Peggy Noonan

Ashley Smith and Brian Nichols were together for seven hours. This is Nichols’s mug shot. This is Nichols’s face after he gave himself up to police Saturday.

Something changed.

Something happened.

*   *   *

This is from the transcript of Ashley Smith’s testimony when she met with reporters in her lawyer’s office on Sunday, March 13:

It was about 2 o’clock in the morning. I was at—I was leaving my apartment to go to the store. I noticed a blue truck in the parking lot with a man in it pulling up. And he parked in the parking space. And I really didn’t think too much about it because I just moved into that apartment, you know, two days prior. So I thought maybe he was a neighbor coming home or something.

So I left and went to the store. And I came back to my apartment about five minutes later. And the truck was still there. And he was still in it. . . . And I kind of got a little worried then. I thought there’s somebody still in that truck. So I got my key to my house ready. And I opened up my car door, and I got out and shut it. And I heard his shut right behind me. I started walking to my door, and I felt really, you know, scared. . . .

I started to scream, and he put a gun to my side and he said, “Don’t scream. If you don’t scream I won’t hurt you.” He told me to go into the bathroom, so I went to the bathroom. And he followed into the bathroom and he said, “Do you know who I am?” and I said no because he had a hat on. And then he took his hat off, and he said, “Now do you know who I am?” And I said, “Yeah, I know who you are. Please don’t hurt, just please don’t hurt me. I have a 5-year-old little girl. Please don’t hurt me.”

He said, “I’m not going hurt you if you just do what I say.” I said, “All right.” So I got—he told me to get into the bathtub, so I got in the bathtub. And he said, “I really don’t feel comfortable around here. I’m going to walk around your house for a few minutes just so I get the feel of it.”

I said, “OK.”

He said, “I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to hurt anybody else, so please don’t do anything that’s going to hurt you.” He said, “You know, somebody could have heard your scream already. And if they did, the police are on the way. And I’m going to have to hold you hostage. And I’m going to have to kill you and probably myself and lots of other people. And I don’t want that.”

And I said, “OK. I will do what you say.”

He looked around my house for a few minutes. I heard him opening up drawers and just going through my stuff. And he came back in. And he said, “I want to relax. And I don’t feel comfortable with you right now. So I’m going to have to tie you up.”

He brought some masking tape and an extension cord and a curtain in there. And I kind of thought he was going to strangle me. I was—I was really kind of scared. But he told me to turn around and put my hands behind my back. And he wrapped my hands in a prayer—in a praying position, so I did that. And he wrapped masking tape around my hands. And then he told me to go into my bedroom. And I sat down on the bed like he asked. And he wrapped my legs with masking tape and an extension cord. . . .

He said, “Can you walk?”

And I said, “No.”

And so he picked me up and took me to the bathroom. And he put me on a stool that I have in my bathroom. He said he wanted to take a shower.

So I said, “OK. You take a shower.”

He said, “Well, I’m going to put a towel over your head so you don’t have to watch me take a shower.”

So I said, “OK. All right.”

He got in the shower. Took a shower. And then he got out of the shower. And he had the guns laying on the counter. But—I guess he really wasn’t worried about me grabbing them because I was tied up.

He asked me if I had a T-shirt. I told him where to find one.

So he got dressed. He put on some clothes that I had in my house that were men’s clothes. And then he came back in the bathroom.

He said, “Can you get up?”

So I got up.

He said, “Can you walk now?”

I said, “No, but I can hop.”

So I hopped to my bedroom and sat on the bed. And he cut the tape off of me, unwrapped the extension cord and curtain. I guess, at that point, he kind of made me feel like he was comfortable enough with me that he untied me. So—we went back in the bathroom. That’s where he felt more comfortable—in the bathroom away from the front of the house, I guess. And we just talked.

I asked him if—I told him that I was supposed to go see my little girl the next morning. And I asked him if I could go see her. And he told me no.

My husband died four years ago. And I told him that if he hurt me, my little girl wouldn’t have a mommy or a daddy. And she was expecting to see me the next morning. That if he didn’t let me go, she would be really upset.

He still told me no. But I could kind of feel that he started to—to know who I was. He said maybe. Maybe I’ll let you go—just maybe. We’ll see how things go.

We went to my room. And I asked him if I could read.

He said, “What do you want to read?”

Well, I have a book in my room.” So I went and got it. I got my Bible. And I got a book called “The Purpose-Driven Life.” I turned it to the chapter that I was on that day. It was Chapter 33. And I started to read the first paragraph of it. After I read it, he said, “Stop, will you read it again?

I said, “Yeah. I’ll read it again.” So I read it again to him.

It mentioned something about what you thought your purpose in life was. What were you—what talents were you given? What gifts were you given to use?

And I asked him what he thought. And he said, “I think it was to talk to people and tell them about you.”

I basically just talked to him and tried to gain his trust. I wanted to leave to go see my daughter. That was really important. I didn’t want him to hurt anybody else.

He came into my apartment telling me that he was a soldier. And that people—that his people needed him for a job to do. And he was doing it.

And—I didn’t want him to hurt anybody else. He didn’t want to hurt anybody else. He just told me that he wanted a place to stay to relax, to sit down and watch TV, to eat some real food.

I talked to him about my family. I told him about things that had happened in my life. I asked him about his family. I asked him why he did what he did.

And his reason was because he was a soldier.

I asked him why he chose me and why he chose Bridgewater Apartments. And he said he didn’t know, just randomly.

But after we began to talk, he said he thought that I was an angel sent from God. And that I was his sister and he was my brother in Christ. And that he was lost and God led him right to me to tell him that he had hurt a lot of people. And the families—the people—to let him know how they felt, because I had gone through it myself.

He told me that he didn’t—he didn’t want to hurt the agent that he hurt. He begged and pleaded with him to do things his way, and he didn’t. So he had to kill him. He said that he didn’t shoot the deputy, that he hit her. And that he hoped she lived. He showed me a picture of the—the agent that he did kill. And I tried to explain to him that he killed a 40-year-old man that was probably a father, a husband, a friend.

And he really began to trust me, to feel my feelings. He looked at pictures of my family. He asked me to—if he could look at them and hold them. . . .

I really didn’t keep track of time too much because I was really worried about just living. I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want him to hurt anybody else. And I really didn’t want him to hurt himself or anyone else to hurt him. He’s done enough—he had done enough. And he really, honestly when I looked at him, he looked like he didn’t want to do it anymore.

He asked me what I thought he should do.

And I said, “I think you should turn yourself in. If you don’t turn yourself in,” this is what I said, “If you don’t turn yourself in, lots more people are going to get hurt. And you’re probably going to die.”

And he said, “I don’t want that to happen.”

He said, “Can I stay here for a few days? I just want to eat some real food and watch some TV and sleep and just do normal things that normal people do.”

So, of course, I said, “Sure. You can stay here.” I didn’t want—I wanted to gain his trust.

Most of my time was spent talking to this man about my life and experiences in my life, things that had happened to me.

He needed hope for his life. He told me that he was already dead. He said, “Look at me, look at my eyes. I am already dead.”

And I said, “You are not dead. You are standing right in front of me. If you want to die, you can. It’s your choice.”

But after I started to read to him, he saw—I guess he saw my faith and what I really believed in. And I told him I was a child of God and that I wanted to do God’s will. I guess he began to want to. That’s what I think.

He got to know me. I got to know him. He talked about his family. How—he was wondering what they were thinking. He said, “They’re probably—don’t know what to think.”

We watched the news. He looked at the TV and he just said, “I cannot believe that’s me on there.”

About 5:30, 6—well, 6, 6:30—he said, “I need to make a move.” And I said, “A move?” He said, “I need to get rid of this car before daylight, this truck [the agent’s].” I said, “OK.”

I knew that if I didn’t agree to go with him, follow him to get the truck—he’d just take the truck, then one thing—or two—one of two things. He would kill me right then, and say, “All right, well, if you’re not going to help me, then I won’t need you anymore.” Or the police would never find him, or it would take longer. And someone else would get hurt, and I was trying to avoid that.

So I went . . . I said, “Can I take my cell phone?” He said, “Do you want to?” I said, “Yeah.” I’m thinking, well, I might call the police then, and I might not. So I took it anyway. He didn’t take any guns with him. The guns were laying around the house. Pretty much after he untied [me], they were just laying around the house.

And at one point, he said, “You know, I’d rather you shoot—the guns are laying in there—I’d rather you shoot me than them.” I said, “I don’t want anyone else to die, not even you.”

So we went to take the truck, and I was behind him, following him. And I thought about calling the police, you know, I thought, he’s about to be in the car with me right now. So I can call the police, and when he gets in the car, then they can surround me and him together, and I could possibly get hurt, or we can go back to my house.

And I really felt deep down inside that he was going to let me see my little girl. And I said—or then when I leave, he can be there by himself, or he—he finally agreed to let me go see my daughter. I had to leave at 9, 9:30. And I really believed that he was going to.

From the time he walked into my house until we were taking that truck, he was a totally different person to me. I felt very threatened, scared. I felt he was going to kill me when—when I first—when he first put the gun to my side. But when I followed him to pick—to take the truck, I felt he was going to—he was really going to turn himself in. So he took the truck.

He got in the car and I said, “Are you ready now?” And he said, “Give me a few days, please.” I said, “Come on, you’ve got to turn yourself in now.” I didn’t feel like he might—I felt like he might change his mind, that he might not want to turn himself in the next day, or a few days after that, and that if he did feel that way, then he would need money, and the only way he could get money was if he hurt somebody and took it from them.

So we went back to my house and got in the house. And he was hungry, so I cooked him breakfast. He was overwhelmed with—”Wow,” he said, “real butter, pancakes?”

And I just talked with him a little more, just about—about—we pretty much talked about God . . . what his reason was, why he made it out of there.

I said, “Do you believe in miracles? Because if you don’t believe in miracles—you are here for a reason. You’re here in my apartment for some reason. You got out of that courthouse with police everywhere, and you don’t think that’s a miracle? You don’t think you’re supposed to be sitting here right in front of me listening to me tell you, you know, your reason here?”

I said, “You know, your miracle could be that you need to—you need to be caught for this. You need to go to prison and you need to share the word of God with them, with all the prisoners there.”

Then 9 came. He said, “What time do you have to leave?” I said, “I need to be there at 10, so I need to leave about 9:30.” And I sat down and talked to him a little bit more. And he put the guns under the bed, like . . . I’m not going to mess around with them anymore.

He gave me some money when I was about to leave. Just kind of like he knew. I said, “You might need this money.” And he said, “No, I don’t need it. I’m going to be here for the next few days.”

I basically said, keep the money. And he said, “No, I don’t need it.” He asked me if there was anything I could do—or he could do for me before I left, or while I was going. He says, “Is there anything I can do while you’re gone?”

I know he was probably hoping deep down that I was going to come back, but I think he knew that I was going to—what I had to do, and I had to turn him in, and I gave him—I asked him several times, you know, “Come on, just go with me.” He said, “I’ll go with you in a few days.”

But when he asked me, “Is there anything I can do while you’re gone, like hang your curtains or something?” And I said, “Yeah, if you want to.”

He just wanted some normalness to his life right then. He—I think he realized all this—all this that I’ve been through, this is not me. I don’t know, that’s my opinion of what he . . .

Then I left my house at 9:30. And I got in the car. And I immediately called 911. I told them that he was there, and she asked me where I was. I said, “Oh, I’m on my way to see my daughter.” I felt glad to just really be on my way to see my daughter. She said, “You’ve got to turn around and go to the leasing office.” So that’s what I did.

*   *   *

It is an idiot’s errand to follow such testimony with commentary. It’s too big. There is nothing newspaper-eloquent to say. We have entered Flannery O’Connor country, and only geniuses need apply.

Here are mere facts. They were together seven hours and each emerged transformed. He gave himself up without a fight and is now in prison. She reported to police all that had transpired, the police told the press, and now she is famous.

Tuesday evening on the news a “hostage rescue expert” explained that she “negotiated like a pro.” Actually what she did is give Christian witness. It wasn’t negotiation. It had to do with being human.

It is an amazing and beautiful story. And for all its unlikeliness you know it happened as Smith said. You know she told the truth. It’s funny how we all know this.

*   *   *

On CNN on Monday afternoon Kyra Philips focused on the angle of the book, “The Purpose-Driven Life,” that Ms. Smith had shown Nichols. She had a local preacher on to tell us more about the book, and more about Christianity. It was informative, loving, a beautiful moment of television.

The more the news played the testimony of Ashley Smith, the more each news show came to seem elevated, ennobled. The past few days the TV screen has been filled with some wonderful light.

Ashley Smith is a national hero—a brave, resourceful single mother who has suffered in her life, and who at a series of pivotal moments did the right thing and the kind thing and helped a killer end a killing spree.

Country songs will be written about her. She’s going to enter our folk lore.

Some people are unhappy to hear rumors she is going to write a book. This is understandable, but they are wrong. More is needed. I hope Ms. Smith reaches to a writer on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which was rocked by the story and did exceptional work covering it, and produces a book that answers these questions: How did she come to believe in Christ, who helped her know what she knows? How did this knowledge transform her? What did “The Purpose-Driven Life” tell her that she needed to know? Whose Bible was it she kept at home and read—one she bought or one she was given? Which book or part does she find herself going back to? What from the Bible did she read to Brian Nichols?

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Is it a matter of happenstance, is it without meaning, that America was taken by this drama at Eastertide, in the days before Palm Sunday, when a wanted man rode by donkey to an appointment at Golgotha?

Is it an accident that a great but troubled country that yearns so to be good is given such instruction at this time?

Maybe we should be thinking: God loves all of us, every one of us most tenderly, even convicts, maybe especially convicts, who know what they are and hang their heads and one of whom, so long ago, looked up, and cried out to the man on the other cross, and received from him a promise of forgiveness and a promise that soon, very soon, they would stand together in a place without pain.

Maybe we should think: This is all quite a mystery, too big to be understood, too beautiful to be ignored.

I just feel like bowing to everyone, all the victims and all the survivors, the good judge, the good guards, the good woman, the reporters, all of whom became part of something big and without borders. The only lesson is love. I feel certain this is true.

Let’s think more about how America gets the news.

The network news organizations and their old flagship shows, the evening news, are in flux: falling ratings, an aging demographic, competition from cable, a general loss of prestige, Rathergate.

But it’s foolish to think the network evening news shows don’t matter anymore. Dan Rather’s show, which has long come in third in a three-way race, gets on an average night eight million viewers. Bill O’Reilly’s show, No. 1 on cable, gets three million viewers on a great night. The networks continue to have greater penetration, higher numbers, bigger budgets.

They’re important; they aren’t over, and they shouldn’t be. Especially during a crisis—and we live in an age of crises—they have a crucial role to play. It is actually in the nation’s interest that network news get better at gathering and telling the news.

Here, offered as a public service, are three suggestions for the owners of the networks. First, stop being mesmerized by Cronkiteism. Second, put your money in the field. Third, put down that copy of the New York Times.

Do these things and good results will follow, including higher ratings.

*   *   *

Last year NBC spent a ton (reportedly $10 million) to get a new anchorman, Brian Williams, to replace Tom Brokaw, who also cost a ton. Next week Dan Rather steps down from CBS, and those who run that network will be told to pay a ton to get a star.
Why do they do this? Because they’re mesmerized by a myth—the corny and no longer relevant belief that the anchorman makes the evening news, that if he’s popular it’s popular.

This is the myth of Cronkiteism. Decades ago everyone in the news came to believe the “CBS Evening News” was No. 1 in the ratings because of the magic of Walter. The truth is Mr. Cronkite took over the evening news in 1963, a bland, plump fellow, a veteran of United Press International with a nice voice. He took over from Douglas Edwards, who covered World War II with Edward R. Murrow. CBS News in those days was the Tiffany network, and they had a great evening news show. Cronkite fit in.

Then John Kennedy was shot, and suddenly, for the first time in the TV era, all eyes turned to television—to the Tiffany network, with the best coverage. And Walter did good work. Soon corporate headquarters realized the evening news could be a moneymaker, a profit center. They pumped more money into the news division, which was still dominated by the ethos of the Murrow Boys, the great journalists who witnessed and took part in Ed Murrow’s one-man invention of CBS News. They created the best broadcast. Mr. Cronkite was its front man. He came to be broadly respected because his show was broadly respected.

Mr. Cronkite became the first megastar TV anchorman, and a generation of programming executives misunderstood why. They thought this was the lesson: first the anchor, then the popularity. This was the opposite of the truth: first an excellent broadcast, then the anchor’s popularity.

Soon CBS will replace Dan Rather. They should hire a reasonable journalist at a reasonable price and then build a sterling, stellar broadcast around him. They should save the money they’d spend on a star and put it in the show.

They should forgo the temptation to blow out all the stops and drag the new anchor to every market in America as the new face of CBS News. They should forgo the temptation to spend a fortune on commercials promoting him. Just put him in there and let America find him. Then let him do interviews. At that point people will actually care what he has to say. People in America like to find stars on their own. Let them.

CBS should also forgo the temptation to spend millions and millions on a new set, new graphics and new theme music. Message to the executive producer: No one in America cares about a new set or new graphics. When focus groups say they notice such things, it’s only because such things have been shoved in their faces and a response requested. New anchors get new sets because anxious producers need something they can point at. The executive producer thinks he has to tell the news division president, who has to tell the company CEO: “We’re doing something big, changing the look of the show.”

It’s a way of covering up the fact that you don’t have a clue.

*   *   *

So take all that money and get yourselves some talented, hungry correspondents. A lot of them. They should be all over Africa, South America, the Mideast and Europe, with talented crews.

Stop with the Stepfordism. Don’t get bright young blondes named Kimmy, Kubby and Koopy. Instead, rehire the great old guys and women you started laying off in the 1980s because they were getting a little fat, a little old, a little untelegenic. They didn’t pop, so you popped them.

Hire them back. They’re all teaching in journalism schools, and they miss the game like you wouldn’t believe. They’ll be thrilled with a second chance, and they’d bring back some of the authority the networks have lost. This is a whole country that enjoys looking at Sipowicz on “NYPD Blue.” This is a whole country that’s aging. We don’t want to watch cupcakes on network TV. That’s what local is for. (Added benefit: when you rehire all these old pro’s it will be a story, get publicity, and the Disney Co., itself eager to return to its roots after decades of cynicism and scandal, will make a hit two-hour movie about it. Because it’s a good story!)

Then open it up—trust your correspondents in the field. Let them tell you the story. Don’t tell them what the story is from New York, after you’ve read the Times and the Washington Post. Let them tell you the story. Let them be our eyes.

What really happened today in Iraq, what are U.S.soldiers doing, what’s the mood in the green zone among people who’ve been there a while? What are they selling in the local candy store in Tikrit, what are young men doing for jobs, what are mothers making for dinner, what’s available to put in the pot, how are the schools going, is it usual for an 8-year-old girl to go to school each day or has that gone by the boards because of war? What do American soldiers think of what Americans back home think of the war, what is their impression of our impression? What does a “letter from home” look like now? Is it a DVD? What is it like to live in a place where everything’s been fine and calm for 10 days and you know you’ve turned a corner and just as you’re thinking this there’s an explosion 10 blocks away and suddenly you hear sirens and people are cowering in doorways?

*   *   *

If you allowed your fine and grizzled correspondents to find the answers and tell us, you would get a fresh and refreshing broadcast. But this does involve putting down your copy of the New York Times.

I worked at CBS 20 years ago and what was true of us then is true now, and true of every other network newsroom: They key evening news coverage off the front page of the New York Times. In Ken Auletta’s piece in The New Yorker this week on Dan Rather’s goodbye he has Mr. Rather in a “Front Page” mode, briskly asking his executive producer what the lead will be that night. Iraq, he answers, and part of the package keys off today’s Times report.

Why do they do this? Is it because the Times knows everything? No. And network producers know it doesn’t know everything. But the bosses of the producers read the Times. And the owners of the network read the Times. And the subordinates of the producers read the Times. They do this because it’s there. If it’s in the Times, it’s real. This is a thought-hangover from 30 years ago, but it lingers.

Thirty years ago this thinking was more understandable. The Times, infuriating on any given day or not, was acknowledged as the nation’s great newspaper. But the Times is now simply an esteemed newspaper. And more and more it plays to a niche, Upper West Side liberals wherever they are. It is not the voice of the age, it is a voice. So less reason than ever to key your coverage off it.

Worse, it kills creativity and enterprise. And it makes the news boring. Who wants a 7 p.m. newscast that reflects the newspaper that hit the Internet 18 hours earlier? The old excuse was, Yeah but we got moving pictures. Now however those pictures have been all over the news by the time it’s 7 p.m.

Turn this bad old habit on its head. Don’t make “It was in the Times” the reason to do a story. Make “It was in the Times” a reason not to do it.

*   *   *

To sum up. Beef up the correspondent staff, hire the best, spend bucks on bureaus, be more independent and creative in your coverage, settle back and let America discover your show.

People will notice in time. In time they’ll become regular viewers. This is the way to prestige and profits. This is the way out of embarrassment and scandal.

For the anchor, get a reasonable journalist and surround him with a great show. Soon enough, as respect and numbers grow, your anchor will be called a Cronkite. That’s how you get a Cronkite. You make the show the star and he becomes a star.

And do this to better serve the American public, which owns the airwaves that provide the platform for your product. Give them a better product. As a public service.

There are two predominant journalistic memes since the Arab spring began. The first, from the left: What if Bush was right? This was most famously and appropriately grappled with on Comedy Central, when Democratic foreign-policy thinker Nancy Soderberg consoled Jon Stewart with the hopefully facetious, but either way revealing, advice to hang on, things can still turn bad with North Korea or Iran. The other, from the middle and the right: As I wrote in this space two years ago, the invasion of Iraq will likely give rise to a surge of democratic feeling that will inspire the entire Mideast. This is known as making it clear to one’s fans and foes that you were on the right side of history.

It’s also known as bragging. But so what? All who supported the Iraqi invasion took lumps for it; all who defended it in what seemed its dark days, and argued for its potential to transform the air of defeat that lingered over Arab politics, deserve the right to say, “I was right.” So go here and here for a sampling of what things looked like to me back then.

I continue to think the president’s inaugural address, suggesting as it did that he was on a mission to expunge all political tyranny from the globe, and asserting that our nation’s survival depended on this utopian project, was a rather crazy speech, weirdly Wilsonian and at odds with conservatism’s ancestral knowledge of the imperfectability of this world and the inability of politics to heal all that wounds us. (Take it away, FreeRepublic.) Samuel Johnson was a genius of literature, but he knew his politics: “How small of all that human hearts endure / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!”

But some things can be healed, and precisely because the endeavor is not utopian but practical. The Iraq project was not utopian: it was a high-risk gut call, a gamble that was also an investment, and it was motivated in part by a belief that progress is possible when right action is boldly taken. By continuing a laser-like focus on the area in which so much of our nation’s energies had been so deeply invested, by staying the course, by sticking to his timetable for elections, President Bush, with his grit, has produced an outcome that is deeply impressive, moving, and cause for world-wide joy.

No one knows what comes next. No one knows what Hezbollah will do, no one knows what will emerge from what is still a cauldron. But no one can say that a new hopefulness has not been infused, and infused by America.

*   *   *

Which leaves the world right now in an interesting place. For America a moment of unaccustomed satisfaction; for the West a moment of unaccustomed admiration for the American president; for the world’s left a moment of unaccustomed doubt; and for many, of all persuasions, a sense of wonderment.

For America, the international plan would be keep on keeping on. Keep solidifying and undergirding the progress in Iraq and Afghanistan, encourage events in Lebanon, Syria and Israel.

But domestically, it’s high time for a pivot.

The drama of the past 3 1/2 years has left us persistently looking outward. America’s thinkers look at Europe and wondering if they appreciate or even understand our leadership. They look at the Mideast and wonder if the rise of people power promises improved stability or signals the possibility of some newer kinds of chaos.

Our outward-looking stance is understandable. 9/11 tripped a series of events. We were attacked from without. And then we were at war. But 9/11 also presented us with a pressing domestic challenge: civil defense. Keeping people alive, or as safe as possible, or with options with which they’re familiar, in case of attack. Not enough is being done in this area, not enough attention is being paid, not enough support is being marshaled, not enough emphasis put.

And who can say the day will not come when we bitterly rue our dreamy lack of preparation? We live in the age of weapons of mass destruction. We live in an age of freelance actors and nuts with nukes. We all know this. We know the word “nuclear” is followed by the phrase “or chemical or biological weapons.” Because of these weapons, as again we all know, we could lose a million people in some American city tomorrow. More than taxes, more than Social Security, more than the financial arrangements by which we live, civil defense is the great domestic issue.

*   *   *

Man has never devised a weapon he hasn’t eventually used. When you live in the age of WMDs you have to assume they’ll eventually be used. And if you assume that, then you have to take steps to keep people as safe as possible as long as possible, and you have to be thinking about how to help them if the next big bad thing happens. Right now, a wise man recently complained, we’re essentially waiting to be attacked. Waiting does not seem prudent.

I am not saying nothing is being done. We are searching out the wicked in foreign lands; we are attempting to break terror cells; we are attempting to get imprisoned terrorists to talk. We have a Homeland Security Department but it is in a continual gearing-up stage, as new bureaucracies, as bureaucracies in general, tend to be.

But we are not doing enough. And I know this because no one is talking about it. Not our political class in Washington, not our local leaders and not, God knows, the media. They should have been all over this issue in the ‘90s, and were not. They should have been all over Osama and were not.

As citizens I think we should ask questions every day. What is the status of vaccine production? Most of our children have never been vaccinated against smallpox. But we know smallpox is one biological weapon that terrorists may use against us.

Is the average U.S. citizen less defended from cataclysm than senators and representatives? They have shelters in the Capitol, and they have gas masks too. Why don’t we? Do people on Capitol Hill have access to medicines and serums that might be needed in a terror event? If not, why not; and if so, why not the rest of us? Do Senators and Congressmen have CBN suits? Again, if not, why not; and if so, why not us?

To this day I don’t think there is a politician in America willing to sound the gong consistently on civil defense, because to build up support for toughening our civil defense you have to tell people the facts, again and again. Politicians don’t want to sound like fear mongers. They don’t want to look eccentric or obsessed. And they don’t want to be tuned out. I think the general feeling among political leaders on civil defense is they’re afraid America will look at them and say, “You are ruining my high. You are so bringing me down.” No one wants to hear again and again that you’re a target. But we are a target.

*   *   *

Let me tell you what I’m seeing in my beloved New York. We are building. You can’t go by a big street and not see the scaffolding and cranes. We are rebuilding downtown where the towers were. We are building a memorial 1,776 feet high. We are rebuilding the Brooklyn waterfront, that beautiful waterfront where I walk each day. They’re planning on putting in parks. We’re building stadiums. We’re rocking. Building is good. But we’re not doing it with enough of an eye to the next big bad thing. And this is a city that knows something about big bad things.

We are doing all this building at the same time that various insane and quite evil men are planning on doing away with our city. They won’t be happy until those skyscrapers are cinders. And when and if they move, the children playing so happily in our brand new Brooklyn waterfront park are going to get hurt. So maybe we could throw in a fallout shelter? Maybe we could be throwing in a few small health clinics, well stocked for a bad day?

But we’re not. That would be a downer too. I think New York and other American cities are on such a building-and-beautifying binge not only because politicians like to take money and build things you can see, and not only because the local economy is growing. I think in New York we build and plan and draw up new parks and new skyscrapers because it makes us feel safe. As if “If you build it, they won’t come.” And it makes us feel brave, insouciant. “We must be a hardy people, or we wouldn’t be building new sports stadiums.” But it’s one thing to be optimistic and burly, it’s another thing to be fooling yourself.

Nothing is bigger than civil defense. At the beginning of an actual and metaphoric spring it is something we should turn to with renewed commitment. We’ll regret it if we don’t.

“Salivating morons.” “Scalp hunters.” “Moon howlers.” “Trophy hunters.” “Sons of Sen. McCarthy.” “Rabid.” “Blogswarm.” “These pseudo-journalist lynch mob people.”

This is excellent invective. It must come from bloggers. But wait, it was the mainstream media and their maidservants in the elite journalism reviews, and they were talking about bloggers!

Those MSMers have gone wild, I tell you! The tendentious language, the low insults. It’s the Wild Wild West out there. We may have to consider legislation.

When you hear name-calling like what we’ve been hearing from the elite media this week, you know someone must be doing something right. The hysterical edge makes you wonder if writers for newspapers and magazines and professors in J-schools don’t have a serious case of freedom envy.

The bloggers have that freedom. They have the still pent-up energy of a liberated citizenry, too. The MSM doesn’t. It has lost its old monopoly on information. It is angry.

But MSM criticism of the blogosphere misses the point, or rather points.

Blogging changes how business is done in American journalism. The MSM isn’t over. It just can no longer pose as if it is The Guardian of Established Truth. The MSM is just another player now. A big one, but a player.

The blogosphere isn’t some mindless eruption of wild opinion. That isn’t their power. This is their power:

1. They use the tools of journalists (computer, keyboard, a spirit of inquiry, a willingness to ask the question) and of the Internet (Google, LexisNexis) to look for and find facts that have been overlooked, ignored or hidden. They look for the telling quote, the ignored statistic, the data that have been submerged. What they are looking for is information that is true. When they get it they post it and include it in the debate. This is a public service.

2. Bloggers, unlike reporters at elite newspapers and magazines, are independent operators. They are not, and do not have to be, governed by mainstream thinking. Nor do they have to accept the directives of an editor pushing an ideology or a publisher protecting his friends. Bloggers have the freedom to decide on their own when a story stops being a story. They get to decide when the search for facts is over. They also decide on their own when the search for facts begins. It was a blogger at the World Economic Forum, as we all know, who first reported the Eason Jordan story. It was bloggers, as we all know, who pursued it. Matt Drudge runs a news site and is not a blogger, but what was true of him at his beginning (the Monica Lewinsky story, he decided, is a story) is true of bloggers: It’s a story if they say it is. This is a public service.

3. Bloggers have an institutional advantage in terms of technology and form. They can post immediately. The items they post can be as long or short as they judge to be necessary. Breaking news can be one sentence long: “Malkin gets Barney Frank earwitness report.” In newspapers you have to go to the editor, explain to him why the paper should have another piece on the Eason Jordan affair, spend a day reporting it, only to find that all that’s new today is that reporter Michelle Malkin got an interview with Barney Frank. That’s not enough to merit 10 inches of newspaper space, so the Times doesn’t carry what the blogosphere had 24 hours ago. In the old days a lot of interesting information fell off the editing desk in this way. Now it doesn’t. This is a public service.

4. Bloggers are also selling the smartest take on a story. They’re selling an original insight, a new area of inquiry. Mickey Kaus of Kausfiles has his bright take, Andrew Sullivan had his, InstaPundit has his. They’re all selling their shrewdness, experience, depth. This too is a public service.

5. And they’re doing it free. That is, the Times costs me a dollar and so does the Journal, but Kausfiles doesn’t cost a dime. This too is a public service. Some blogs get their money from yearly fund-raising, some from advertisers, some from a combination, some from a salary provided by Slate or National Review. Most are labors of love. Some bloggers–a lot, I think–are addicted to digging, posting, coming up with the bright phrase. OK with me. Some get burned out. But new ones are always coming up, so many that I can’t keep track of them and neither can anyone else.

But when I read blogs, when I wake up in the morning and go to About Last Night and Lucianne and Lileks, I remember what the late great Christopher Reeve said on “The Tonight Show” 20 years ago. He was the second guest, after Rodney Dangerfield. Dangerfield did his act and he was hot as a pistol. Then after Reeve sat down Dangerfield continued to be riotous. Reeve looked at him, gestured toward him, looked at the audience and said with grace and delight, “Do you believe this is free?” The audience cheered. That’s how I feel on their best days when I read blogs.

That you get it free doesn’t mean commerce isn’t involved, for it is. It is intellectual commerce. Bloggers give you information and point of view. In return you give them your attention and intellectual energy. They gain influence by drawing your eyes; you gain information by lending your eyes. They become well-known and influential; you become entertained or informed. They get something from it and so do you.

6. It is not true that there are no controls. It is not true that the blogosphere is the Wild West. What governs members of the blogosphere is what governs to some degree members of the MSM, and that is the desire for status and respect. In the blogosphere you lose both if you put forward as fact information that is incorrect, specious or cooked. You lose status and respect if your take on a story that is patently stupid. You lose status and respect if you are unprofessional or deliberately misleading. And once you’ve lost a sufficient amount of status and respect, none of the other bloggers link to you anymore or raise your name in their arguments. And you’re over. The great correcting mechanism for people on the Web is people on the Web.

There are blogs that carry political and ideological agendas. But everyone is on to them and it’s mostly not obnoxious because their agendas are mostly declared.

7. I don’t know if the blogosphere is rougher in the ferocity of its personal attacks than, say, Drew Pearson. Or the rough boys and girls of the great American editorial pages of the 1930s and ’40s. Bloggers are certainly not as rough as the splenetic pamphleteers of the 18th and 19th centuries, who amused themselves accusing Thomas Jefferson of sexual perfidy and Andrew Jackson of having married a whore. I don’t know how Walter Lippmann or Scotty Reston would have seen the blogosphere; it might have frightened them if they’d lived to see it. They might have been impressed by the sheer digging that goes on there. I have seen friends savaged by blogs and winced for them–but, well, too bad. I’ve been attacked. Too bad. If you can’t take it, you shouldn’t be thinking aloud for a living. The blogosphere is tough. But are personal attacks worth it if what we get in return is a whole new media form that can add to the true-information flow while correcting the biases and lapses of the mainstream media? Yes. Of course.

I conclude with a few predictions.

Some brilliant rising young reporter with a growing reputation at the Times or Newsweek or Post is going to quit, go into the blogging business, start The Daily Joe, get someone to give him a guaranteed ad for two years, and become a journalistic force. His motive will be influence, and the use of his gifts along the lines of excellence. His blog will further legitimize blogging.

Most of the blogstorms of the past few years have resulted in outcomes that left and right admit or bray were legitimate. Dan Rather fell because his big story was based on a fabrication, Trent Lott said things that it could be proved he said. But coming down the pike is a blogstorm in which the bloggers turn out to be wrong. Good news: They’ll probably be caught and exposed by bloggers. Bad news: It will show that blogging isn’t nirvana, and its stars aren’t foolproof. But then we already know that, don’t we?

Some publisher is going to decide that if you can’t fight blogs, you can join them. He’ll think like this: We’re already on the Internet. That’s how bloggers get and review our reporting. Why don’t we get our own bloggers to challenge our work? Why don’t we invite bloggers who already exist into the tent? Why not take the best things said on blogs each day and print them on a Daily Blog page? We’d be enhancing our rep as an honest news organization, and it will further our branding!

Someone is going to address the “bloggers are untrained journalists” question by looking at exactly what “training,” what education in the art/science/craft/profression of journalism, the reporters and editors of the MSM have had in the past 60 years or so. It has seemed to me the best of them never went to J-school but bumped into journalism along the way–walked into a radio station or newspaper one day and found their calling. Bloggers signify a welcome return to that old style. In journalism you learn by doing, which is what a lot of bloggers are doing.

Finally, someday in America the next big bad thing is going to happen, and lines are going to go down, and darkness is going to descend, and the instant communication we now enjoy is going to be compromised. People in one part of the country are going to wonder how people in another part are doing. Little by little lines are going to come up, and people are going to log on, and they’re going to get the best, most comprehensive, and ultimately, just because it’s there, most heartening information from . . . some lone blogger out there. And then another. They’re going to do some big work down the road.

I have been thinking about John Paul II. Everyone has, I suppose. The pope yesterday missed Ash Wednesday services at the Vatican. This after a recent hospitalization.

Ash Wednesday reminds Catholics that we will leave this world some day, that from dust we came and to dust we will return. We are asked to renew our spiritual lives, to give up some small pleasure and give that sacrifice to God, at least until the spring, and Easter.

The pope’s long physical decline is part of a long goodbye that carries within it meaning. I want to talk at some length about how some see that meaning, and about how I saw John Paul 18 months ago.

*   *   *

After seeing him I thought: I saw a saint at sunset. It was actually early morning, 7:30 a.m. according to my notes, on July 2, 2003. A brilliant morning in the middle of the worst Roman heat wave in a century. The city was quiet, the streets soft with the heat.
Hundreds of us had gathered in the Piazza Del Suffizo, in the shadow of Bernini’s colonnade, the marble columns that curve outward around St. Peter’s Square. The breeze was warm, the pounding heat gathering, and we fanned ourselves with thin green Papal Audience tickets. The crowd was happy—chirping nuns, clicking tourists.

We were about to see the pope at his weekly audience. Among us: A group of deaf Italian adults in white baseball caps, with silk Vatican flags—green, gold and white—tied around their necks. Members of a choir from the Archdiocese of St Louis. A group of nuns from the Little Mission for the Deaf in Bologna, Italy. There was a man from Monterrey, Mexico, with his wife and two children. As the crowd grew we were pressed close, and began talking as if we knew each other.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“To see the pope,” said the man from Monterrey. “He is the most important Christian in the world. He is the follower of Christ.” When minutes later I read the quote back to him from my notebook he edited it. “He is the most important person in the whole world.”

I talked to a woman with a hat made of hay. Spiky yellow straw actually, the brim down to shade her face. She was wearing a big white clamshell suspended from a necklace. She was 45 or 50 and looked like pictures of the older, weathered Greta Garbo. She told me she was on a pilgrimage. She had walked hundreds of miles in a tour of Marian sites. She and her husband—bearish, gray-bearded—had departed upper Austria in May, and had arrived the preceding day, July 1. They had walked on highways and small roads. She showed me her diary of the pilgrimage; in neat, clear script she had documented every church they had seen along the way. Her husband had drawn pictures of cathedrals in blue ballpoint ink. He had taken snapshots of little chapels and pasted them in the diary. “Here,” she said to me. She pointed to a page on which she had drawn her feet after six weeks of walking. They are comic line drawings of angular feet bruised by exaggerated calluses. Next to them she drew the lotions and bandages she had put upon the wounds. They had gone to mass every day of their journey, she said. And why had they come here?

“Why? To see il Papa!” She gestured as if to say: This is the culmination.

*   *   *

We filed through metal detectors that did not seem to work—no beeping or bopping, no one watching things closely—and were directed through a paved area just off St Peter’s square. (Later, when I would return to it, a young priest would tell me, “We think he may have been crucified just under here.” I shook my head. “St. Peter. It may have been just about here, down there.” And he pointed at the pavement.)

We entered the Paul VI Audience Hall, an enormous concrete structure, cavernous and modern, like a big suburban evangelical church. Rows of fixed seats were pointed toward the stage. People were filing in single file and in groups, hundreds of them, then thousands. I walked among them and heard the language of France, England, Mexico, Austria, the Czech Republic. There were groups from West Africa, Germany, Poland, Scotland, Portugal and Brazil. A Romanian chorus of middle-aged women began to sing softly in their seats. When they finished, a choir from Bialystok, Poland, 30 young women and men, began to sing lustily.

Suddenly there was a rustling up front. Dozens of African women danced in, laughing and clapping in floor-length white cotton dresses. On the hems were sewn the words “Archdiocese of Freetown,” Sierra Leone. They sat next to Catholic school children from Rwanda, who were clapping and shaking tambourines.

I thought: The whole church is here.

The room rocked. Cheering here, drums there, an American spiritual crooned somewhere in the back. The choruses would pick up each other’s sound, so that a group from Santo Domingo would sing, and as they finished a young male choir from Poland, in white tie and tails, would take up the song, and then as they finished a group of American Indians—in native dress and full headdresses they looked like beautiful peacocks—would break into native drums. I thought the disparate but unified members of the audience, as they echoed and supported each other, were like a living symbol of the church every day in the world.

Something came alive on the stage. Two Swiss guards in their purple-and-orange uniforms, big red plumes on their black helmets, entered the stage and stood erect in the middle, with metal staffs. The audience began to applaud.

Then a flurry of cardinals and bishops in black, with red and purple sashes. Then two papal chamberlains in white tie and tails.

*   *   *

We looked to the left of the stage. There was movement.

It was him, the pope—20 minutes early. The woman next to me, a regular audience-goer, laughed. “When he’s ready, he’s ready these days,” she yelled to me over the noise.

The pope was rolled onto the stage. He was seated in a brown wooden chair that rested within some kind of wooden rig on little wheels. They pushed him forward slowly. It was like a wheel-throne; it was like the kind of big wooden roller they use to get something off the top shelf at Home Depot. It looked both practical and absurd.

He was dressed all in white, bent forward in his chair. White surplice, white beanie, white gold-fringed sash. As the wheel-throne reached the center of the stage a scrum of aides and cardinals surrounded his chair. They helped him to his feet, helped him gain balance, helped transfer him to a white upholstered high-backed chair. Then they turned it toward the audience.

He looked out at us. We looked back at him. His face was—oh, his face!

I thought of the little girl on John Paul’s last trip to Canada, two years before. She was a child, 6 or so, and she had it in her head that the pope was the best person in the world. So her parents brought her to a big outdoor mass, and she was chosen to give him flowers. She walked up to him with her little bouquet and held it toward him. He leaned his upper body toward her in his chair. Then she turned and ran sobbing from the stage with what seemed like panic. Because he was old and his head was big and his neck and back were curled and the effort to lift his head so you can see his face draws his features down, and the Parkinsonian mask that freezes his face makes him look angry, or ill-meaning, or sad. So the poor girl ran.

*   *   *

Now the crowd took to its feet and the applause was continuous. But it was muted somehow, not full of joy as the crowd had been before the audience had begun.
His cassock was too short—six inches off the floor. We could see his white cotton sport socks. We could see his worn brown shoes. This is a pontiff who wears old loafers, like a working man, like a regular man, and not the traditional silk slippers of a pope.

“We love you, Papa!” someone called out. “We love you, Holy Father.”

He lifted his head with effort. We took our seats. Suddenly I realized the purpose of a Vatican announcement that had been issued the week before, when I had just arrived in Rome. The Holy Father, the press office said, would not go hiking in the hills this summer as he had in the past, but instead would work through his vacation writing a memoir of his early years. Rome buzzed; how amazing that the old man would produce a book on his time off. What they didn’t notice, what had been cleverly obscured by the announcement, is that the pope’s legs don’t work anymore. Of course he isn’t hiking.

When I mentioned this later to a priest in Rome, he laughed. He told me John Paul has grown sensitive about speculation regarding his illnesses, and had recently groused, half comically, to an American cardinal, “Tell those American journalists the pope doesn’t run the church with his feet.”

*   *   *

The pope read to us from remarks typed on white letter-size paper. His voice was blurry and thick. The papers trembled in his hand. He spoke in Italian. The thin-necked microphone was sensitive; we could hear him breathe between the sentences.

People in the audience became distracted. Then the pope spoke in Polish and his voice became stronger, and even though most of the people in the audience didn’t understand what he was saying they quieted, and leaned forward.

He had a bad tremor in his left arm. During the translation he leaned his head and rested his chin on his left hand, in an attempt to control the tremor.

Then the pope cleared his throat and spoke in English. But the only words I could make out were, “the spirit of the Beatitudes.” Later I read the Associated Press report of the pope’s message. He had spoken of Psalm 145, which he called “a song of praise for the morning.” It ends, he said, “in a proclamation of the sovereignty of God over human history.” It reminds us, he said, that “the Lord shall reign forever.”

Schoolchildren from Santo Domingo cheered the old chant: Juan Pablo, Segundo, el padre de el mundo.

He raised his right hand to acknowledge the chants. The playfulness of the past—the way he used to wave with both hands, up and down, and say “Woo woo!” to the children who cheered him in New York and Chicago so long ago—is not possible to him any more.

And yet as I watched him I realized I did not see him as ill and frail. I saw him as encased—trapped in there, in an outer immobility. And yet inside he is still John Paul.

I thought: he is a victim soul. His suffering has meaning.

He is teaching us something through his pain.

*   *   *

He sang to us a little at the end, like an old man sitting in the sun. Most of us couldn’t tell the words or the tune but he was doing it for us, and there was something so beautiful and moving in it. I turned to a friend. “We are hearing a saint singing,” I said. I breathed it in, let the sound enter my ears. I wanted to put my hands over them and hold the sound in my head.

Then John Paul made the sign of the cross. The cardinals came and knelt before him and kissed his hand. A group of American Indians mounted the stage to kneel before him. Dozens of newly-wed couples in gowns and tuxedoes mounted the stage two by two to receive his blessing. Then the sick—children rolled out onto the stage in hospital beds, people in wheelchairs.

I always get the feeling with John Paul that if he could narrow down who he meets and blesses to those he likes best it would not be cardinals, princes or congressmen but nuns from obscure convents and Down syndrome children. Especially the latter. Because they have suffered, and because in some serious and amazing way they understand more than most people. Everyone else gets tied up in ambition and ideas and bustle, but the modest and limited are able to receive this message more deeply and openly: God loves us, his love is all around us, he made us to love him and play with him and serve him and be happy.

I know a woman who once worked with the retarded. The Down syndrome children would ask her to comb her long blond hair, and then they’d get lost in it, lost in the beauty of it. They touched it and patted it and walked through it like curtains. It takes a kind of spiritual genius to know a hunk of long blond hair is heaven. They knew. The pope knows they know.

*   *   *

And then the audience was over. The scrum of handlers and Cardinals descended again and surrounded the pope. They hauled him up, helped him transfer from the white chair back to the wheel throne. And then they began to push him off the stage.

He turned to us, raised his right hand and made a halting sign of the cross. And then the Poles in the audience broke into the song that went back to the beginning, the authentic sound of 25 years ago, when John Paul first walked onto the Vatican balcony and looked out at the world. They had sung it for him at every stop along the way of his long papacy, through good times and bad. “Stolat! Stolat! May you live a hundred years.”

I stayed until the very end, two hours. Then I turned to see all the people standing behind me, to see their faces so I could describe them someday. And I was taken aback.

Because they were gone. Most of them, two-thirds, had already left. They were gone before the pope had even left the stage. As if they’d had their ticket punched—I saw the old guy—and were on their way next to see the cats in the Coliseum.

His whole life is a goodbye tour now. He knows they come to see him in part because they want to be able to say, “I saw John Paul the Great.” And so there is around him a sense of inescapable twilight.

An explosion of joy and sadness will mark his passing. Joy because it is time now for a younger man to put his stamp upon the age. Sadness because he is a giant, the last pope of the old age. And something else. After him the real modern world begins, the new one, the post-9/11 one, and all will be in play. He was the last fruit of the old world. His presence was definite and dense as the Vatican itself.

*   *   *

His suffering is his witness. It has a purpose. It is telling us something. Yesterday, in thinking about this and remembering that audience, I called the great writer and thinker Michael Novak. He thought aloud for me. St. Therese of Lisieux, he reminded me, believed her suffering could help others. She would take her moments of pain or annoyance or sadness and offer them to God, believing that they became united with God’s love, united that is with something infinitely powerful which works always for the betterment of man. She would ask God to take her suffering and use it to help the missionaries of the world. She knew, Mr. Novak said, what Dostoevsky knew: there’s a kind of web around the world, an electric web in which we’re all united in suffering and in love. When you give to it what you have, you add to the communion of love all around the world. Therese was a Carmelite. Mr. Novak spoke of George Weigel’s observation that the pope has a Carmelite soul, a soul at home with the Carmelite tradition of everyday mysticism.

What should the pope’s suffering tell us? Several things, said Mr. Novak. He is telling us it is important in an age like ours to honor the suffering of the old and the infirm. He wants us to know they have a place in life and a purpose. He not only says this; he lives it. He was an actor as a youth; he teaches by doing and showing, by being. His suffering is a drama he is living out quite deliberately. John Paul stands for life, for all of life. He wants to honor what the world does not honor.

But why, I said, does God allow this man he must so love to be dragged through the world in pain? He could have taken him years ago. Maybe, said Mr. Novak, God wants to show us how much he loves us, and he is doing it right now by letting the pope show us how much he loves us. Christ couldn’t take it anymore during his passion, and yet he kept going.

Which reminded me of something the pope said to a friend when the subject of retirement came up a few years ago: “Christ didn’t come down from the cross.” Christ left when his work was done.

Mr. Novak noted that John Paul II has often spoken of the need to heal the thousand-year breach in the church between East and West. The pope believes his work did not end with the fall of the Berlin Wall, that it includes attempting to repair the great split between Rome and Constantinople and Moscow. Mr. Novak said he may well be using his suffering, giving it to God to heal it. “He will be a very unhappy man if he doesn’t get to Moscow before he dies,” said Mr. Novak. “St. Peter may have a lot to answer for.”

George Bush finally began his second term on Wednesday night with an address that marked the return of the Bush of the stump, the Bush who was re-elected president three months ago and whom the nation knows well. His State of the Union address underscored that he meant what he said when he ran: Efforts to move against junk lawsuits, protect marriage and reform Social Security are all on the table. America continues as a friend of liberty throughout the world. The speech was marked by an air not of insistence but of persuasion.

George Bush made it clear he does not intend to cooperate with the tradition whereby second terms are all anticlimax enlivened by scandal. He will not be at the mercy of history. He means to continue doing big things.

This was the plainspoken Bush of old. The state of our union is “confident and strong.” We must be “good stewards” of the economy, must “renew” and “update” “great institutions,” will try to make the tax code more coherent and just. Refreshingly, he called for “spending discipline”; he said he wants to “cut the deficit in half” by the time he leaves office.

In the much-anticipated section on Social Security reform the president was expected to aim his remarks at members of his own party who think it doesn’t make sense to risk stepping on the third rail unless you’re desperate to flee an oncoming train. Mr. Bush said the train is bearing down and coming fast: When Social Security began 16 workers supported one retiree, but soon it will be two for every one. He deftly raised and let fall ideas put forward in the past by various Democrats—limiting benefits, increasing the retirement age. He made a case for voluntary personal accounts in a way that seemed clear, simple and costless, although next-day news reports raised questions about how much of the accounts will be kept by each individual investor, which made it all sound complicated indeed. He told Congress everything is on the table, all ideas will be listened to, the process will be “open” and “candid,” any ultimate change must be “wise and effective.”

*   *   *

Here I raise a question about human nature that I cannot answer. Republicans tend to assume that everyone hungers for more investment accounts to handle. This is because Republicans like personal autonomy and authority, and are good at math. Others might reasonably wonder if life isn’t complicated enough. The beauty of the Social Security system is its almost idiotic simplicity: They take your money from your paycheck and then 40 years later when you’re old they start giving some back each month. Personal accounts are less simple.

Favoring the Bush plan is the fact that it is aimed primarily at the young. When you are just entering adulthood and beginning a career you tend not to find life too complicated because you haven’t already made a thousand big decisions and lived with their repercussions. But I sometimes think of Ayn Rand’s sister, who came from Russia to visit the celebrated author in New York. She walked into an American supermarket for the first time and was overwhelmed: too much choice, a thousand kinds of cereal, doesn’t it all give you a headache? Rand was impatient; her sister came from the land of No Choice, and wasn’t up to the battle. A young person of course would not be overwhelmed by options but revel in them. Still, if, as the president seemed to suggest throughout his speech, gray-haired baby boomers are calling all the shots in America, we’ll see if the gray-haired ones really hunger for more decisions to make.

But in a surprising way for the president the issue is win-win. If he loses in Congress, he lost on a great issue on which his large base will likely believe he was right, and on which history will not be able to prove him wrong. And if he wins, he allows the free market to energize and renew a huge creaky behemoth. My guess? Little Big Man is going to get reform.

In the foreign-policy section the president was markedly modest in tone. The difference between us and our enemies is that we know we have “no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else.” Freedom is advancing, subjugated peoples are voting, democracies are being born, we are “witnessing landmark events in the history of liberty.” America will work with “our friends” in the Mideast to “encourage a higher standard of freedom.” The government of Saudi Arabia should become more democratic; the “great and proud nation of Egypt” is capable of showing the way to greater democracy in the region. We “expect” the Syrian government to stop supporting terrorists. We are “working with our European allies” to convince Iran not to develop nukes. We “stand with” the people of Iran. This was gentle but pointed, more specific and less messianic, than the recent inaugural—and therefore less open to misinterpretation. It was more finely calibrated, which is to say it was calibrated.

*   *   *

The end of the speech offered an unforgettable moment. When the mother of Marine Sgt. Byron Norwood, who gave his life in Iraq, was honored in the balcony, and then leaned down to embrace the woman in front of her, an Iraqi who had lost her father to Saddam, and who had just voted—when that mother embraced that woman it said more than words could about what we are doing and why. Sacrifice brings progress; courage brings deliverance; love born in Pflugerville can liberate in Fallujah. It pierced the heart.

As for the Democratic response, Harry Reid looks and talks like a small-town undertaker whom you want to trust but wonder about, especially when he says the deceased would love the brass handles. Although Nancy Pelosi continues to look startled, even alarmed, her comments are predictable and pedestrian. Both seemed eager not to agree with Ted Kennedy’s recent “Iraq is Vietnam” statements, which more and more seem not just stupid but scandalously so. Absent endorsing radical defeatism, however, Mr. Reid and Ms. Pelosi had little to say. They made Important Sounds. Neither seemed sincere or serious. The president seemed both.

I have been called old, jaded, a sourpuss. Far worse, I have been called French. A response is in order.

You know the dispute. Last week I slammed the president’s inaugural address. I was not alone, but I came down hard, early and in one of the most highly read editorial pages in America. Bill Buckley and David Frum also had critical reactions. Bill Safire on the other hand called it one of the best second inaugurals ever, and commentators from right and left (Bill Kristol, E.J. Dionne) found much to praise and ponder. (To my mind the best response to the inaugural was the grave, passionate essay of Mark Helprin.) So herewith some questions and answers:

A week later, do I stand by my views?

Yes. If I wrote it today I wouldn’t be softer, but harder.

Am I heartened by White House clarifications that the speech did not intend to announce the unveiling of a new policy?

Yes. My reaction is the exact opposite of Bill Bennett’s and E.J. Dionne’s, who were both disappointed. I am relieved.

Why don’t I see the speech as so many others do, as a thematic and romantic statement of what we all hope for, world freedom? Don’t we all want that?

Yes. But words have meaning. To declare that it is now the policy of the United States to eradicate tyranny in the world, that we are embarking on the greatest crusade in the history of freedom, and that the survival of American liberty is dependent on the liberty of every other nation—seemed to me, and seems to me, rhetorical and emotional overreach of the most embarrassing sort.

What’s wrong with a little overweening ambition? Shouldn’t man’s reach exceed his grasp?

True. But history is quite big enough right now. We’ve already been given a lot to grasp. The president will have real juice for the next 2 1/2 years. If in the next 30 months he can stabilize and fortify Iraq, helping it to become a functioning democratic entity that doesn’t encourage terrorism; further gird and undergird Afghanistan; keep the U.S. safe from attack; make our alliances closer; make permanent his tax cuts; and break through on Social Security, that will be huge. It will be historic. It will yield a presidency that even its severest critics will have to admit was enormously consequential, and its supporters will rightly claim as leaving a lasting legacy of courage and inspiration. We don’t need more than that—it’s quite enough. And it will be quite astonishing. Beyond that, don’t overreach. Refrain from breast beating, and don’t clobber the world over the head with your moral fabulousness.

What was the biggest mistake of the speech?

They forgot context. All speeches take place within a historical context, a time and place. A good speech acknowledges context often without even mentioning it.

For a half century our country faced a terrible foe. Some feared conflagration. Many of us who did not were convinced it would not happen because the United States was not evil, and the Soviet Union was not crazy. The Soviets didn’t want war to achieve their ends, they wanted to achieve those ends without the expense and gamble of war. We rolled them back, bankrupted them, forced their collapse. And we did it in part through a change of policy in which Ronald Reagan declared: From here on in we tell the truth. He called the Soviet Union an evil empire because it was a) evil and b) an empire, and c) he judged a new and stark candor the way to begin progress. We’d already kissed Brezhnev; it didn’t work. And it wasn’t Reagan’s way in any case.

Today is quite different. The context is different. Now we are up against not an organized state monolith but dozens, hundreds and thousands of state and nonstate actors—nuts with nukes, freelance bioterrorists, Islamofascists, independent but allied terror groups. The temperature of our world is very high. We face trouble that is already here. We don’t have to summon more.

Healthy alliances are a coolant in this world. What this era demands is steely resolve, and actions that remove those who want things at a full boil. In this world we must speak, yes, but softly, and carry many sticks, using them, when we must, terribly and swiftly. We must gather around us as many friends, allies and well-wishers as possible. And we must do nothing that provides our foes with ammunition with which they can accuse us of conceit, immaturity or impetuousness.

Here is an unhappy fact: Certain authoritarians and tyrants whose leadership is illegitimate and unjust have functioned in history as—ugly imagery coming—garbage-can lids on their societies. They keep freedom from entering, it is true. But when they are removed, the garbage—the freelance terrorists, the grievance merchants, the ethnic nationalists—pops out all over. Yes, freedom is good and to be strived for. But cleaning up the garbage is not pretty. And it sometimes leaves the neighborhood in an even bigger mess than it had been.

Am I saying we shouldn’t support freedom then?

Hardly. But we should remember as we do it that history, while full of opportunity, is also a long tale of woe. And human vanity—not only that of others, but our own—only complicates our endeavors. Thomas Jefferson was a genius, a great man who loved liberty. But that love led him to headlong support of a French Revolution that proved more demonic than liberating. He was right to encourage the fire of liberty but wrong to lend his great name to Robespierre, Marat and the rest. So much of life is case-by-case, so many of our decisions must be discrete and particular and not “thematic.” It is hard to do the right thing. That is why grown-ups often get headaches and children mostly don’t.

Life is layered, complex, not always most needful of political action. For many people in the world the most important extrafamilial relationship is not with the state but with the God. Pope John Paul II helped free his beloved Poland from the Soviet yoke. But when he looked at Poland some years after its freedom was won, he wondered if many of his kinsman had not chosen a kind of existential enslavement to Western materialism. He wondered if his people were not in some ways less free. It wasn’t a stupid question. It was at the heart of life.

But isn’t hard criticism of such an important speech at such a serious moment disloyal? You’re a Bush supporter!

I am. I even took off from the Journal to work for his re-election. I did exciting and I hope helpful work at considerable financial loss. But loyalty consists of many things, including being truthful with our friends. As Reagan used to say, candor is a compliment. This White House can take it. Two years ago, after watching a series of rather too jocular and arguably too boastful news conferences from administration leaders on the coming war, I said that they seemed to be suffering from mission inebriation. I meant it. And meant it as a caution. The White House can be a hothouse. Emotions run high, tired minds run on adrenal fumes. When I said last week that they seemed again to be suffering from mission inebriation, I meant that too.

As for criticizing Mr. Bush on something so big, that’s why I did it: It’s big. And so important. When you really disagree, you have to say so. In the end I found the president’s thinking perplexing and disturbing. At any rate, in the end, as Jack Kennedy once said, “Sometimes party loyalty asks too much.”

What do you think of David Frum’s wondering if the fact that the system let this speech through doesn’t suggest the system needs work?

I had a similar thought. I wonder if this White House, with its understandable but not always helpful Band of Brothers aspect, isn’t different from previous White Houses in this. In other White Houses there were always too many people eager to show their worth by removing the meaning of the speech, or warning the president that such and such shouldn’t be said. I get the impression no one in this White House wants to be the person in the speechwriter’s memoir who tried to remove “Tear down this wall” or “evil empire.” So often such people are defensive, anxious, unhelpful. They often lost the battle in the Reagan White House, to the benefit of history. But for this speech there seemed no one who wanted to think defensively and wield the editing stick. Which is bad, because such people are actually needed. They’re like dead wood in a forest; they add to the ecology; they have their purpose.

Bill Buckley and David Gelertner suggest the speech was badly written. Isn’t that really the essential problem?

No. It was badly thought. In any case most inaugural addresses are rather badly written, and I would know. We haven’t had a truly great one since 1961, 44 years ago. In this case the document seems to me to bear hard the personal mark of the president, and not of writers. But it is not the plain-talking Bush we know so well. It is Bush trying to be fancy. It is a tough man who speaks the language of business, sports and politics trying to be high-toned and elegant.

You’re being patronizing.

That’s what jaded old French people are for.

We all have our different styles. The biggest style mistake you can make is to use someone else’s style, or the moment’s style if you will, and not your own.

Speaking of style, how did you like the headline on your piece last week?

I thought it was quite wicked and didn’t capture the meaning of the piece. When I pointed this out to the editor he promised in the future to be more nuanced. But it was my fault. Advice to self: don’t go to cover a story before you’ve OK’d the headline on the previous one.

What are you looking forward to now?

I am hoping for a State of the Union address that is tough, clear, tethered, and in which the speaker takes his program seriously but himself rather more lightly. I am hoping the headline will be, “Return to Planet Earth.”

*   *   *

Two departures this week deserve note. A respectful and affectionate goodbye-from-columnating to Bill Safire of the New York Times, a great presence on that op-ed page for 30 years. He was a gutsy, witty wader into the fray. He has taken shots at me in the past, and in the spirit of comradely columnary aggression I wish I could take a goodbye shot back. (If he were sitting next to me now he’d say, “Don’t be soft, I’m on top, start a pile-on!”) But I can’t. A classy and provocative pro from beginning to end. I’m going to miss his column a lot.

Johnny Carson’s gift was that he seemed startled by sophistication. This was so American. It’s why Americans loved him. When the starlet blurted the seamy detail, when someone said or did something too odd or too open to interpretation, Carson would give the audience the dry look. And east or west, north or south, we all got the joke. When we laughed together, in our separate houses, that was a kind of community. It was a good note on which to end the day. He was an American treasure. Rest in peace.

It was an interesting Inauguration Day. Washington had warmed up, the swift storm of the previous day had passed, the sky was overcast but the air wasn’t painful in a wind-chill way, and the capital was full of men in cowboy hats and women in long furs. In fact, the night of the inaugural balls became known this year as The Night of the Long Furs.

Laura Bush’s beauty has grown more obvious; she was chic in shades of white, and smiled warmly. The Bush daughters looked exactly as they are, beautiful and young. A well-behaved city was on its best behavior, everyone from cops to doormen to journalists eager to help visitors in any way.

For me there was some unexpected merriness. In my hotel the night before the inauguration, all the guests were evacuated at 1:45 in the morning. There were fire alarms and flashing lights on each floor, and a public address system instructed us to take the stairs, not the elevators. Hundreds of people wound up outside in the slush, eventually gathering inside the lobby, waiting to find out what next.

The staff—kindly, clucking—tried to figure out if the fire existed and, if so, where it was. Hundreds of inaugural revelers wound up observing each other. Over there on the couch was Warren Buffet in bright blue pajamas and a white hotel robe. James Baker was in trench coat and throat scarf. I remembered my keys and eyeglasses but walked out without my shoes. After a while the “all clear” came, and hundreds of us stood in line for elevators to return to our rooms. Later that morning, as I entered an elevator to go to an appointment, I said, “You all look happier than you did last night.” A man said, “That was just a dream,” and everyone laughed.

*   *   *

The inauguration itself was beautiful to see—pomp, panoply, parades, flags and cannonades. America does this well. And the most poignant moment was the manful William Rehnquist, unable to wear a tie and making his way down the long marble steps to swear in the president. The continuation of democracy is made possible by such personal gallantry.

There were some surprises, one of which was the thrill of a male voice singing “God Bless America,” instead of the hyper-coloratura divas who plague our American civic life. But whoever picked the music for the inaugural ceremony itself—modern megachurch hymns, music that sounds like what they’d use for the quiet middle section of a Pixar animated film—was . . . lame. The downbeat orchestral arrangement that followed the president’s speech was no doubt an attempt to avoid charges that the ceremony had a triumphalist air. But I wound up thinking: This is America. We have a lot of good songs. And we watch inaugurals in part to hear them.

Never be defensive in your choice of music.

*   *   *

The inaugural address itself was startling. It left me with a bad feeling, and reluctant dislike. Rhetorically, it veered from high-class boilerplate to strong and simple sentences, but it was not pedestrian. George W. Bush’s second inaugural will no doubt prove historic because it carried a punch, asserting an agenda so sweeping that an observer quipped that by the end he would not have been surprised if the president had announced we were going to colonize Mars.

A short and self-conscious preamble led quickly to the meat of the speech: the president’s evolving thoughts on freedom in the world. Those thoughts seemed marked by deep moral seriousness and no moral modesty.

No one will remember what the president said about domestic policy, which was the subject of the last third of the text. This may prove to have been a miscalculation.

It was a foreign-policy speech. To the extent our foreign policy is marked by a division that has been (crudely but serviceably) defined as a division between moralists and realists—the moralists taken with a romantic longing to carry democracy and justice to foreign fields, the realists motivated by what might be called cynicism and an acknowledgment of the limits of governmental power—President Bush sided strongly with the moralists, which was not a surprise. But he did it in a way that left this Bush supporter yearning for something she does not normally yearn for, and that is: nuance.

The administration’s approach to history is at odds with what has been described by a communications adviser to the president as the “reality-based community.” A dumb phrase, but not a dumb thought: He meant that the administration sees history as dynamic and changeable, not static and impervious to redirection or improvement. That is the Bush administration way, and it happens to be realistic: History is dynamic and changeable. On the other hand, some things are constant, such as human imperfection, injustice, misery and bad government.

This world is not heaven.

The president’s speech seemed rather heavenish. It was a God-drenched speech. This president, who has been accused of giving too much attention to religious imagery and religious thought, has not let the criticism enter him. God was invoked relentlessly. “The Author of Liberty.” “God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind . . . the longing of the soul.”

It seemed a document produced by a White House on a mission. The United States, the speech said, has put the world on notice: Good governments that are just to their people are our friends, and those that are not are, essentially, not. We know the way: democracy. The president told every nondemocratic government in the world to shape up. “Success in our relations [with other governments] will require the decent treatment of their own people.”

The speech did not deal with specifics—9/11, terrorism, particular alliances, Iraq. It was, instead, assertively abstract.

“We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.” “Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self government. . . . Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation’s security, and the calling of our time.” “It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in the world.”

Ending tyranny in the world? Well that’s an ambition, and if you’re going to have an ambition it might as well be a big one. But this declaration, which is not wrong by any means, seemed to me to land somewhere between dreamy and disturbing. Tyranny is a very bad thing and quite wicked, but one doesn’t expect we’re going to eradicate it any time soon. Again, this is not heaven, it’s earth.

*   *   *

There were moments of eloquence: “America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies.” “We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny because we do not accept the possibility of permanent slavery.” And, to the young people of our country, “You have seen that life is fragile, and evil is real, and courage triumphs.” They have, since 9/11, seen exactly that.

And yet such promising moments were followed by this, the ending of the speech. “Renewed in our strength—tested, but not weary—we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom.”

This is—how else to put it?—over the top. It is the kind of sentence that makes you wonder if this White House did not, in the preparation period, have a case of what I have called in the past “mission inebriation.” A sense that there are few legitimate boundaries to the desires born in the goodness of their good hearts.

One wonders if they shouldn’t ease up, calm down, breathe deep, get more securely grounded. The most moving speeches summon us to the cause of what is actually possible. Perfection in the life of man on earth is not.

The Rathergate Report is a watershed event in American journalism not because it changes things on its own but because it makes unavoidably clear a change that has already occurred. And that is that the mainstream media’s monopoly on information is over. That is, the monopoly enjoyed by three big networks, a half dozen big newspapers and a handful of weekly magazines from roughly 1950 to 2000 is done and gone, and something else is taking its place. That would be a media cacophony. But a cacophony in which the truth has a greater chance of making itself clearly heard.

Is it annoying that the panel that issued the report did not find liberal bias in the preparation and airing of the Bush National Guard story? Yes, but only that. It’s not as if anyone has to be told. I hate to be cynical, and this is cynical, but the panel that produced the report was not being paid by CBS to find liberal bias. It was being paid to do the anatomy of a failure with emphasis on who did what wrong.

It found fault with the anchorman, the producer and their overseers, a conclusion CBS likely welcomed because CBS has wanted to remove Dan Rather for a long time because of low ratings. Rathergate weakened his position, and CBS moved. Firing the producers and overseers allows them to say We’ve turned the page, paid a price and put the story behind us. Also, if the report was to be taken seriously by the rest of the mainstream media it could not allege liberal bias. The MSM were not going to do headlines saying, “We’ve been busted!”

Finally, one somehow gets the impression the writers of the Report thought proof of bias would be found in memos saying, “Comrades, we move against the imperialistic Bush Regime at 0800.” Which is not exactly how it works. In any case those memos were not found. But maybe the writers of the report thought someone else would write about the whole sticky issue of bias. Like bloggers, who the report tells us have “a conservative agenda.” That will surprise Duncan “Atrios” Black and Josh Marshall, but let it go.

*   *   *

Of the commentary that followed the report, the most interesting so far has been Howard Fineman’s essay on MSNBC.com. Mr. Fineman, a fluid writer who is likely aware of his own biases—I have wondered if he doesn’t track them to make sure they are in line with the biases of Newsweek and MSNBC, which employ him—is a hardworking journalistic veteran who entered the MSM when it was at its zenith, in the 1970s. One might say he is the platonic ideal of MSMness. Mr. Fineman writes that the Rathergate report has left the MSM damaged and reeling, its hegemony a thing of the past. All true. In his roll call of responsibility he names first “George Bush’s Republican Party,” but that is the reflex of a certain mindset and not true. Mr. Bush and the GOP had nothing to do with what has happened to the MSM, which is not to say they are not happy it’s been deeply and deservedly wounded.

Mr. Fineman asserts that the MSM came into existence after World War II, which is essentially true, but goes on to claim that it came into existence as the result of the fact that “a temporary moderate consensus came to govern the country.” Please. America was a political battleground in those days, fighting over everything from McCarthyism to the true nature of communism to the proper role of government to Vietnam. The MSM didn’t come into existence because of a brief period of political comity. The MSM rose because it had a monopoly. And it fell because it lost that monopoly.

Let me repeat that: The MSM rose because it had a monopoly on information. The networks, newspapers and magazines were a Liberal Monolith. In one of his “Making of the President” books the liberal but ingenuous Teddy White famously said of 57th Street in Manhattan that when he stood there he was within a stone’s throw of all the offices in which all of American media was busily churning out its vision of The News. Churning it out were a relatively small group of a few hundred liberals who worked and mostly lived on an island off the continent; they told that continent not only what it should be thinking about but how it should be thinking of it. (I think the New York Times unconsciously echoes this old assumption in their television commercials in which an earnest, graying, upscale dunderhead says the New York Times surrounds a story and gives him new ways to think about it. Doesn’t it just?)

But in the past decade the liberals lost their monopoly. What broke it? We all know. Rush Limbaugh did, cable news did, the antimonolith journalists who rose with Reagan did, the internet did, technology did, talk radio did, Fox News did, the Washington Times did. When the people of America got options, they took them. Conservative arguments rose, and liberal hegemony fell.

All this has been said before but this can’t be said enough: The biggest improvement in the flow of information in America in our lifetimes is that no single group controls the news anymore.

*   *   *

You can complain now, and your complaints can both register and have an impact on the story, as happened with bloggers and Rathergate. You can be a part of the story if you find and uncover new information. You can create the story, as bloggers did in the Trent Lott scandal. American journalism is no longer a castle, and you are no longer the serf who cannot breach its walls. The castle doors have been forced open. Other voices have access. Bloggers for instance don’t just walk in and out, they have offices in the castle walls.

Is there a difference between the bloggers and the MSM journalists? Yes. But it is not that they are untrained eccentrics home in their pajamas. (Half the writers for the Sunday New York Times are eccentrics home in their pajamas.) It is that they are independent and allowed to think their own thoughts. It is that they have autonomy and can assign themselves stories, and determine on their own the length and placement of stories. And it is that they are by and large as individuals more interesting than most MSM reporters.

Remember the movie “Broadcast News”? The bland young reporter played by William Hurt who yearned to be a star and a member of the establishment would be a major network anchor or producer now, his hair gone a distinguished gray. The character played by Albert Brooks—the bright, mischievous and ultimately more talented journalist—would be a blogger now.

Now anyone can take to the parapet and announce the news. This will make for a certain amount of confusion. But better that than one-party rule and one-party thought. Only 20 years ago, when you were enraged at what you felt was the unfairness of a story, or a bias on the part of the storyteller, you could do this about it: nothing. You could write a letter.

When I worked at CBS a generation ago I used to receive those letters. Sometimes we read them, and sometimes we answered them, but not always. Now if you see such a report and are enraged you can do something about it: You can argue in public on a blog or on TV, you can put forth information that counters the information in the report. You can have a voice. You can change the story. You can bring down a news division. Is this improvement? Oh yes it is.

*   *   *

Some think bloggers and internet writers of all sorts are like the 19th century pamphleteers who made American politics livelier and more vigorous by lambasting the other team in full-throated broadsides. Actually, I’ve said that. And there are similarities. But it should be noted that the pamphleteers were heavy on screeds and colorfully damning the foe. The most successful bloggers aren’t bringing bluster to the debate, they’re bringing facts—font sizes, full quotes, etc. They’re bringing facts and points of view on those facts that the MSM before this could ignore, and did ignore. They’re bringing a lot to the debate, and changing the debate by what they bring. They’re doing what excellent reporters would do.

They will no doubt continue to be the force in 2005 that they have been the past few years. Meantime the MSM will not disappear. But it will evolve. Some media organs—Newsweek, Time, the New York Times—will likely use the changing environment as license to be what they are: liberal, only more so. Interestingly they have begun to use Fox News Channel as their rationale. We used to be unbiased but then Fox came along with its conservative propaganda so now just to be fair and compete we’re going liberal.

I don’t see why anyone should mind this. A world where National Review is defined as conservative and Newsweek defined as liberal would be a better world, for it would be a more truthful one. Everyone gets labeled, tagged and defined, no one hides an agenda, the audience gets to listen, consider, weigh and allow for biases. A journalistic world where people declare where they stand is a better one.

Networks, on the other hand, may try harder to play it down the middle, and that would be wise. The days when they could sell a one-party point of view is over. No one is buying now because no one is forced to buy. But everyone will buy the networks when they sell what they’re really good at, which is covering real news as it happens. Tsunamis, speeches, trials—events. Real and actual news. They are really good at that. And there is a market for it. And that market isn’t over.

The 109th Congress has been sworn in and convened, and now the new post-election reality begins. If I were a Democrat right now I would think big and get serious. Second terms are tough for incumbents; history has not handed George W. Bush an easy ride, and there’s no reason to think that will change now; and Mr. Bush is a gambler who’s not afraid to throw the dice, which means he will likely have not only stunning gains but stunning losses ahead. The Democrats are still competitive. “In every defeat lies the seed of future victory, in every victory lies the seed of future defeat.” Every morning I’d put my game face on knowing my party will stand a good chance of making a big presidential comeback in four years. Look confident; this will encourage victory. Or at least leave people saying you look confident, which for you will be a victory.

No one wants to be head of the Democratic National Committee. This is bad but understandable. A fractious party has been further fractured by a hard year. What you need for DNC chairman is a man or woman of some stature who can make the case for your party day in and day out in big media. Fund-raising expertise is secondary—hire someone to do it. So is organizational skill—hire organizers. You need someone who makes the Democratic Party look nonsleazy, nonmanipulative and nonweak on TV. He doesn’t have to be nationally known, but he must be—how to put this?—good-natured, moderate in manner, and normal-seeming. That would mean not Howard Dean.

There is much to build on. You hold 44 Senate seats, 202 House seats and 22 governorships. You have been on a losing strain for a while, but you can turn that into opportunity. Now, in the depths—or what you frankly hope are the depths—you can move for change within the party. Nothing sobers like defeat. Use the new sobriety to shake off the mad left. This is the best chance you’ve had all century! Seriously, this is the best chance you’ve had in a long time. You couldn’t rethink the party when you had Bill Clinton, because he kept winning. But he was a special case, a once-every-quarter-century natural. He had the gift; he brought his own winnerness with him every bit as much as he brought his own mess.

The Groups—all the left-wing outfits from the abortion people to the enviros—didn’t deliver in the last election, and not because they didn’t try. They worked their hearts out. But they had no one to deliver. They had only money. The secret: Nobody likes them. Nobody! No matter how you feel about abortion, no one likes pro-abortion fanatics; no one likes mad scientists who cook environmental data. Or rather only rich and creepy people like them. Stand up to the Groups—make your policies more moderate, more nuanced, less knee-jerk.

Don’t reflexively oppose President Bush on Social Security reform. Talk and listen and consider; ask open-minded questions at hearings. If he’s wrong—if his prescriptions don’t promise to make the system stronger and more just down the road—then make a persuasive case, one a grown-up could listen to and understand. Don’t do “sound bites for blue heads in Dade County,” be serious. People can tell when you’re not. They just punished you at the polls again because you weren’t. You have nothing to gain but stature.

*   *   *

Hold a big public party meeting on taxes and spending. I am serious. Everyone knows where the Republican Party stands on both: they’re against the former, and—in theory if not practice—against the latter. Where are you? Thrash it out, and in public. The next big election is two years away. You have the time. The attitude here should be: When the people talk, we listen. They just spoke. We are listening to what was said, pondering it, and will respond earnestly and in good faith. You don’t have to be doctrinaire anymore, because your doctrines failed you. Reinvent.

A Sister Souljah moment? Why not? Keep your eyes sharp for a constituency that has proved itself spectacularly unhelpful in the past few decades, and go at it hammer and tong. I think not an individual, though Jesse Jackson and all he stands for is tempting. Go at a group. How about junk scientists? With Michael Crichton’s manifesto doing well and getting praise, and with the natural disaster of the tsunami having left everyone brushing up on their wave trains and tectonic-plate knowledge, the time is right.

Or—and this would be splendid—there’s this. In states like the Democratic bastion (though in some ways a vulnerable one) of New Jersey, people are starting to fear they’re going to be forced from their homes by rising property taxes. New Jersey used to be a safe haven. Now its citizens are clobbered with taxes and spending. This leaves those on fixed incomes in a precarious state. Who is more sympathetic, a widow in Lodi or a Democratic Party that stands for the status quo? Come to her aid. Say “Enough is enough.” Say “We can’t support endless spending. Stupid and corrupt spending is the enemy of wise spending, and wise spending is what the Democratic party is about.” Tax relief is an issue almost everywhere, and it is not going away any time soon.

John Kerry was almost shrewd to try to get to the right of Bush on issues like homeland security and immigration. I say almost because he didn’t do it long enough or deeply enough, and by the time he made his move no one believed much of what he said. That’s what the Swift Boat ads did to him; they didn’t make him look like a coward but a liar. That he could never speak of his 20 years in the Senate didn’t help. But he’s over, and you’re here. Homeland security can always be improved, and immigration will only grow as a fact and an issue. Get serious.

And don’t forget to confuse categories. Be counterintuitive. Republican Mike Bloomberg of New York won’t let workingmen and -women smoke at the local bar. Democrats always wind up in support of such measures. Don’t! Distance yourself from the smoke Nazis, from all Nazis. Be sane; take the side of normal humans with normal imperfections. Let the Republicans look stupid on these issues if they choose to. Don’t fall for it. The Sierra Club will love you anyway. (Politicians in New York tell me the tide has turned, that even people shuddering outside buildings grabbing a smoke say it’s only right. I’m not shuddering outside a building, but I talk to smokers all the time and let me tell you how they feel about the banners. They hate them.)

*   *   *

The Bush administration has stood for cutting taxes, allowing high spending, and being tough in the world. The Democrats stand for raising taxes, high spending, and being weak in the world. Should the Democrats become more like Republicans? Yes, they should. Then, in the next big contest, they can agree on the big points with the Republicans and win on three other things. First, on small points, as Mr. Clinton did with such key issues as The Campaign for the Right Child-Carrying Seatbelts. Second, on campaign expertise. Third, on the personality and character of the candidate.

On all of these points they can be truly competitive. If they choose to get serious.