Peggy Noonan

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

But the media story has three parts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

Well, they probably can, short term.

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

What’s true in terms of the criticism?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The e-mail came from a reader, U.S. Marine Corps, retired:

So, I was driving down I-20 from NE Columbia [S.C.] toward the city when I began to pass this huge convoy of Army trucks, Humvees, etc. The convoy was in the right lane. I was driving in the left. The convoy vehicles were loaded with tough-looking young soldiers, and each of them had the familiar “AA” (All American) patches of the famous 82nd Airborne Division stitched on their sleeves. Of course—being such an enormously long convoy of these young paratroopers traveling west on I-20—it was obvious they were from Fort Bragg, N.C., and they were heading toward the Katrina damaged Gulf Coast, where other 82nd paras had already been deployed.

The convoy took up the entire right lane of the interstate for several miles. . . . But what made it such a wonderful sight was that in the left lane, civilian drivers and passengers (young, old, black, white, some driving Mercedes, some driving smoke-belching old rust-traps) were slowing by each Army vehicle and waving and giving the thumbs up. And the soldiers were waving back . . . some smiling, some trying to look tough, a few were drinking Cokes.

A few months ago, these same guys were fighting in Iraq. . . . Now they were roaring down the highway in a long green line in central South Carolina . . . in the lane next to me. They looked tough, but most looked as if they were barely old enough to shave. Some of them probably had tubes of Clearasil (or whatever teenagers use today to fight acne) stowed away in their field packs. I briefly thought about the fact that they had not been back from Iraq for very long. And for a second, I even considered the fact that—though they were all wearing their helmets and their battle gear—none of their vehicles had any armor plating. But why should they? No one was going to shoot at ‘em or hit ‘em with an IED . . . not here in central South Carolina. Not ever.

I looked at one of the soldiers as I passed. He looked at me, and smiled through the sweat of his smooth and freckled face. My eyes began to well up . . . and I didn’t really know why. Best, Me

Mine did too, and I didn’t know why either. And knew. It’s moving to see, if only with your mind’s eye, young men come in to save our country. And it’s moving to see Americans recognize it, honor it, salute it.

*   *   *

It has been a tough 10 days for America—toughest, obviously and by far, for those who took the full blow, and those who rushed to help them, but it has been demanding even for those who only absorbed the impressions and testimony of the tragedy from afar.
It feels unhelpful at the moment, and self-indulgent, to add to the sum total of criticism and damnation. Reporters on the scene have been giving the most constructive criticism, simply by reporting the facts. But the couch commandos of the pundit brigades have not added much light the past week, only heat. Some attacks have been unseemly (the tragedy of others isn’t a stick you use to make a point that’s merely partisan) and some are at this point redundant (everyone who’s been knocked seems to at least some degree to have deserved it, and those who covered themselves in glory, from the rescuers of the Coast Guard to the people of Texas, seem to have earned that, too).

I’m just thinking of basics. I have a friend who lost everything he had in New Orleans—his house and all the material things that represent a personal history—except the most important thing, his family. They fled the storm and wound up in Alabama. I have a friendly acquaintance who’s spent the past 10 days looking for her family and finding them, one after another. On Tuesday this week both friends were remembered at a noon mass in Brooklyn. A bishop asked for the names so he could take them to Rome next week and ask the synod of bishops to pray for them specifically. Which means the pope will wind up praying for friends who last week fled for their lives in a car, and waded through water looking for a sister. It is not a small world, it is minute.

And wonderful. It’s good to be alive, no matter where you are or in what condition. “The impulse of tragedy is on to life and more life,” said Eugene O’Neill after another long week’s journey. Wherever you are—on a cot in the Astrodome looking up and waving at Katie Couric; walking with your friends after the first day of school; at home in your quiet suburban life with the TV on in the background feeling grateful for what you have, feeling grateful just for being dry and for not being on a cot in a football field, but feeling also maybe your life is a little small, feeling lately that it seems to be passing you by—it’s good to be alive.

Sometimes when I’m down I do what may be an odd thing. I don’t really know if it’s an odd thing. I remember that someday I’ll be on my deathbed, and on that day and on that moment when I’m about to die I will probably think that life was pretty good and I’m going to miss it. If you know this on the brink of death, then why not cut to the chase and know it now? I offer this to anyone who needs to cut to the chase today.

*   *   *

It happens to be my (perhaps idiotic) hunch that everyone identifies with some other person or people who play a role in the unfolding drama you see on your screen when a national catastrophe occurs. This may be one of the reasons such tragedies are so painful for people far away. They personalize a story by identifying, and that identification rattles them and pierces their detachment. When they say, “Did you see the guy who rappelled out of the helicopter and got the people off the roof?” I think they’ve imagined what it was like to be that man dropping onto the house as the waters raged.

Maybe you identify with the rescuers, or the rescued. Maybe you identify with a brave cop, or with the neighbor who picked up an axe and smashed through a roof to save a man in the attic. Or the TV producer who was clearly frightened of the crime around her but stood her ground on Canal Street and kept reporting by phone. Maybe you identify with the poor crazy mayor (sorry) or the famous “blithering idiot” FEMA director (sorry) or the tough cigar-chomping general.

Let me tell you the greatest moment I saw in all the coverage. It’s the middle of the day on Thursday or Friday last week. The Army is arriving, or the Guard. A big green truck full of fresh-faced young men is cruising along a New Orleans street. Lt. Gen. Russell Honore happens to be standing there as the truck slows to make a turn. He looks up and yells at the kids on the truck, “Put those guns down!”

They’re startled. They’ve been lurching along with their guns pointed upward as if they’re ready for looters, as if their mission is protect life and property. Which of course it was, but they were kids, seemingly inexperienced, and they didn’t seem to realize there were no looters around, just survivors of the storm, citizens gathered on a corner to watch the truck go by. Gen. Honore yells to the soldiers, “Put those guns down!” and immediately they all take their rifles and point them down at their feet, and ride on. And the little crowd on the corner burst into cheers. They just cheered and applauded this new presence of sanity in their city.

This is what leadership is, specific and discrete decisions that are right because they’re human and full of common sense. You know someone’s a looter because he’s looting: rifles up. A peaceful citizen deserves respect: rifles down. I don’t know if Gen. Honore is as great as they say. I hope he is. But he won my respect at that moment.

So maybe—back to identifying with actors in the drama—you relate to him. Maybe you imagine what it would be like to be in charge of a mess and trying to bring method to madness. Maybe who you relate to, who you imagine being, says something big and deep about you. Maybe not. Maybe worth thinking about for a moment.

*   *   *

The stories that pierce my heart involve the terror of children. And the one that hit me the most was the story of the 6-year-old boy found wandering over a bridge with six younger children. Most of the kids were too young even to know their names. The 6-year-old was carrying a 15-month-old infant. They were taken in and cared for by strangers, by nurses; and ultimately all their parents were found. But we forget the terror of children. Adults, even the dimmest of them, can calculate and think up strategies, even if they’re bad ones. They can feel and know it’s a feeling. But with young children it’s all impressions, they can’t think it through. They have a natural, primal will to survive, but beyond that they’re helpless, it’s all wet and cold and the way momma’s face looked when the radio said everyone’s leaving.
One of the things I have been thinking about is how children take their cues from the adults around them. If the adults are enraged and screaming, children become scared and learn that the way to respond to frustration and pressure is with screaming and rage. If no one’s in charge, children can tell. If no one is leading, children can tell. If no one is caring for them they infer they aren’t worthy of care.

It is hard to be a parent at any time, but to be a parent in a life-or-death crisis is brutal. It is hard to give children what they need when you’re overwhelmed yourself. It’s hard, when you’re afraid, to talk to children gently and listen to them, really hear them, so you can figure out what they’re really telling you when they ask a surprising or seemingly illogical question. It takes patience not to work out your frustration or terror or pessimism on them, but to show instead forbearance, or frankly fake it if you have to. And to show optimism and faith—”We’ll be OK, don’t you worry”— because optimism and faith can become a habit, they are communicable, and the habit of optimism and faith allows children to trust life, to enter it steadily and have confidence in it.

It is exhausting being a parent under trying circumstances. It is probably the hardest thing in the world. But on such things nations rise and fall, endure or falter.

And no one says thank you, or rather no one has videotape of your heroism and replays it in a loop. But for parents in the Superdome and Astrodome, for parents living with children in somebody’s spare room, for parents in a motel room crammed with three generations of a family, from the old and frightened to the young and colicky—for those who lost everything and yet are still functioning as parents—well, please consider this a small salute from far away. A small attempt to recognize, and honor. You’re saving a country, too.

Katrina is a huge and historic story. The human cost, the financial cost, the rendering uninhabitable of a great and fabled American city—all of it amazing. A quick look at the good, the bad, and the let’s-shoot-them-now.

• The governors. Political leadership in times of crisis is a delicate thing. You have to be frank about the fix you’re in without being demoralizing. You have to seem confident without seeming out of touch with reality. You have to be human without indulging all your very human emotions. Rudy Giuliani set the modern standard on 9/11, and in a way that is not remarked upon. All his public statements were brilliantly specific. He told you exactly what resources were on their way to do what and where and why; he told you the No. 4 subway had been diverted west and then south until 11 a.m. Saturday; he told exactly which blocks were closed off and for how long; he told you New York would come back and then he told you why and how. His leadership was a masterpiece of specificity. That he had the facts at his command left people feeling: Thank God, someone’s in charge, I can take care of me while he takes care of the city. That’s what people want in a time of crisis.

  Mississippi’s Gov. Haley Barbour came closest to the Giuliani model. We are friendly acquaintances; I knew him years ago when he was a political operative in Washington. I’m frankly surprised he’s turned into a leader, but he has. From the beginning of the hurricane drama Mr. Barbour came close to Mr. Giuliani’s specificity. In news conferences he laid out with breadth and precision the facts of the Mississippi coastal devastation. He had to keep telling the press and the public that there would be more dead than they understood, a delicate thing to have to do. He did it with candor and transparency but no defeat. He had command of what facts were known. His face was shocked and sad, but he never looked beaten; he referred on “Larry King Live” to the rebuilding of the coast as if it were a foregone conclusion but one that will take massive work. He seemed straight, unillusioned, human. Watch Mr. Barbour. If he continues like this, he’s going to become a significant national figure.

  Louisiana’s Gov. Kathleen Blanco was shakier, but she can recover. She wore her heart on her face, not always helpful in a leader in crisis. In her early news conferences she looked concussed. Her presentation seemed scattered. This was human—as governor she was one of the first to understand how bad the storm’s impact was—but politics is a tough room. Early on she was clearly trying to make people understand how bad the situation is. She had to. But the overall impression she left was not informational and hope-giving but shook-up and dispiriting. She can turn this around. The waters may have peaked; a comeback will at some point commence. She showed anguish and now she can show fortitude, like a fighter made hungry by pain. Go, Kathleen, your state needs you. People will take their cues from you. Butch up, punch back, wade in. Literally. Be there.

• President Bush. The political subtext: Does he understand that what has happened in our gulf is as important as what is happening in the other gulf? Does he know in his gut that the existence of looting, chaos and disease in a great American city, or cities, is a terrible blow that may have deep implications? It was bad luck that on the day it became clear a bad storm was a catastrophe he was giving a major Iraq speech, and bad planning that he arrived back at the White House cradling a yippy puppy. But his Rose Garden statement was solid. Yes, it was a laundry list, but the kind that that gives an impression of comprehensive government action. Having the cabinet there was good. His concern was obvious. But more was needed in terms of sending a U.S. military presence into New Orleans.
• The media. Excellent as always in time of crisis. We all love to hate them, but when a story like this comes along you’re glad Anderson Cooper decided to stand there up to his butt in snakes and alligators to tell you about the city that’s become a swamp. You’re glad the anchors are so crisp and contained, you’re glad Brian Williams is in the Superdome telling you what’s going on. They’re rich and celebrated, our media stars, but when stories like this come they earn it. Not sufficiently celebrated: television cameramen, who do much of what Anderson Cooper does only while walking backwards and with their eye in a viewfinder. They’re good.
• Rescuers. Nothing gives you hope in your fellow man like those pictures of the rescuers dropping from helicopters in breathtaking rooftop rescues. Remember what Dick Cheney said when flight 93 went down in a field in Pennyslvania? He said he had a feeling an act of significant bravery had occurred on that plane. We’re going to hear about some significant acts of bravery during Katrina, too.
• Bloggers. In February I wrote that bloggers will help get America through a national crisis. They just did. Nothing has the immediacy and believability of local reports by citizen journalists living through a local story. Terry Teachout performed a public service linking to Katrina blogs; Glenn Reynolds offered links to relief organizations. The Times Picayune’s live-blogging has been solid. Local bloggers were great until they started losing electric power and couldn’t send anymore. Mr. Teachout told me at the end they were blogging by BlackBerry. As power comes back the greatest blogging should begin—what it was like, what the recovery is like, what is happening on the streets. Thanks in advance.

*   *   *

Last week I said that this is the wrong time in history to move forward with the wholesale closings and consolidation of military bases throughout the U.S. Terrorism was on my mind, but the incredible tragedy on the Gulf Coast is giving us a new gulf war, one in which we must help an entire region get back on its feet after being leveled by an ancient foe, the hurricane, and what is happening there right now in New Orleans and Mississippi seems tragically illustrative of the fact that local military presence can be crucial in times of grave national emergency.

The importance of local presence is not only practical but also psychological and symbolic. As I write I am watching CNN, which is showing a truck carrying half a dozen soldiers speeding into downtown New Orleans. Good. Thugs are looting and shooting there. Local police are overwhelmed and unable to restore order, and there was Tuesday’s report that some law enforcement officers had actually joined in the pillaging. At a time like this the presence of U.S. troops can make all the difference.

I hope Congress and the president are watching, and I hope what they see will have some impact on their decision about whether go forward with or rethink the base closings. It is not wrong to want to save money, rid a highly bureaucratized system of redundancies, and modernize. But timing is everything. We are at an odd time. This is no time for a wholesale shift or a radical retrenchment. They should leave the military base system where it is. They should look to New Orleans for proof of how important a local military presence can prove to be, even in dramas caused not by man but nature.

*   *   *

As for the tragic piggism that is taking place on the streets of New Orleans, it is not unbelievable but it is unforgivable, and I hope the looters are shot. A hurricane cannot rob a great city of its spirit, but a vicious citizenry can. A bad time with Mother Nature can leave you digging out for a long time, but a bad turn in human behavior frays and tears all the ties that truly bind human beings—trust, confidence, mutual regard, belief in the essential goodness of one’s fellow citizens.

There seems to be some confusion in terms of terminology on TV. People with no food and water who are walking into supermarkets and taking food and water off the shelves are not criminal, they are sane. They are not looters, they are people who are attempting to survive; they are taking the basics of survival off shelves in stores where there isn’t even anyone at the cash register.

Looters are not looking to survive; they’re looking to take advantage of the weakness of others. They are predators. They’re taking not what they need but what they want. They are breaking into stores in New Orleans and elsewhere and stealing flat screen TVs and jewelry, guns and CD players. They are breaking into homes and taking what those who have fled trustingly left behind. In Biloxi, Miss., looters went from shop to shop. “People are just casually walking in and filling up garbage bags and walking off like they’re Santa Claus,” the owner of a Super 8 Motel told the London Times. On CNN, producer Kim Siegel reported in the middle of the afternoon from Canal Street in New Orleans that looters were taking “everything they can.”

If this part of the story grows—if cities on the gulf come to seem like some combination of Dodge and the Barbarian invasion—it’s going to be bad for our country. One of the things that keeps us together, and that lets this great lumbering nation move forward each day, is the sense that we will be decent and brave in times of crisis, that the fabric holds, that under duress it is American heroism and altruism that take hold and not base instincts born of irresponsibility, immaturity and greed.

We had a bad time in the 1960s, and in the New York blackout in the ’70s, and in the Los Angeles riots in the ’90s. But the whole story of our last national crisis, 9/11, was courage—among the passersby, among the firemen, among those who walked down their stairs slowly to help a less able colleague, among those who fought their way past the flames in the Pentagon to get people out. And it gave us quite a sense of who we are as a people. It gave us a lot of renewed pride.

If New Orleans damages that sense, it’s going to be painful to face. It’s going to be damaging to the national spirit. More damaging even than a hurricane, even than the worst in decades.

I wonder if the cruel and stupid young people who are doing the looting know the power they have to damage their country. I wonder, if they knew, if they’d stop it.

The federal government is doing something right now that is exactly the opposite of what it should be doing. It is forgetting to think dark. It is forgetting to imagine the unimaginable.

Governments deal in data. People in government see a collection of data as something to be used, manipulated or ignored, but whatever they do with it, it’s real. It’s numbers on a page. You can point to them.

To think dark, on the other hand, takes imagination—and something more.

As adults living in the world, we know some things. As Murphy taught us, if it can go wrong, it will go wrong. As the journalist Harrison Salisbury said, in summing up what he’d learned in a lifetime observing history, “Expect the unexpected.” As JFK taught us, “There’s always some poor son of a bitch who doesn’t get the word”—someone in the field who doesn’t know what’s going on and does exactly the wrong thing. As Ronald Reagan once said in conversation, man has never invented a weapon he didn’t ultimately use. And as life has taught us since 9/11, we live in a dangerous age and the dangers aren’t over, if they will ever be.

When you think dark, you’re often and inescapably thinking with your gut, a vulgar way of referring to a certainty that lives somewhere between your spirit, soul and intellect. Your gut knows things your brain can’t assert as fact because they’re not facts, not yet. It can take guts to listen to your gut.

*   *   *

Right now the federal government is considering closing or consolidating hundreds of military bases throughout the U.S. A government commission is meeting this week to vote on specific base-closing proposals in the Pentagon’s plan. Yesterday they voted to close big bases like Fort Monmouth, N.J., and Fort Gillem, Ga. (They voted to save the naval base in Groton, Conn.)

The Pentagon says this huge and historic base-closing plan will save $50 billion over the next two decades. They may be right. But it’s a bad plan anyway, a bad idea, and exactly the wrong thing to do in terms of future and highly possible needs.

The Pentagon has some obvious logic on its side—we have a lot of bases, and they cost a lot of money—and numbers on paper. They have put forward their numbers on savings, redundancies, location and obsolescence.

But they’re wrong. What they ought to do, and what the commission reviewing the Pentagon’s plan ought to do, is sit down and think dark.

In the rough future our country faces, bad things will happen. We all know this. It’s hard to imagine some of those things on a beautiful day with the sun shining and the markets full, but let’s imagine anyway.

Among the things we may face over the next decade, as we all know, is another terrorist attack on American soil. But let’s imagine the next one has many targets, is brilliantly planned and coordinated. Imagine that there are already 100 serious terror cells in the U.S., two per state. The members of each cell have been coming over, many but not all crossing our borders, for five years. They’re working jobs, living lives, quietly planning.

*   *   *

Imagine they’re planning that on the same day in the not-so-distant future, they will set off nuclear suitcase bombs in six American cities, including Washington, which will take the heaviest hit. Hundreds of thousands may die; millions will be endangered. Lines will go down, and to make it worse the terrorists will at the same time execute the cyberattack of all cyberattacks, causing massive communications failure and confusion. There will be no electricity; switching and generating stations will also have been targeted. There will be no word from Washington; the extent of the national damage will be as unknown as the extent of local damage is clear. Daily living will become very difficult, and for months—food shortages, fuel shortages.

Let’s make it worse. On top of all that, on the day of the suitcase nukings, a half dozen designated cells will rise up and assassinate national, state and local leaders. There will be chaos, disorder, widespread want; law-enforcement personnel, or what remains of them, will be overwhelmed and outmatched.

Impossibly grim? No, just grim. Novelistic? Sure. But if you’d been a novelist on Sept. 10, 2001, and dreamed up a plot in which two huge skyscrapers were leveled, the Pentagon was hit, and the wife of the solicitor general of the United States was desperately phoning him from a commercial jet that had been turned into a missile, you would have been writing something wild and improbable that nonetheless happened a day later.

And all this of course is just one scenario. The madman who runs North Korea could launch a missile attack on the United States tomorrow, etc. There are limitless possibilities for terrible trouble.

*   *   *

So we are imagining America being forced to fight for its survival on its streets. How does this get us to base closings? On the day the big terrible thing happens there will of course be shock and chaos. People will feel the need for protection—for the feeling of protection and for the thing itself. They will want and need American troops nearby and they will want and need American military bases up and operating to help maintain some semblance of order. The very presence, the very fact of these bases will help in the big recovery.

That’s what all these bases are going to be needed for. To help us survive a very bad time.

We don’t need these bases for sentimental reasons. We don’t need them because local congressmen want the jobs and money they provide. We don’t need them because we must never change the structure and operations of our defense system. We need them because someday they may very well help us survive as a nation. Seems worth the price, doesn’t it?

This of course is pure guessing on my part. I can’t prove it with data. My gut says that when things turn dark, we will need all the help we can get.

It’s easy to say, “Oh, if we think in such an apocalyptic fashion, the bad guys have already won.” But that’s not a thought, it’s a slogan. Think dark and you’re prepared for darkness, and preparation will be half the battle.

*   *   *

Each day each of us should—must—move forward individually with hope, faith and optimism. Why not? Life is good and God is real. But in terms of public policy we should make our plans based on the assumption that thinking dark is thinking safe.
Because if it can go wrong it will go wrong, because man has never invented a weapon he did not ultimately use, and because the beginning of wisdom is to expect the unexpected.

President Bush and Congress are to review and either accept or reject the final Pentagon/commission plan in November. They should reject it. Leave it where it is. Think dark.

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You see the similarities.

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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