Peggy Noonan

The biggest story of the year happened just as big-thinking journalists went on vacation after filing their “Ten Biggest Stories of 2004” pieces. Life has a way of surprising us.

I thought the other day of Harrison Salisbury, and his response when asked what he’d learned after a lifetime as a reporter. “Expect the unexpected,” he said. And of course we do, in the abstract, but when a story like this comes along in the particular, with maybe 80,000 dead, maybe more, we are aghast. And should be. Call it the force of nature or the hand of God or both; call it geological inevitability or the oldest story in the world (life is tragic) reasserting itself on a broader-than-usual level—however you see the earthquake and the tsunami, it reminds you that man is not in charge.

Of all the things I’ve heard said of the great horror, nothing seemed to me to sum it up as well as a woman chatting with a man as he cut her hair in New York. The TV was on, CNN. They stopped and watched the latest video of surging waves crashing through a hotel. The man sighed and shook his head. “Life is terrible,” he said. The woman said, “Oh it’s beautiful, beautiful, but full of pain.”

*   *   *

“Did you hear about the baby they found floating on a mattress?” “Did you hear about the 2-year-old Swedish kid they found wandering down a street?” “Did you hear about the guys who floated on a refrigerator?” Did you hear about the model, the surfer, the snorkelers?

People are fascinated by these stories, and so am I. It’s a little like the first days after 9/11 in New York: “Did you hear about the guy in the wheelchair on the 91st floor?” Soon we will be hearing about massive relief efforts and individual acts of heroism and sacrifice, and those stories will be a relief, and maybe even in some cases an inspiration.

Not everyone distinguished himself. What to say of those who’ve latched on to the tragedy to promote their political agendas, from the U.N. official who raced to call the U.S. “stingy,” to the global-warming crowd, to administration critics who jumped at the chance to call the president insensitive because he was vacationing in Texas and didn’t voice his sympathy quickly enough? Such people are slyly asserting their own, higher sensitivity and getting credit for it, which is odd because what they’re actually doing is using dead people to make cheap points.

On the other hand, there were moments of true excellence in those who reported on, witnessed, and responded to the tragedy, from the groups sending food and medicine to those rushing to the disaster scene to help. The cable news networks distinguished themselves, and CNN in particular has been fabulous, wall to wall. News ennobles them. When there’s no news CNN is endless chatter, tacky as cheap sets. Then news comes and they are reminded of why they exist: to tell us what’s happening, to get the newest and latest. It’s as if the anchors sit straighter, knowing they do have a purpose beyond being the aural screen saver on our TV.

*   *   *

The other night at dinner a friend wondered aloud if this almost-world-wide tragedy would have an impact on peace. Would it remind us of all we have in common, and how precious life is? This reminded me of something Ronald Reagan used to say of all the conflicts in the world. He’d say that if the world were attacked by Martians tomorrow, we’d all come together, and it’s too bad we couldn’t manage to cut to the chase. This used to be taken as an example of his idiocy, but of course it’s true. We would all drop our local and ancestral hatreds to fight shoulder to shoulder against the common foe. Years later, in true Reaganesque style, Hollywood produced the blockbuster “Independence Day,” in which extraterrestrials attacked the earth and the world united in resistance.

(In a similar spirit, let me say that if Steven Spielberg went to the Mideast tomorrow, announced he was making a movie, and sent out a casting call for males age 12 to 30 he would immediately establish a new Mideast peace, at least for the length of the shoot. Because the only thing the young men there would rather do than kill each other is be a movie star. Hmmmm, a suicide bombing that raises my family’s status in the neighborhood or a possible date with Cameron Diaz, let’s see . . . Mr. Spielberg would also get a Nobel Peace Prize. I am actually not kidding.)

The biggest story of 2004 has come, has not yet gone, and will be with us for some time. Two thousand five begins on Saturday. For the new year, two thoughts. Remember it can all be swept away in a moment, so hold it close and love it while you’ve got it. And may we begin 2005 pondering how much we have in common, how down-to-the-bone the same we are, and how the enemy is not the guy across the fence but the tragedy of life. We should try to make it better. We should cut to the chase.

And it came to pass, that in those days there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that the whole world should be enrolled.
This enrolling was first made by Cyrinus, the governor of Syria.

And all went to be enrolled, every one into his own city.

And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth into Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem: because he was of the house and family of David,

To be enrolled with Mary his espoused wife, who was with child.

And it came to pass, that when they were there, her days were accomplished, that she should be delivered.

And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him up in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.

— Chapter Two, verses 1 through 7, The Gospel According to St. Luke, Douay-Rheims Version

I was 7 years old and what I wanted for Christmas was a desk. I don’t know why. I think I had it in my head that grown-up women who were glamorous had desks, and I would have gotten that impression through the movies—Rosalind Russell in the newsroom bossing Cary Grant around, Katharine Hepburn on the phone. This was the 1950s, and that’s the kind of movie they always played on “Million Dollar Movie” on Channel 9 in New York. They had no money for programming on Channel 9 so they repeated the same movie over and over for a week at a time. To this day I can recite whole sections of dialogue from “They Drive by Night” but that’s not important now.

Anyway, all I wanted was the desk. But I didn’t expect to get it because desks were huge and expensive and shiny and . . . well, it was unlikely. And yet that Christmas morning I ran to the tree with my sisters and over on the side was a desk. I want you to know what it looked like. It was small, maybe two feet high, and beige, and made of plywood. It had a drawer for pencils. The plywood wasn’t finished and if you rubbed against it the wrong way you’d get a splinter, but it was the most beautiful desk in human history. I was overwhelmed. I got a kitchen chair and sat at it. It was fabulous. It is my favorite Christmas moment. What followed was better.

I sat there, closed my eyes, put my hands over them, and tried to imagine the first Christmas. And I saw it. I saw it like a movie. It was a blue black night and there were people on the road and I saw the man and the woman, I saw them going from house to house and being told there was no room. Then they went to a rocky place on a little hill just beyond the houses. There were some trees and bushes and a sort of wooden shanty with hay on the floor. Then there was the cry of a child. Animals came and stared and their breath warmed the air. It was starry. Mary’s blanket was Joseph’s cloak. And I thought: It’s all true. It’s not just a story, it’s true, it really happened. This struck me like a thunderbolt.

When I wondered in later years why I had that moment—why I saw it in my mind and suddenly knew it was true—I thought it was connected to the desk. The fact that it was there seemed a miracle. The joy of receiving a happy gift and being grateful for it and excited by it opened up my mind. It cracked open my imagination and let a truth that seemed like magic in.

*   *   *

Is there a moral to this memory? What it taught me, what I remember all these years later, is that everyone likes gifts but no one is more affected by their power than children. They are susceptible to wonder. A child can look at a red toy car in the red-green glow of Christmas tree lights and imagine an entire lifetime. A child can play with a new doll and smell good things being cooked and hear sweet music and it can make that child imagine that life is good, which gives her a template for good, a category for good; it helps her know good exists. This knowledge comes in handy in life; those who do not receive it, one way or another, are sadder than those who do.

We have two more days before Christmas. Remember the soldiers and sailors, remember ma and pa, remember your friends but especially remember the kids. For some people this is difficult because they don’t really know what kids want or need or will be moved by. So here is my idea. I invite readers of this space to tell of their favorite childhood Christmas gift, and what effect it had on them. This might offer inspiration. And anyway they’re always nice stories.

This week the president’s chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, made news when he spoke about the religious references George W. Bush makes in his speeches. Mr. Gerson said that while President Bush believes, as most Christians do, that God is at work in his life, the president does not of course believe that God is behind his presidency or his policy positions.

Mr. Gerson said the president’s references to God are both carefully considered and well within the traditions of presidential rhetoric, and while some consider such references inappropriate, to rid a president’s statements of religious references would be unfortunate on aesthetic grounds—”as a writer I think this would flatten presidential rhetoric and make it less moving and interesting”—and, more important, on grounds of tradition, history and truth. “Scrubbing” public discourse of religious ideas would remove “one of the main sources of social justice in our history.” We forget at our peril that it is the pursuit of justice rooted in faith that has yielded up such great American moral and political movements as abolition, civil rights and the pro-life movement.

Mr. Gerson was eloquent, his arguments apt. But what seemed most telling was his being questioned on whether, when the president refers to belief, he is speaking in “code” to evangelicals. No, said Mr. Gerson, “they’re not code words, they’re our culture.” He said that when he put in a reference to T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” in a speech, he was not sending a code; he was making a literary reference that springs from our culture. The same with religious references. They are not “a plot” or “a secret.”

*   *   *

The idea that the president is speaking in religious code to his religious followers says more about the reporters who asked the question than it does about the president, or his speechwriter.

It reminded me of something. Once, 20 years ago, I was working in the White House and received a call from a respected academic. Her area of claimed expertise was presidential rhetoric. She introduced herself and told me she wanted to talk about “the manipulation of symbols” in President Reagan’s speeches. I told her I was not sure what she meant, could she tell me more.

She said, “You know, the flag—stars and stripes. He uses symbols like the flag in his speeches.”

I thought about that. I said I couldn’t think of anything the president had said about the flag, couldn’t even remember him using the word flag. Could she give me another example of what she meant. She just pressed on about the manipulation of symbols and seemed to focus on flag imagery, so I told her someone in speechwriting had given the president a Scott Fitzgerald quote recently on the meaning of being American. It was very moving. Maybe when the president speaks movingly of our country and its people she sort of sees flags in her imagination? She liked that. How do you all do that? she said. Do what? I said. Manipulate symbols that way, she said. I said, I don’t think we “do” anything. We’re just writers, we write. It’s writing.

We rang off without having achieved the mind meld she hoped for. I thought about the conversation for years. My first thought was, You can get so well educated in America that your thoughts become detached from common sense. You can get so complicated in your thinking that the obvious isn’t real to you anymore. I wondered if she didn’t honestly think that it couldn’t just be writing. She thought it was some kind of higher, dark and secret magic. She thought there were secret codes and symbols placed in speeches to communicate secret messages and elicit certain reactions.

And it is not only academics or journalists who sometimes think things like that. So do Democrats, at least if you go by the last election. In the Kerry camp there was great faith that if only they got what they called “the message” put into something like the American language, their problems would be solved. They tried many messages. They tried going to church and speaking scripture about “faith without acts”; they tried “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time”; they tried “I’m John Kerry and I’m reporting for duty.” The problem was that none of it seemed fully true to Mr. Kerry, it seemed imposed on Mr. Kerry by people searching for a message. And—most important—it seemed to be just words unconnected to serious policy. And Americans always vote on policy—on high taxes or low, on fighting the war on terror this way or that. Mr. Kerry’s statements didn’t seem dark or magical, they just seemed like something the campaign was trying this week.

It seemed to me that the Democrats in the last cycle really did think there is some high magic in the creation of political rhetoric, and that Republicans do some voodoo that they, being ingenuous and honest, haven’t quite gotten a handle on yet.

*   *   *

As long as Democrats think that, Republicans will win. But just for the record, it’s a kind of crazy and paranoid way to look at rhetoric—secret codes and secret code receivers. Here’s a real secret. The most successful phrases are not imposed top-down from the candidate to the people; they bubble up and emerge and are used by the candidate. That’s how “It’s the economy, stupid” came about. The American people let the Clinton campaign know the biggest issue for them in 1992 was the economy. Bill Clinton received the message—it was all over his polls—and used it. Another way of saying this is that Reagan didn’t magically ride out from the West with a new political philosophy that he talked the American people into backing. A particular kind of conservatism was a rising tide in the 1970s and ‘80s and he was part of it. He believed in it; in time he became its most persuasive explainer and exhorter, and its natural leader. The meaning of Reaganism bubbled up around him and within him. Nothing had to be imposed from the top down. No symbols had to be manipulated, whatever that means.
Always in politics it comes down not to words but to actions. It’s not poetry but policy that claims support and wins. Allow me to prove this, for I think I can. I know something the Democratic Party can do right now that will improve its standing and increase its popularity. It can be done this week. Its impact will be quick and measurable.

It is this: Stop the war on religious expression in America. Have Terry McAuliffe come forward and announce that the Democratic Party knows that a small group of radicals continue to try to “scrub” such holidays as Christmas from the public square. They do this while citing the Constitution, but the Constitution does not say it is wrong or impolite to say “Merry Christmas” or illegal to have a crèche in the public square. The Constitution says we have freedom of religion, not from religion. Have Terry McAuliffe announce that from here on in the Democratic Party is on the side of those who want religion in the public square, and the Ten Commandments on the courthouse wall for that matter. Then he should put up a big sign that says “Merry Christmas” on the sidewalk in front of the Democratic National Committee Headquarters on South Capitol Street. The Democratic Party should put itself on the side of Christmas, and Hanukkah, and the fact of transcendent faith.

This would be taking a stand on an issue that roils a lot of people, and believe me those people don’t think conservatives are scrubbing America of Christmas, they think it’s liberals; and they don’t think it’s Republicans, they think it’s Democrats. Confound them, Terry! Come forward with a stand. It is the stand that is the salvation, not mysterious words or codes or magic messages.

Do this, Democrats. Announce you will apply pressure to antireligious zealots throughout the country. You have nothing to lose but a silly and culturally unhelpful reputation as the party that is hostile to religious expression. What you could gain is respect and gratitude. Pick up that Christmas tree, Terry, take it outside and put a star on top, stand next to it, yell Merry Christmas and ring a bell. That’s a manipulation of symbols that would actually make sense.

We have been writing lately about Republicans. Let’s pay some attention to Hillary Clinton, just for fun.

I wrote a book about her more than four years ago. The idea came from a friend, a bright former-Republican-now-Democrat who thought my Wall Street Journal pieces on Mrs. Clinton’s looming senatorial candidacy could be turned into something longer that made the case against her. I immediately thought: Yes, that could make a difference. I went to my publisher, who agreed, and I hit it hard, speaking to Mrs. Clinton’s friends and enemies, scouring the record. What I concluded was that Mrs. Clinton was an unusually cynical leftist political operative who had no great respect for the citizens of the United States or for America itself, but who saw our country as a platform for her core ambitions: to rise and achieve historic personal and political power both with her husband and without him.

Since the book came out I haven’t written much about Mrs. Clinton. I’d said what I had to say. In interviews on the book tour I said what seemed to me the obvious: she would keep her head down in the Senate and work hard, she would gain praise for her ability to get along with Republican senators, she would position herself as a moderate, and run for the presidency in 2008.

She is, right now, in what is surely the happiest time in all of her life, her zestful, independent and productive 50s. She is the single most powerful figure in the Democratic Party. She is popular and broadly supported in her adopted home state. She has a star’s presence at meetings, symposiums, podiums and parties. She is the Democrats’ premier fundraiser. She is its presumptive presidential nominee in the 2008 cycle. Her daughter is grown and launched; her husband is recovering from recent surgery and is not likely to cause her future embarrassment because he is (a) not in office, and (b) the happy recipient of low expectations regarding his personal behavior. Beyond that any unfortunate actions on his part will only make her look more sympathetic and, in comparison, more mature and stable.

*   *   *

So what about the future? Let’s do some Q&A.

How is Mrs. Clinton positioning herself in terms of the issues?

She is taking care of her liberal base while cherry-picking key issues on which she can get to the right of the Republican party. This is most astute and quite effective. For the liberals she produces a steady stream of base-friendly efforts (Special Committee on the Aging, education funding, help for the emotionally disturbed, extended unemployment insurance) and classic pork barrel. To get to the right of the president she talks homeland security and immigration. On homeland security she fights for increased funding, better controls at U.S. ports, tightened security for nuclear power plants and chemical plants. She issues warnings about the use of weapons of mass destruction on American soil. She is a member of the Armed Services Committee and likes to talk about military reform. On immigration she has begun talking tough on border security, accusing the administration of not spending enough, employing enough people, using the best technology. She recently called herself “adamantly against illegal immigrants,” by which she no doubt meant illegal immigration, and has been inching toward support for a national ID card.

Why does she want to get to Mr. Bush’s right on these issues?

Three reasons. The first is that she knows another attack on American soil is inevitable and wants to position herself politically as The Wise One Who Warned Us.

Second, she knows that a woman perceived as a liberal has no chance at winning the presidency while a woman perceived as a tough, pragmatic moderate does. So she is tough where Mr. Compassionate Conservative is soft (immigration), or is vulnerable, after a coming attack, to charges that he was soft (homeland security). She can’t lose on this one. Security can always be better, and after America is attacked again anger and finger pointing will be widespread.

Third, Mrs. Clinton knows the Democratic Party as a whole is to the left of the electorate. She is used to this. It is the story of her life. The electorate in Arkansas were always more moderate than Gov. and Mrs. Clinton, and President and Mrs. Clinton for that matter. She knows how to operate in such conditions. She does not intend to go down in flames as a leftist when she runs for president. This will take guile. She has guile.

But what about what people are saying is the key difference between the red states and the blue states, the values thing, religion. So many Americans cleave to a religious faith, and the Democratic Party is perceived to be uninterested in faith except to the degree that they are mildly hostile (“Take down that Merry Christmas sign!”) or believe religion is a “language” they must learn to “speak effectively.” Isn’t that an essential problem for the Democrats?

Yes. And she knows it. And she is about to get very spiritual. She knows it’s not enough to run around quoting scripture on the stump, as John Kerry did. On the other hand she cannot speak as Bush did of Christ as the center of her life because that would not be credible: She has never spoken that way and strikes no one as born again.

But she can go about it in her own way. She will begin giving interviews in which she speaks of the importance of the teachings of Christ in her thinking about policy issues. She will also begin to emphasize as never before her Methodist youth, and her hometown pastor’s emphasis on public service. Something tells me a big black Bible is being put on a coffee table in her office even as I type. And there will also suddenly be more media availabilities after Sunday church service.

Always remember what Bill Clinton did after he lost re-election to the governorship in 1980. He joined the choir in the only local church whose services were broadcast on television throughout Arkansas every Sunday morning. You could turn in every Sunday and see him in his robe, with his music book, singing spirituals.

*   *   *

If Mrs. Clinton is such a big Democratic star, why didn’t her colleagues consider her for majority leader, instead of the less impressive and sophisticated Harry Reid?

She doesn’t want it. She doesn’t want to lead the Democratic senators. She wants to lead the Hillary for President effort. She wants her independence. She will in fact demonstrate some of that independence down the road by opposing the Democratic Conference when it is insufficiently tough, pragmatic and moderate on some key issues of her concern. Nothing will more underscore her reputation for moderation, and she has nothing to lose, as she doesn’t care what the other senators think of her. She thinks they’re the guys in the background in the photo-op. Similarly she will take no serious part in telling her party how to turn itself around. She will keep her wisdom to herself.

So how will she spend her time the next two years or so?

She will continue as the peerless fund-raiser of her party. She very much believes in money and its power to ensure success. She will continue to reach out to conservative opinion makers. She likes to surprise them by asking them to come by or go to lunch. This is bold and shrewd; it leaves them “surprised” and “curious,” the first step toward “more impressed than I wanted to be.” It won’t change their minds, but to some small degree she hopes it will declaw them. She will continue to quietly pork-barrel the left and push base-friendly issues while speaking more and more about improving the military and national security.

But wait a second, she can’t win her party’s nomination that way. The primary voting base of the Democratic Party is leftist.

Yes, but in her case it doesn’t matter. The base of the party will be with her, for two reasons. First, they know her history and know her. They believe she sees the world as they do but does certain things to survive. She was woven into the left and knew everyone on the left for 25 years.

Second and just as important, after the trauma of the Kerry loss, after the morass of doubt and depression in which the party now finds itself, she will seem to be one thing they really want: the person who can win. Because she is a winner. She always has been. The base will make a calculation not unlike the one she has made: We can play moderate to win, no problem.

You make it sound like a Hillary candidacy is inevitable.

She is inevitable as a candidate, but not as a president. There will be serious drawbacks and problems with her candidacy. When she speaks in a large hall she shouts and it is shrill; she sounds like some boomer wife from hell who’s unpacking the grocery bags and telling you that you forgot not just the mayo but the mustard.

That’s fixable, to some degree. What may not be fixable is that many voters associate her with a time of scandal and bad behavior. I mean not Monica, which the Clintons always pretend is The Scandal, but every other scandal of the Clinton era: FBI files, illegal fund-raising, sleazy pardons, the whole ugly mess. There will be some who associate her with the cultural disaster that was the Clinton presidency. There will be those who remember she and he led the country down a path both dark and merry while Osama tapped out his plans on a laptop in a cave.

Are those all the potential impediments to her plans?

No. There is still, always, with Mrs. Clinton, the question of her deepest convictions and beliefs. Also known as What She Stands For, or What She Believes. She has been finessing all this for decades and will continue to attempt to, but it may not work in a national presidential run. What she believed did not seem all that important when she was running for first lady, and was easily finessed when she ran in liberal New York. But there is an old paper trail, there is a record of radical statements and writings by Mrs. Clinton. She could disavow what she has written in the past, but never has. In this she is like John Kerry, who could not disavow his youthful, radical statements about Vietnam. Why has she not disavowed, and why can’t she? That will be a question.

*   *   *

Does that stuff really matter?

Sure. It’s at the heart of things. Americans want to know the deepest beliefs of their president. Mrs. Clinton is no doubt correct that the first woman president will be a conservative or a tough moderate. But maybe the American people would prefer a woman who actually is a conservative or a moderate, such as Sen. Kay Baily Hutchison, as opposed to one who plays one on TV.

So in your view the Democratic bench consists of Hillary. Who’s on the Republican bench?

They’ve got a deep bench and a big fight coming. Alphabetically the list so far can be considered to include George Allen, Bill Frist, Rudy Giuliani, Chuck Hagel, John McCain, Bill Owens, George Pataki, Mitt Romney, and beyond that any number of potential surprise guests from Tommy Thompson to Colin Powell to Mrs. Hutchison. It will be quite a race. I’m already looking forward to it.

Life is complicated, people are complicated, and most of us are a jumble of virtues, flaws and contradictions. I like to try to understand the past, try to put it together in a way that makes sense to me. This can involve judging not only your own actions and decisions but those of others, which can be hard. I have a friend who once said in the middle of a conversation, “Don’t understand me too quickly.” Don’t categorize me; don’t decide you broke the code. Sit back and watch; it’s more interesting than you may know.

Which gets me to Dan Rather, who was once my boss, and who of course has announced his retirement from the anchor chair at CBS News. Everyone I know is asking me what I think of it. I think a lot of things.

I’m going to use the past tense in speaking of him because I’m speaking of his career, and speaking of when I knew him in the past.

My first thought: It is a hard world. We all know this in the abstract, but it can take you aback in the particular. In public life the entire body of your work—an entire career of almost 50 years—can now essentially be summed up and dismissed by the last headline on your career, which in this case is “Rather Retires Under Cloud After Forged Documents Story.” If Dan had retired of his own volition a year ago, that would not be the headline. “Long Career Reflected Stunning Rise of U.S. Media” would be more like it.

I am not saying timing is everything, although it can be rather a lot. I’m thinking of . . . well, Richard Nixon. Nixon had one of the great gutsy careers in American political history, and on the greatest issue of his lifetime—the ugliness and destructiveness of communism here and abroad—he was right, and put his career on the line. He did much good. But his headline is Watergate.

I think the bitterness of Nixon’s presidential years, the personal darkness he seemed to display, was in part a product of simple human pain, and the pain was the result of this: He had been right and brave and done the right thing in the 1950s, and the American left and its cousin the American establishment would never forgive him for it. And he couldn’t stop wanting their approval. He put a traitor named Alger Hiss in jail. The left would make him pay. He paid the price in terms of his personal peace. He handed his enemies a sword.

One of those who picked it up and used it against him was Dan Rather. There is an amazing and unseen circularity to life. And wanting approval can make you do strange things.

*   *   *

Dan was a great boss. He was appreciative of good work and sympathetic when it wasn’t good. He was one of the men—Douglas Edwards and Dallas Townsend were two others—to whom I am indebted, for they taught me how to write for the ear, how to write for people who are listening as opposed to reading. He was generous with praise. Someone who did a good job on a story got flowers and a note. Someone in the newsroom once knocked Dan in a magazine profile, saying he was insecure, always sending too many flowers. Dan thought, Really? Life’s tough, you can’t send too many flowers! He was open to ideas, he was democratic and not hierarchical in his management style, and he tried to be fair in his dealings with people in spite of a personal emotionalism that was deep, ever present and not entirely predictable.

For three years, from 1981 through 1984, I wrote his daily radio commentary, a four-minute essay with a one-minute spot that went out to all the CBS affiliates and network-owned stations. It was a great job. We did some good work. Here’s how it got done: When I had been doing the show for a few weeks I could see that my work was not good—uneven, without voice, without a clear point of view. I thought I knew the reason. I had become increasingly a political conservative. Dan, it was obvious to me, was a sort of establishment liberal—not a wild leftist and not an ideologue, but whatever smart liberals thought was more or less what he wound up thinking, and saying. I couldn’t write his views well, because I didn’t buy them and didn’t fully understand them. I couldn’t write my views, because the show had to reflect his thinking. So I went to him and told him my problem. He was great. He said: On any given issue that we discuss, give the liberal point of view fairly and give the conservative point of view fairly, and then we’ll end it with my opinion, because it’s my show. I thought that sounded good.

And it worked. “Dan Rather Reporting” actually got something of a conservative following, not because it was a conservative show—it wasn’t—but because it actually put forward the conservative point of view in what might be called a fair and balanced way. At CBS News in those days that was surprising.

CBS then was full of people who liked to argue about who opposed the Vietnam war first, this producer or that reporter. It was a matter of pride who was antiwar first. On the night in 1980 when Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in a landslide, and brought with him a Republican Senate, CBS News, a busy hive full of people charged with telling America the news at a dramatic moment, was like a morgue. I was happy, and the blue-collar workers—the cameramen who were bringing up families on Long Island, the secretaries from Queens—were delirious. Finally someone would lower their taxes—payroll taxes on overtime were killing them—and stop the humiliation in Iran. But the white-collar workers, the producers and writers and on-air talent—oh what a sad and depressed lot they were. The forces of evil had won.

Two things to be said here. One is that CBS News hasn’t changed that much, and the other is that the media world in which it operates has changed completely. The whole context has changed. No one has to accept the enforced corporate liberalism of the networks anymore, as they did from 1950 through 1990. They have options, from cable to Fox to the Internet to hundreds and thousands of radio shows, newspapers, magazines. The old network hegemony is over. That’s why network news viewership is down, that’s why the evening news isn’t appointment TV anymore. America didn’t turn crazily right, Americans just finally got political options in how they’d get the news, and took advantage of them.

*   *   *

Dan Rather’s career traces all this. He rose as network TV rose, rose in the age of Cronkite, and when he took Mr. Cronkite’s chair it was front-page news. He was one of the three men in America who’d tell the entire country the news. It was big stuff.
Along the way, on the way, he had his dramas. He was the young reporter at Parkland Memorial Hospital who got word from a priest that JFK was dead. He had it first. He covered the civil rights era down South in the 1960s—an insufficiently appreciated shaper of the views of young reporters of Dan’s generation. They saw white men in uniforms use fire hoses on young blacks; they saw black people trying to get a cup of coffee at the counter at Woolworth’s punched and dragged away; they covered the bombing of the Birmingham church, and the funerals of the little girls who died there. (Nine-year-old Condi Rice, who lived nearby, could have been one of them.) The civil rights struggle seared everyone, but few more than the young reporters who covered it, and few, I think, more than Dan.

So did Vietnam, from which Dan reported, again at personal risk. Another perhaps insufficiently appreciated fact: Part of the bitterness of Vietnam was the bitterness of those who were risking their lives in the fight on the ground only to perceive, day by day, that their government, and its Clark Cliffords and other shrewd operators, were pulling the plug on the war and not fighting to win. In Washington they were trying to escape with their careers and reputations intact. On the ground in country, as they used to say, they were trying to escape with their lives. Imagine how you’d feel if you were a grunt losing your friends as all this became clearer day by day. And imagine what it was like to be young Dan, listening to those grunts each day.

And then Watergate. More and more I think that scandal will be remembered as a kind of hysteria, a virus that jumped from reporter to reporter, newsroom to newsroom, raising temperatures to fever pitch. Dan was one of the reporters who went after Nixon, et al., with a vengeance. Looking back one might ask: Why?

For a mix of reasons. Because it was good for business. Because it drove up “Evening News” numbers. Because there was blood in the air. Because Watergate seemed to illustrate what reporters knew, just knew, was the secret truth residing in Richard Nixon’s dark heart: a desire for enemies lists and break-ins and IRS reviews. Because it built up reporters as white knights, and reporters really didn’t mind being seen as white knights. Because it was exciting, and black and white. The good guys were Democrats, investigators, special counsels and journalists looking for The Truth. The bad: Nixon, Republicans, anyone who worked for Nixon except a good source, Charles Colson, then a wild man, and G. Gordon Liddy, a wild man to this day.

If you were a young Dan Rather you knew which side was the side to be on. You knew which side your bosses were on. You knew which side would lead to your rise. And you knew which side would win.

It wasn’t exactly complicated. Every conservative in America in the last century, especially in the media and in the colleges, knew they would be dinged and damaged if they held to their beliefs. Every liberal in the media and the academy knew they could rise if they espoused liberal views. Dan wanted to rise.

Probably the worst moment in his career, because it was arguably the one most obvious in showing bias and a political agenda, was the time Dan tried to beat up George H.W. Bush live, on the “CBS Evening News,” over Iran-contra. Mr. Bush decked him instead, and with a question that reverberates: How would you like your whole career to be judged by one mistake? I do not doubt that CBS News that night thought it was going to take down a vice president, and wanted to. And was embittered by its failure. Which may have contributed to the years long, Ahab-like quest of producer Mary Mapes to bring down George W. Bush with documents it took bloggers less than 24 hours to reveal as fabrications.

And yet. Dan Rather was one of the great breaking-news reporters of our time. Hurricanes, earthquakes, big sudden stuff—he loved it, and he knew how to cover it. A friend reminded me of the beauty with which Dan asked for silence as CBS’s cameras lingered on the sun going down on quake-ravaged San Francisco in 1989. And I think of his delicate coverage of stories like Princess Diana’s funeral.

I don’t think Dan Rather ever saw himself as being destructive in his views and biases when the story of the night was political. He always seemed to me to love America, was moved, always, by those who fight for it. He respected the armed forces and their sacrifices. He surprised me one day by reciting from heart and with tears in his eyes the last letter of Travis at the Alamo. And there was the time, after 9/11, when he went on David Letterman’s show and, in speaking of the heroism of what he’d seen at Ground Zero and the tragedy of it, burst into sobs. He felt it. Anyone who felt 9/11 down to his bones—well, who’s to gainsay that?

*   *   *

Ultimately this is what I think was true about Dan and his career. It’s not very nice but I think it is true. He was a young, modestly educated Texas boy from nowhere, with no connections and a humble background. He had great gifts, though: physical strength, attractiveness, ambition, commitment and drive. He wanted to be a star. He was willing to learn and willing to pay his dues. He covered hurricanes and demonstrations, and when they got him to New York they let him know, as only an establishment can, what was the right way to think, the intelligent enlightened way, the Eastern way, the Ivy League way, the Murrow School of Social Justice way. They let him know his simple Texan American assumptions were not so much wrong as not fully thought through, not fully nuanced, not fully appreciative of the multilayered nature of international political realities. He swallowed it whole.

He had a strong Texas accent, but they let him know he wasn’t in Texas anymore. I remember once a nice man, an executive producer, confided in me that he’d known Dan from the early days, from when he first came up to New York. He laughed, not completely unkindly, and told me Dan wore the wrong suits. I wish I could remember exactly what he said but it was something like, “He had a yellow suit!” There was a sense of: We educated him. Dan wound up in pinstripe suits made in London. Like Cyrus Vance. Like Clark Clifford. He got educated. He fit right in. And much of what he’d learned—from the civil rights movement, from Vietnam and from Watergate—allowed him to think he was rising in the right way and with the right crew and the right thinking.

People are complicated, careers are complicated, motives are complicated. Dan Rather did some great work on stories that demanded physical courage. He loved the news, and often made it look like the most noble of enterprises. He had guts and fortitude. Those stories he covered that touched on politics were unfortunately and consistently marred by liberal political bias, and in this he was like too many in his profession. But this is changing. The old hegemony has given way. The old dominance is over. Good thing. Great thing. Onward.

One night during the past campaign I made a speech at an annual county GOP meeting in Pennsylvania. I can’t remember the name of the county or where it was exactly; I was there at that moment of early darkness when Pennsylvania is New Jersey and New Jersey is Ohio: it all looks the same. There are trees and highways.

I walked into the hotel ballroom and what I saw startled me. There were a thousand people milling about, making quite a din. They were all standing and talking and eating chicken fingers from hors d’oeuvres tables dotted around the room. There were no chairs. Normally when I speak it’s to people in chairs in a hall.

I was introduced at a little podium and began to speak and the people in the back continued their racket. I made some jokes to get them laughing and draw them in to my remarks, but the roar continued. People up front started telling them to be quiet back there. They got louder. I looked out at them and said if they didn’t simmer down I’d start to sing, which would be terrible for them. The roar continued. All I could think to do at that point was talk through it and over it and do my best and say what I had to say and introduce the next speaker, a U.S. senator.

He—it was Arlen Specter—understood the room.

He took the podium, readjusted the mike, smiled and said, “Ssssshhhhhhhh.”

He said it very softly, drawing it out, then letting the sound gently disappear. Then he said it again, even softer.

And the crowd began to quiet.

The senator’s wife leaned toward me and explained, consolingly, “You didn’t know, but when the crowd won’t stop you have to go ‘Ssssshhhhhhhh.’ It’s the only thing that works.”

“Why does it work?” I asked.

She said she thought it might be something in the human brain that responds, even in adulthood, to the first sound your mother made to you when you were an infant and fussing.

“Ssssshhhhhhhh.”

Wonderful sound.

And good advice for our country, isn’t it? After all the Sturm und Drang of the past few weeks our country would benefit from an absence of sound. Next week we mark Thanksgiving. Today, in anticipation, and after our fractious election, we could declare National Settle Down Week. National Be Still Week. Or National Give It a Rest Week.

The Great American Ssssshhhhhhhh-Out.

I told a friend this. He said, “Like Larry Hagman.” This of course confused me. He explained that once a week Mr. Hagman, the actor, used to say nothing. He’d wear a sign on his lapel that said, “Please forgive me, I’m not talking today.” This irritated his family. It makes me want to find him and adopt him.

We have all been talking a great deal, and for a long time. We have been choosing a posture and verbalizing its legitimacy, its excellence. I Hear America Saying.

Ssssshhhhhhhh, I want to respond. “I almost went to Canada but went into therapy instead.” No—go to Canada. Add to the great silence there. Or help build one here. “You had better bring your agenda to the front burner and to a full boil,” Bob Jones III of the eponymous Bob Jones Everything Down South, warns the re-elected president. Jeez, as Bob Jones doesn’t say, could we relax a little?

I want to say to Bob Jones III, “Bob, meet Buddha.” Life is a good thing. Breathe in. Breathe out. We’re here. It’s good.

I want to say Bob, remember Psalm 46:10: “Be still and know that I am God.” Or just, “Be still.” Or “Be.”

Instead I say to Bob Jones III, and to myself: Ssssshhhhhhhh.

*   *   *

You want to discuss the appointment of Condi Rice to State. Ssssshhhhhhhh.
She is a good person; she has experience and accomplishments; she is stable, hardworking and sophisticated. She is also—this is breathtaking, still—a young black woman raised to the position first held by Thomas Jefferson. It is considered corny to point this out. But corny’s not all bad. Look at it this way. In every U.S. embassy and consulate in the world very soon, non-Americans will walk in to see two things: a picture of the American president and next to it a picture of the young black woman who is this nation’s secretary of state. They will notice this, and consciously or not they will think: This truly must be some kind of country.

Is there a drawback to her appointment? There must be. There is a drawback to everything. The Bush cabinet is getting very Bushian. That sends a clear message. But you don’t always want to send a clear message. Sometimes you want to confuse things. Sometimes you want to give an unclear message to the world so that it will sit down and scratch its head, in silence. When Colin Powell was secretary of state, foreign leaders didn’t know exactly where he stood, either in terms of policy or internally, in his place in the Bush hierarchy. It confused them. This was so wonderful. They confided all sorts of things to him because they didn’t know what he’d respond to or how or what he’d bring home and wouldn’t. It’s good when foreign leaders confide. It can be good when they don’t know. More head scratching, I say. More “ssssshhhhhhhh.”

The criticism of Ms. Rice has been fascinating. Her critics need to sit down and have a Coke, as Bob Dole said. A friend said to me yesterday, “She is boring.” I thought, really? You can’t be boring enough; we’ve had quite enough excitement.

Another person said, “She’s not very feminine.” My first thought was: Neither was Colin.

My second thought was: How startling is this conversation? I should probably explain it was held in Manhattan.

“I think she is extremely ladylike in her bearing and manner,” I said. “Soft voice, pastel suits, heels, not a hair out of place.”

“Yes,” my friend said, “but she doesn’t give off any sparks of sexuality.”

“That’s another thing I like about her”, I said. We don’t want a secretary of state running around giving off sparks of sexuality, do we. We don’t want a secretary of state giving off sparks at all. We want a nice, quiet, calming, competent, sophisticated, even-keeled person to do a good, solid, nonshowy job.

Why do I think President Bush picked her? Because he knows her, trusts her, and knows she’ll take care of State while he takes care of the CIA, which will be another great Bushian battle. She managed the National Security Council; she’ll manage State. It’s fine. Don’t fuss. Ssssshhhhhhhh.

That is good advice for the CIA, too. What has been happening there is remarkable. That we would have our central foreign intelligence agency OKing attack books that knock White House foreign policy, and during a close presidential campaign is remarkable, unprecedented, not good. The strangeness and immaturity of the resigning CIA officials’ complaint—that Porter Goss’s Hill staffers, new to the agency, had been rude to them—was best captured by Cliff May in National Review Online. May said: Would James Bond whine that Moneypenny had been rude to him? Would he run to Q and say, She got in my face, she was brusque, boo-hoo?

I don’t think so. I think he’d suck it up and have a moody drink. I think James Bond would look at the members of the American intelligence and say, “Ssssshhhhhhhh.”

*   *   *

There is so much news and bombast going on. Fallujah, the Supreme Court, postelection insults, cabinet resignations, cabinet announcements, “He’s dead now,” Kashmir, new nukes for Russia, Rice to State, the Specter controversy. There are so many battles going on. The stakes are so high. And each battle has appointed generals fighting them verbally on television. Yesterday on “Crossfire,” Paul Begala called Condi Rice a liar and an incompetent. Jon Stewart was right: Stop it.

Ssssshhhhhhhh.

I’ll finish with Sen. Specter, whose sonorous “Ssssshhhhhhhh” was so satisfying. Arlen Specter was just re-elected by the people of Pennsylvania, a major industrial state; the Judiciary Committee chairmanship is his by tradition and seniority. Conservatives have been angry with him for a long time and for good reason. They have expressed their unhappiness. They have made their point. Mr. Specter has been chastened and warned; the leadership of his party told him to fight for himself. He knows the Republican Party will expect him to support the nomination of judges free of a Roe v. Wade litmus test, or any litmus test, including a religious test. Many believe, and with reason, that a practicing Catholic isn’t allowed to be a federal judge in America anymore. Mr. Specter will have to be more open-minded, more supportive, than he’s been in the past. But he looks like a man who got the message, doesn’t he?

The on-the-ground conservatives who won this election for the Republican Party want to show their force. Understandable. They won. But there’s a lot of force being shown lately, and sometimes it’s conservative to step back, to hold your fire, to wait.

Give him the slot. If it doesn’t work, revisit it later. There are enough battles going on.

Ssssshhhhhhhh.

And that goes for me too. “Happy Thanksgiving,” she said softly, sonorously, meaning no ill and wishing good digestion, peace and a fine turkey for all.

Well, I just can’t stop being happy. I don’t mean elated—it’s hard to get elated by big history, as opposed to by the birth of a baby, say, or a child’s being elected president of the debating club—but I continue to feel relief (the exit poll hives have gone down) and satisfaction (my countrymen, such good sense they have). So let’s just let the mood continue and have fun.

This week I went to a symposium thrown together at the last minute by the Club for Growth, the Washington-based political action committee that gives crucial financial help to candidates who espouse economic policies that will help the American job machine, and opposing those who do not. Almost every Senate and House candidate they backed this year won. Also it was the club that worked with Hollywood’s David Zucker to get out the anti-Kerry commercial that was perhaps the best of the season, the one with the guy standing at the altar when the bride realizes he just can’t make up his mind and starts to chase the bridesmaid, and then the old organist. It captured John Kerry’s indecision and its implications. More important, it was funny.

Members of the club gathered in a New York hotel room, and president Stephen Moore said we ought to take a moment for a full and uninhibited gloat. So we applauded, stomped and cheered. It’s good to see Republicans show their joy. Republicans are people who can always see the next problem down the road, and are always working on it; moreover they’re often like the Irish and the Jews, who don’t believe in good fortune, and if it happens don’t mention it or it will stop. But for this night, skepticism, worry and even maturity were put aside, and everyone was just happy.

I was on a small panel that talked about the meaning of last Tuesday, why it happened, what was behind it. The nice thing about such panels is that nobody knows the meta-answer, so you can’t be wrong, only rather interesting or mildly stupid, which is allowed among friends. I knew some of the speakers were heavyweights who would look at the returns and their implications with gravity and sophistication, so I decided the only thing I could do that they couldn’t was be shallow. Thus I shared views that were based on a merely intuitive sense of what might have been going through the minds of some of the almost 60 million people who voted for George W. Bush.

*   *   *

I actually think all elections come down to issues, to great questions that are answered vote by vote in the ballot box. But I put that wisdom aside for the fun of free association.
This is what I said: The president won re-election by a relatively healthy margin because the American people judged him to be the better man. He seemed to have the better character of the two candidates. He’d tell you what he was going to do, and why, and then he’d do it. He’d been doing that for four years. He did it in the campaign, too. He was dependable, and he was predictable. It’s nice to have a predictable president. It’s not nice in the nuclear age to have a surprising one.

Mr. Bush was not known as a sneak or a liar. We have had presidents who were known as sneaks and liars, some quite recently, but that wasn’t Mr. Bush, and I believe it was a relief to normal people. That relief was never articulated by anybody I remember hearing, but I believe it had a real if unquantifiable effect on the voters’ choice.

I think the people tended toward Mr. Bush because they saw him as a good American man, a man they know—an imperfect one with an imperfect past who turned his life around with grit and grace. That’s a very American story. It’s one we all know, and respect. There are Democrats—Chris Heinz was reportedly one, at the end—who amuse themselves referring to President Bush as a former cokehead. I don’t know about that, but I know America went through the 1970s, and America is still in recovery. When nice people hear things like “former drunk” they tend to put the internal emphasis on the word former.

The American people arguably did not pick the more interesting man in the race. Mr. Kerry strikes me as a complicated and intelligent person, and the one time I spent any time with him he seemed to be bright, and to have an interesting range of thoughts on many issues. Mr. Bush, on the other hand, does not strike me as the most interesting man in the world. That’s one of the things I love about him. I sort of have a theory that Americans don’t necessarily desire terribly interesting men as presidents. “Interesting” tends to bring with it a whole bunch of other attributes—”complicated,” “hard to figure,” “unknowable,” “startling,” even sometimes “tortured and tragic.” A lot of us are Republicans, and we just hate tortured and tragic. Or rather we like it in our plays and novels and TV characters and even in our friends. But not in the guy with his finger on the button.

I think Mr. Bush, the better man in terms of character, was also the more normal man. And we like normal. He loves sports and business and politics, and speaks their language. Normal. His wife is important to him, and his kids seem a bit of a mystery to him, and perhaps even to some degree intimidating. Normal. He thinks if bad guys attack New York City and the Pentagon, we go after them and kill them—normal. He thinks marriage is between a man and a woman—normal. He thinks if Baptist preachers in a suburb of Louisville have an after-school plan that has an excellent record of turning kids from juvenile delinquency to thinking about college, those Baptist preachers should be helped and encouraged every way we can, and it has nothing to do with “church and state.” Normal. He thinks if there’s an old plaque bearing the Ten Commandments on the wall of the courthouse you should leave it alone—it can’t hurt, and it might help. Normal.

Finally, you look at President Bush, and you can tell he’s not going to change much anymore. He’s 58 and he’s going to stay who he is. He is not emotionally or intellectually labile or subject to great swings—he’s not going to shock us and announce tomorrow that, on reconsideration, Osama had a point, or he actually doesn’t like Jesus. He’s not going to say tax increases are good. He’s not going to say we need more regulation of small businesses. He liked to brag sometimes in the campaign “You know who I am—I say what I mean and I mean what I say.” Actually, it wasn’t bragging, for it was true.

Some liberals, misunderstanding Mr. Bush’s support, think that in the red states they think Bush is a god. They do not. They do not think he is perfect; they do not think he is Pericles; they do not think he has the subtlest political mind since Harry Hopkins (if Hopkins was subtle—I forget). They just like him, and respect him. Some love him, but they all make teasing jokes about him. This is a man whose very White House called its political strategy shop “strategery.” The American people are in their own way fiercely sophisticated. They know the history of second terms: woe and error. They expect Mr. Bush to make mistakes. But they don’t expect him to make amazing out-of-character mistakes. They expect him to make George Bush-type mistakes. They can live with that.

*   *   *

The journalist and economist who followed me on the panel said some serious big things. One said he could quite imagine Mr. Bush defying the second administration curse, in part because of his boldness: He means it about Social Security reform, for instance, and he’s going to do it. The economist was convinced Mr. Bush will move big time against the estate tax, which we call the death tax, and on capital gains. No one, however, predicted lower spending. There was a sense that once again Mr. Bush will trade spending for progress in other areas, and let that progress lower the size of the deficit down the road.

There was a nice moment in the Q&A, which I’ll share. I was asked by Stephen Moore about comparisons of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, how they are alike and how they differ. I told him I normally don’t answer that question from journalists because they always turn it into a sort of “but she conceded Bush lacks Reagan’s rhetorical gifts” kind of thing. I don’t know why liberal journalists enjoy comparing Mr. Bush with Reagan. They never wanted to compare JFK’s leadership style with the giant who preceded him 15 years before, FDR, and they never compared Bill Clinton’s rhetoric to JFK’s. But Stephen was asking not as a mischievous journalist, so I said I’d answer.

I just recounted something that has stayed in my mind. About a year ago I was visiting West Point, and I was talking to a big officer, a general or colonel. But he had the medals and ribbons and the stature, and he asked me what I thought of President Bush. I tried to explain what most impressed me about Mr. Bush, and I kept falling back on words like “courage” and “guts.” I wasn’t capturing the special quality Mr. Bush has of making a tough decision and then staying with it if he thinks it’s right and paying the price even when the price is high and—

I stopped speaking for a moment. There was silence. And then the general said, “You mean he’s got two of ’em.” And I laughed and said yes, that’s exactly what I mean. And the same could be said of Reagan.

It was a happy night at the Club for Growth.

*   *   *

On Monday, National Review’s editor, Rich Lowry, wrote this on The Corner, his magazine’s blog: “I’ve been talking to Bush folks about how they pulled off this victory over the last couple of days, and the grass roots activism is something to behold. It was driven largely by volunteers who gave of their time and effort because they believed in something—in the president and in conservative ideas. This was a marvelous exercise in democratic citizenship and if it had happened on behalf of Howard Dean or some other liberal, we would never hear the end in the media of how members of this grassroots army vindicated their ideals on election day. But that’s exactly what these Bush volunteers did.”

Mr. Lowry had it exactly right. I witnessed it from the bottom up, going door to door with volunteers in Florida, meeting with the troops collating and delivering pro-Bush literature in Ohio, meeting with the phone callers who were getting out the vote in Pennsylvania, and hearing everyone’s stories on the national battle of the Bush lawn signs. They were always being removed in the dark of night. (One Ohio man got so fed up he wired his Bush sign with some kind of cattle prodder thing; in the morning, proof through the night that his sign was still there.) I saw mothers leave their kids to work at various headquarters for a few hours whenever they could, and husbands stay out late to put up banners. I saw the young man in an Ohio headquarters who kept a baseball bat in his office because they had been menaced, and he meant to menace back if he had to.

Which gets me to last week’s column, in which I wrote about Agincourt. I got a lot of mail about my reference to the fact that the bloggers and Internetters of 2004 were like the yeomen of England who pierced the old armor of the French aristocracy at that great battle. Some people wrote to me parts of the famous speech Harry the king gave minutes before the battle in Shakespeare’s “King Henry V.” Young Harry’s troops are outnumbered, and for all he knows outgeneraled. But they had their guts and their weapons and an unkillable desire to win.

One reader wrote and mentioned St Crispin’s Day, the day of the battle, which inspired me to open my Shakespeare. You know the speech well, but let’s enjoy it again, in tribute to Bush’s yeomen and -women.

The King speaks to his men in Act IV, Scene III, in the English camp:

This day is call’d the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbors.
And say, “These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.”
Old men forget; yet all shall be forget,
But he’ll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words,
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap while any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

St. Crispin Crispian—or St. Crispin and St. Crispian, there might have been two; quick research indicates no one knows—were apparently shoemakers and evangelists who tried to convert Britain in the third century. Their feast day—the day of Agincourt—was Oct. 25. This year, Oct. 25 was exactly eight days before the election, when all Mr. Bush’s yeomen had gathered in their separate fields, and were shooting their best arrows, and working their hearts out, and ensuring what would become their great victory. Here’s to them.

But of course none of this is anything to what is being done today, and tomorrow, in another battle, called Fallujah. It was launched on what might be called the Feast Day of the United States Marines, their 200th birthday as an American fighting force. As Shakespeare might have said, Semper fi.

God bless our country.

Hello, old friends. Let us savor.

Let us get our heads around the size and scope of what happened Tuesday. George W. Bush, 43rd president of the United States, became the first incumbent president to increase his majority in both the Senate and the House and to increase his own vote (by over 3.5 million) since Franklin D. Roosevelt, political genius of the 20th century, in 1936. This is huge.

George W. Bush is the first president to win more than 50% of the popular vote since 1988. (Bill Clinton failed to twice; Mr. Bush failed to last time and fell short of a plurality by half a million.) The president received more than 59 million votes, breaking Ronald Reagan’s old record of 54.5 million. Mr. Bush increased his personal percentages in almost every state in the union. He carried the Catholic vote and won 42% of the Hispanic vote and 24% of the Jewish vote (up from 19% in 2000.)

It will be hard for the mainstream media to continue, in the face of these facts, the mantra that we are a deeply and completely divided country. But they’ll try!

The Democrats have lost their leader in the Senate, Tom Daschle. I do not know what the Democratic Party spent, in toto, on the 2004 election, but what they seem to have gotten for it is Barack Obama. Let us savor.

The elites of Old Europe are depressed. Savor. The nonelites of Old Europe, and the normal folk of New Europe, especially our beloved friend Poland, will not be depressed, and many will be happy. Let’s savor that too.

George Soros cannot buy a presidential election. Savor. “Volunteers” who are bought and paid for cannot beat volunteers who come from the neighborhood, church, workplace and reading group. Savor.

The leaders of the Bush effort see it this way: A ragtag band of more than a million Republican volunteers who fought like Washington’s troops at Valley Forge beat the paid Hessians of King George III’s army. Savor.

*   *   *

As I write, John Kerry is giving his speech. He looks hurt. Who wouldn’t? He fought to the end, for every vote, untiring and ceaseless. I told some young people recently who were walking into a battle, “Here’s how to fight: You fight until they kill you, until they kill you and stop your heart, and then you let them carry you out of the room. But you fight until they carry.” I think that’s how the Democrats fought. Good for them.
To admit defeat with attempted grace is a moving sight. Kerry did well. His talking about his “good conversation” with the president was gracious and helpful. He was honest about the facts of the vote in Ohio. When he thanked his people from the bottom of his heart it was a real thanks. “Thanks to Democrats and Republicans and Independents. . . . Thanks to everyone who voted.” “Don’t lose faith, what you did made a difference . . . and building on itself . . . the time will come when your votes, your ballots, will change the world. And it’s worth fighting for.” A lot of pundits and editorialists are going to say, “His best speech of the campaign was his last.” But that’s not the point.

Mr. Kerry graced democracy today. He showed his love for it. Savor.

And now the president is speaking. He looks tired and happy. He looks as if the lines on his forehead are deeper. Maybe it’s the lighting. “We had a really good phone call,” he said of Mr. Kerry. “He was very gracious . . . and he and his supporters can be proud of their efforts.” Good for them both. He announced his agenda: reform the tax code, privatize Social Security, help the emerging democracies of Iraq and Afghanistan. “And then our servicemen and -women will come home with the honor they have earned.”

“Today I want to speak to every person who voted for my opponent. . . . I need your support. . . . I will do all that I can do to earn your trust. . . . We have one country, one Constitution, and one future that binds us.” All good. Savor.

*   *   *

Who was the biggest loser of the 2004 election? It is easy to say Mr. Kerry: he was a poor candidate with a poor campaign. But I do think the biggest loser was the mainstream media, the famous MSM, the initials that became popular in this election cycle. Every time the big networks and big broadsheet national newspapers tried to pull off a bit of pro-liberal mischief—CBS and the fabricated Bush National Guard documents, the New York Times and bombgate, CBS’s “60 Minutes” attempting to coordinate the breaking of bombgate on the Sunday before the election—the yeomen of the blogosphere and AM radio and the Internet took them down. It was to me a great historical development in the history of politics in America. It was Agincourt. It was the yeomen of King Harry taking down the French aristocracy with new technology and rough guts. God bless the pajama-clad yeomen of America. Some day, when America is hit again, and lines go down, and media are hard to get, these bloggers and site runners and independent Internetters of all sorts will find a way to file, and get their word out, and it will be part of the saving of our country.

Last note. As much as anyone, the POW wives of Vietnam, who stood against the Democratic nominee for president and for the Republican, can claim credit for the Bush victory. Everyone with a computer in America, and a lot of people with TVs, saw their testimony about the 1970s, and their husbands, and John Kerry. You could not come away from their white-haired, soft-faced, big-eyeglasses visages without thinking: He should not be commander in chief.

Oh, another last note. Tuesday I heard three radio talkers who refused to believe it was over when the ludicrous, and who knows but possibly quite mischievous, exit polls virtually declared a Kerry landslide yesterday afternoon. They are Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. The last sent me an e-mail that dismissed the numbers as elitist nonsense and propaganda. She is one tough girl and they are two tough men. Savor them too.

Life should be fun. It should be satisfying and exciting. As much as possible one should do what one’s heart dictates, as long as it is constructive and helpful. (If it is not, one should take one’s heart to a minister, rabbi or therapist, and get one’s heart in order.)

In this spirit, a slight swerve is announced here.

Everyone who reads me knows I am a political conservative, by which I mean I adhere to a particular philosophy, a way of viewing life and man and his time on earth. I do not think a lot of modern conservatives have taken on their philosophy because they were brought up in it, schooled in it, and swallowed it whole. And I don’t think a lot of them became conservatives because they read a book by Hayek or Adam Smith and thought, “Ah ha, this seems sound!” I think a lot of people in our time who have become conservatives did it because they had a certain and particular kind of mind. To choose just one facet, they have a natural respect and even sometimes love toward human beings, while at the same time having no illusions—none—about who we are. Man is not perfect and is not perfectible, at least by other men. We are what we are; God made us and gave us freedom; we use it to ill and good; man best operates through certain arrangements and traditions, and those arrangements and traditions are best animated by respect for the individual and love of liberty.

You start out there, and then you find yourself hearing something or reading something that you find out is “conservative.” You pick up National Review at the age of 17, or you read C.S. Lewis or bump into the autobiography of a man named Whittaker Chambers and you read and suddenly you think, “Oh my God, that’s exactly what I think.” That moment, for a young conservative, is a very happy one, a breakthrough.

In the leftist water in which we all swim, and have swum for half a century, left-liberalism reigns: in media, in academia, in the schools and the newsmagazines. It is a great relief to see there are actually a number of little fish like you, trying hard to swim upstream.

Because I am a conservative I support the party that best represents conservative views, the Republican Party. Sometimes I get mad at it; often it disappoints me. It is imperfect, and not perfectible. But to a greater degree than in the past I feel an urge to help it. Since peace was wrenched off the tracks on 9/11, deep in my heart I have pulled for President Bush, Vice President Cheney, members of the current administration, and Republicans in the Senate and the House. With the decline of the Democratic Party I have become convinced there is a greater chance we will win the war if the Republican Party wins the election.

In the past four years I have written about and given advice to both parties in this column. But a week ago, while watching the Democratic convention, I made a decision.

I am going to take three months’ unpaid leave from The Wall Street Journal and attempt to support the Republican Party in the coming and crucial election. (Every four years everyone says “this is the most important election of my lifetime,” but this year I believe it is true.) I’m going to give whatever advice and encouragement I have in terms of strategy, approach, message—I hate that word—and issues. No one has asked me to do this, and I do it as a volunteer, not for a salary but simply to give my time to help what I think is the more helpful side. This will take a bite out of my finances but I can do it. Actually most of us, when we die, wind up with a few thousand dollars in the bank. We should have spent it! I am going to spend mine now.

The White House does not need my help. They have the best political strategists, communications specialists and speechwriters since the Reagan era, which had the best of all these since the time of JFK. President Bush has his sound, and it’s a good one. He’s getting his sea legs on the stump—it’s hard to go from being-president to being-president-and-running again-for-president, it’s a bit of a shift and is always awkward. But he’s got it together and they’ve got it together.

There are others, however, lower down on the power pole, who might benefit from another hand on deck. I’ve called a few this week and they’ve been welcoming and I’ll see if I can add to their fortunes. If I can’t I’ll at least try not to sink them.

Because politics is such a spectator sport and an obsession for so many people—I include myself in this group; who else would watch almost every minute of the Democratic convention, and enjoy it?—some political reporters will call me and ask who I’ll be trying to help or what I’ll be doing. Let me give them my answer now, and it is an answer that will not change. It is the wonderful reply of Terry Edmonds, a speechwriter for John Kerry, who was pressed by a reporter on what work he was doing at the Democratic convention. “I don’t exist,” he said. He doesn’t want to talk about whatever contributions he’s making. Neither do I. Also, to be frank, while I’m sure Mr. Edmonds is wonderful at what he does and his modesty obscures the size of his contributions, I am not so confident that I will be wonderful at what I do. I haven’t lived a political life since 1988. I have no idea if my ideas will prove pertinent or helpful.

*   *   *

A word about careers. Mine has been varied and has not always gone as planned. When I left the Reagan White House and wrote my first book I was certain I would not return to politics. I worked hard to gain an independent voice as a writer of books and essays and, the past four years, this column. A while back I also agreed to spend part of the 2004 election year commentating on MSNBC and NBC. But it was not fully satisfying. I never felt I was moving the ball forward either for my beliefs or for myself or for that elusive thing that yet exists called “what is true.” The oppositional nature of TV news shows—there’s a liberal and a conservative and they fight, which equals drama, which equals ratings—often keeps progress from happening and truth from being said. And in an odd way people talk a lot on these shows—there’s a high syllabic content—but they often don’t say what they really mean.

Anyway, I never felt I was moving the ball forward. So I ended my contract and figured out where I should be. I decided it’s good to be on TV in whatever venue seems right when you feel you have something important you want to say. I also decided that when you are living through crucial history and you believe one political party is on balance right, and trying to fight a valiant fight, you should join in if you can.

When I return after the election I hope I will bring to my work a new and deeper knowledge of modern politics, the American electorate, and changes in media coverage of both. If it turns out things go well I’ll come back and tell you why I think it went well. If things don’t go well—if the Republicans lose, or they lose plus I’m a big flop in my efforts—I’ll tell you about that too.

*   *   *

A personal note. My colleagues at the Journal have been sterling. This is the third time in four years they’ve allowed me to take a leave, the first two to finish books. They appropriately decided I cannot write for them during this time even now and then, because it is not the business of The Wall Street Journal to employ Republican or Democratic operatives. (I hate that word because it sounds so John Le Carre; but if you are trying to help a party you are operating in its favor, so there you are.) My personal thanks to James Taranto, my wonderful editor of four years; and to Paul Gigot, the editor of the editorial page of the Journal, who shared reservations as to the personal wisdom of my decision and yet proceeded with what might be called a conservative’s love for personal freedom.

The major American political conventions have become like the party conferences of the conservative Tory and liberal Labour parties in England. The point is to showcase the party’s reigning and rising stars. There’s some arguing and maneuvering in the background but it’s in smoke-free green rooms, and it’s not between politicians but media consultants, and it’s over things like whether the spermatozoa-esque pictures of John Kerry crawling in a dust free space suit should be a) laughed off, or b) responded to with dark suggestions of leaks by NASA operatives. They went with plan b, and a fluke became a story. Sometimes candidates must think like the king in Shakespeare: “First thing, let’s kill all the consultants.”

*   *   *

Unlike most Americans I have been watching it all on TV. I am enjoying it because I love politics and speeches. Some observations.
So far, a lot of the speeches have seemed to be an expression of the Democratic Party’s persistent problem, which is that it can’t seem to decide on a message. The speeches have been about everything—health care, technology, minimum wage—but a speech about everything is a speech about nothing. You have to decide.

Some of the speeches had a stale, canned and fulsome quality. Ted Kennedy seemed ponderous and heavy. With his new round glasses he looks like old pictures of his father if his father had grown corpulent. He brought out old chestnuts, quoted JFK, tried mightily to rouse. “John Kerry offers hope, not fear.” “An economy that works for everyone.” “That’s the kind of America we’ll have with John Kerry in the White House.” He has outlived his rhetorical age. It was the speech of someone desperate to move you. Speeches like this never do.

When Barack Obama began his speech everyone watching thought: A star is born. Talk about famous overnight. His Bill Cosby-esque line—”the slander that a black youth with a book is acting white”—was right for the times, which is to say in line with common wisdom, and when he spoke of blue states where “we worship an awesome God,” he was not just hitting a note but using the authentic language of American evangelism. When you first see him he is a plain man of irregular features and jug ears. But when he begins to speak his features blend into harmony and handsomeness. This kind of thing only happens if you have magic. At one point the C-Span cameras went to an unhappy looking Jesse Jackson in the stands. He looked like he was thinking, “I don’t remember passing a torch.” But it was passed.

Teresa Heinz Kerry’s speech was an odd and interesting mix, just like Teresa Heinz Kerry. She is such a distinctive personality, so unusual as a presidential candidate’s wife, that when she began to thank the delegates in five languages a friend asked me with some alarm if she was speaking in tongues. It was weird that she didn’t talk much about her husband—if she doesn’t have special insights or stories to share on him who does?—but it was fun when she dealt with her verbal indiscretions by breezily calling herself “opinionated.” What saves Mrs. Heinz Kerry is a singularity, an individualism, and a retained femininity. She seems like someone who’d come to your house with homeopathic medicine if you had a sinus infection. But there’s a disconnect. There is about her too an air of grievance—the sighs, the resigned shrugs—as if she feels she has been a victim of unusual suffering. She seems not to have noticed that all her life she has been a child of privilege. It’s odd. I wonder sometimes if some liberals have somehow never been told that bad things happen in life, and who are constantly perplexed by whatever misfortunes befall them.

Hillary Clinton was in comparison cold, robotic and too heavily botoxed. At a certain point Botox can become a problem for those in public life. Mrs. Clinton now has to pop her eyes out to show excitement. Worry lines are honorable, and in Mr. Clinton’s wife they are understandable. She should keep them. She has obviously been practicing public speaking—her voice was lower, more modulated and less screechy than usual. Her speech was full of assertion—”I know a thing or two about health care”—but lacking in wit or grace. As always she seemed full of certitude and lacking in sincerity.

Ron Reagan is too coached in media. He has the smooth round tones of a game show host. He patronized his audience. “Let me paint as simple a picture as I can,” he said of stem cell research. This is how liberals say, “I’ll talk slowly, stupid.” When he began with “I am not here to make a political speech,” he seemed like a salesman on the lot: “This is not a used car, it is a pre-owned car.” By the end he seemed to me like Ron Popeil of the late night pocket-fisherman infomercials: And by the way, no fetal tissue is used in this process! He seemed a nicer person years ago when he was dancing in his underpants on Saturday Night Live. He is that unusual person who seems less authentic when not in a tutu.

As in conventions past, some of the best and most revealing moments came away from the podium and in interviews. A sleek Caroline Kennedy hit all the anchor booths, and with Tom Brokaw seemed to leave open the idea that she will be running for office. So will, one senses, Ben Affleck. “You have to enervate the base,” he told Chris Matthews, who introduced him on “Hardball” as “a great writer.” (He must have been thinking of Jayson Blair.) What Mr. Affleck has going for him in terms of politics, besides moviestardom, is, the above notwithstanding, a quick intelligence. Going against him will be this: When he’s watching himself on the monitor and doesn’t know he’s on camera his bright boyish eyes become clever, sensual and vain. He has Clinton eyes.

*   *   *

While watching the convention this week I have been reading the early 20th century novels of Indiana’s Booth Tarkington, the once wildly popular chronicler of American mores and social arrangements as our great rise began. I had a hunch I’d find things pertinent to our times. Sure enough, in the short story collection “In the Arena,” Tarkington gives this description of a political ward heeler. “He was a pock-pitted, damp looking soiled little fungus of a man who had . . . through the operation of a befitting ingenuity, forced a recognition of his leadership.” This of course reminded me of Michael Moore, a modern sort of ward heeler, who was seated in the presidential booth with Jimmy Carter and who early in the week became the face of the convention. It would be good for Mr. Kerry if he seizes the stage from Mr. Moore, and Mr. Affleck, et al., tonight. It is time he came to dominate the proceedings with focus, and a message. He should not let this convention speak for him. He should speak for him.