Peggy Noonan

The world is used to bad news and always has been, but now and then there occurs something so brutal, so outside the normal limits of what used to be called man’s inhumanity to man, that you have to look away. Then you force yourself to look and see and only one thought is possible: This must stop now. You wonder, how can we do it? And your mind says, immediately: Whatever it takes.

What they did in Fallujah, Iraq, yesterday was such an event. The ambush, grenading, shooting and killing of four American civilians, the setting of their SUVs on fire and the brutalization of their corpses was savage, primitive, unacceptable. The terrible glee of the young men in the crowds, and the sadism they evinced, reminds us of the special power of the ignorant to impede the good. The pictures that television appropriately mostly did not show and the Internet inevitably mostly did were horrifying in a way that was reminiscent of the first still pictures of the Trade Center victims of 9/11. It was like seeing people in business suits falling through the air again. It was as if someone pointed a camera at evil and actually caught it in the act.

The Americans who were murdered were, according to the wires, working for a security company, a North Carolina-based subcontractor hired by the U.S. government, among other things, to guard convoys.

The convoys carried food. They carried it to Fallujah.

*   *   *

The four civilians were not the only Americans who died in Iraq yesterday. We lost five soldiers in a roadside bombing. The statements of American officials in Iraq were appropriate: This stops nothing, the terrorists will not win. A State Department spokesman said the contractors “were trying to make a difference and to help others.” Indeed they were. There are many such in Iraq. They are risking their lives for many reasons, including improving the prospects for health and safety of 12-year-old boys like the one quoted by Reuters who witnessed the actions of his elders after the attack on the civilians. “I am happy to see this,” he said.

It is hard not to hate the teenagers and young men who celebrated under the bridge where they hanged the charred bodies. They are human expressions of nihilism. They take pleasure in evil, and they were not shy to show it. They are arrogant. They think barbarity is their right.

If this time, in this incident, these young men are left unchecked, their ways and attitudes, their assumptions and method of operating will only be encouraged, and spread. So we had better check them.

*   *   *

It is possible that the atrocity in Fallujah was spontaneous or not fully thought through, but it doesn’t look like it. It seems likely to have been at least to some degree, and perhaps a high degree, well planned and calculated. The brutalizing of the bodies was done in a way that seemed imitative, as all have noted, of the incident in Mogadishu, Somalia, where in 1993 a frenzied mob dragged the dead body of a U.S. Army Ranger through the streets. The civilized world was horrified, and everyone knows what followed: a quick American retreat.

It is not a stretch to imagine the young murderers of Fallujah had this on their minds: Do it again to America, kill them and string up their corpses, because when you do this America leaves.

And so this time the response must be the opposite of the response in Mogadishu.

We know what the men and boys who did the atrocity of Fallujah look like; they posed for the cameras. We know exactly what they did—again, the cameras. We know they massed on a bridge and raised their guns triumphantly. It’s all there on film. It would be good not only for elemental justice but for Iraq and its future if a large force of coalition troops led by U.S. Marines would go into Fallujah, find the young men, arrest them or kill them, and, to make sure the point isn’t lost on them, blow up the bridge.

Whatever the long-term impact of the charred bodies the short term response must be a message to Fallujah and to all the young men of Iraq: the violent and unlawful will be broken. Savagery is yesterday; it left with Saddam.

It is not only coalition forces that should send this message. It is important that Iraqis themselves—pro-peace and pro-democracy Iraqis who are attempting to build a new government—come forward to denounce what happened in Fallujah. They should stand before the world and denounce the atrocity in the most serious terms. So should our allies. And so should the United Nations.

*   *   *

If an unforgettable message is not sent to the young men of Fallujah, the young nihilists will be inspired, and the lesson of their nihilism—brutality trumps goodwill—will gain ground. The progressives of Iraq will be further disheartened, and all of those there from the West to help, from contract workers to military troops, will feel more beset, more resentful and less hopeful of a good outcome.

The terrible pictures of the charred bodies on the bridge cannot be erased, and no one who saw them is going to forget them. But they can in time come to be accompanied by other pictures—of determined U.S. Marines, for instance, rounding up the men who massed on the bridge under the bodies, and brandished their weapons, and laughed.

At this week’s 9/11 hearings, the much-anticipated finger pointing between Democrats and Republicans did not really occur. There was partisan jockeying and sniping, but in general a certain politesse prevailed—Madeleine Albright understands the position Colin Powell was in, Mr. Powell understands the forces at work as Ms. Albright’s State Department wrestled with a proportional response to actionable intelligence.

At first I was surprised, then relieved—a partisan dogfight would only inspire America’s foes. But two days in I wondered if the central dynamic of the hearings didn’t come down, simply, to this: Government takes care of government. People in government who’ve achieved a certain position in foreign affairs tend to treat gingerly people in government who’ve achieved a certain position in foreign affairs. They are on the same social circuit, have experienced similar pressures and stresses, have read similar data, talk to the same journalists. They belong to a brotherhood, and at the hearings you could tell. (An uneasy brotherhood, though: It was hard not to find yourself wondering, as you watched the testimony, if a lot of these people didn’t have something on each other.)

Everyone seemed distressingly reasonable. The testifiers all offered long and understandable stories as to why they took the decisions they took, or didn’t take decisions, or couldn’t possibly have taken them. About halfway through Sandy Berger’s testimony I remembered the words of the film director Jean Renoir: “The terrible thing about life is that everyone has his reasons.”

The hearings did no damage to common-sense assumptions about 9/11. Common sense suggests that those who led the nation for eight years before 9/11 bear greater responsibility than those who led the nation for less than eight months. Nothing in the hearings disturbed that notion. In fact, I thought Ms. Albright’s testimony tended to underscore it. She spoke of the “megashock” of 9/11 and repeatedly suggested there was no political will on the part of the American people before that date to attack the Taliban or invade Afghanistan.

She’s right. There was no movement among voters to take out Al Qaeda. Most people didn’t know what al Qaeda was. But that of course is where leadership comes in.

*   *   *

One summer day in the late 1990s I had a long talk with an elected official who was a friend and longtime political supporter of President Clinton. I asked him why, if Bill Clinton cared so much about his legacy, he didn’t take steps to make America safer from terrorism. Why didn’t he make it one of his big issues? We were at lunch in a New York restaurant, and I gestured toward the tables of happy people drinking golden-colored wine in gleaming glasses. They’re all going to get sick when we get nuked, I said; they’d honor your guy for having warned and prepared.

Yes, the official said, but you have to understand that Clinton is purely a poll driven politician, and if the numbers aren’t there he won’t move.

Too bad, I thought, because the numbers will someday be there.

The lunch was off the record, and I appreciated the official’s candor; he didn’t try to spin me. I wasn’t shocked by what he said—Mr. Clinton was a poll driven animal. But you didn’t have to be psychic to know bad things were coming; you only had to be watching the world. I found myself marveling at Mr. Clinton’s thinking, which in the short term was savvy and in the long term spoke of a kind of moral retardation.

It is not the job of a president to say, “I’d like to do what’s necessary to protect our country, but the people won’t understand it or appreciate it.” It is the job of a president to say, “I have to do what is necessary to protect our country, and so I’ll try to persuade the people as to the rightness of my thinking. But if it comes to that I’ll do what’s needed and pay the price.”

Mr. Clinton did not do that. He did not attempt to rouse the American people.

*   *   *

Abraham Lincoln once said that public opinion is everything. Lincoln, however, did not sit around musing that he’d like to abolish slavery but the people don’t want it, or that he’d like to hold the country together but voters don’t like body bags, and anyway what’s the exit strategy? (In fact Lincoln, in his war, had an exit strategy: Kill them until they give up, then leave.) Lincoln tried to form public opinion. He spoke to people. He persuaded.

Ronald Reagan had his head kicked in every day for taking steps he actually believed were right, such as helping the Nicaraguan democrats against the communist Sandinistas. He paid the price, enduring cries of “warmonger” and “cowboy.” But in the end the Sandinistas were vanquished and democracy came, and something like peace.

Mr. Clinton never wanted to pay the price. He wanted to be popular. And so he campaigned hard on child safety seats and midnight basketball. Baby issues.

*   *   *

Why did the government fail to see 9/11 coming? Some individuals did—writers, thinkers, military experts. But those we elected, and those they appointed, by and large did not. Why?

This is the great question. The hearings did not answer it.

It was a failure of imagination, a failure to envision that a terrible thing could happen, that a particular terrorist group meant to do what it said it would do. There was a sunny and empty-headed assumption that America would stay lucky; after all, we’d been lucky since terrorists hit the World Trade Center in 1993, and that wasn’t so bad—just a handful killed. It was a failure to take our enemies seriously. All of us each day have so much we want to do, but the terrorists each day wanted to do one thing: get America. That was an advantage. There was a pass-the-buck mentality that prevails in government, with everyone quick to go on record warning of a threat and then letting the warning itself act as a replacement for action.

And to make it all worse we had, from 1993 to 2001, an essentially unserious president who had no clue what to do with the power he had accrued, or even the popularity, and who squandered both in a need for personal drama and trauma. He had eight solid years to move, but he did not do the hard things he had to do. He left it for the next guy.

*   *   *

The hearings should not have been held, for one reason: Our country at this moment in history should not be focusing time and attention on who made mistakes and why and when. Not that these things don’t matter; they do, desperately, and history will be full of the story. But we have a war to fight, a country to protect, and that is what should have precedence. As government officials last week rehearsed their testimony the enemy was planning new horrors for Americans to endure. Right now we should be preparing—taking protective action in our ports and around our nuclear facilities, at our borders, etc. American officials should not be busy testifying; they should be busy making sure every citizen has a CBN suit, a regulation gas mask and data on how to recognize and respond to a chemical, biological or nuclear incident.

The most pressing thing at the moment is making America safer. Instead, our officials are otherwise engaged. As they were before 9/11.

The actor James Caviezel, who plays Jesus in “The Passion of the Christ,” met with Pope John Paul II on Monday at the Vatican. Afterward Mr. Caviezel talked with me briefly by phone from Rome. I asked him what it was like, and transcribed what he said.

“I walked into the room and I was laughing at myself—who am I, where I’m from, and now I’m going in and sitting here having this huge meeting. And there’s the pope sitting there in a chair with a chair next to him and I am to sit in it. I had an opportunity to see him when I was a boy, but I didn’t because I had to study for a Spanish test that I probably didn’t study for anyway. But my family came back and they were overjoyed. That was in 1984, when the pope came to Vancouver, British Columbia.

“I walked in and he just waved to me. It was in the Vatican, in a big room; I think it was the library. There were a lot of chambers that went in different places—a room off a room off a room, you know.

“He smiled and waved. There were four of us, me and my wife and my mother-in-law and father-in-law. My wife was right to my right. She kneeled first and she kissed his hand. I kneeled down and kissed his hand, and then we talked.

“Did you ever read the pope’s Letter to the Artists of the World? I read it several times when I was a young actor. It was very important to me. It came out and I remember what he said is that part of the truth, right, is accepting—you can’t just write about darkness and say ‘This is the way it is,’ because light always comes through. It must. If you went into a 40,000-foot warehouse, even if you just light a match the match pierces the darkness. It pierces even in the vast amount of darkness. As I see it, the movie is a light, it is a match.

“So the first thing I began to talk about was his Letter to the Artists. I told him it gave me great strength in my life and my career. I thanked him. I said, ‘Thank you.’ The pope—this is a very holy man. He’s seen the Nazis and the communists [and there were] people he knew that understand what a regime is like and what they do, and how they can take your freedom from you. He’s seen it. This is the pope from Fatima. I think the guy’s a mystic. He’s a saint. I’m not impressed by celebrity—that word is bad when you’re standing in front of a saint. But something moved me. I know he is a saint.

“I wanted a blessing for my marriage and my family. The other thing I said—the point of the film, I always knew if it’s gonna rock you have to have Mary. There are different Christian traditions and ways and views, but let the Holy Spirit do his work, I’m not denying the mother. What her son said on the cross, ‘Mother behold your son, Son behold your mother’—it’s one of the seven things Jesus said on the cross. He said it. You can’t leave it out, so if you include it you have to develop it, you have to tell the story, to show it. He was giving his mother to the world. He gave his mother to John, to the world.

“So the second thing I said to the pope is, ‘You boldly put the M on your crest.’ The Blessed Mother on his crest. She is the one I think who made the movie for her Son. I told [the pope], ‘Your statement, your example.’ She knew the great pain. We put her son to death for saying, ‘Be a good person.’ Well, he told the truth. The truth cuts like a sword. That’s the sword right there, ‘Be a good person.’

“In the world we make good as evil and evil as good. But here’s a guy [the pope] who doesn’t do that. He carries a lot of crosses. I don’t know how he functions. And there’s politics everywhere—everywhere. But the church will survive. It’ll be here when we’re dust.

*   *   *

“When this whole thing began—I met one day with Mel [Gibson], and we’re talking about other roles, and then stories in the Bible, and he’s looking at me. And I said, ‘You want me to play Jesus, don’t you?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’ Your life builds up to things. When you’re asked a question, when the whole history of your life comes to that moment—You want me to play Christ. don’t you?—God gives you a grace inside your heart that says, ‘Look, this is where I need you.’ One of the great saints, I read her, is Maria de Agreda, a mystic. She wrote that Mary said, ‘If you truly follow my son, scandal will follow you all your life.’ But OK—if they persecute you, they persecuted him first.

“Miraculous things have happened. When I was hit by lightning [during the filming of a crucifixion scene], it was the one day I didn’t have communion. We always had mass and I always received communion but on that one day the priest ran out of hosts. I was up there on the cross and I was hit and we knew I was going to be hit, we could see it coming. And the eyes of the men below me turned glossy. Everything was pink, fire coming from both sides of my head. And there was a sound—it was like the sound of the planes hitting the building on 9/11, a weird, guttural, discordant sound. Not like an explosion. And then afterwards I heard the sound when they played one of the films, the videotape [of the World Trade Center on 9/11, on television] and it was like a shock: ‘That is the sound of the lightning.’ The plane going into the building.

“This is a very intense time in my life. The first part of my life was a leading up to this, a preparation. You learn a lot. You shouldn’t hold on to things, to neuroses. People, artists, think they have to hold on to their neuroses, their pains, or they won’t be a good actor anymore or a good artist. That’s the Liar. The Liar tells you that. You hold on to them, you’ll just wind up a lonely person. People become lonely with time, and the fame has moved on to someone else. You have to heal, you have to maintain relationships and get rid of dysfunction and neurosis. That’s why we say the Our Father—’Deliver us from evil.’

“I get letters from people—’You swore in this movie,’ or whatever. I reply ‘Yes, I play sinners.’ I look for stuff that has redemption. That doesn’t mean the characters are redeemable.

“I’m—my love—I love my church. I love my church and through my church I see my country as the greatest gift God gave us, freedom.

“How long did I speak to [John Paul]? I can’t really remember. It wasn’t longer than five minutes with me and 10 minutes with my family. When I left I was happy. I just felt happiness. We all left together.”

*   *   *

(Pope John Paul II’s Letter to the Artists of the World is available here.)

In a patriotic attempt to help make the next eight months more interesting and fun, some practical advice for both presidential contenders.

First John Kerry.

The Democrats this year are proving themselves bold and tough. Mr. Kerry this week has been audacious—going into Florida and warning that Republicans mean to steal it, challenging President Bush on national security when national security is Mr. Kerry’s famous weak spot. Why would he draw attention to his own weakness? To confuse things, to make them seem in play. That he isn’t hiding from his weak spot but highlighting it will convince some people it’s probably not a weak spot. This is good stuff.

But Mr. Kerry is out on a limb in his repeated charges that a Republican “smear machine” dominated by “the most crooked . . . lying group” is trying to do him in. His language is red-hot because he wants to be quoted again and again, and he wants to be quoted because he thinks it will inoculate him against coming attacks. But a man who would be president shouldn’t sound like a hysteric who can’t take the heat. He should stop that.

*   *   *

Mr. Kerry has a structural weakness on the stump. It’s John Kerry. There he was this week on stage in shirtsleeves, with a handheld mike, riffing along. “I have news for George W. Bush . . .” “George Bush said he would be a uniter, but instead he is a divider . . .” “I used to do Elvis . . .” Raspy, pacing back and forth. He reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t place it. The blank intensity, the conviction that what’s on his mind is important, though he can’t quite remember why . . .

And then I had it. Captain Rex Kramer in “Airplane,” played by Robert Stack. At the end of the movie he’s alone in the tower at the microphone, talking to an empty plane. “Do you know what it’s like to fall in the mud and get kicked in the head with an iron boot? Of course you don’t, no one does. It never happens. It’s a dumb question. Skip it.”

There’s the same faintly disturbing aspect to his free associations. Mr. Kerry’s voice is like Robert Stack’s, the same studied actor’s baritone.

*   *   *

Mr. Kerry will get better as the campaign wears down his self-consciousness and makes him too tired to act.

But he needs a new speechwriter. Bob Shrum’s work sounds too old, of another era—all that phony baloney And so a new generation stakes its claim on greatness stuff, the faux populist I look like a Brahmin but I’m really Tom Joad. It’s tired. It’s like Teddy Kennedy outtakes from 1980. Mr. Kerry sounds like an Al Gore knockoff. No, worse, he sounds like every Democratic politician of the past quarter century. And no wonder, since Bob Shrum has been the voice of every Democratic politician of the past quarter century.

Shake it up, make it new. Mr. Kerry needs a young speechwriter for whom it’s all still moving and big. Someone who’s excited to be there and who speaks the language of America as it is now, a language that is awake, concrete, sometimes awkward. People around a candidate are always beating what he’s going to say into smoothness, but it is that very smoothness—affordable health care for hardworking Americans—that makes us all want to tear our faces off and run from the room, though perhaps I understate.

A new Kerry speechwriter should be someone whose first impulse in talking about heavy industry jobs going overseas is not to type, “Once I built a railroad, now it’s done / Brother, can you spare a dime?” It wouldn’t hurt if the new speechwriter ever had to sell anything for a living, even for a few months. And it would be nice if America weren’t one big abstraction to him, but someplace real where he’s actually lived.

*   *   *

In only one week, a central and significant Bush charge against Kerry has hit its target and stuck. It’s that he’s a flip-flopper who’ll vote this way and that with an eye only to short-term political gain. Kerry supporters, most famously in the New York Times, have been forced to spin this into the fantasy that Mr. Kerry has a special sense of nuance and subtlety—that he appreciates “shades of gray.” Well, mist is a shade of gray, and so far a lot of voters think he’s lost in it.

Mr. Kerry can’t escape 20 years of conflicting votes and statements. But he can try something that may subtly gives an impression of strength and conviction.

Campaigns take place, as we all know, on TV. And we all know that when you’re asked a question by a television interviewer you are not supposed to answer the question. You’re supposed to make believe you’re answering it. You’re supposed to use the question to pivot into what you really want to talk about. And so if asked, say, “Now that the administration has admitted they have found no Iraqi WMD’s don’t you regret voting for the war?,” Mr. Kerry is not supposed to say yes or no, he’s supposed to say a few puffy words that help him shift as soon as possible into a denunciation of President Bush and the abuses he has inflicted on the American people.

We’ve all been watching this kind of interview for 25 years. It is extremely boring. It contributes to the national feeling that politicians are liars and operators.

What would wake things up for Mr. Kerry and make him seem stronger? If he defied his media training and answered the question. “Yes, I do regret it. It’s the worst mistake I’ve made in my political lifetime.” Next question. No filibustering, no pivot. Interviewers come in with a list of 25 to 50 questions. Mr. Kerry should take them all, answer them, and leave the interviewer scrambling to think of more. This is a gamble—you never know what they’ll come up with—but it might also make Kerry look forthcoming and in command. And anyway, this is Mr. Kerry’s moment, he should shake the dice and throw ‘em.

*   *   *

Now President Bush.

The common wisdom the past weekend was that the more people talked about the Bush ads and 9/11, the more the president would benefit. The repeated linking of Mr. Bush and 9/11 only underscores his history and leadership.

The common wisdom this weekend will be that last week’s common wisdom was wrong. Bush got no discernible bounce from the spots, though in the long term he may. It’s too soon to say.

The media this year are to an unusual degree—even for them—keen to give Mr. Bush a hard time and Mr. Kerry a boost. The daily anti-GOP pounding is taking a toll.

We all know the reasons the press is doing what it’s doing—its biases, its need for a horse race. But this year the press is also taking it on itself to make up for the disparity in war chests. They don’t think Mr. Kerry is going to catch up with the president in terms of money, and they’re trying to even the score.

There’s also the impact of the endless buzz of cable news. Fox, CNN and MSNBC have to fill 24 hours a day with something. When the Bush campaign commercials came out they filled it—gratefully, hungrily, thirstily—with the free playing of the commercials over and over.

*   *   *

The Bush campaign had given them the kind of big fat subject they could fill an hour with. But they couldn’t just play the Bush commercials; they had to have conflict, an interesting story line, and it couldn’t be pro-Bush because that would be unfair. “Here are the Bush commercials. Is Mark McKinnon great or what?”

The first story cable came up with: Laura Bush is in the commercials and Dick Cheney isn’t, because she’s the president’s chief character witness and Mr. Cheney’s a drag on the ticket. (If it had been Messrs. Bush and Cheney sitting there in the commercials warmly remembering administration high points, they would have called it a subtle play for gay votes.) The Laura Bush story didn’t really take off. So it was replaced by, “Bush is cynically using 9/11!” (If the commercials hadn’t mentioned 9/11, they’d all be saying, “He left out 9/11 and the brave who died there—an implicit admission that his leadership there failed!”)

This took off. With tens of thousands of relatives of 9/11 victims, there have to be some who are Democrats or dislike Bush. Even better, they can show up in a studio and act as physical counterpoints to the hundredth playing of the commercials.

It is true that cable news outlets have only a fraction the ratings of network news. But networks and newspapers keep cable on all day in their newsrooms. Thus are media waves born.

Did this one capsize anything? No. But it probably kept the Bush ship from making timely progress.

*   *   *

The media are going to fight Mr. Bush hard until just about two weeks after they all decide he is definitely going to lose. (I think this will be around mid-October.) Then they’ll start to pound Mr. Kerry, at least for a while. He’ll scream bloody murder. It’ll be great.

I agree with those around the president who felt he had to move now, criticize Mr. Kerry now, begin the campaign early. Or rather bow to the fact that it has begun. Right now the key to Mr. Bush’s success in defining both himself and Mr. Kerry is joy. The joy of the battle. And what joyous battlers bring to the proceedings: humor and wit and grace.

The one thing cable TV can’t resist, and can’t ignore even if it comes from a Republican, is wit. Wit brightens their copy. They love humor and joy. They will use a pithy putdown over and over. That’s why Mr. Bush got so much mileage out of even a wan joke about Mr. Kerry having been in Washington long enough to take two sides on every issue.

Mr. President, keep it up but do it better.

Don’t make the country mad at John Kerry, make them laugh at John Kerry. And use wit not only for wit’s sake but to make political and philosophical points.

This year comedy’s a cannon. It’s the only thing right now that will break through the media wall.

The other day I was thinking of the White House Correspondents Association Dinner a couple of years ago at which Ozzy Osbourne was the big attraction. He stood up when the president entered the room and gestured to his own long hair. He yelled out something like, “You should grow your hair too.” Mr. Bush looked and laughed and shouted, “Second term, Ozzy!” That’s the spirit.

It was funny. Wound up all over the news.

*   *   *

Two other thoughts. The president needs to be surrounded by young people who love him. One reason: Because this is great to see. The campaign should get Mr. Bush to college campuses a lot, in the middle of big, well-advanced rallies. Mr. Bush needs to be surrounded by young people, to whom he talks about Iraq and the war on terror and its meaning and implications. He needs to rock.

And Mr. Bush needs backup. Hello congressional surrogates, that would be you. I heard a rumor the other day that Republicans are in control of the Senate and House. Could this be true? I ask because every day on the news Teddy Kennedy is at a hearing toasting the posties of some Republican or administration figure. Yesterday it was George Tenet. Mr. Kennedy was, as usual these days, hostile, provocative and showily contemptuous. Cable and the networks are loving it. Thursday it was Joe Biden yelling at steroid-using athletes for being the kind of people who used to knock him down.

Could a Republican please say something interesting?

President Bush needs his team to be alive and awake and hold its own hearings on issues that are important to Republicans on the ground.

GOP senators and congressmen seem to me to be acting not like they’re excited by this moment in history but intimidated by it. As if they’re thinking, “Oh no, we’re in charge now and everyone will blame us when things go wrong!” They need a little spirit of 1994: “We’ll make the very dome of this Capitol vibrate with our energy.”

Guys: wake up. There’s a battle outside.

John Kerry certainly looks like a president—the thick steel-wool hair, the Lincolnian planes and shadows of his face. He is tall and slim and seems serious. He also has the guts to wear salmon-colored ties. A red tie is red and a blue tie is blue, and red and blue know what color they are. Salmon is a more delicate hue. Salmon can’t decide what color it is. Sometimes it’s pink and sometimes it’s orange. It’s like wearing ambivalence on your shirt. This is an unusual thing for a politician to do if it’s thought through, and it takes courage.

Mr. Kerry seems to me not a man of deep belief but of a certain amount of sentiment and calculation. One has the sense he is a liberal Democrat because of the time and place in which he was born, that he inhaled a worldview as opposed to struggling through to one.

I have been wondering how much of Mr. Kerry’s career is an essentially unreflective meditation upon the life of John F. Kennedy. Or to put it more directly, how much of his professional life has been a case of JFK disease.

*   *   *

The murdered president dominated the imaginations of more than a generation of Democratic politicians, and continues as their most formative role model. President Clinton had a famous JFK complex. No one who was there will ever forget the moment at the 1992 Democratic Convention when the famous picture of teenage Bill Clinton pushing himself forward to reach out to shake hands with President Kennedy flashed across the screens that loomed over the convention floor. I was there in Madison Square Garden, and the impact on the crowd was electric, as if Michelangelo’s painting had come alive and they were actually seeing God touch Adam.

Gary Hart in 1984 took JFK disease to the point of physically imitating Kennedy on the campaign trail, shoving his hands distractedly in and out of the pockets of his suit jacket, tugging at his hair (actually this was more like Bobby Kennedy). I saw Mr. Hart do this with my own eyes the night he won New Hampshire. I was a young writer at CBS, working on Dan Rather’s copy. I thought Mr. Hart attractive and his imitation suggestive of deep weirdness. It turned out he did a fabulous verbal imitation of Teddy too.

Sen. Kerry has had his JFK moments too. The other day I watched a clip of Mr. Kerry’s famous testimony to Congress on Vietnam 30 years ago. Have you ever heard it? It was a total JFK impersonation—“hoff” for half, etc. In the pictures that exist of Lt. Kerry in Vietnam he seems startlingly similar in pose, squint and physical attitude to pictures of John Kennedy with his crew in World War II. PT boats, Swift boats; “Mahs-CHEW-sitts,” the initials JFK . . .

If you saw a generation of Republican candidates doing a physical imitation of Ronald Reagan or George Bush the elder, would you find it weird? I think you would. The only person in politics who has ever tried to morph himself into Ronald Reagan was Al Gore in his first debate with George W. Bush. He even wore makeup that echoed the heightened color of Mr. Reagan’s cheeks. He wound up looking not like Mr. Reagan but like a turn-of-the-century madam in a San Francisco whorehouse, but that’s not important. What’s important is the jarring weirdness of seeing one politician trying to make you unconsciously experience him as another politician.

*   *   *

JFK was an interesting man, privately complicated and publicly merry. When his motorcade went by in 1960, women—especially nuns, I once read—couldn’t help themselves; they jumped up and down in excitement. The Kennedy campaign called them the jumpers. Mr. Kerry on the other hand—well, no one jumps for him.
I didn’t think a man with a face that anguished would make it this far. I mean without other qualities that overwhelm and even counter the message of the face, which is: I suffer from mild clinical depression, do you?

Mr. Kerry also has me pondering the now-uneasy relationship of Democrats and class. JFK was a millionaire’s son and all the happier for it. He benefited from it. To be a millionaire in those days was strange and glamorous. And he’d been to Harvard. An Irish Catholic who’d gone to Harvard: Go Jack. Mr. Kerry has used his wealth to get ahead but it does not work as a plus for him. Wealth doesn’t have the patina it used to for Democrats.

He can’t play regular guy, he’s clearly not a regular guy. He seems very much like a man who keeps a secret stash of Grey Poupon. This was said of George Bush the elder but seems more true of Kerry.

*   *   *

When he speaks, both in prepared text and off the cuff, Mr. Kerry is boring. I don’t mean he doesn’t make you laugh, nod or swoon, I mean he doesn’t make you think. A speech should be a text in which, ultimately, the speaker and the audience are thinking, together. Mr. Kerry’s crowds seem to put up with his remarks and wait patiently till they end so they can begin to cheer.

That Mr. Kerry is a boring man means the election will be dirty and vicious. If he were interesting and dynamic and sunny, if he seemed both experienced and sincere, he arguably could win the upcoming race without letting his campaign get unduly nasty. But he is a charm-free zone on the stump, and he has offered no galvanizing political philosophy or higher meaning. His people will feel the only way he can win is to be uniquely destructive.

How do we know that is coming? It has already begun. First the sustained attack on the president’s National Guard service. It is early for such attacks. Second, the indiscreet threat by an unnamed Kerry adviser as reported weeks ago in the New York Times: “Everything—everything—is on the table.” He, or she, has since been silenced. But the point was made. And there is the repeated insistence of those around Mr. Kerry that they’re just not going to take it the way Michael Dukakis did; they’ll fight when they’re attacked. In this they are peddling a story line to the press: Democrats are unfairly attacked and have been too polite, too gentle, too liberal to fight back.

Will this work? I haven’t experienced liberals as too gentle to fight, and I don’t think anyone who pays attention to political and cultural issues has. I have a feeling voters will experience this tack the way a mother might experience two kids fighting in the back of the car. Johnny screams, “Timmy hit me!” Timmy, who in fact nudged Johnny after Johnny called him stupid, says, “I did not!” Mother admonishes Timmy: “Leave Johnny alone.” Johnny waits till she turns to smile at Timmy triumphantly and pinch him. Timmy smacks him. “Mommy, Timmy hit me!”

Mothers in this position wind up irritated with both children, but know in their hearts Johnny is going through a stage in which he’s a weenie, and a whiner too.

*   *   *

Many intelligent people think Kerry will decide to pick Hillary Clinton for vice president. This is almost touchingly absurd. First of all, Hillary isn’t waiting at home for the guy to call. If she wants it she’ll let him know, but she doesn’t want it. Why should she? She’s already been president, as it were. She’s already worked hand in hand in a White House with a guy who wasn’t as sharp as she was. Moreover, she needs more distance between her and the many scandals of the Clinton era. By 2008 or 2012 they’ll be ancient history. Then she will run, and not for vice president. For now, Kerry doesn’t want anyone who’ll overshadow him, and she would. With her on the ticket he’d be B-roll. Very soon now she’ll squelch vice presidential talk. “I made a promise to the people of New York . . .”

The other woman of the moment, Teresa Heinz, is going to make things fun. I saw her on C-Span give an eloquent speech a few weeks ago in Wisconsin—notes, no text, and she didn’t refer much to the notes. She spoke interestingly of her youth, her political views. She has been wealthy, connected and powerful for so long she has grown mildly bored with her good fortune, and in all her time in public life she has not developed much of an edit button. She seems in interviews like someone who’s walked through many smoke-filled rooms, waved her arms impatiently, and told the maid to plug in a few air fresheners. She is not awed by media people; she thinks producers and anchormen are people who are lucky she invited them to dinner at Louisberg Square.

Mark Leibovich of the Washington Post did a brilliant and rather too detail-rich profile of her last summer. People didn’t know she considered her late husband, John Heinz, to be her real husband until then. It was startling, and delightful. She hasn’t given an indiscreet interview since. But she will. Before that, however, there will be a series of long and glowing interviews from big media reporters who a) need to foster a relationship with a possible future first lady, and b) want to be the first to change the narrative line from “known crazy woman” to “colorful, earthy and authentic presence—and secret power in the campaign.”

*   *   *

The good news about Mr. Kerry, and I mean this seriously, is he does not appear to be insane. We now know Howard Dean was frightened he might become president, and this perhaps led to what might be called irrepressibility and irritability. We know Wesley Clark was . . . well, he seemed a little mad too. The untold story of the Democratic race is that one of our two great parties had a remarkably shallow bench. They had no one. But Mr. Kerry is not crazy. You can imagine him as president. You can imagine him struggling, like Mr. Clinton, to know what precisely he wanted the presidency for once he had it, but at least you can imagine him having it.

If he were president he would surround himself with the same foreign-policy people Clinton did—Richard Holbrook et al. It wouldn’t be insane—Incompetent maybe, confusing certainly, and uncertain certainly too. They would struggle. The great unmentioned fact of Democrats in power and foreign policy right now is that they try hard to do nothing, because if they were to do something it would be what Republicans do. And they don’t want to do that.

They’d be a little lost, maybe a little like JFK.

On Tuesday Sen. John Kerry racked up his 16th, 17th and 18th victories out of 20 primaries and caucuses, reinforcing his stand as front-runner for his party’s nomination and ceding nothing—no close calls, no hustings embarrassments—to Sen. John Edwards.

We know who the Dean voters were, and we could picture them—kids at the MeetUp, people entering politics for the first time. And we have a sense of who the Edwards voter is—someone who is still shopping, who is drawn to his sunny indignation or his Southernness. But who are the Kerry voters? The reigning cliché is that they’re simply Democrats who want to win, who’ve settled on him as the guy who can beat George W. Bush. I think of them as union operatives, union leaders, savvy teachers union communications directors, party operatives and party donors. Which is to say the party establishment that Howard Dean threatened and John Edwards has not so far succeeded in seducing. But when Democrats are on fire over the electability of a man and not the man himself—well, if I were a Democrat I’d worry about that down the road.

When putative candidate Kerry is dinged and dinged again by the journalistic and political vetting process, when his votes and stands and record are inspected for implications, when the conviction that he’s electable begins to wane—and all these things will happen, at least to some degree—what will it do to pro-Kerry fervor in the rank and file?

I continue to be perplexed by this fact: One of the reliable dynamics in this campaign has been the more you see Mr. Kerry the less you like him, and the more you see Mr. Edwards the more you like him. But there doesn’t seem any Edwards groundswell at the moment, and he’s everywhere. A Democratic political professional told me the other night that Mr. Edwards never got enough time in the clear; Mr. Dean and Wesley Clark stayed in too long and kept him from emerging. I think I hear an Edwards line coming if he loses: We didn’t lose, we ran out of time. But I guess I see it as the Democratic establishment against the upstart—“age and treachery will beat youth and exuberance every time.”

Super Tuesday looms—California, Georgia, New York, Ohio and six other states—and this I suppose will be John Edwards’s last chance. If he is to succeed he must begin to win; if he is to win he must do it now, in the big voting on Tuesday.

He has one thing in his favor, and it’s potentially big: the debates. It is in debate that Mr. Edwards has always shown strength, made an impression, stood as a likely alternative. If he is to alter the outcome, he’s going to do it in debate. Tonight.

*   *   *

As for the Republicans, the president’s announcement on the marriage amendment was a decision to join a battle that had already begun. Massachusetts’ courts and San Francisco’s mayor forced his hand. He did what he had to do, and what he’d long said he’d do: take the stand that marriage is between one man and one woman, period. No one knows if supporters can get two-thirds of the House and the Senate and three-fourths of the state legislatures, but however it ends it will end with the votes of the representatives of the people, including the state legislator who lives down the block, and not by our black-robed left-wing masters in the courts.

Television treated it only as a political matter: Mr. Bush playing to his base. Indeed he gave his base what he told he’d give them: action if needed. He no doubt hoped it would not be. The press misses this story. It is true that there is a broad consensus in the United States against same-sex marriage. But it is also true, as Mr. Bush and his men well know, that even though people ask for leadership on social issues, when an American politician talks about those issues, he is painted as a moralizer, and in time the characterization sticks. America dislikes politicians who moralize, and they dislike no one more than Republican politicians who moralize.

Mr. Bush’s decision looks easy, but I think it was not. The president and his team would have loved to have avoided it. The left overplayed its hand and forced the issue. For now this will benefit Mr. Bush. And Messrs. Kerry and Edwards have given themselves no glory by saying they’re against homosexual marriage but refusing to make clear what they would do to protect states from having it imposed on them.

It would be good, however, to see the president speak about American open-mindedness and what it means in practice and theory. America is now a country—it was not always—in which people feel free to hold whatever private views on all human groups and behaviors while bowing to the moral necessity to show respect and regard for all groups that are different, in whatever ways. We have gone beyond tolerance in America; we have arrived at affection and sympathy and mutual respect. It has been beautiful to see, and I have seen it in my lifetime. It’s worth talking about.

*   *   *

It has been a big political week for the president, with his burly and more pointedly partisan than usual speech to the Republican governors on Monday, then his marriage announcement Tuesday. When he twitted John Kerry to the governors he signaled whom the White House not only assumes will be the Democratic nominee but prefers as an opponent. Those around the president think Mr. Kerry comes across as cold, aloof and a typical pol—“Al Gore without the charm,” as one of them put it this week.

But they are convinced it is going to be a close race. That’s not just spin to rev the troops; it’s their conviction. They don’t see us as a 50-50 country but as a 48-48 country, with the fight over the remaining 4% of the population. It took me aback when I heard this—not that it was surprising, but it reminded me of something Lee Atwater told me 20 years ago. Forty percent of the country will vote Democrat no matter what, he said, and 40% will vote Republican. Every presidential contest is a wrestling match for the 20% in the middle.

That was true then, or at least the polls bore it out. Now that 20 has shrunk to four. I’m not sure what that means. No one else is either. But somehow it strikes me as both inevitable and not good.

A few quick thoughts about the president. I saw him this week at a White House event. I’d been looking forward to it. A lot had happened since I’d last spent time with him, in July, for an interview for Ladies Home Journal, and I was eager to get a sense of how he’s feeling, thinking and looking as the election gears up. Also I’ve been tough on him lately and wondered how he treats people under such circumstances.

The president bounded into the Roosevelt Room at 10:30 on a weekday morning with a flurry of aides behind him. He looked tanned, rested and perhaps preoccupied. He walked around the table and shook hands with everyone. Then he did something surprising. He sat down at the big brown meeting table and instead of offering an opening comment and then taking questions, as I’d expected, he simply talked to us about how he sees the world. He did this for 45 minutes. He was funny and frank. He made a point to make and maintain eye contact with each of us, now this one and now that, as he talked. He shared thoughts, observations and stories in a way that seemed both free-associative and thematically linked. The theme was freedom, or rather liberation—liberation in political terms, in personal terms, in the world and at home. I cannot quote him, but since the dozen who were there will soon be sharing their impressions with friends, and since you are my friends . . .

What the president’s associates and allies had been telling me seemed completely true. His spirits were high, and at points he seemed loaded for bear. He has rock confidence that his actions in Afghanistan and Iraq have been right and have helped the world. He suggested that you’ve got to stand your ground when it’s the high ground. He made it clear he intends to.

He wound it all up, took no questions, and left with the flurry.

We left inspirited. Most everyone there if not everyone was a supporter of the president, but I think each came out more so.

How did he treat me? I’d like to say he was cool because that would suggest he’s been reading my columns and they’ve had a huge impact. In fact he was friendly as ever. There are several ways to interpret this. I choose to believe he is hiding his pain.

*   *   *

It’s left me thinking about the importance of the coming election in terms of choosing a path, or staying on and continuing down a path. If you think of the great questions of this great and dangerous era—cloning, terrorism, how to achieve peace, the ability of Americans to build not just stable lives but fruitful lives economically and what might be called culturally—you realize they will all be dealt with in this election. Or rather the outcome will affect these issues and more, and so effect the future in the deepest possible way.

It is fascinating to me that after two months of the Democratic Party demonstrating what appears to be dynamism, and the Republicans struggling with such questions as the weapons of mass destruction, and the president fighting back charges regarding his military service, the smartest read on where we are came this week from a a Zogby poll that said the Democrats are leading in the Democratic areas and the Republicans are leading in the Republican areas. Mr. Bush’s poll numbers are down, but the blue states are blue and the red states are red. And no one knows what will change that.

Here are two dynamics that are emerging, and will have impact. First, we all know the party that has not been in the White House is always hungry, highly energized, and has a lot of arguments on its side. They’ve had a lot of time to refine those arguments while they’ve been out in the cold. But this year the Democrats do seem hungrier than usual, in part because of the continuing wound of the 2000 election, in which their candidate had a plurality of the popular vote despite losing in the electoral college. They think they won, and lost. They feel a heightened passion.

Have you seen them out there? Teddy Kennedy revitalized and refocused, as if this is his last great campaign; the entertainment-industrial complex in full battle cry; television producers energized by the battle, political wives making passionate speeches, young voters entering the process, whether for Howard Dean or someone else. This is rise of the Broken Glass Democrats. Remember Broken Glass Republicans in 2000? They’d crawl over broken glass to help their guy and get the change they wanted. I think we are seeing the beginning of that with the Democrats.

*   *   *

What may turn out to be the Republicans’ secret weapon, or the secret ingredient of their success? I think that, as always, it comes down to issues. People want higher taxes or lower, seek more personal authority over their social security accounts or not, support the effort in Iraq or do not. But there will also be their sense of who the candidates are as men, in terms of character, personality, gifts and predilections. And that will factor in too. I was asked this week why the president seems so attractive to the heartland, to what used to be called Middle America. A big question. I found my mind going to this word: normal.

Mr. Bush is the triumph of the seemingly average American man. He’s normal. He thinks in a sort of common-sense way. He speaks the language of business and sports and politics. You know him. He’s not exotic. But if there’s a fire on the block, he’ll run out and help. He’ll help direct the rig to the right house and count the kids coming out and say, “Where’s Sally?” He’s responsible. He’s not an intellectual. Intellectuals start all the trouble in the world. And then when the fire comes they say, “I warned Joe about that furnace.” And, “Does Joe have children?” And “I saw a fire once. It spreads like syrup. No, it spreads like explosive syrup. No, it’s formidable and yet fleeting.” When the fire comes they talk. Bush ain’t that guy. Republicans love the guy who ain’t that guy. Americans love the guy who ain’t that guy.

Someone said to me: But how can you call him normal when he came from such privilege? Indeed he did. But there’s nothing lemonade-on-the-porch-overlooking-the-links-at-the-country-club about Mr. Bush. He isn’t smooth. He actually has some of the roughness and the resentments of the self-made man. I think the reason for this is Texas. He grew up in a white T-shirt and jeans playing ball in the street with the other kids in the subdivision. Barbara Bush wasn’t exactly fancy. They lived like everyone else. She spoke to me once with great nostalgia of her early days in Texas, when she and her husband and young George slept in the same bed in an apartment in Midland. A prostitute lived in the complex. Barbara Bush just thought she was popular. Then they lived in a series of suburban houses.

George W. Bush didn’t grow up at Greenwich Country Day with a car and a driver dropping him off, as his father had. Until he went off to boarding school, he thought he was like everyone else. That’s a gift, to think you’re just like everyone else in America. It can be the making of you.

When you are a conservative and tend to support conservatives, it will come as a surprise, and an unwelcome one, when you ding one, as I dinged President Bush the other day about his “Meet the Press” performance. Of those who responded, about 60% disagreed with me, and the rest were more or less in agreement. Many of those who disagreed with me said they thought the president had done well with Tim Russert, that the interview made clear his decency and sincerity. Others said I was kicking the president when he’s down and that’s the problem with conservative pundits, they can’t be trusted. My answer is the obvious one: It is the job of a writer to write the truth as he sees it, and if it’s an uncomfortable truth, then so be it.

But here’s what was most interesting to me. The letters in disagreement were often passionate and insisted that Mr. Bush will be re-elected. They were so insistent that I realized: They’re nervous out there, the Bush people. If they weren’t so nervous, they wouldn’t have cared about bad reviews. They wouldn’t have been so insistent.

So today, in an attempt to harness and refocus the passion of Bush supporters, a contest. Let’s go all Deanian and unleash the power of the internet.

*   *   *

It is February 2004. In nine months, the big election. The White House, even as I type, is in the process of preparing a huge and high-stakes campaign. They have a foe to fight, money with which to fight the foe, and loyal troops who will march.
When the president’s men gather to come up with the themes and rhetorical approaches of 2004, there’s a big question that more often goes unarticulated, and unnoticed. It is: How to make it new.

Mr. Bush has been president three years. He has presided over a time of dense history. Most of the voters in the country have been paying more attention than usual. We know what’s happened.

The Bush people have to roll it all into, say, one speech, which can be distilled to one paragraph, which people will distill to a sentence or two to explain to themselves and others why they support the president for re-election.

Just about now they’d be coming up with the paragraph.

But as they do it they have to make it new. To make you look and notice they have to make it fresh, and succinct, something you believe and remember. And it’s got to be true. When the paragraph a president’s men come up with is not true, they lose. Jimmy Carter’s paragraph in 1980 was: We’re not so bad, and at least you know us, and Jimmy is a nice man, and by the way that Reagan guy is just too extreme and radical and right-wingy and nutty. People didn’t find Ronald Reagan too extreme. And he wasn’t too extreme. He seemed like a possible antidote to failure—Jimmy Carter’s failure in the world. The paragraph wasn’t true. Mr. Carter lost in a landslide.

*   *   *

Is it easy for a White House to come up with paragraph? No. It’s hard. There’s so much to say, you don’t know what to say.

After a while, presidential staffers become so immersed in the sheer grinding dailyness of the White House that it’s hard to step out of the thought stream and characterize it in a new way. Years from now they’ll do that in their memoirs, capture the big meanings. But it’s hard to do it now, when they’re immersed.

Another thing. By the end of a first term, White House staffers have been exhausted by history. Every White House is high stress and high stakes 24/7, 365. You get so tired that your ability to judge your fatigue becomes dull, and you don’t even know how tired you are. This White House has dealt with more history and drama than many. When I worked in the White House I used to imagine that when I left I’d do what the Broadway producer Leland Hayward used to do after an opening night. He was so sleep-deprived by the time a show was mounted that he’d go to bed and wake up only to drink milk. He’d sleep 10 hours, get up, drink milk, and go back to bed for another 10 hours. He’d do that for days.

In the past, in the White Houses of Kennedy and LBJ and Nixon, it was tense and grueling, and staffers in those days often dealt with the dailyness of the tension by doing the kinds of things people used to do. They smoked and drank and stayed up late and had intense discussions about the tragedy of governance, and then they’d write it all down in drunken sprawls in their diaries. They partied hearty and thought hard. That stopped in the 1980s. The last sort of rocking White House was that of the abstemious Baptist Mr. Carter, whose young aides flocked to the bars of Georgetown. That’s how Hamilton Jordan got in trouble for spitting Amaretto at the Egyptian ambassador’s wife. Those were the days.

Now things are so clean that the other night I bumped into an aide to the president and asked with concern if the grueling routine was getting to him, and was he trying to get away from the office enough and go for a hike and get time away from things, room to daydream. He thought for a moment and then told me that on those days that he did not begin with prayer, he became tired. But otherwise, no. He told me the president was in the office at 6:45 a.m. and usually leaves at 6 p.m., so everyone got to go home. I found this remarkable. Not that I hadn’t heard it before, I had, we all have, but I thought it was spin. I didn’t know it was really true. When I worked for Mr. Reagan I was there till 11 p.m. Anyway, what the aide said seemed so sane and moderate I didn’t know whether I wanted to compliment him or smack him. He was rather priggish, but it sounded like he was doing everything right.

*   *   *

A final note on a challenge for this particular administration in putting together the re-election paragraph and making it new. Normally White Houses have a built-in fear of their own political base. It’s the base that holds a president’s feet to the fire. The anxiety a base causes can be inspirational; it keeps you on your toes. George Bush the elder forgot to fear his base; they reminded him why he should have. George Bush the younger has, since 9/11, been very close with his base. But now, for the first time, that base is a little restless—over immigration, high spending, etc. And the vast American middle has yet to be nailed down. Which means the Bush White House is in a challenging time. They are not used to this kind of challenge. They’ve been through, every day, a bad time from the world, from terror and diplomatic stress. But they have been on a pretty unbroken winning streak in terms of popularity.

They don’t know how to be scared. They probably can’t wrap their brains around the idea they should be. Or rather in the abstract they know they should be—they read the papers—but in the particular, in their minds and souls, I doubt they have fully wrapped their brains around it. Which is too bad, because fear makes you sharp.

Now for our challenge. What should the Bush paragraph consist of? How to make it new? How to make it memorable, and true? Readers, you are invited to wrap up in one paragraph what the Bush campaign should say as it unveils itself anew. The White House reads this site. They’ll see it. Take the floor and tell them how to do it.

President Bush’s interview on “Meet the Press” seems to me so much a big-story-in-the-making that I wanted to weigh in with some thoughts. I am one of those who feel his performance was not impressive.

It was an important interview. The president has been taking a beating for two months now—two months of the nonstop commercial for the Democratic Party that is the Democratic primaries, and then the Kay report. And so people watched when he decided to come forward in a high stakes interview with Tim Russert, the tough interviewer who’s an equal-opportunity griller of Democrats. He has heroic concentration and a face like a fist. His interviews are Beltway events.

But certain facts of the interview were favorable to the president. Normally it’s mano a mano at Mr. Russert’s interview table in the big, cold studio. But this interview was in the Oval Office, on the president’s home ground, in front of the big desk. Normally it’s live, which would be unnerving for a normal person and is challenging for politicians. Live always raises the stakes. But Mr. Bush’s interview was taped. Saturday. Taped is easier. You can actually say, “Can we stop for a second? Something in my eye.”

*   *   *

You can find the transcript of the Bush-Russert interview all over the Web. It reads better than it played. But six million people saw it, and many millions more will see pieces of it, and they will not be the pieces in which Mr. Bush looks good.

The president seemed tired, unsure and often bumbling. His answers were repetitive, and when he tried to clarify them he tended to make them worse. He did not seem prepared. He seemed in some way disconnected from the event. When he was thrown the semisoftball question on his National Guard experience—he’s been thrown this question for 10 years now—he spoke in a way that seemed detached. “It’s politics.” Well yes, we know that. Tell us more.

I never expect Mr. Bush, in interviews, to be Tony Blair: eloquent, in the moment, marshaling facts and arguments with seeming ease and reeling them out with conviction and passion. Mr. Bush is less facile with language, as we all know, less able to march out his facts to fight for him.

I don’t think Mr. Bush’s supporters expect that of him, or are disappointed when he doesn’t give it to them. So I’m not sure he disturbed his base. I think he just failed to inspire his base. Which is serious enough—the base was looking for inspiration, and needed it—but not exactly fatal.

Mr. Bush’s supporters expect him to do well in speeches, and to inspire them in speeches. And he has in the past. The recent State of the Union was a good speech but not a great one, and because of that some Bush supporters were disappointed. They put the bar high for Mr. Bush in speeches, and he clears the bar. But his supporters don’t really expect to be inspired by his interviews.

*   *   *

The Big Russ interview will not be a big political story in terms of Bush supporters suddenly turning away from their man. But it will be a big political story in terms of the punditocracy and of news producers, who in general don’t like Mr. Bush anyway. Pundits will characterize this interview, and press their characterization on history. They will compare it to Teddy Kennedy floundering around with Roger Mudd in 1980 in the interview that helped do in his presidential campaign. News producers will pick Mr. Bush’s sleepiest moments to repeat, and will feed their anchors questions for tomorrow morning: “Why did Bush do badly, do you think?”

So Mr. Bush will have a few bad days of bad reviews ahead of him.

But I am thinking there are two kinds of minds in politics. There are those who absorb and repeat their arguments and evidence—their talking points—with vigor, engagement and certainty. And there are those who cannot remember their talking points.

Those who cannot remember their talking points can still succeed as leaders if they give good speeches. Speeches are more important in politics than talking points, as a rule, and are better remembered.

Which gets me to Ronald Reagan. Mr. Reagan had a ready wit and lovely humor, but he didn’t as a rule give good interviews when he was president. He couldn’t remember his talking points. He was a non-talking-point guy. His people would sit him down and rehearse all the fine points of Mideast policy or Iran-contra and he’d say, “I know that, fine.” And then he’d have a news conference and the press would challenge him, or approach a question from an unexpected angle, and he’d forget his talking points. And fumble. And the press would smack him around: “He’s losing it, he’s old.”

Dwight Eisenhower wasn’t good at talking points either.

George W. Bush is not good at talking points. You can see when he’s pressed on a question. Mr. Russert asks, why don’t you remove George Tenet? And Mr. Bush blinks, and I think I know what is happening in his mind. He’s thinking: Go through history of intelligence failures. No, start with endorsement of George so I don’t forget it and cause a big story. No, point out intelligence didn’t work under Clinton. Mention that part of the Kay report that I keep waiting for people to mention.

He knows he has to hit every point smoothly, but self-consciousness keeps him from smoothness. In real life, in the office, Mr. Bush is not self-conscious. Nor was Mr. Reagan.

*   *   *

What we are looking at here is not quality of mind—Mr. Bush is as bright as John Kerry, just as Mr. Reagan was as bright as Walter Mondale, who was very good at talking points. They all are and were intelligent. Yet neither Mr. Bush’s interviews and press conferences nor Mr. Reagan’s suggested anything about what they were like in the office during a crisis: engaged, and tough. It’s something else.

John Kerry does good talking points. In interviews he’s asked for his views on tax cuts and he has it all there in his head in blocks of language that cohere and build. It gets boring the 14th time you hear it, but he looks capable. Hillary Clinton is great at talking points—she’s the best, as her husband was the best in his time.

Democrats have minds that do it through talking points, and Republicans have minds that do speeches. (Mr. Bush has given a dozen memorable speeches already; only one of his Democratic challengers has, and that was “I Have a Scream.”) And the reason—perhaps—is that Democratic candidates tend to love the game of politics, and Republican candidates often don’t. Democrats, because they admire government and seek to be part of it, are inclined to think the truth of life is in policy. How could they not then be engaged by policy talk, and its talking points?

Republicans think politics is something you have to do and that policy is something you have to have to move things forward in line with a philosophy. They like philosophy. But they are bored by policy and hate having to memorize talking points.

Speeches are the vehicle for philosophy. Interviews are the vehicle of policy. Mr. Kerry does talking points and can’t give an interesting speech. Mr. Bush can’t do talking points and gives speeches full of thought and assertion.

Philosophy takes time. If you connect your answers in an interview to philosophy, or go to philosophy first, you can look as if you’re dodging the question. You can forget the question. You can look a little gaga. But policy doesn’t take time. Policy is a machine gun—bip bip bip. Education policy, bip bip bip. Next.

If I worked for President Bush I’d say spend the next nine months giving speeches, and limit interviews. If I worked for Mr. Kerry I’d say give a lot of interviews, be out there all the time, and don’t try to wrap your points up in a coherent philosophy, which is something a good speech demands. Anyway, that’s how I see it. Am I wrong? By the way, I’ve never been able to stick to a talking point in a TV interview in my life.