Peggy Noonan

(Editor’s note: This column appeared on July 12, 2002. Pat Tillman died in combat in Afghanistan yesterday.)

Maybe he was thinking Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Maybe it was visceral, not so much thought as felt, and acted upon. We don’t know because he won’t say, at least not in public. Which is itself unusual. Silence is the refuge of celebrities caught in scandal, not the usual response of those caught red-handed doing good.

All we know is that 25-year-old Pat Tillman, a rising pro football player (224 tackles in 2000 as a defensive back for the Arizona Cardinals, a team record) came back from his honeymoon seven weeks ago and told his coaches he would turn down a three-year, $3.6 million contract and instead join the U.S. Army. For a pay cut of roughly $3.54 million dollars over three years.

On Monday morning, Pat Tillman “came in like everyone else, on a bus from a processing station,” according to a public information officer at Fort Benning, Ga., and received the outward signs of the leveling anonymity of the armed forces: a bad haircut, a good uniform and physical testing to see if he is up to the rigors of being a soldier. Soon he begins basic training. And whatever else happened this week—Wall Street news, speeches on the economy—nothing seems bigger, more important and more suggestive of change than what Pat Tillman did.

Those who know him say it’s typical Tillman, a surprise decision based on his vision of what would be a good thing to do. When he was in college he sometimes climbed to the top of a stadium light tower to think and meditate. After his great 2000 season he was offered a $9 million, five-year contract with the St. Louis Rams and said thanks but no, he was happy with the Cardinals.

But it was clear to those who knew Mr. Tillman that after September 11 something changed. The attack on America had prompted a rethinking. Len Pasquarelli of ESPN reported last May that the “free-spirited but consummately disciplined” starting strong safety told friends and relatives that, in Mr. Pasquarelli’s words, “his conscience would not allow him to tackle opposition fullbacks where there is still a bigger enemy that needs to be stopped in its tracks.” Mr. Tillman’s agent and friend Frank Bauer: “This is something he feels he has to do. For him, it’s a mindset, a duty.”

*   *   *

“I’m sorry, but he is not taking inquiries,” said the spokeswoman at Fort Benning. She laughed when I pressed to speak to someone who might have seen Mr. Tillman or talked to him. Men entering basic training don’t break for interviews, she said. Besides, “he has asked not to have any coverage. We’ve been respecting his wishes. And kinda hoping he’d change his mind.” Mr. Tillman would, of course, be a mighty recruiting device. The Army might have enjoyed inviting television cameras to record his haircut, as they did with Elvis. But Mr. Tillman, the Fort Benning spokesman says, “wants to be anonymous like everyone else.”

Right now he has 13 weeks of basic training ahead of him, then three weeks of Airborne School, and then, if he makes it, Ranger School, where only about a third of the candidates are accepted. “It’s a long row,” said the Fort Benning spokesman, who seemed to suggest it would be all right to call again around Christmas. Until then he’ll be working hard trying to become what he wants to become.

Which I guess says it all.

Except for this. We are making a lot of Tillmans in America, and one wonders if this has been sufficiently noted. The other day friends, a conservative intellectual and his activist wife, sent a picture of their son Gabe, a proud and newly minted Marine. And there is Abe, son of a former high aide to Al Gore, who is a lieutenant junior grade in the Navy, flying SH-60 Seahawk helicopters. A network journalist and his wife, also friends, speak with anguished pride of their son, in harm’s way as a full corporal in the Marines. The son of a noted historian has joined up; the son of a conservative columnist has just finished his hitch in the Marines; and the son of a bureau chief of a famous magazine was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army last month, on the day he graduated from Princeton.

As the Vietnam-era song said, “Something’s happening here.” And what it is may be exactly clear. Some very talented young men, and women, are joining the armed forces in order to help their country because, apparently, they love it. After what our society and culture have been through and become the past 30 years or so, you wouldn’t be sure that we would still be making their kind, but we are. As for their spirit, Abe’s mother reports, “Last New Year’s, Abe and his roommate [another young officer] were home and the topic came up about how little they are paid [compared with] the kids who graduated from college at the same time they did and went into business.

“Without missing a beat the two of them said, ‘Yeah—but we get to get shot at!’ and raised their beer bottles. No resentment. No anger. Just pure . . . testosterone-laden bravado.”

*   *   *

The Abes and Gabes join a long old line of elders dressed in green, blue, gray, white, gold and black. Pat Tillman joins a similar line, of stars who decided they had work to do, and must leave their careers to do it. They include, among others, the actors Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable and Tyrone Power in World War II; sports stars Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio in the same war; and quarterback Roger Staubach in Vietnam. It is good to see their style return, and be considered noble again.

And good to see what appears to be part of, or the beginning of, a change in armed forces volunteering. In the Vietnam era of my youth it was poor and working-class boys whom I saw drafted or eagerly volunteering. Now more and more I see the sons and daughters of the privileged joining up.

That is a bigger and better story than usually makes the front page. Markets rise and fall, politicians come and go, but that we still make Tillmans is headline news.

I do not know precisely why President Bush’s popularity continues high despite a month of the most relentless pounding from partisans, the press, the 9/11 commission and history itself (Fallujah, etc.) No one else knows either. Professionals will read the polls through the prism of their own expertise. Media people will say it’s the cumulative effect of Mr. Bush’s stirring ads. Those who agree with the president’s stand on Iraq will say it’s Iraq. Others may argue it’s because he put tax cuts at the heart of his economic policy and the economy has begun to rebound. There is probably some truth in all of this. But my guess would be something else.

I think Mr. Bush is admired and liked after three years of war, terror, strife and recession because people have eyes.

They look at him, listen to him, and watch him every day. They can tell that George W. Bush is looking out for America. They can tell he means it. They can see his sincerity. They can tell he is doing his best. They understand his thinking because he tells them his thinking. They think he may be right. They’re not sure, but at least they understand his thinking.

They are not shocked that our intelligence system wasn’t working very well before 9/11. They would like our intelligence system to be first-rate and the best in the world, and they like to say they expect it to be best in the world. But they also think it comes from Washington, it’s government, and so by definition flawed. Mr. Bush has survived not finding of the weapons of mass destruction for two reasons. One is that Americans have come to be sure that Saddam was an unusually bad man and a threat to whatever stability the Mideast enjoys. The other is that Americans believe Mr. Bush himself honestly believed Saddam was a threat. If Bill Clinton, who thought Iraq had WMDs, had invaded Iraq post-9/11 and not found them, he would have been thrown out of office. That’s because no one ever believed what Mr. Clinton said, and they wouldn’t have believed his explanations. They assumed most of what he did had a cynical and self-serving basis. Mr. Bush doesn’t have that problem, because regular people don’t think he’s a habitual liar. (This is why in presidential elections character trumps everything. It’s not some abstraction, it has practical and daily presidential applications.)

Americans do not think Mr. Bush has a persona to dazzle history, they think he is the average American man, but the average American man as they understand the term: straight shooter, hard worker, decent, America-loving, God-loving.

*   *   *

They can tell he is not doing it all by polls and focus groups. If he were doing it by polls and focus groups he wouldn’t have defied the U.N., invaded Iraq, and pursued its democracy. He would have talked instead about nuance, multilateral negotiations and the need for child safety seats in SUVs. He moved on Iraq because he thought it was right and it would make the world safer. You can agree or disagree with him, but it is hard to doubt his guts, his seriousness and his commitment. And Americans respect guts, seriousness and commitment.

That does not mean Americans will give him a blank check and say: Go do what you want. It means they’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and stand by him with cool eyes as long as they feel it’s right for them and the country.

Mr. Bush’s critics say he sees things too much in black and white, but he is addressing the central issues of life and death. He isn’t dithering or dodging and he isn’t spending all his time trying to maintain his viability within the system. He’s calling the shots, bearing the burden and taking the heat. He reminds me of a man I know who was imprisoned in Vietnam. We went to lunch in a place with short candles on the table. I was asking about the Hanoi Hilton. A waiter walked by and bumped the table, which made a candle tilt against a wicker basket full of bread. The basket was lined with paper napkins, which went up in flames. The man didn’t change his tone of voice as he continued his story, quietly picked up the flaming basket, placed it on the floor and softly stepped on it with his large right shoe. The flames went out. He continued his narrative as he eyed a waiter, handed him the smoking basket and asked for more bread. President Bush reminds me of that guy. He would not offer sensitive or witty commentary on how odd it is to be surprised by fire on a spring day, but he would put the fire out.

Mr. Bush has the calm and anxious face of an American man who believes in God but just read the raw threat file. He knows what trouble we’re in and he knows what time it is. He is alert and determined but ultimately trusting and hopeful, because there really is a God and he really is watching. This is very American.

*   *   *

The implications for the election? We all know a presidential campaign involving an incumbent is in good part a referendum on that incumbent. Which sounds like a one-part process, but it’s a two-part process.

If you want to fire the incumbent, you have to have someone to hire in his place. The guy who opposes the incumbent has to seem like a credible president. He has to be a real alternative, a possible president. So far, roughly four months into his national fame, John Kerry has not made the sale. There are people who have Bush-fatigue, but they do not have Kerry-hunger.

So far he doesn’t seem like a possible president. He seems somewhat shifty, somewhat cold, an operator. He has a good voice but he seems to use it most to slither out of this former statement or that erstwhile position. It’s OK that he looks like a sad tree, but you can’t look like a sad, hollow tree. And it looks a little hollow in there. As if Iraq is an issue Kerry feels he has to handle deftly, and not a brutal question we have to solve, together. As if homeland security is an issue, or civil defense, or preparedness. They’re not issues. They’re life and death. Mr. Kerry doesn’t seem to know.

Which is why he isn’t gaining traction, or gaining purchase on the president. The Democrats and their nominee say on one day that Mr. Bush ignored terrorism, and on the next that he exaggerated the threat. They say his administration didn’t give enough time to planning Iraq, then they say he was obsessed with Iraq. They say he’s dimwitted and gullible, then they say he’s evil and calculating—he cooked Iraq up in Texas, in Ted Kennedy’s phrase.

You know why they can’t define what’s wrong with Mr. Bush? Because they don’t even know what’s wrong with him beyond that he is not them, not Mr. Kerry, not a Democrat.

Can the Democrats win this way? No.

It is a modern political cliché that how the public perceives an event is everything. People who say this forget that reality is important too, and only in part because public opinion tends in its rough way to follow it. But as regards President Bush’s press conference Tuesday night, his third in three years, public perception will decide all. (Not press perception, which has been negative and will grow more so with time.)

What do I think public opinion of the president’s news conference will be? Generally positive. Here’s why: The president spoke uninterrupted for the first 17 minutes, when most people were tuning in to see what he had to say. His speech/announcement hit every point that had to be covered, crisply and yet somberly. Yes, things are tough in Iraq now; yes, we are going to stick to the plan to turn sovereignty over to the Iraqis; yes, we will stay as long as our presence makes the difference between success and failure, stability and chaos. Yes, we will increase troop strength if needed; yes, we have faith that Iraq will ultimately choose democracy and civic health. It was a measured and logical layout of U.S. plans and positions. (Read the opening statement here. It tells you everything you need to know about what Mr. Bush thinks and where he stands.) It will have made a positive impression while people were watching with wide-awake eyes.

*   *   *

It was after the statement that things got more awkward. The president rambled and repeated talking points, playing for time as he tried to remember what he’d decided he was going to say in response to this question or that. Sometimes he remembered and became energized; sometimes he didn’t.

But here the press came to his rescue, and God bless them. They are so clearly carrying water for the left-liberal establishment, they were so clearly carrying water for the preening and partisan hacks who dominate the 9/11 commission, and the Washington Post’s coverage of the news conference yesterday morning was so clearly teeing up Bob Woodward’s next book, that the media nullified their hostility. They could have done some damage to the president with a grave and honest spirit of inquiry.

Instead, they played left-wing Snidely Whiplash. They almost twirled their mustaches, and I don’t mean only the women: Will you apologize, Mr. President? Do you feel personally responsible for Sept. 11? Do you think you’re a loser as a communicator? What was your worst mistake? Do you really like that tie? Do you ever consider hanging yourself from a cornice in the East Room with your tie? When you look in the mirror do you feel mild disgust or just that feeling of shame where you sort of want to tear your face off and run screaming from the room?

Imagine it is April, 1943 and FDR is meeting with the press. Mr. President, why did you fail us on Dec. 7? You call it a day of infamy, but didn’t it reveal your leadership style to be infamous? Why did you let the U.S. fleet sit sleepy and exposed at Pearl Harbor? Do you think your physical infirmity, sir, has an impact on your ability to think about strategic concerns, and will you instruct your doctors to make public your medical records?

But of course they wouldn’t have asked these questions. Our press corps in those days was more like Americans than our press corps is today. They were both less self-hating and more appropriately anxious: Don’t be killing our leaders in the middle of a war, don’t be disheartening the people. Win and do the commentary later.

*   *   *

I noticed once again at the news conference that Mr. Bush has turned garrulous. He has taken to speaking at great length in venues of his choosing, and more and more he chooses. A week ago I took part in a seminar on book writing at a gathering of Republicans in Georgia. The president spoke to the gathering later that night, at an informal dinner for a few hundred, and I stayed on to watch. Everyone knew his remarks would be brief, but they were not. After an hour the governor of Florida, sitting behind him on the small stage, shifted like someone who knew big brother was going on too long, and finally threw a dinner roll at his back to make the point. I made the last part up, but Jeb Bush looked like someone trying to throw his voice: Wrap it up, buddy. Eventually the president did, with what seemed reluctance, after an hour and 20 minutes of a tour of his horizons, a personal and at times startlingly blunt appraisal of other leaders and the realities they face.

When I mentioned to a friend that I’d never heard of Mr. Bush speaking so long, the friend, who sees him often, said the president had recently spoken for more than an hour at a lunch, to the startlement of listeners who wound up furtively checking their watches. Another Washington denizen shared a similar story.

This is unlike our president. I don’t know what it means. I suspect it means his staff, having seen his effectiveness in small groups with this style, is telling him to do it for large groups, as he did at the news conference. This should be re-examined.

The president at the news conference did not seem unprepared or uninformed. He looked to me like someone who had been coached within an inch of his life and who insisted on yet more coaching late in the day, and who began the news conference with the kind of tiredness that first expresses itself not physically but intellectually. A subject is introduced and the smooth ivory dominoes do not begin to click into place one after another, as they do when one is fresh, or lucky. (I hereby retract that unfortunate image.) Instead one furrows his brow and shakes his head. Over-stimulated and wanting to yawn is a bad place to be.

Should a president under crisis go into any venue that does not call on his greatest strengths? No. Get him out there doing speeches, meeting with citizens, taking a few shouted questions, again and again. That’s how Mr. Bush best communicates his convictions, logic and plans, and that is the purpose of presidential communication.

More and more it seems to me Mr. Bush is not only Bill Clinton’s successor but his exact opposite: Mr. Clinton perfectly poised and hollow inside, a man whose lack of compass left him unable to lead within the Oval Office but who gave a compelling public presentation of the presidency, and Mr. Bush a strong president with an obvious soul, decisive at the desk, but with no dazzling edifice. It’s actually amazing that two such different men came so close together. Lucky for us, considering the history, that Mr. Bush was the one who came now.

Peter Jennings: . . . a week so extraordinary, so packed with history that one hardly knows where to begin. An overview from our correspondent Jack McWethy.

McWethy: Peter, what a week it was. On Thursday in Washington riveting testimony. The head of the National Security Council, Condoleezza Rice, live before the 9/11 commission and the country. She was a dramatic witness. In calm tones and over three hours Rice walked through the history of America and al Qaeda, reviewing both the Bush administration’s eight-month leadership before September 11, 2001, and the Clinton administration’s eight years. She came with heavy documentation—memoranda, briefing notes.

Bottom line, she said, the Bush administration removed Saddam Hussein of Iraq for reasons of national and international security. The administration, she said, was deeply concerned about terrorism, aware of the threat of al Qaeda, and moved against it forcefully in Afghanistan and Iraq. The questioning was tough but struck many observers as strikingly nonpartisan.

In a compelling moment, Rice noted that she had previously answered “every single question” now put to her by the commission in private testimony. She told commission members she believed they were wrong to press for public testimony—“You have said that 9/11 was so extraordinary a day that it justifies public testimony from the NSC director, but I ask you to realize that the future will be full of extraordinary days. You have set a precedent that will not be unset, and that will prove unhelpful during the crises of the future.”

She added, however, that she found herself feeling “rather personally and selfishly grateful” to be compelled to give testimony. “The whole world is watching,” she said. “They have a right to know that the American nation moves forward only in good faith, only for the most serious of reasons, and only with the intention of making the world a safer and more decent place.”

Rice challenged the committee to “get your work done,” so that the government can turn undivided attention to what she called “the next big steps”—an extraordinary plan to assist in the invention and manufacture of “anything that can help the people of the world make their way through the coming difficult decades.” She referred to what the president will soon announce as “an on-the-ground strategic defense initiative.” She said it will begin in the U.S. with the giving out of gas masks and state-of-the-art suits to protect against chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, along with a renewal of the national civil defense system, more intelligence funding and measures, and a surprise Bush administration decision to reverse itself and back a national ID card, and step up border and immigration control.

All in all, huge news. By the way, Peter, administration foe Richard Clarke, who did commentary on Rice’s testimony for CNN—that’s him next to Anita Hill—said: “I must admit I realize for the first time that there’s a heck of a lot I didn’t know and didn’t imagine. This is food for thought.” Asked by Wolf Blitzer if he might now disavow some of the charges in his recent best-selling book Clarke said, “I may put a new preface on the paperback.”

But that is just what happened in the hearings on Thursday.

Friday morning, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts made a stunning speech retracting what he called his “intemperate and, truth be told, cynical” comments earlier this week when he compared Iraq to Vietnam and George W. Bush to Richard Nixon. Kennedy said that Sen. John McCain’s remarks on the Senate floor Thursday afternoon had been “both sobering and steadying.”

McCain, the respected Republican moderate, said Iraq is “safer now” than it was under Saddam and “this is no time to cut and run.” Kennedy said he’d pondered McCain’s views, and concluded they were right. “I guess I panicked,” Kennedy said. “I wanted to be relevant again. I wanted to be young again. So I indulged my ego and hoped, aloud, for hopelessness. The fact is, we cannot afford to let Iraq descend into chaos and nihilism.”

Kennedy said that while U.S. troops were deployed in a foreign land he would say nothing that would give inspiration to those who do not wish our country well. He said he will lead a movement within his party to both assist in the democratization of Iraq, and begin a national conversation on what should be next in terms of U.S. national security. “My needs are nothing compared to my nation’s needs,” he said. “Even though I am, uh, roughly, arguably the size of Connecticut, and can personally moon Europe. Thank you.”

In possible response to that—Peter, we cannot claim to know all the reasons for these events, only their order—the president of France, Jacques Chirac, made his own stunning speech in Paris. In what appeared to be an extended ad lib in an otherwise unremarkable text, Chirac said he had just finished reading Anne Applebaum’s book “Gulag,” which this week won the Pultizer Prize.

Said Chirac, “Halfway through it a lightbulb went off. I had an insight. An inspiration! Applebaum reminds us of the Soviet reign of terror. We know who ended that, and let’s face it, it wasn’t French intellectuals smoking Gauloises and shrugging with silent existential eloquence. It was America. While Harry Truman was doing his best to give us the Marshall Plan and save Europe, Stalin was getting drunk all night and deciding who to shoot next. Bastarde. A regular Saddam. And then I realized: Oh, I have been unappreciative! I have been silly about America. She has more than proved her high mindedness and idealism and tradition of goodness. And now she is having a bad time in Iraq. Well, I have decided it is time to stand with America as America has stood with us. So, ‘Pershing, we are here!’ We will send French troops to join the coalition. This is a historic move—but then any country that is magnifique would do it. And France is magnifique. And by the way, Mr. Berlusconi, the leaders of Europe are not a bunch of ‘big ugly slugs.’”

Finally, Rome. The Vatican. Where pope John Paul II this week said he is praying for coalition troops in Iraq. He asked churches throughout the world to “offer up” Easter Sunday masses for peace, and said he knows the American effort in Iraq “is meant at improving lives and leading that unhappy place toward democracy.” The pope performed his ritual washing of the feet of the poor, a yearly act aimed at showing Christian humility and love.

The pontiff asked this year also to personally wash the feet of Riccardo Di Segni, the chief rabbi of Rome. Afterward the two went into the pope’s private Vatican apartment and watched a DVD of “The Passion,” the fourth viewing for the pope, and about an hour ago they had dinner “as friends do.” Those words are the pope’s. The chief rabbi upon leaving pronounced the movie “a little boring but not so bad.” The pope seemed to nod, and said, “If you believe what you’re watching is a true story it’s enthralling, but if you think it’s not, it’s probably not.” Pressed by reporters for his own reaction to the film, the pope smiled. “I say it again,” he said in a deep but soft voice. “It is as it was.”

An amazing Holy Week, Peter, an amazing Passover holiday, some amazing moments.

Jennings: Amazing indeed. When we return, good news for humor writer Al Franken: His numbers may not be good at the end of his first week on the air but his new liberal radio network has nonetheless grown 100%. He now has six stations—roughly, or rather exactly, 1% of Rush Limbaugh’s. Now this. . . .

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.

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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.

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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.