief.” Great TV work, the kind PBS at its best produced and produces, is more likely to come out of unhurried and rather removed environments. And boy, was PBS removed. They never had to worry about the bottom line; until recently they didn’t know there was a bottom line. But some great work came from PBS’s detachment from marketplace realities. And it has even been work—such as “The Civil War”—that helped our country by teaching our children the things they must know to go on to become adults who love their country. This, in the world we live in, is no small thing. It’s huge.

*   *   *

Why, then, doesn’t Congress continue to fund PBS at current levels but tell them they must stick to what they are good at, and stop being the TV funhouse of the Democratic Party? Nobody needs their investigative unit pieces on how Iran-contra was very, very wicked; nobody needs another Bill Moyers show; nobody needs a conservative counter to Bill Moyers’s show. Our children are being raised in a culture of argument. They can get left-right-pop-pop-bang anywhere, everywhere.

PBS exists to do what the commercial networks should and won’t. And just one of those things is bringing to Americans who have not and probably will not be exposed to it the great treasury of American art, from the work of Eugene O’Neill (again, ABC won’t be producing “Long Day’s Journey” anytime soon), outward to Western art (Shakespeare) and outward to world art.

And science. And history. But real history, meaning something that happened in the past as opposed to the recent present, with which PBS, alas, cannot be trusted.

Art and science and history. That’s where PBS’s programming should be. And Americans would not resent funding it.

PBS producers would rebel, claiming such programming would rock with age. What they would mean is, There’s little personal status in art, and much in controversy. You don’t get any particular respect for mounting a great play or a producing a great symphony: their excellence is already known. Respect and status come from controversy. But too bad. The point of PBS is not to employ clever producers.

*   *   *

Does all this sound rarefied, a ratings loser? PBS is supposed to be rarefied. As for ratings, let’s imagine this. PBS mounts a production of “Hamlet.” No one will watch it? What if Brad Pitt takes the role? He’d be happy to do it; he gets a high-class venue in which to show he can actually act, and in return he earns the gratitude of those who care about culture or say they care, which is most Americans. He’d get points for doing it for scale, which of course he’d have to. Young people would watch. They would thus imbibe Shakespeare, still the jewel in the crown of Western culture. PBS would be thanked for doing a public service. Conservative congressmen would find themselves in the unexpected and delightful position of being called friends of the arts, and liberal congressmen would be able to say “I told you PBS is worthwhile.”

And so on. Symphonies. A study of the work of George Bellows. A productions of “Spoon River Anthology.” David McCullough on George Washington. A history of the Second Amendment—why is it in that old Constitution? Angelina Jolie as Juliet, Kathleen Turner as Lady Macbeth, Alec Baldwin as Big Daddy when you get around to Tennessee Williams. It will keep him away from politics. Sean Penn as Hickey in “The Iceman Cometh.” There are far more great actors than there is great material. Mine the classics, all of them, of the theater and arts and music and history.

It is true that if you tell PBS producers they are now doing a play series they will immediately decide to remount “Angels in America.” How about a rule: It takes at least 50 years for a currently esteemed work to prove itself a work of art, a true classic. It proves this by enduring. Do plays that have proved themselves to be enduring contributions—i.e., art. Look to the permanent, not the prevalent.

PBS should be refunded, because it does not and will not exist elsewhere if it is not. But it should be funded with rules and conditions, and it should remember its reason for being: to do what the networks cannot do or will not do, and that somebody should do.

I don’t know that Democrats understand how Republicans experience the attacks Democratic leaders make on them. I’m not sure they know how they sound to us.

In America there is a lot of political integration. Democrats and Republicans are friends. Life forces them to be if they need to be forced, which most don’t. They know each other from the office, Little League, school meetings, the neighborhood. Actually America is mostly filled with people who say not “I’m a Democrat” and “I’m a Republican,” but “I voted for Bush” and “I like McCain” and “I voted for Kerry.” They identify by personal action more than political party, at least in my experience.

Washington is more politically segregated. In Washington, Democrats by and large hang out with Democrats, Republicans with Republicans. This is true in consulting, in think tanks, in journals, in Congress. If you work for a Democratic senator, the office is full of Democrats. The people with whom you share inside jokes and the occasional bitter aside are Democrats. The “neighborhood” in which you go to meetings during your long days is Democratic. The same is true for Republicans.

And it’s inevitable. The structure of things decrees it, as does human nature. Like-minded people seek like-minded people for stimulating conversation and more.

So in some key ways in Washington, the most politically engaged individuals in both parties do not understand each other. This expresses itself in certain assumptions. Democrats think Republicans are mean. Republicans know Democrats are the mean party.

*   *   *

Knowing that, let’s do a thought experiment. Close your eyes and imagine this.

President Bush is introduced at a great gathering in Topeka, Kan. It is the evening of June 9, 2005. Ruffles and flourishes, “Hail to the Chief,” hearty applause from a packed ballroom. Mr. Bush walks to the podium and delivers the following address.

“Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I want to speak this evening about how I see the political landscape. Let me jump right in. The struggle between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party is a struggle between good and evil—and we’re the good. I hate Democrats. Let’s face it, they have never made an honest living in their lives. Who are they, really, but people who are intent on abusing power, destroying the United States Senate and undermining our Constitution? They have no shame.

“But why would they? They have never been acquainted with the truth. You ever been to a Democratic fundraiser? They all look the same. They all behave the same. They have a dictatorship, and suffer from zeal so extreme they think they have a direct line to heaven. But what would you expect when you have a far left extremist base? We cannot afford more of their leadership. I call on you to help me defeat them!”

Imagine Mr. Bush saying those things, and the crowd roaring with lusty delight. Imagine John McCain saying them for that matter, or any other likely Republican candidate for president, or Ken Mehlman, the head of the Republican National Committee.

Can you imagine them talking this way? Me neither. Because they wouldn’t.

Messrs. Bush, McCain, et al., would find talk like that to be extreme, damaging, desperate. They would understand it would tend to add a new level of hysteria to political discourse, and that’s not good for the country. I think they would know such talk is unworthy in a leader, or potential leader, of a great democracy. I think they would understand that talk like that is destructive to the ties that bind—and to the speaker’s political prospects.

*   *   *

Why don’t Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean know this? And what does it mean that they do not know it?

For as you know, the color-coded phrases in the “Bush speech” above come from speeches and statements given by Sen. Clinton and Democratic chairman Dean recently. (Mrs. Clinton’s comments are in green and Mr. Dean’s in purple, and I changed “right” to “left.”)

Clinton is likely the next Democratic nominee for president. Mr. Dean is the head of the Democratic Party. They are important and powerful. They may one day run the country. It is disturbing that they speak as they do.

How do people who are not part of the Democratic base react to their statements? I think something like this: What’s wrong with these people? Don’t they understand they lower things with their name calling and bitter language? If this is how they feel free to present themselves in public, what will they do and say in private if they ever run the country?

If Mr. Bush ever spoke this way, most Republicans would feel embarrassment. I would be among the legions who would denounce his statement. Democrats are half the country; it is offensive to label them as hateful, it’s wrong. Even though we’re torn by disagreements, there is an old and unspoken tradition that we’re all in this together, we’re all citizens together. It is destructive to act against this tradition.

One assumes all the media, especially the MSM, would treat the speech as if it were an epochal event in the Bush presidency, and the beginning of the end. They would say he was unleashing the dark forces of division; they would label his statement as manipulative, malevolent, immature.

And they’d be right.

*   *   *

There is a tradition of political generosity that prevails among the normal people of America, a certain live-and-let-live-ness. That is why Little League games don’t break out in fistfights, at least over politics. You don’t shun people in the neighborhood because they’re Democrats, and you don’t inform the Republican in the next cubicle that he is evil, lazy and racist. That just doesn’t play in America. There are breaches, exceptions, incidents. We are not angels. But by and large even though we disagree with each other, and even if we come to dislike each other, we maintain, for reasons both moral and practical, decorum. Civility. We keep a lid on it. We don’t lower it to the level of invective. We don’t by nature seek to divide.

When you have been in Washington long enough and have become consumed by your place in the political struggle, you can lose sight of the American arrangement. You can become harsh and shrill. You can become the sort of person who would start the fight at the Little League game. You can become—how might a columnist, as opposed to a political leader, put it?—a jackass. But not a funny one, a destructive one, the type that can knock down the barn it took the farmer years to build.

The comportment of Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean is actually not worthy of America. Their statements suggest they are in no way equal to the country they seek to lead. And something tells me that sooner or later America is going to tell them. But in a generous, mature and fair-minded way.

Some wounds don’t fully heal because they’re too deep and cut too close to the bone. The story that Deep Throat was Mark Felt has torn open old wounds. Pat Buchanan, Robert Novak and Chuck Colson—all at the top of their game 30 years ago, all very much in the game today—were passionate in their criticism, saying Mr. Felt has little to be proud of, was unprofessional, harmed his country. Ben Stein was blunt: Mr. Felt “broke the law, broke his oath, and broke his code of ethics.” Old Watergate hand Richard Ben-Veniste and the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen called Mr. Felt a hero. The old battle lines fall into place. As to the higher themes of the story, some were credulous. On the “Today” show yesterday Chris Matthews called those who have criticized Mr. Felt “hacks and flacks,” whereas reporters “are looking for the truth” and can be trusted. Glad he cleared that up.

Was Mr. Felt a hero? No one wants to be hard on an ailing 91-year-old man. Mr. Felt no doubt operated in some perceived jeopardy and judged himself brave. He had every right to disapprove of and wish to stop what he saw as new moves to politicize the FBI. But a hero would have come forward, resigned his position, declared his reasons, and exposed himself to public scrutiny. He would have taken the blows and the kudos. (Knowing both Nixon and the media, there would have been plenty of both.) Heroes pay the price. Mr. Felt simply leaked information gained from his position in government to damage those who were doing what he didn’t want done. Then he retired with a government pension. This does not appear to have been heroism, and he appears to have known it. Thus, perhaps, the great silence.

His motives were apparently mixed, as motives often are. He was passed over to replace J. Edgar Hoover as director of the FBI by President Nixon, who apparently wanted in that place not a Hoover man but a more malleable appointee. Mr. Felt was resentful. He believed Nixon meant to jeopardize the agency’s independence. Here we have a hitch in the story. The liberal story line on the FBI was that under Hoover it had too much independence, which Hoover protected with his famous secret files and a reputation for ruthlessness. Mr. Felt was a Hoover man who joined the FBI in 1942, when it was young; he rose under Hoover and never knew another director. When Hooverism was threatened, Mr. Felt moved. In this sense Richard Nixon was J. Edgar Hoover’s last victim. History is an irony factory.

Even if Mr. Felt had mixed motives, even if he did not choose the most courageous path in attempting to spread what he thought was the truth, his actions might be judged by their fruits. The Washington Post said yesterday that Mr. Felt’s information allowed them to continue their probe. That probe brought down a president. Ben Stein is angry but not incorrect: What Mr. Felt helped produce was a weakened president who was a serious president at a serious time. Nixon’s ruin led to a cascade of catastrophic events—the crude and humiliating abandonment of Vietnam and the Vietnamese, the rise of a monster named Pol Pot, and millions—millions—killed in his genocide. America lost confidence; the Soviet Union gained brazenness. What a terrible time. Is it terrible when an American president lies and surrounds himself by dirty tricksters? Yes, it is. How about the butchering of children in the South China Sea. Is that worse? Yes. Infinitely, unforgettably and forever.

And so the story that Mark Felt was Deep Throat exposes old fissures, and those fissures are alive and can burst open because a wound this size—all this death, all this loss—doesn’t really heal.

*   *   *

Maybe the big lesson on Felt and Watergate is as simple as the law of unintended consequences. You do something and things happen and you don’t mean them to, and if you could take it back you would, but it’s too late. The repercussions have already repercussed. Mark Felt cannot have intended to encourage such epic destruction. He must have thought he was doing the right thing, protecting his agency and maybe getting some forgivable glee out of making Nixon look bad. But oh the implications. Literally: the horror.

Were there heroes of Watergate? Surely many unknown ones, those who did their best to be constructive and not destructive, those who didn’t think it was all about their beautiful careers. I’ll give you a candidate for great man of the era: Chuck Colson. Colson functioned in the Nixon White House as a genuinely bad man, went to prison and emerged a genuinely good man. He told the truth about himself in “Born Again,” a book not fully appreciated as the great Washington classic it is, and has devoted his life to helping prisoners and their families. He paid the price, told the truth, blamed no one but himself, and turned his shame into something helpful. Children aren’t dead because of him. There are children who are alive because of him.

Is the Deep Throat story over? Yes, in the sense that it will no longer be treated as a mystery. In spite of the million questions we’ll be hearing—and there are and will be many serious questions—the MSM will stick with the heroic narrative. Mr. Felt was Deep Throat. Deep Throat was a great man who helped a great newspaper put the stop to the lies and abuses of an out-of-control White House. End of story. Why? Because in celebrating this story in a certain way journalists of a certain age celebrate themselves. Because to bring unwelcome and unwanted skepticism to the narrative would be to deny 20th-century journalism—and 21st-century journalists—their great claim to glory. Because the MSM is still liberal, and the great Satan of all liberals, still, is Richard Nixon. And because, as Ben Bradlee might say, It’s a goddamn good story.

Or as they put it in yet another John Ford masterpiece, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” “When the legend becomes the fact, print the legend.”

You’ve heard the mindless braying and fruitless arguments, but I’m here to tell you the facts, no matter what brickbats and catcalls may come my way. Lindsey Graham defied the biases of his constituency to do what was right, not what was easy. Robert Byrd put aside personal gain to save our Republic. David Pryor ignored the counsels of hate to stand firm for our hopes and dreams. Mike DeWine protected our way of life. These men are uniters, not dividers.

How do I know?

Because they told me. Again and again, and at great length, as they announced The Deal. And I believed them, because I am an idiot. Or as they might put it, your basic “folk” from “back home.”

Listening to them I thought of some of the great and hallowed phrases of our Republic. “The rooster who thought he brought the dawn.” “The only man who can strut sitting down.”

I know they’re centrists, but there is nothing moderate about their self-regard. And why should there be? I personally was dazzled by their refusal to bow to the counsels of common sense and proportion, and stirred that they had no fear of justified insult (“blowhard,” “puffed up popinjay”) as they moved forward in the halls of the United States Senate to bravely proclaim their excellence.

*   *   *

John McCain wryly reminded us not to miss A&E’s biography of his heroic Vietnam experience. Joe Lieberman referred to the group as “this band of brothers, and sisters.” But my favorite was Lindsey Graham, who said, “I know there will be folks ‘back home’ who will be angry, but that’s only because they’re not as sophisticated and high-minded as I am. Actually they’re rather stupid, which is why they’re not in the Senate and I am. But I have 3 1/2 years to charm them out of their narrow-minded resentments, and watch me, baby.”

Oh, excuse me, that’s not what he said. That’s only what he meant. It was the invisible scroll as he spoke. The CNN identifier that popped up beneath his head as he chattered, however, did say, “Conceited Nitwit Who Affects ‘Back Home’ Accent to Confuse the Boobs.”

Oh wait, that’s not what it said. It said, “R-South Carolina.” My bad.

Actually, what Mr. Graham said was, “People at home are gonna be mad at me for a while.” He said he decided to support the deal because “kids are dyin’ “ in Iraq, “Social Security is comin’ up,” and “this is a lot bigger than me.” If only he knew that is true.

*   *   *

Why do they do this? Is their egomania not part of a trend? Have you noticed that every announcement now made on television has become an Academy Awards show in which the speaker announces that he is the winner? I often watch cable news during the day, and in the past year I’ve been taken aback by what happens when a local police chief announces the capture of a serial killer who’s been murdering people for 30 years. The police chief does not say, “We finally got him.” Instead he gives a long speech congratulating himself, lauding law-enforcement personnel, complimenting his department, congratulating investigators and their families, and nodding to the district attorney, the attorney general and the governor. Sometimes the police chief’s voice shakes, so moved is he by the excellence of himself, his colleagues and his bosses. Then he announces a bad guy got caught. The only thing he never says is, “Sorry it took 30 years!” The only question he doesn’t want to hear is, “Didn’t you get tips on that guy in 1978?”

All this self-lauding has become strange. Public figures use the press to laud themselves with no embarrassment, no sense of what is important, and no sense of modesty. If Jack Webb were here he would deck these guys. Broderick Crawford would bark “10-4” and hit them on the head with his Highway Patrol walkie-talkie. Once again I think of the wisdom of Tony Soprano: Let Gary Cooper talk and he’ll never shut up.

Every announcement of news in America has become an Academy Awards show. And every speaker has become a variation on Sally Fields: “I like me, I really like me!”

*   *   *

Back to the senators. Why did they put on that performance the other day? Yes, it was sheer exuberant egotism; it was the excitement of the TV lights; it was their sly conviction that if they laud themselves they will be appearing to laud the institution; and it was, no doubt, the counsel of their advisers that in the magic medium of television, if you declare you are a “hero” often enough people will come to associate the word “hero” with you. Advisers, you must stop telling them this. Please.

I think everyone in politics now has been affected by the linguistic sleight-of-hand, which began with the Kennedys in the 1960s, in which politics is called “public service,” and politicians are allowed and even urged to call themselves “public servants.” Public servants are heroic and self-denying. Therefore politicians are heroic and self-denying. I think this thought has destabilized them.

People who charge into burning towers are heroic; nuns who work with the poorest of the poor are self-denying; people who volunteer their time to help our world and receive nothing in return but the knowledge they are doing good are in public service. Politicians are in politics. They are less self-denying than self-aggrandizing. They are given fame, respect, the best health care in the world; they pass laws governing your life and receive a million perks including a good salary, and someone else—faceless taxpayers, “the folks back home”—gets to pay for the whole thing. This isn’t public service, it’s more like public command. It’s not terrible—democracies need people who commit politics; they have a place and a role to play—but it’s not saintly, either.

I don’t know if politicians have ever been modest, but I know they have never seemed so boastful, so full of themselves, and so dizzy with self-love.

There. Thank you. I yield the floor.

This is the official end of high heels in Washington, isn’t it?

The Republican Senate staffer, who spoke to me after she returned to her desk following the evacuation of the Capitol, laughed.

“I think it might be, yeah,” she said.

She spoke to me anonymously because she wanted to be free with her observations.

I asked her what it was like at 11:59 a.m. Wednesday, when word came to the Hart Senate Office Building that everyone had to get out. Here’s her story.

*   *   *

“I was on the phone in the office. The girl behind me, about 30 years old, all of a sudden jumped up and said, ‘They’re running off the floor!’ We have a TV monitor in the office that is always showing the floor of the Senate. Sen. [Carl] Levin was running off the floor.
“A few minutes later the alarms came. The squawk box goes off: ‘Evacuate immediately! Evacuate immediately!’ Each office has a big black duffel bag with gas masks and decontamination stuff. We’re all trained in the use of this stuff. Big sealed bag. Somebody grabbed it. We evacuated immediately.

“Every office has been trained—each office is required to have an official security person who makes sure everyone is out. You meet later at a designation.

“So we go down the stairs and out the door. What’s interesting about this is the people who have been here a while know what the drill is, but the kids who’ve just come in, the interns, the new staff, the visitors to the Capitol, they flip out. They haven’t had the experience that you in New York and we in Washington have had.

“Longtime staffers move purposefully. They’re not seized with ‘Oh my God!’ The new ones run. The kids were like they were fleeing for their lives. They are all on their cell phones calling mom back in Dubuque.

“We’re fighting a war; you’re involved because you’re in the Capitol.

“I was here on 9/11. That day I had to be forced to leave because I refused to leave when I found out it was terrorism. When the second plane hit the towers everyone left, but my reaction was, ‘No blankin’ terrorist is gonna make me leave the Capitol.’

“There’s different ways people think after something like this. Some think I could be back home in Iowa with my garden and my house and my kids.

“Others think, I belong to the U.S. government and there’s no way I’m not doing my job.

“This time I left. I don’t want to cause an argument.

“I was wearing open-toed, two-inch heels. Is this the official end of high heels in Washington? I think it might be, yeah.

“This time they did not say remove your shoes. They said, ‘Run, move away from the Capitol, move east, move east.’ You could tell it was something from the way they acted. I thought of Barbara Olson, because I could tell it was serious this time, and I was there that day.

“There were a lot of hazmat trucks, ambulances, the police in black vans, FBI or whatever. I feel like something is working—we’re coordinating better, and more seriously.

“We met at our designation, at the statue at Stanton Park, on C Street Northeast, a few blocks away. We did a headcount. Some people missing, but we knew they were elsewhere when we left.

“We stayed in Stanton Park for 40 minutes. People grabbed a smoke; smart people brought their lunch. The new people had to get their minds wrapped around it. A lotta people on cell phones calling kids, mom. Me too—I didn’t want my family to hear on the TV and worry I wasn’t alright.

“We left the office with a portable intercom. The official security person carries it. It signals when it’s all clear. It also signals when it has to tell us to get farther away from the Capitol. We waited to hear. They came on and said all clear.

“We said, ‘Good, let’s go.’ “

*   *   *

After we rang off I remembered the incident during the Reagan funeral, when everyone was evacuated from the Capitol because a small plane with a broken communications system strayed over restricted airspace. (It turned out to be carrying the governor of Kentucky.) Yesterday’s story is bigger because it involved both the Capitol and the White House, and because it heavily involved the White House press corps, which was given alarming and contradictory instructions: Get in the basement, run away from the building.

You witness a lot of pared down and unmediated human nature in situations like this. During the Reagan funeral, when many were gathered in ceremonial rooms in the Capitol, a gallant old woman, a former government official, calmly and very definitely informed a security man she was not leaving. A friend saw a powerful media figure almost knock over a wheelchair-bound woman as he raced from the room. A witty and brilliant woman turned her heel as she ran in high Manolo Blahniks down the Capitol steps. She slowed at the bottom and told a close friend to leave her, she couldn’t run anymore. He said: No, if you die my life won’t be fun anymore, I’m staying. And he did.

And I am thinking what the woman from the Hart Building told me about the young. It reminds me of Lesley Stahl. After 9/11, Lesley found that the young people in her office in New York were especially shook. Panic attacks, anthrax in the news, the fear that more death was coming.

When a young person would confide his or her fears, Lesley started saying, “Come sit next to me.” She would talk to them softly about how lucky they all were to have to concentrate on getting the news. They would sit with her at her desk and do their work next to her. Then after a while they’d leave, and if they got scared again an hour later, they would come and sit next to her again.

The young are new to history. The job of the mature is to be mature. Here’s to them.