Peggy Noonan

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.

On Saturday night Sept. 8, 2001, I did something unusual. I went to Madison Square Garden to watch the taping of a Michael Jackson special that was soon to be aired on CBS. A friend had come to town with tickets and we decided to meet for dinner and go together. We thought it would be fun because we thought it would be strange.

We had no idea.

The special was aimed at celebrating Michael Jackson’s career. He was newly under the heavy cloud of scandal, and his advisors had cooked up a new story—a reunion of the Jackson family—to replace the scandal story.

Thousands of young people showed up, and some people who were not so young. Top tickets went for thousands of dollars. Michael Jackson, dressed in his black glitter suit, came out and danced with his brothers and sang and grabbed his crotch. The crowd screamed and cheered. Liz Taylor came out in a stiff gown, looking like a statue in Madame Tussaud’s that had been designed to retain water. She sat silently in a sort of little balcony overseeing the action, saying nothing but waving like the queen mother. Marlon Brando too was a guest star. He sat at the center of the stage with a mike in his hand and spoke for about 10 minutes in a kind of deranged if harmless free association. People booed. They couldn’t tell what he was saying, but they didn’t spend this kind of money to see a fat man in a chair say things that might be serious. Liza Minnelli came out and did a number that was either an homage to or a wan imitation of her mother. And then Witney Houston came out.

This part you may remember, for photos of her made their way across the newspapers of the world. She was emaciated, like a person in a terrible famine. Just a few years before she had been America’s sweetheart, singing with perfect poise and pitch. Now there were repeated reports in the tabloids of drug abuse, and her appearance seemed to buttress them. “Skeletonism,” I said to my friend. “I think it’s a disease now. You get famous and then turn into a skeleton.”

There were other acts and other odd moments, and throughout them the crowd cheered and yelled.

*   *   *

Later, as we got into a cab, we said nothing. It was odd to go from such sound to such silence. But we were both pondering.

It wasn’t that any individual moment during the evening was so stunningly bizarre. (Mr. Brando, for instance, was only as bizarre as Brando is.) It was that taken as a whole the night yielded an unmistakable sense of decay and disorder. “I feel like we just witnessed the end of our culture,” I said.

“We are,” he said. “It’s a freak show now. The whole thing, it’s just a freak show.”

Two-and-a-half days later came 9/11 and the ending of a world. When my friend and I talked again he said, “Remember that night? You could see it coming then.”

Why am I treating you to a bad memory? Because I am disturbed about our culture and can’t stop thinking about it. I’m embarrassed by our culture too, and made anxious by it. Aren’t you?

For a while after 9/11 we seemed to sober up. There seemed a new seriousness. It wasn’t heavy and somber, there was a lot of humor and wit, but we were perhaps a little chastened, a little more mature. Sept. 11 was such a shock to the national system that after it the culture’s long slide into narcissistic netherworlds seemed momentarily stopped, or at least slowed. But it’s picked up again.

Last Sunday night I joined some friends at a Texas barbecue restaurant in Manhattan. We were a football-free zone, marking the birthday of a friend from San Antonio. We had a great time eating what Texans call barbecue and we call brisket. I got home about 9 p.m. and put on the television. It looked like a good game. I logged on to Drudge, and saw the big picture of Justin Timberlake, whose expression could have been described as evil if his face had more intelligence, turned toward Janet Jackson, whose famous breast was exposed to show the famous nipple decorated by the famous Goth-looking metal sunburst.

Oh no, I thought. We’re back to the pre-9/11 freak show.

You have all followed the great controversy, although I’m not sure controversy is the right word for an incident the facts of which no normal human would debate. Was it deliberate? No, the Goth pastie, the lyrics “I’ll have you naked before the end of this song,” and Janet Jackson’s slowness to cover her breast and quickness to enact what she thinks is a look of shame, make it clear it was all an accident. Did MTV know it would happen? No, when they put out the announcement promising “shocking moments” from Ms. Jackson, they didn’t mean anything by it. Did the—let’s be generous—perhaps retarded Justin Timberlake realize he’d gone too far? Of course—that’s why he issued the winking statement about “wardrobe malfunction.” Was the NFL taken aback? Gosh, they must have been—who would think MTV would do something vulgar and highly sexualized? Will an FCC fine of $27,500 stop the networks? Oh sure, in their tracks.

Now they’re saying the answer is a tape delay. Believe me, half the country would like to put the entire culture on a tape delay.

*   *   *

Why was the piggy paganism of the Super Bowl so obnoxious? Our culture has been sick for a while—highly sexualized, violent, inspirational to the unstable. Our media have for decades been robbing our children of the not-knowingness that is the hallmark of childhood. It’s not new; it’s just worse, or perhaps I mean more obvious. This was the Super Bowl, after all, a football game in early-evening prime time with children watching, and nice people who hadn’t bought into the concept of seeing a sex show.

Blogger Mickey Kaus raised most quickly some big points. “The issue isn’t nudity but the implicit endorsement of acting out male fantasies of violent and invasive non-consensual sexual behavior. Never mind the message it sends to international audiences—say young, angry Muslims, to pick a random example, who may have been wondering whether America really is immoral.” He added that this year’s game was telecast to 229 countries and territories, including China for the first time.

But at least indignation is broad and deep. So broad and deep there may be hope in it. Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake, in stepping over the line, could wind up being remembered as the entertainers who reminded us there is a line, or should be.

This might be a frog-in-the-water moment. You remember: You put a frog in a nice cool pot of water, and he’s happy and swims around. But if you put a flame underneath the pot and slowly raise it, chances are he’ll boil to death. On the other hand, if you dump a frog in a boiling pot of water, he’ll jump right out and be saved.

Our culture has been on a boil for years. Then it cooled a bit. The other night at the Super Bowl they put the flame higher and the water began to boil. The frog—that would be us—is still alive. And may, in his shock, jump out of the water.

But the question is: How? How to turn it around. I wonder if all the sane adult liberals and conservatives couldn’t make progress here. But how. Readers?

Let me assert something that I cannot prove with a poll but that is based on serious conversations the past few months with Republicans and also normal people: 9/11 changed everything. Yes, I know you know that. But it has even changed how people who usually vote Republican think about Democratic candidates for president. Our No. 1 question used to be: Can we beat this guy easily? But now we feel the age of terrorism so profoundly challenges our country, and is so suggestive of future trauma and national pain, that our No. 1 question has become: Is he . . . normal? Just normal. Is he stable and adult and experienced?

Only then we ask if we can beat him.

*   *   *

The Democratic nominee in 2004 could win the election. There may be something to the idea that Democrats in general want to get rid of George W. Bush more than Republicans in general want to keep him. One of the men running in New Hampshire tonight could become the next president, and lead the war on terror. And our country cannot afford a bit of a nut.

Which get us of course to Howard Dean. But not for long. I do not know how Democrats in New Hampshire will judge him today, but I can say with confidence that the American people will not choose him as president, because they will not want him near the nuclear arsenal.

Which gets me to Wesley Clark. Forgive me, but he seems to be another first class strange-o. He has been called arrogant and opportunistic. That’s par for the course in politics, but what worries me about Gen. Clark is that it seems to be true to greater degrees than is usual.

On the night of John Kerry’s win in Iowa, Gen. Clark went on “Larry King Live.” The other guest was Bob Dole, not exactly an ideologically rigid man. His presence seemed to signal the establishment giving a big hello and an insider’s teasing to the relatively new candidate. Remember how it went? Mr. Dole, a little emollient, then a little mischievous, told Gen. Clark, first, that “somebody [had] to lose” in Iowa and, next, that “politically you just became a colonel instead of a general.” This little barb set off a pompous harrumph of a retort: “Well, I don’t think that’s at all—Senator, with all due respect, he’s [Kerry’s] a lieutenant and I’m a general. You got to get your facts on this. He was a lieutenant in Vietnam. I’ve done all of the big leadership.” The exchange ended with Gen. Clark telling Mr. Dole that he, Wesley, had “been in a lot of tough positions in my life, one of them was leading the operation in Kosovo . . .”

“I won a war”? “I pitch a 95-mile-an-hour fastball”? “I’ve done all of the big leadership”? “I’ve been in a lot of tough positions”?

Oh no. Another one.

*   *   *

Gen. Clark gives off the vibrations of a man who has no real beliefs save one: Wes Clark should be president. The rest—the actual meaning of his candidacy—he seems to be making up as he goes along. It seems a candidacy void of purpose beyond meeting the candidate’s hunger. He is passionately for the war until he announces for the Democratic nomination facing an antiwar base, at which point he becomes passionately antiwar. He thanks God that George Bush and his aides are in the White House, then he says they’re the worst leaders ever. Anyone can change his mind; but this is not a change, it’s a swerve, and without a convincing rationale. Last week, Brit Hume asked Gen. Clark when it was that he’d “first noticed” that he—Gen. Clark—was a Democrat. There was laughter, but that was a nice big juicy softball. Gen. Clark flailed and fumbled. Later he blamed Mr. Hume for being a Republican agent.

When you are making it up along the way you make mistakes that might, politely, be called tonal. It is not terrible that he was introduced the other day in New Hampshire by a bilious activist, Michael Moore, who called the president a “deserter.” Gen. Clark didn’t address the charge when he took the stage. He could have been distracted, and it certainly would have been ungracious to say, “Thanks for that introduction, which I must disavow because it suggests a grassy knoll extremism with which I cannot associate myself.” But in the days afterward Gen. Clark was repeatedly questioned about Mr. Moore’s charge. He dug the hole deeper by leaving open the possibility that it was true.

More telling is Gen. Clark on abortion. A pro-lifer wouldn’t have the smallest of chances in the Democratic Party, but a certain Clintonian politesse is expected when the question is raised. “Abortion is always a tragedy but denying a woman her reproductive rights under the Constitution would also be a tragedy”—that kind of thing. This is what Gen. Clark said when he met with the Manchester Union-Leader and was questioned by the newspaper’s Joseph McQuaid:

Clark: I don’t think you should get the law involved in abortion—
McQuaid: At all?
Clark: Nope.
McQuaid: Late-term abortion? No limits?
Clark: Nope.
McQuaid: Anything up to delivery?
Clark: Nope, nope.
McQuaid: Anything up to the head coming out of the womb?
Clark: I say that it’s up to the woman and her doctor, her conscience. . . . You don’t put the law in there

.

Gen. Clark was then asked, “What about when she’s grown up and at the prom, can you kill her then?” He said, “Absolutely. Chase her across the dance floor. This is a personal decision for the mother.” Oh—sorry—I made that last part up. He did not advocate killing children 18 years after they’re born. Though one wonders why not. Maybe he does have nuance. His campaign tried to spin it into a plus. He forgot to speak “artfully,” “precisely.” But he was nothing if not precise. He forgot to speak sanely.

All of this was captured by Camille Paglia last summer, in an interview with Salon that at the time struck me as extreme and now seems prescient. Asked what she, as a pro-military Democrat, thinks of the retired general, she said: “What a phony! . . . Clark reminds me of Keir Dullea in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’—a blank, vacant expression, detached and affectless.” But, said the interviewer, his supporters say he is handsome and great on TV. Ms. Paglia: “Doesn’t anyone know how to ‘read’ TV? The guy’s an android . . . a slick, boudoir, salon military type who rubbed plenty of colleagues the wrong way. Clark is not a natural man’s man. And he’s no Eisenhower. . . . This is just another hysterical boomlet, as when the nerdy Northeast media went gaga for John McCain—’Finally, a soldier we like!’”

After this interview, Gen. Clark’s military colleagues began to speak critically of him on and off the record—an apple-polishing operator who abused the chain of command. It is true that Americans respect and often support generals. But we like our generals like Eisenhower and Grant and George Marshall: We like them sober, adult and boring. The title “general” is loaded enough. We don’t want one who is temperamental and unpredictable and strange.

*   *   *

And so my Democratic friends, patriots who vote Democratic and are voting in today’s primary and the ones down the road. Please. We will take Joe Lieberman or John Kerry or even young John Edwards, men who appear to be somewhere in the normal range. We need a person who could rally the nation on a terrible day, and who could arguably meet the security demands the age requires. We can’t afford flip-outs, or people who are too obviously creepy. Just a person in the normal range. Is that asking too much? Say it ain’t so. Give Gen. Clark his marching orders: Retreat!

One suspects the Democrats will send him packing. Just as one suspects he might eventually withdraw, saying something like, “You won’t have Wes Clark to kick around anymore.”

On the matter of the pope, “The Passion” and the famous papal quote, you are perhaps perplexed. You are not alone. This is a story marked by, among other things, a certain amount of intrigue, and some of it is like something out of “The DaVinci Code.”

My Dec. 17 column reported that Pope John Paul II had seen Mel Gibson’s movie on the crucifixion of Christ, “The Passion,” and had offered a judgment on it: “It is as it was.” The quote came from the film’s producer, Steve McEveety, who told me that it was given to him by the pope’s longtime private secretary, Archbishop Stanislau Dziwisz.

At almost the same moment my piece ran, the National Catholic Reporter ran a piece by Rome correspondent John L. Allen Jr., saying the Vatican had given a “thumbs up” to Mel Gibson’s film. It quoted a senior Vatican official who spoke on condition of anonymity: “The Holy Father watched and enjoyed the film. His comment afterwards was, ‘It is as it was.’ “

The next day Reuters reported in a dispatch with a Vatican dateline that it had a Vatican source who said the pope had seen the film, was “moved” by it, and afterward said, “It is as it was.”

A week later, on Dec. 24, reporter Cindy Wooden of the Catholic News Service wrote a piece saying that “a senior Vatican official close to the pope,” who insisted that his name not be used, had denied that the pope said what he was quoted as saying. “The Holy Father does not comment, does not give judgments on art,” Ms. Wooden quoted the official as saying. “I repeat: There was no declaration, no judgment from the pope.” She quoted another Vatican official saying, “The Holy Father saw this film, but did not express any opinion on it.”

On Jan. 9, John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter defended his piece. He reported that he had gone back to his original source, “a well placed Vatican official who is normally a reliable guide to the pope’s mind.” Mr. Allen wrote: “The official is adamant that the original story was right—the pope did indeed say, ‘It is as it was.’ “ Mr. Allen provided new information. The pope and Archbishop Dziwisz had watched the film in the dining room of the pope’s private apartment on a television with a large screen and a videocassette recorder.

*   *   *

Which brings us to this week.

On Sunday Frank Rich of the New York Times, in a column attacking the marketing of the film and those who have supported it, reported that he contacted the Italian translator in the McEveety-Dziwisz meeting. The translator backed the quote up—Archbishop Dziwisz had quoted the pope saying “It is as it was”—and added that the archbishop had also used the word “incredible” to describe the film.

The day after Mr. Rich’s piece ran, Cindy Wooden of CNS returned to the story—with a blockbuster. Archbishop Dziwisz—the man quoted as the source of the papal quote—denied that the pope had told anyone his opinion of the film. “I said clearly to McEveety . . . that the Holy Father made no declaration,” he said.

What gives?

The answer to that question is important for several reasons. The truth matters. What a pope says matters. And what this pontiff says about this film matters. “The Passion,” which is to open on Feb. 25, has been the focus of an intense critical onslaught since last summer. The film has been fiercely denounced as anti-Semitic, and accused of perpetuating stereotypes that will fan hatred against Jews. John Paul II has a long personal and professional history of opposing anti-Semitism, of working against it, and of calling for dialogue, respect and reconciliation between all religions. His comments here would have great importance.

Finally, it is important what the Holy Father said because no piece of work that is destructive and cruel—and what is more destructive and cruel than anti-Semitism?—should be helped by anyone, including and especially the greatest religious leader of our time.

So while to some this may seem a tempest in a teapot, it is not. It is an important story.

*   *   *

Let me tell you of my experience in the drama. This summer I was invited to a Washington screening of the film. I went with some trepidation: Could the charges of anti-Semitism be true? I didn’t think that Mel Gibson would set out to create a deliberately anti-Semitic piece of work; that kind of movie would have been rejected by audiences and lambasted by critics. But people can do ignorant things and thoughtless things, and their work can be destructive. I didn’t know what Mr. Gibson’s film would be. So I watched, and found myself moved and inspired by the film, which isn’t about hatred but love, and love’s continuing war with evil. It is a film that engenders awe, gratitude, and no small amount of self-examination. What role do I play in the crucifixion of Christ, and what role would I have played if I had been there?

I was relieved. It is a story about Jews and Romans, about Jewish saints and sinners and Roman brutes and cynics, but it isn’t really about Jews and Romans; it’s about humanity. It’s about us.

I didn’t write about the movie because I felt it was a private showing and not meant for public comment.

Jump ahead to just more than a month ago. On Dec. 16, Variety got a scoop: John Paul II had seen the film. What did he think of it? I reached Mr. McEveety, the film’s producer, who told me with great excitement that it was true—he had taken the film to Rome, he had gotten it to the pope, and afterwards he had spoken to the pope’s friend and secretary, Archbishop Dziwisz, who told him that the pope, after seeing the film, had shared his reaction: “It is as it was.”

This was news. But had the archbishop said it for public consumption? Mr. McEveety told me he had discussed the quote voiced by Archbishop Dziwisz with the pope’s longtime official spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, head of the Vatican press office. Mr. McEveety said that Dr. Navarro Valls had told him he could use the papal quote when asked about the Holy Father’s reaction to the film.

I was surprised. Dr. Navarro-Valls is famously close-mouthed, and spends most of his time knocking stories like this down. It was unusual that he would give Mr. McEveety permission.

So I e-mailed Dr Navarro Valls at the Vatican telling him I wanted to write a piece for OpinionJournal and asking him about the quote. I didn’t hear back and sent another: “Dr. Navarro Valles [sic], my deadline is in two hours and I do hope you’ll let me know if there is anything on the Pope’s reaction beyond ‘It is as it was’—wonderful words, and I know you have already been in touch with Steve about them, but I would greatly appreciate it if there’s anything you could add regarding general Vatican feeling on the film, any further comment from the Holy Father, etc. Best, Peggy Noonan”

I got a response. “Dear Peggy, I don’t have for now any other comment on this. I [sic] anything is said in the future I will send it to you. Greetings, J. Navarro-Valls.”

*   *   *

I reported the story including what Dr. Navarro-Valls said. I knew that if the Vatican wanted to protest the quote or deny it they would come down on Mr. McEveety and me like a ton of bricks, officially and quickly. I was glad to see reports from Vatican sources in subsequent weeks backing up the quote and the story.

When questions surfaced challenging the quote, Mr. McEveety e-mailed Dr. Navarro-Valls and asked for his help. He answered by e-mail advising Mr. McEveety not to worry, to use the phrase “It is as it was,” and to repeat those words “again and again and again.” Mr. McEveety sent me a copy of the e-mail.

It seemed to me obvious that some in the Vatican were disturbed that the pope’s comment had become public and was being used to defend the film. Several important Vatican figures had praised the film on the record in the past few months, but the film continued to be controversial—and the Vatican hates unneeded controversy. But I knew of Dr Navarro-Valls’s encouragement of the use of the quote, and assumed that at some point he would acknowledge that encouragement.

Instead, intrigue. Yesterday, Jan. 21, Rod Dreher of the Dallas Morning News e-mailed Dr. Navarro-Valls and asked him about the e-mails the spokesman had sent to Steve McEveety. How could the Vatican deny the pope’s quote when you told the producer to use it again and again?

Dr. Navarro-Valls quickly replied. He told Mr. Dreher that the e-mails were not authentic. He was suggesting that they were fabricated.

Mr. Dreher, a friend who used to be my neighbor in Brooklyn, contacted me and asked for my reaction. I told him I was flummoxed. I immediately wrote Dr. Navarro-Valls and asked him to confirm his e mail to me.

The return address on Dr. Navarro-Valls’s e-mail to Rod Dreher was the same as the one on his e-mails to me. We did some checking on Dr. Navarro-Valls’s e-mail to me of Dec. 17. It was sent via an e-mail server in the Vatican’s domain, and the IP address belongs to a Vatican computer.

I have not yet had a response from Dr. Navarro-Valls, but hope to. I have also written to Steve McEveety and asked if he has any response to Dr. Navarro-Valls’s assertion that what Steve said were e-mails from Dr. Navarro-Valls were in fact not authentic.

*   *   *

Believe me, it is painful to be accused however implicitly of being the accessory to a lie. And it would grieve me more than I can say to have been part of wrongly attributing an important statement to a great pope who is for me a personal hero. Last night I spoke to Mr. McEveety, but he would not speak on the record about Dr. Navarro-Valls or the controversy that continues to swirl. I’ll be writing more soon about this extraordinary story.

One way to look at life is that we’re all waiting. You’re born, you grow into the autonomy of adulthood, and then you have to find a way to pass your time until a) you enter your real life, the one that never ends and is full of joy, or b) you enter the meaningless black void that is death and the silence of the tomb. The trick lies in finding a way to spend your time that is pleasurable, satisfying and honorable. What does this have to do with political prognostication? I really don’t know. I just know that political pundits have chosen, as their way to spend the heart of their adult years, gathering the latest facts on and trying to explain politics.

They are all on somebody’s bus today, traveling with a candidate to a pancake breakfast or a potluck dinner. God bless them, for they work hard. The older ones, the boomer reporters and their elders, went through last weekend what they go through every four years: Not Iowa again! Then they stuffed their suits into a beige Hartman bag and got a taxi to the airport. They have been on the bus since 1972 or ‘80 or ‘84 and they are wondering if history hasn’t gotten flatter and thinner and smaller, if history isn’t merely recapitulating itself, playing out a drama that seems less central than once it did. But they go. Because it’s their job and they’re good at it. And because if they don’t go their peers will gossip. They know the true drama of life is being replayed elsewhere, whereas when they were 28 they thought the Iowa outcome really was the drama of life. That’s what reading too much Teddy White will get you.

The younger reporters on the bus will be saying cynical things right now, feeling that’s the right tone to project their world-weariness. And of course they’re right. Cynicism is not an inappropriate response when surrounded by artifice, and much of modern politics is artifice. In being cynical they’ll also be trying to fit in with the boomers. But the boomers haven’t grown more cynical—they started out cynical. They’re actually nicer now. And what they want is a good hotel with 24-hour room service.

*   *   *

Just a month ago it was easy for pundits: Howard Dean’s in the lead, Dean’s got the mo and the dough. That was the common wisdom. But it has changed. There’s a story now. The new common wisdom is that Mr. Dean is no longer the lead car in the race, that he’s hit an oil spot and is spinning, maybe losing control.

I am a conservative and do not hope for a Democratic victory, but I do hope for a Democratic fight, and I think Mr. Dean would lose in a rout. He seems too odd, too politically immature and too essentially ungrounded to be president. So the new storyline is in my view good news.

The polls say Mr. Dean’s lead in the caucuses is tightening; Dick Gephardt and John Kerry are duking it out for second place; John Edwards is rising. Zogby says it’s Dean 24%, Gephardt and Kerry tied at 21%, Edwards at 15% and moving up. So even if Mr. Dean wins with something like these numbers, his competitors will immediately start saying, “Seventy-five percent of our party did not vote for Howard Dean.” And that will win them all more time.

*   *   *

But this is what seems to me interesting and suggestive that the change shown in the polls is real. The press has kicked in and is playing a part in the drama. The journalistic establishment has become an anti-Dean mover. Tuesday’s New York Times piece on the absent Mrs. Dean, for instance—that was a piece with a sting. They decided to front-page it six days before the caucuses. The morning network news shows and the cable news shows are full of Mr. Dean’s gaffes, Mr. Gephardt’s rise and Mr. Edwards’s potential.

Why? It is true the press wants a race. They don’t want to spend the next three months filing “Dean Wins Again” and “Why Kerry Failed to Ignite.” But it’s more than that. Reading between the lines and listening between the lines, it’s hard to avoid the thought that reporters don’t really like Mr. Dean. The last time a viable Democrat rose, in 1992, the columnists for the newsmagazines and profile writers for the newspapers loved Bill Clinton with a throbbing love. None of those columns are being written now. They don’t love Mr. Dean.

This is not a shock. He seems as unlovable (unless you’re a Deaniac) as he is improbable. But I suspect there’s something else at work. I wonder if mainstream media aren’t trying to save the Democratic Party from Mr. Dean. They know he’s not a likely winner down the road. Boomer reporters who’ve been through the Clinton experience have sharp eyes. I suspect they’re put off by Mr. Dean’s Clintonian aspects, such as his tendency to dissemble. They’re pushing Gephardt and Edwards and even Kerry. They may push Wesley Clark. But they’re not pushing Dean.

*   *   *

Someone said of Mr. Gephardt recently that he always looks like he has a fever. I laughed when I heard this because it’s true. But he also looks like a man who’s calm, stable, mature and experienced. Mr. Kerry continues to look like a sad tree, which is a challenge because his face and demeanor are at odds with his message and determination. But he too is mature and experienced. They’ve both been through a life in major-league politics—they’ve been through the shakedown cruise, they’ve been frisked and fisked. As for Mr. Edwards, he is distinguished by a certain cheerful cool and discipline, He’s positive, he doesn’t get down in the muck, and somehow in pictures he’s always looking up, unlike Mr. Dean, who somehow is always looking down from a stage. True, no one’s tried to kill Mr. Edwards yet, which would account for some of his cheeriness, but he does seem to have the right happy-warrior disposition. Any of these three could give George W. Bush a run for his money. (Mr. Clark, I’m afraid, seems even stranger than Mr. Dean. We’ll talk about him soon.)

Mr. Dean’s bad patch could ultimately be a gift to him. If he emerges triumphant on Monday and it isn’t a squeaker, he will soon be calling himself the Comeback Kid. He’ll claim he’s been through a terrible pummeling and emerged unscathed, proof he can go the distance. He’ll have propulsion into New Hampshire, where he’s strong anyway.

This is a real generational fight within the Democratic Party, those with years versus those with youth. The old versus the young. Every time I’ve seen a political war between old and young—between the liberal mandarins of the Republican party and the young conservatives, and then between the old right and the new right—I’ve been with the young. But this time I see wisdom in the older, middle-class and blue-collar Democrats who are wiping the mud off their boots before walking into the Gephardt fundraiser.

Mr. Dean’s people are proudly antiestablishment. For them it’s the Pussyfooting Party Powers versus an Unformed But Rising Mass. If the Democratic establishment reasserts itself in Iowa, many pundits—including me—will have to eat the words they’ve been speaking the past few months. Dean was not inevitable. In my case, never will words be eaten so happily.

I want to like Howard Dean. I don’t mean I want to support him; I mean I want to like him, or find him admirable even if I don’t agree with him. I want the Democratic Party to have a strong nominee this year, for several reasons. One is that it is one of our two great parties, and it is dispiriting to think it is not able to summon up a deeply impressive contender. Another is that democracy is best served by excellent presidential nominees duking it out region to region in a hard-fought campaign that seriously raises the pressing issues of the day. A third is that the Republican Party is never at its best when faced with a lame challenger. When faced with a tough and scrappy competitor like Bill Clinton, they came up with the Contract with America. When faced with Michael Dukakis they came up with flag-burning amendments. They need to be in a serious fight before they fight seriously.

I do not know how Howard Dean will do in Iowa, but I am one of those who think the Democrats will nominate Mr. Dean, and so I would like to like him and be able to imagine that many others will. I also would like to like him because now and then he says something that shows promise. Yesterday when asked if he ever wonders what would Jesus do, he replied: “No.” This was so candid, I loved it. In the same interview, when asked if his wife would join him on the campaign trail, he said, “I do not intend to drag her around because I think I need her as a prop on the campaign trail.” Political spouses often are dragged around as props. It’s not terrible to say so. It’s refreshing.

*   *   *

But it is hard to like Howard Dean. He seems as big a trimmer as Bill Clinton, and as bold and talented in that area as Mr. Clinton. He says America is no safer for the capture of Saddam Hussein, and then he says he didn’t say it. He floats a rumor that the Saudis tipped off President Bush before 9/11, and then he says he never believed it. When he is caught and has to elaborate, explain or disavow, he dissembles with Clintonian bravado. This is not a good sign.

He is not a happy warrior but an angry one. In the past I have thought of him as an angry little teapot, but that is perhaps too merry an image. His eyes are cold marbles, in repose his face falls into lines of mere calculation, and he holds himself with a kind of no-neck pugnacity that is fine in a wrestling coach or a tax lawyer but not in a president. We like our presidents sunny, easygoing and optimistic. They have access to the nuclear launch code, and we don’t want them losing their tempers easily. Mr. Dean’s supporters no doubt see him as optimistic, but optimists aren’t angry.

There is a disjunction between Dean’s ethnic background and his personal style. His background is eastern WASP—Park Avenue, the Hamptons, boarding school, Yale. But he doesn’t seem like a WASP. I know it’s not nice to deal in stereotypes, but there seems very little Thurston Howell III, or George Bush the elder for that matter, in Mr. Dean. He seems unpolished, doesn’t hide his aggression, is proudly pugnacious. He doesn’t look or act the part of the WASP. This may be partly because of his generation. Boomer WASPs didn’t really learn How It’s Done the way their forebears did. (Boomers of every ethnicity are less ethnic than their forebears.) George W. Bush is a little like this too—less polished, more awkward, than one might expect. At any rate there is some political meaning to this. It will be harder for Republicans to tag Mr. Dean as Son of the Maidstone Club than it was for Democrats to tag Bush One as Heir to Greenwich Country Day. He just doesn’t act the part.

On the other hand, Mr. Dean’s angry look and angry demeanor will not serve him well as he tries to carry the women’s vote.

*   *   *

Howard Dean is as much like George McGovern as 2004 is like 1972, which is to say not much. But Mr. Dean is not Mr. McGovern in a more important way. Mr. McGovern was guided and inspired by his own sense of a particular ideology. He reflected it, and his young supporters, who that year took over the party, shared it. They stood for something. Mr. Dean’s people—and Mr. Dean—don’t seem to have anything as coherent as an ideology. Instead they have attitude.

Howard Dean’s rise is about two things. The first is the war. Most of the other serious Democratic candidates were reasonable about it, if you will. Dean didn’t bother to be reasonable, or to appear reasonable: Bush is a bum and his war is a fraud. This was pitch-perfect for a disaffected base made lastingly furious by the 2000 election. Having gained the advantage, Mr. Dean never let go. His imprint was set. He left his competitors stuttering, “But at the time the president’s data did seem compelling, and so . . .” He forged on. His was the shrewdest, quickest read of the Democratic voter of 2004.

The second reason for his rise is that he is not an insider but an insurgent. He has an insurgent’s attitudes and subtle disrespect (or sometimes unsubtle, as when he referred to members of Congress as cockroaches). The young and Internet-savvy found this approach attractive. (An essay should be written by a Democrat on what it was about the Democratic establishment—the men and women of the Clinton era, the party members in Congress—that elicited such contempt.) Mr. Dean’s forces used the Internet with great and impressive creativity, and not only in fund-raising. Have you seen Flat Howard? It’s a life-size Howard printout you can get off your computer. You tape the pieces together and have a life-size Howard Dean. They’re ingenious and spirited in Dean-land.

Because Mr. Dean is operating as an insurgent, his supporters hold him to different standards. Is he inconsistent? No, he’s nimble. Is he dishonest in his statements? No, he’s just tying those establishment types in knots. Mr. Dean’s supporters seem to like him not in spite of his drawbacks, but because of them.

*   *   *

Mr. Dean’s problem in the future will not be so much credibly pivoting right on major issues as attempting to pivot into something like the normal range in terms of temperament, personality and the interpretation of things he’s already said when he’s popping off—and he pops off a lot. Some of the things he has said or suggested—Osama bin Laden shouldn’t be presumed guilty, for instance—are the rhetorical equivalent of Michael Dukakis in the tank. He looked silly. He looked unserious. Mr. Dean is going to look that way, too.

I hope something surprising happens in Iowa, and New Hampshire, and in the South. I hope it becomes a real fight on the Democratic side, and I hope that fight yields up someone who is serious, substantive, and thoughtful. But that’s not what I see coming. What I see coming is a Dean nomination followed by a rancorous campaign followed by a Dean defeat.

We have all seen the stories this Christmas season—they are not new, they are only more so—of the local struggles between what I suppose might be called the forces of modernity versus the forces of faith. Tussles in schools and townships over the Christmas display, the prayer, the T-shirt, the cross, the statue of Mary. It’s all a continuation of what Michael Kinsley once sardonically referred to as the crèche menace. But it has moved beyond the crèche: It is increasingly a movement to ban on all public property—and pretty much in public, period—the signs and symbols of a religious holiday that roughly 90% of Americans celebrate. It doesn’t even have to be Christmas-related. Last week there was the story of the Florida housing group that banned a statue of the Virgin Mary from the front of a house in the community.

They are very busy, The Banners. They seemed to have calmed down after 9/11, when half the country exploded with spontaneously put-forward religious symbols (crosses, votive candles, cards with saints’ faces), and it was somehow . . . allowed. Shock shook The Banners into reasonableness; tragedy concentrated their minds; they retreated. But now they are back, and it is the meaning and actuality of 9/11 that has receded.

*   *   *

The motives of The Banners are mixed. Some seem to have aesthetic distaste for religious symbolism that is the outward and visible expression of an inner distaste for religion itself—it’s old fashioned, unworldly, very booga booga woo woo, which can’t be helpful, can it? Some of The Banners seem driven by malice and the impulse to bully—your religion is not my religion, so it will not be mentioned in public, bub, no matter what the holiday or how many celebrate it.

But some of The Banners mean well and believe their efforts are constructive. They believe that assertions of religious belief are inherently divisive, that to put forward the symbols of belief is threatening to society’s peace. They believe that the displaying of the symbols of one faith is an implicit denial of the beliefs of another faith. They do not think that faith is part of the answer; they think it is a big part of the problem (see fundamentalist Islam; see the protracted war in Northern Ireland). They think that if only people would stop being religious, we wouldn’t have religion around roiling people’s emotions and making them violent. (If you say to them, “Man is prone to violence, and one of the things that tends to make his heart gentle is faith in God,” their eyes widen in shock: That couldn’t possibly be true!)

*   *   *

I have witnessed these arguments close up—I suppose everyone in the country has—and I have learned something. And I didn’t want to let the season end without saying it. I learned what I learned by talking to mothers as they debated these issues outside school. This was years ago, when my son was in grade school.
This is what I learned: Censoring doesn’t work. Accommodation does. But a particular kind of accommodation.

The answer is not banning religious symbols. This brings resentment and engenders a quiet seething that does not encourage peace and understanding.

The answer is not to banish religious symbols from the public square. The answer—the pro-peace position if you will—is to fill the public square with the signs and symbols of faith. It is not to banish them from the schools, it is to teach them in the schools.

The answer is not to present in the school’s display case the sorry little compromise of the 1990s—the tired little Santa and the dusty dreidel. The answer is to display a menorah and explain what it is, and its history, and what it means to Jews. The answer is to display a crucifix or a cross and explain what it means to Christians. And, yes, the answer is to show a Koran and explain what it is. The answer is not to ban Christmas carols from the school pageant but to sing them; they are part of our culture and history, and they are beautiful. And there are other religious songs that are not Christian. Sing them too.

The answer is not to banish belief but to bring it in and explain it in loving terms to our hungry-minded children. This will truly teach them appreciation and diversity and respect and regard for others. We, their parents, are limiting them and harming them by hiding the things of faith, or forcing them underground. They deserve light.

*   *   *

I’ll end with a happy story. A few years back I had a small patch of patio in Manhattan, in an apartment building up in the 90s off Park Avenue. It was a little outdoor area overlooked by scores of apartments. The patio was empty and sad looking when I got there, so I started to put in some flowers and bushes and then I put out a two-foot-high plaster statue of the Blessed Mother. It was as if I’d summoned the forces of hell. Maybe I had. One neighbor started putting flyers under my door explaining that idolatry and Mary-worship consigns its unfortunate devotees to hell. Other neighbors complained about the garden. People got mad.

I was taken aback. I think part of it had to do with class. You can tool the streets of working class Lodi, N.J., and see little Marys in the front and back yards and no one says boo. But you can go from one end of Park Avenue to the other, and never—and I mean never—see a Virgin Mary in a window or a roof garden. I know. I have searched. There are Catholics on Park Avenue, but mostly there are rich people. And believe me the rich of Manhattan seem either not to like religious symbols or they know to keep them to themselves. Display is vulgar (and working-class).

The rich are lucky, but they are also human. Like most humans they think they have what they have only because of their efforts; or, as is often the case in America, they’ve been lucky so long they think they deserve it. They think they got it because they made better decisions and more sober choices. I think they forget God had anything to do with it. Displaying the signs and symbols of faith is just not very . . . Park Avenue.

Anyway, putting Mary out there in a public space engendered resentment. Mary—poor Mary, the most peaceful and loving of women—was causing quite a fuss. So I took Mary into the house, and she lived for three years in a closet. Then I moved to Brooklyn. In Brooklyn there was another patch of land, another patio area. With flowers and bushes it could be beautiful. So I hired a local landscaper, and I showed her Mary. I told her I really wanted to put the statue outside but I didn’t want to cause trouble with the neighbors. I told her of my problems in Manhattan. The landscaper looked at me, perplexed. Finally she spoke. “This is Brooklyn,” she said. “You can do Mary here.” And so I did, and she is out there now.

There’s a big Mary of Fatima across the street at the local church, too, so I am surrounded by Mary. My having her there is my way of saying, “A likeness of the beauty and sweetness of the mother of God is here in my garden and I hope it brings you peace.” No one has complained. No one has said a thing.

When the PC talking points came out in 1985 no one sent Brooklyn the memo. We have mezuzahs and Marys all over the place. We have a vital synagogue and social center just down the block, and the headquarters of the Jehovah’s witnesses down the other; the synagogue is next to a home for Franciscan priests. A few blocks away on Atlantic Avenue the mosques are next to the Baptist churches. One of my neighbors is an ardent Lebanese Maronite, and another is a lover of Buddha. He keeps a statue in the window.

This is actual diversity. Everyone gets to be, we don’t fear faith. May the world in 2004 be more like Brooklyn, and may its arguments over religion and the public square be solved the Brooklyn way.