Peggy Noonan

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

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

A week later, do I stand by my views?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What was the biggest mistake of the speech?

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

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

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

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

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

Am I saying we shouldn’t support freedom then?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’re being patronizing.

That’s what jaded old French people are for.

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

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

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

What are you looking forward to now?

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

Never be defensive in your choice of music.

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

This world is not heaven.

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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.