Peggy Noonan

Trent Lott’s position in the Senate is deeply eroded, more than has been made public. His most vocal Senate defenders have one by one privately decided he must go. They want him to step down but have no reason at this point to think he will. They do not want the drama to continue until they meet to vote on his fate on Jan. 6. And some are fearful that Mr. Lott will squeak through that vote, which will have many unfortunate implications, for the party’s future and for his ability to lead. Even if he manages to cobble together 26 votes, his 51-member caucus will have been deeply divided.

Mr. Lott at this point seems to be on automatic pilot, doing what politicians do when they’re fighting for their lives: pressing for support automatically and almost unthinkingly, speaking to the media, making his case. He’s in shock. His shock is understandable. It would have been good if he had resigned this week. Maybe he will over the holidays. But it would be best for the Republican Party—and the country—if Republican senators were utterly brutal and moved to fire him before then. This would be a Christmas present to the country: Jim Crow’s long, gasping death is finally over. If they do not move before Jan. 6 they certainly must fire him as leader on that date. And when they do they should read a brief statement explaining what they did and why they did it. And then they should speak no more, and go back to work.

*   *   *

Meanwhile, Bill Clinton brought his special brand of crinkly-eyed malice to the story Wednesday, telling CNN that the growing opposition to Mr. Lott within the GOP is “hypocritical” because, after all, Republicans are racists anyway. Or rather, “I think what they are really upset about is that he made public their strategy.” And “he just embarrassed them by saying in Washington what they do on the back roads every day.” This from the man who gave that old segregationist J. William Fulbright the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

You could almost see Mr. Clinton’s mind whirling as Jonathan Karl interviewed him. Hmm, I could be high-minded and speak thoughtfully during what amounts to a public crisis, or I can play gut-ball politics and slam the enemy. No contest. Way to go, Bill, and happy holidays from a grateful nation.

Others will refute Mr. Clinton’s charges. I’m going to do a Lott question-and-answer, because I sense the story is becoming confused, with good people trying to do and think the right thing and tearing their hair out over what is fair and integritous. (Integritous is a word made up by a kid I know. It means just what it sounds like, full of integrity. It is a great word, so I’m going to try to popularize it.)

*   *   *

Q: Why should an unfortunate remark be enough to cost Mr. Lott his job?

A: Because it’s 2002. Because America began its modern civil rights movement 50 years ago, and at some point we as a people have to be able to declare, in truth and comfort, that this good movement has reached its maturity. The half-century mark would seem a good time. You know the movement has reached full maturity and won over a nation when none of that nation’s leaders feel free to speak, consciously or unconsciously, the language of racial antagonism. When one does, he should be replaced.

There are other reasons.

It is a mistake to underestimate the degree to which some black Americans fear they may find themselves at the mercy of the forces that used to keep them down. People internalize memories and absorb the vibes of history. Margaret Thatcher told me a few years ago that one of the things she’d become deeply aware of while in power is how fearful so many people feel in their daily lives, that insecurity itself is a great force in modern life. I was struck by this. I’d never heard a political figure speak so thoughtfully about the varieties of human experience, and I also thought she was right, and I was startled that it was Mrs. Thatcher saying it. She wasn’t famous for sensitivity.

But many people are fearful, deep down, that some old bad day will return. There are American Jews who fear pogroms will someday come to this country. You may think that surprising, but they have reason to feel as they do: The Holocaust took place in their lifetimes, or killed their family, or scarred the lives of their loved ones.

In the same way there are blacks in America who fear, deep down, that the whites of America do not accept them truly, will never accept them fully, would move against them if possible and, at the very least, often deride them behind their backs. Do you find that surprising? I don’t. I think it’s sad and human and understandable. It’s what happens when people have been enslaved.

One of the great patriotic emotions of our time, it seems to me, is to be eager that everyone in our country come to feel as secure and respected as everyone else. Part of that—just a small part but a meaningful one—means no speaking in racial code words by political, cultural or religious leaders. Period. Or anyone else if that’s possible.

I believe that Trent Lott spoke at the Thurmond birthday party in racial code words. And a man who does that should not, half a century into the modern movements for civil rights, be allowed to continue as the face of a major political party in politics.

Q: But come on—Democrat Robert Byrd went on Fox and actually said some people are “white niggers,” and he’s still in the Senate. Jesse Jackson called New York “Hymietown,” and they still call him a leader. Mike Wallace made fun of Mexicans and blacks and he’s still on “60 Minutes.” Mr. Lott’s getting a raw deal.

A: If you compare him with others maybe he is, but why compare him with others? Trent Lott is the majority leader of the Senate. That’s big. Jesse Jackson is a freelance fraud, he’s not a leader, he’s not a holder of high office in a great democracy. Bobby Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, who was once a member of the KKK (Tip O’Neill is said to have had a private nickname for him, “Sheets”), is not a leader either; he’s a weird throwback. And Mike Wallace doesn’t represent the United States; he represents Mike Wallace’s ambition.

Q: But Mr. Lott apologized. Isn’t that worth something?

A: Yes. A lot, actually.

Q: Don’t you think he’s really sorry for what he said?

A: Yes.

Q: Do you think he’s more sincere because he got caught?

A: Yes. We’re all more sincere when we get caught.

Q: Well, if he apologized and you think he’s sincere, isn’t that enough?

A: No. Look, to be human is to feel sympathy for the guy at the bottom of the pile-on. Mr. Lott is going through a special kind of torture, the torture of the modern media age, which entails humiliation in front of an entire nation. In front of the world. So I feel sympathy, and I’m not kidding. But he should step down as a congressional leader of a great party, recede deeper into the woodwork of the Senate, and accept the price we all pay one way or another, in public or in private, when we do something destructive.

Q: Is this story about other things, though? Isn’t some of it about Mr. Lott being an ineffective leader, so people are moving against him because they want a change of leadership anyway?

A: In some cases that’s probably true. People often have mixed motives. It’s hard to know someone else’s motives; it can be hard to fully know your own. But in general I don’t think this is about Mr. Lott’s flaws or virtues as a leader, I think it’s about America and race and what it is acceptable to say.

Q: But isn’t there a double standard here? Democrats get slapped on the wrist for using racial and religious epithets, but Republicans lose their jobs over it. It’s not fair.

A: Maybe it isn’t fair, but think of it this way: The history of the Republican Party on race is mixed. Yes, that’s true of the Democrats too, but Democrats are perceived today as sympathetic to the movements for freedom that have marked the past century, and Republicans are not. This has some implications. It means Republicans have to go out of our way to show that our hearts are in the right place. But there’s another thing that is even more important. If we are tougher on ourselves, maybe that’s good. Why shouldn’t we be tougher on ourselves?

If the Democrats all too often treat race as if it were a card to be played in a game, and if the Republicans in contrast attempt to struggle through the issue and be serious and go out of their way to expunge the last vestiges of the old racial ways, isn’t that something we should be proud of? History is watching. It will know what we did. What will history think if it sees a new seriousness on race from the Republican Party? I think it will say: Good. And I think that matters.

Q: But won’t this just hand another win to the Democrats?

A: That’s not the most important thing; that’s not a high consideration. To many Democrats, this is a just an inside-Washington political story; it’s all gut-ball politics, and by seeking political opportunity in the Republicans’ dilemma they’re revealing a stunning insensitivity to those Americans who felt hurt and angered by Mr. Lott’s comments.

There’s no reason Republicans should treat it as a game; there’s no reason the standards of conservatives should be as elastic as those of the left. Partisan Democrats have figured out that keeping Trent Lott as majority leader would be a major coup for them. Every time Mr. Lott stands to speak for his party he’ll have an invisible bubble over his head that says “Remembers Segregation Fondly.” Even better, Mr. Lott, in his Black Entertainment Television interview, more or less announced that to prove he’s not a racist he’ll support legislation that is at odds with conservative thinking, such as supporting affirmative action. As Andrew Sullivan said, this is the worst of two worlds in which Mr. Lott leaves the old racism to embrace the new racism.

Q: Why are you conservative pundit-writer-chatterer types so passionate about this?

A: Lots of reasons. One is that we’re tired of being embarrassed by people who aren’t sensitive to the reality of race in America. We’re tired of being humiliated by politicians who otherwise see many things as we do but who seem to have an inability to be constructive and understanding about race. We’re tired to being associated with hate mongering. We care about our country, and we think patriotism demands a constructive attitude in this big area.

Some of us have put our reputations in jeopardy by supporting programs like the school liberation movement because we want to help people who don’t have much and need a break. Or we’ve put ourselves in jeopardy by opposing racial preferences, or any number of other programs, for the very reason that we believe completely in our hearts and minds that all races are equal and no one should be judged by the color of his skin. And then some guy comes along and speaks the old code of yesteryear and seems to reinforce the idea that those who hold conservative positions are really, at heart, racist. We are indignant, and we have been for a long time.

In the Lott scandal our indignation reached critical mass. A lot of conservatives, many of them 50 and under, decided enough is enough, let’s end this, let a new party be born. And by the way, in the particular case of Trent Lott, it didn’t start yesterday. Stanley Crouch just surprised me by sending me a column he wrote almost four years ago for the New York Daily News. It was about a Lott appearance before the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white-supremacist group. I said it was springtime and it’s time to throw out the garbage, and Mr. Lott should go. Go to the archives of conservative journals and see what they’ve been writing and thinking for a long time about race. This is a good time to get real conservative thinking out there and known for what it is.

Q: What do you think Mr. Lott should do after he steps down, or is pushed out by Republican senators?

A: I think he should rewrite the first paragraph of his obituary every day of his life by speaking about the American dilemma as a Southern white man of the 20th century. He should begin his speeches with, “My name is Trent Lott, and I used to be majority leader of the Senate. Let me tell you how I lost my job.” Then he should speak with candor about what he knows and has seen of race in America. Q&A to follow. This could be a real contribution to our country.

After his huge scandal, John Profumo, England’s former secretary of state for war, did something like this. He devoted his life to doing good. And to anyone who was watching, he died a great man.

People approach the Trent Lott story in political terms. Does it hurt the Republican Party? Do the Democrats get more out of the scandal if they successfully campaign for Mr. Lott’s departure, or do they gain more if he continues as GOP leader, functioning as a handy daily symbol of the racism that resides in the secret heart of all conservatives? What did President Bush’s comments mean? And by the way, why isn’t the New York Times flooding the zone?

These questions can be quickly addressed. First, of course the Republican Party is damaged by having as one of its leaders a man who, half a century after Jim Crow’s long death began, makes statements that can be construed as meaning segregation was better than its demise.

Second, the Democrats get more out of the scandal if Mr. Lott stays on; every time he gets up to speak, he solidifies their base. Though it is true, as Rush Limbaugh has pointed out, that the Democrats can hardly get a higher percentage of the black vote, and their continued fixation on interest group politics keeps them playing the politics of yesterday.

Third, Mr. Bush hit Mr. Lott hard, saying “any suggestion that a segregated past was acceptable or positive is offensive.” And then, after pausing to allow sustained applause, he went onto say, “Recent comments by Sen. Lott do not reflect the spirit of our country.” Why did Mr. Bush do that? Because he wants to separate himself and his party from Mr. Lott and his mouth. Normally Republicans rally around when they think one of their own is being unfairly smeared. Mr. Bush was saying Mr. Lott isn’t being unfairly smeared. This is big—presidents don’t publicly knock their party’s congressional leaders—and suggests the White House is pondering the GOP’s deep Senate bench, and how Mitch McConnell, Bill Frist or anyone but John McCain might be an improvement.

And finally, the New York Times isn’t flooding the zone—yet—because they are familiar with the old wisdom that one should never interfere with one’s enemy while he is destroying himself.

*   *   *

It is hard to believe that Trent Lott meant to suggest that segregation was OK. It’s hard to believe any modern American would think that. But he left his remarks open to that interpretation. Why would a politician leave his remarks open to such a reading? Maybe it was an unthinking mistake, which would be unfortunate in its own way. But maybe it was the kind of thinking mistake politicians sometimes make.

A politician will stand and address a crowd and suggest something without quite saying it. He’ll leave some words out of a sentence, as if by accident, or as if he’s being casual because he’s surrounded by close friends. Or he won’t be completely specific. He’ll fade out with an ellipsis instead of completing a sentence, which leaves different members of an audience able to think that they’re on his true wavelength and infer his real meaning. Different politicians at different times use this form for different reasons.

Way back in the 1950s and ‘70s and even ‘80s some Southern politicians of Mr. Lott’s generation—in both parties—employed the “thinking mistake” to talk about race. So when Mr. Lott the other day emphatically but nonspecifically declared that if Strom Thurmond had been elected president, “we wouldn’t have a lot of the problems we’ve had,” a lot of people, including me, wondered if he were not making a thinking mistake.

If he was, how creepy. (A childish word and insufficient, but not a bad beginning.) To whom did Mr. Lott think he was communicating? Did he think the Capitol Hill staffers and friends who attended Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party were racists who pined for the old days of separate but equal? Why would he think that? In the press accounts I read, Mr. Lott’s statements about what a grand old fellow Strom is were cheered, understandably. It was his birthday and he’s done some good things, such as being strong on the national defense throughout his career. But when Mr. Lott made the reference to a hypothetical Thurmond presidency, an uncomfortable silence swept the room. That was understandable too. Because when Strom Thurmond ran for president in 1948 he ran explicitly as a segregationist who would attempt to stop the civil rights revolution. He never, ever should have been elected president of the United States. It is truly weird for a person who lives in our world, in the modern world, to say otherwise.

*   *   *

Sometimes I think we should get back to some basic truths when we talk about race and civil rights. Instead we talk past each other.

A lot of liberals harp on the subject of race, and they do it in a way that gives more attention to hatred for racists than love for equality. They can’t make or buy enough movies with names like “Ghosts of Mississippi,” which illustrate how terrible white people are, were and probably will be again if we don’t pass more laws. (White Southerners are and historically have been particularly demonized by liberals.)

The liberals’ sin is a mindless race obsession that keeps them from seeing clearly. But conservatives have a sin too. A lot of them become deaf when the subject is race. All their lives they’ve heard the long 40-year rap about how wicked America is, how hateful, and along the way they just stopped listening. Which left them unable to hear nuance, and slow, if you will, to hear the music of a great movement.

All this is part of the kabuki that happens when you take a great moral movement like civil rights and turn it, as it is inevitably turned, into a political movement. Sides get hardened and sides get stupid. It’s a little like the debate the past few years about obscene art. In that particular kabuki liberals get off on their faux courage, making believe it takes guts to create a painting of the Madonna smeared with feces. In the world we live in that takes no courage, and they know it. If they had guts they’d do a beautiful painting of the Madonna and accept the price: marginalization and dismissal by the art establishment. At the same time, conservatives in these battles get off on faux outrage. They stand up, shake their fists and say they’re outraged that someone would desecrate the Madonna. And some are. But some in their hearts know it’s all nonsense that means nothing, and what they really feel is delight that the left has once again done something ugly and stupid, and in public.

*   *   *

But apart from posturing there’s a real story in where we are and where we have been in terms of civil rights in America.

There was an old American institution whereby people were judged by, and the facts of their lives were arranged around, what race they were born into. “If you’re white you’re right, if you’re black step back.” It lasted for hundreds of years. Its most vicious expression was slavery, and its less vicious forms continued for roughly a hundred years after slavery was ended, by war.

We’re talking “separate but equal”; we’re talking about the embarrassment and shame of a bad school for local black kids and a better school for local white kids. We’re talking about what nationally syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell referred to this week when he remembered being a soldier in the ‘50s. He lived in New York but was stationed down South. The bus he took to his base stopped at a gas station near Winston-Salem, N.C. He saw the bathroom marked for “Whites Only.” He walked around looking for the “Blacks Only” bathroom but he couldn’t find it. So he used the Whites Only men’s room. As it happens no one said anything, but he wondered why a man wearing the uniform of his country should have to go through something like that. It made him wonder what he was fighting for.

He was fighting for a nation that had a conscience to which an appeal could be made. And in spite of his forced march in pursuit of the Blacks Only bathroom, in spite of a thousand other humiliations he probably experienced and never speaks of, he became one of the great 20th-century appreciators of and defenders of this great nation and its freedoms.

It is very painful, our racial past. We made blacks and whites and all other colors equal in this country at great cost. A lot of feelings got hurt; a lot of people got hurt; a lot of people died. To pick only one of the millions of examples: Harold Ickes, the political operative who worked for Bill Clinton and now works for Hillary Clinton. I can’t imagine agreeing on too many political issues with Mr. Ickes, but back in the ‘60s he helped organize the Freedom Riders to desegregate the South. In Louisiana he got into a fight with some local bad guys. He was beaten so badly that he lost a kidney. He’s still walking around with only one kidney. He’s just a middle-aged white lawyer who’d pass you by on the street in a shirt and a tie, but in this respect, in terms of what he did 40 years ago, he is a hero. There were a lot of heroes in those days. It was all wrenching, but in the end we did the right thing.

And we’re proud of it, and should be. It’s cause for joy. And if you don’t know that, well, then let me play the ellipsis game . . .

*   *   *

If you think of where we are now, in 2002, with so much more equality and working together and living next door to each other and sending our kids to the same schools and Boy Scout meetings, if you don’t understand that . . .

And if you don’t get it that the only nations that will succeed in the future will be those nations whose citizens enjoy the maximum amount of personal and political and intellectual freedom, and that it’s good we’ve spent so much of the past half century trying to ensure the expansion of those freedoms . . .

And if you look at who protects us in our armed services, including all these young black kids who could be embittered, who could choose to believe that they don’t have a chance, who could be using the past as an excuse not to try for a future, and who instead are putting their lives on the line to protect white and black and yellow and red America . . .

If you are a political figure who hasn’t integrated all this into your brain and your heart . . .

Then maybe you should just . . .

*   *   *

And now let me translate. I’m saying Mr. Lott should step aside.

People approach the Trent Lott story in political terms. Does it hurt the Republican Party? Do the Democrats get more out of the scandal if they successfully campaign for Mr. Lott’s departure, or do they gain more if he continues as GOP leader, functioning as a handy daily symbol of the racism that resides in the secret heart of all conservatives? What did President Bush’s comments mean? And by the way, why isn’t the New York Times flooding the zone?

These questions can be quickly addressed. First, of course the Republican Party is damaged by having as one of its leaders a man who, half a century after Jim Crow’s long death began, makes statements that can be construed as meaning segregation was better than its demise.

Second, the Democrats get more out of the scandal if Mr. Lott stays on; every time he gets up to speak, he solidifies their base. Though it is true, as Rush Limbaugh has pointed out, that the Democrats can hardly get a higher percentage of the black vote, and their continued fixation on interest group politics keeps them playing the politics of yesterday.

Third, Mr. Bush hit Mr. Lott hard, saying “any suggestion that a segregated past was acceptable or positive is offensive.” And then, after pausing to allow sustained applause, he went onto say, “Recent comments by Sen. Lott do not reflect the spirit of our country.” Why did Mr. Bush do that? Because he wants to separate himself and his party from Mr. Lott and his mouth. Normally Republicans rally around when they think one of their own is being unfairly smeared. Mr. Bush was saying Mr. Lott isn’t being unfairly smeared. This is big—presidents don’t publicly knock their party’s congressional leaders—and suggests the White House is pondering the GOP’s deep Senate bench, and how Mitch McConnell, Bill Frist or anyone but John McCain might be an improvement.

And finally, the New York Times isn’t flooding the zone—yet—because they are familiar with the old wisdom that one should never interfere with one’s enemy while he is destroying himself.

*   *   *

It is hard to believe that Trent Lott meant to suggest that segregation was OK. It’s hard to believe any modern American would think that. But he left his remarks open to that interpretation. Why would a politician leave his remarks open to such a reading? Maybe it was an unthinking mistake, which would be unfortunate in its own way. But maybe it was the kind of thinking mistake politicians sometimes make.

A politician will stand and address a crowd and suggest something without quite saying it. He’ll leave some words out of a sentence, as if by accident, or as if he’s being casual because he’s surrounded by close friends. Or he won’t be completely specific. He’ll fade out with an ellipsis instead of completing a sentence, which leaves different members of an audience able to think that they’re on his true wavelength and infer his real meaning. Different politicians at different times use this form for different reasons.

Way back in the 1950s and ‘70s and even ‘80s some Southern politicians of Mr. Lott’s generation—in both parties—employed the “thinking mistake” to talk about race. So when Mr. Lott the other day emphatically but nonspecifically declared that if Strom Thurmond had been elected president, “we wouldn’t have a lot of the problems we’ve had,” a lot of people, including me, wondered if he were not making a thinking mistake.

If he was, how creepy. (A childish word and insufficient, but not a bad beginning.) To whom did Mr. Lott think he was communicating? Did he think the Capitol Hill staffers and friends who attended Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party were racists who pined for the old days of separate but equal? Why would he think that? In the press accounts I read, Mr. Lott’s statements about what a grand old fellow Strom is were cheered, understandably. It was his birthday and he’s done some good things, such as being strong on the national defense throughout his career. But when Mr. Lott made the reference to a hypothetical Thurmond presidency, an uncomfortable silence swept the room. That was understandable too. Because when Strom Thurmond ran for president in 1948 he ran explicitly as a segregationist who would attempt to stop the civil rights revolution. He never, ever should have been elected president of the United States. It is truly weird for a person who lives in our world, in the modern world, to say otherwise.

*   *   *

Sometimes I think we should get back to some basic truths when we talk about race and civil rights. Instead we talk past each other.

A lot of liberals harp on the subject of race, and they do it in a way that gives more attention to hatred for racists than love for equality. They can’t make or buy enough movies with names like “Ghosts of Mississippi,” which illustrate how terrible white people are, were and probably will be again if we don’t pass more laws. (White Southerners are and historically have been particularly demonized by liberals.)

The liberals’ sin is a mindless race obsession that keeps them from seeing clearly. But conservatives have a sin too. A lot of them become deaf when the subject is race. All their lives they’ve heard the long 40-year rap about how wicked America is, how hateful, and along the way they just stopped listening. Which left them unable to hear nuance, and slow, if you will, to hear the music of a great movement.

All this is part of the kabuki that happens when you take a great moral movement like civil rights and turn it, as it is inevitably turned, into a political movement. Sides get hardened and sides get stupid. It’s a little like the debate the past few years about obscene art. In that particular kabuki liberals get off on their faux courage, making believe it takes guts to create a painting of the Madonna smeared with feces. In the world we live in that takes no courage, and they know it. If they had guts they’d do a beautiful painting of the Madonna and accept the price: marginalization and dismissal by the art establishment. At the same time, conservatives in these battles get off on faux outrage. They stand up, shake their fists and say they’re outraged that someone would desecrate the Madonna. And some are. But some in their hearts know it’s all nonsense that means nothing, and what they really feel is delight that the left has once again done something ugly and stupid, and in public.

*   *   *

But apart from posturing there’s a real story in where we are and where we have been in terms of civil rights in America.

There was an old American institution whereby people were judged by, and the facts of their lives were arranged around, what race they were born into. “If you’re white you’re right, if you’re black step back.” It lasted for hundreds of years. Its most vicious expression was slavery, and its less vicious forms continued for roughly a hundred years after slavery was ended, by war.

We’re talking “separate but equal”; we’re talking about the embarrassment and shame of a bad school for local black kids and a better school for local white kids. We’re talking about what nationally syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell referred to this week when he remembered being a soldier in the ‘50s. He lived in New York but was stationed down South. The bus he took to his base stopped at a gas station near Winston-Salem, N.C. He saw the bathroom marked for “Whites Only.” He walked around looking for the “Blacks Only” bathroom but he couldn’t find it. So he used the Whites Only men’s room. As it happens no one said anything, but he wondered why a man wearing the uniform of his country should have to go through something like that. It made him wonder what he was fighting for.

He was fighting for a nation that had a conscience to which an appeal could be made. And in spite of his forced march in pursuit of the Blacks Only bathroom, in spite of a thousand other humiliations he probably experienced and never speaks of, he became one of the great 20th-century appreciators of and defenders of this great nation and its freedoms.

It is very painful, our racial past. We made blacks and whites and all other colors equal in this country at great cost. A lot of feelings got hurt; a lot of people got hurt; a lot of people died. To pick only one of the millions of examples: Harold Ickes, the political operative who worked for Bill Clinton and now works for Hillary Clinton. I can’t imagine agreeing on too many political issues with Mr. Ickes, but back in the ‘60s he helped organize the Freedom Riders to desegregate the South. In Louisiana he got into a fight with some local bad guys. He was beaten so badly that he lost a kidney. He’s still walking around with only one kidney. He’s just a middle-aged white lawyer who’d pass you by on the street in a shirt and a tie, but in this respect, in terms of what he did 40 years ago, he is a hero. There were a lot of heroes in those days. It was all wrenching, but in the end we did the right thing.

And we’re proud of it, and should be. It’s cause for joy. And if you don’t know that, well, then let me play the ellipsis game . . .

*   *   *

If you think of where we are now, in 2002, with so much more equality and working together and living next door to each other and sending our kids to the same schools and Boy Scout meetings, if you don’t understand that . . .

And if you don’t get it that the only nations that will succeed in the future will be those nations whose citizens enjoy the maximum amount of personal and political and intellectual freedom, and that it’s good we’ve spent so much of the past half century trying to ensure the expansion of those freedoms . . .

And if you look at who protects us in our armed services, including all these young black kids who could be embittered, who could choose to believe that they don’t have a chance, who could be using the past as an excuse not to try for a future, and who instead are putting their lives on the line to protect white and black and yellow and red America . . .

If you are a political figure who hasn’t integrated all this into your brain and your heart . . .

Then maybe you should just . . .

*   *   *

And now let me translate. I’m saying Mr. Lott should step aside.

“Watch, he’s gonna tax the snow.” We turned toward the TV mounted on the wall. “Gonna pay for it now!” the counter clerk said, and people in line laughed as they paid for their papers. Mayor Mike Bloomberg had just come on to do a live news conference. They had the TV on in the candy store to get updates on the weather. Mr. Bloomberg announced this was “the first big test” of his administration. The guy next to me caught my eye; we smiled and thought: Thanks for the context—we thought this was about the storm. We forgot it’s about you! It wasn’t obnoxious, just comic, a pure moment of the inevitable solipsism of a modern mayor in the media age.

We were extroverting in the candy store yesterday afternoon on Montague Street in Brooklyn. Everyone was talking because it was snowing outside, heavily, with three inches on the ground and three or four more still in the sky. When I walked in, an old man pointed at me and said, “There is snow on your coat,” in the manner of Sherlock Holmes making a discovery.

“They say it’s snowing outside,” I said in the manner of one sharing primo gossip.

“That explains it,” he said.

Strangers smiled at each other as they trudged by on the street. Outside a church they were leaving noon mass, and a woman with an unplaceable accent said, “Nice day!” And we all smiled at that because we were in the middle of a storm but it was true. It was nice. It was beautiful. I came home to e-mails. One, from a friend in Maryland: “Got weather? We’re under piles and piles of the stuff, predicting 10-12 inches. I love it. It’s so quiet out here, and wonderful soft monochromatic hues. This is the best.” Another happy e-mail from a friend who took his three-year-old to a hardware store, bought a cheap sled, and pulled his boy through Brooklyn. “Everyone we passed stopped to talk to us.”

*   *   *

We are loving the snow in New York. Everyone is walking or looking out the windows or talking about how bad it’s going to get. The storm began last night in the South, swept up through Washington, where it may leave eight inches; on through Baltimore and Philly, up to New York yesterday morning, heading later, they said, for Boston.

For every adult the first day of snow forever brings back memories of old snow days—the radio on and everyone listening, and the announcer saying, “. . . and public and parochial schools on the south shore have just announced they will not open.” And from house to house you could almost hear the kids cheer. Freedom, a free day—what a gift from God.

This year, up here, the snow seemed more than ever an unexpected gift. At this point last year we were all still rocked by Sept. 11, and barely noticed the snow. (My unscientific telephone survey tells me no one in New York remembers any snow at all last year.) In fact we had very little, as if the heavens too were in shock.

But this one yesterday, this first snow—it was heavy, wet, coming down at a slant, it is building. It was a real snowfall. And it was beautiful.

The first snow always startles you. It makes everything look better. In the suburbs it gives a layer of cottony brightness to trees and fences and lawns; it covers the tricycle left in the driveway, turning its little aluminum frame into an abstract sculpture that says: See how quickly yesterday turns into today. In farm areas the snow is a blanket over cold corn and baby wheat. But it’s in the city that snow does its most obvious magic. It heightens beauty, covers flaws, softens hard angles. It makes a row of trash cans a craggy white wall. It gives wholeness back to rusty fences and heightens the dignity of plain things like stoops and elegant things like steeples. It makes us see again what we’d been forgetting to notice.

*   *   *

But it isn’t only the beauty. That’s not the only thing a big snow brings.

“Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plane, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.” So wrote James Joyce at the end of his great short story “The Dead.” They are famous words; it’s a famous passage. Joyce’s snow didn’t fall over the house, or the city, or over his sensitive characters in a neighborhood in Dublin. Snow was falling all over Ireland, and touching everyone, as if they were together.

The biggest problem no one talks about in America, still, is loneliness. Maybe we don’t hear about it much because most of the talkers about America—TV people, pundits of all sorts—are pretty well integrated into the world around them. And busy, so that if they’re lonely they don’t know it.

But a lot of people are lonely, encased in their thoughts about their own lives and experiences and memories and challenges. Encased in habit, too. And embarrassed to be alone in a technologically sophisticated place where a high value is put on our ability to reach out and touch someone.

But then something happens. Nature comes along and hands us something big—a storm or an earthquake—and the lonely come forward, if only by inches. We all find ourselves sharing the same preoccupation. This breaks down reserve and gets us thinking of and dealing with the same subject matter.

Bad weather, bad news makes you part of something: a community of catastrophe. You see your neighbor, and this time you don’t just nod or keep walking. You call over, “Wow—you believe this?” And you laugh. You make phone calls. Weather makes you outward. It eases the lives of the lonely.

And then when the storm passes or the earthquake is old news, people retreat back into their aloneness with their own thoughts. They get quiet again. It will take another snowstorm or a hurricane before the ad hoc community of catastrophe springs up, and makes them a member of something.

*   *   *

So that’s what was in the air too, yesterday: an easing of estrangement, a coming together, and people who didn’t know each other talking.

I could see it all outside my window. I write in a room with a big window just beyond my computer. The window is seven feet tall and 40 inches wide. At this moment I am looking out the window at the church across the street. It is made of granite stone, is more than a century old, and its big brass doors were once the doors of the old ship the Normandie. To the right of the doors there is a little garden. In the middle of it is a statue of Mary of Fatima. She stands almost five feet high. Before her, two statues of kneeling children look up. There was a third but someone stole it. I have seen people stop and look at the statues at night. There is a lady in the neighborhood who every time she goes by stops and says something to Mary and nods; she sometimes gestures as if they are old friends catching up, and then walks on. You see wonderful things when you live across from statues.

The day of the storm, Mary and the children have snow on their heads and their cloaks. She is still looking down at the children, and they are looking up, their hands together in marble prayer. People are bustling by. The snow is coming at an angle against them as they walk by the church toward Montague Street, and they are leaning forward in the wind. A nanny and a child in a red jacket and a black cap just passed, holding hands. Now an old woman in a raincoat and an umbrella. Now a bunch of teenagers are running, throwing snowballs. A boy just literally slides by on the street as if his back were a sled. I want to applaud. There’s laughter out there, great gaiety.

And now just outside the window I hear for the first time the authentic sound of winter in the north: a shovel scraping a sidewalk. It is an undistinguished and prosaic sound, and yet if I took a high-quality tape recorder and taped it and played it for a room full of a thousand people and said, “What is this sound?” I’ll bet 990 of them would know: That is someone shoveling snow. It is a distinctive sound. Soon I hope I hear the slap of tire chains on a blacktop road. I haven’t heard that yet this year. I can’t wait. I have no idea why.

*   *   *

It’s dusk now, and it’s still coming down. Snow is general all over the East. It is falling on every part of the crooked shore, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Chesapeake Bay and, farther north, softly falling into the dark mutinous Montauk waves. It is falling, too, upon every part of the lovely churchyard across the way.

And this, to end. After snow gets you out of the house, and out of yourself, and into the world, it stops you in your tracks. Because it reminds you of something you know and forget to think about. It reminds you that there is a higher force at work, it is beyond and above, it governs all the heavens and “the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling.”

Thank you, James Joyce. I spent my snow day with you.

There is so much to be thankful for that no column could begin to encompass it. Here are just three things, from the past year:

1. The continuance of the new patriotism which is marked not by a tinny boastfulness but by an intellectually and emotionally experienced fidelity to and respect for the founding ideas, documents and assumptions which have guided us since we declared our independence from the mother country 226 years ago.

2. A still-broad prosperity.

3. An enjoyment of religious freedom that is so much a part of the air we breathe, so expected, that we barely remember to be thankful for it. Yes I know they look down on American religious feeling in our great universities, but the Ivy League isn’t America. The suburbs of Dallas where they busy themselves doing, among other things, Christian outreach to topless dancers is America.

There is much to be happy about. But why wallow in good cheer? My subject today is not something we have gained the past few years but something we’ve lost. Or seemingly lost.

It is an old, stark bit of knowledge. It is something Americans used to be born knowing, or at least picked up along the way.

It is this: You pay a price for where you stand. And this isn’t terrible.

*   *   *

On “NBC Nightly news” last week there was a story. You’ve probably seen it. An Eagle Scout is fighting the Boy Scouts of America because they won’t let him be a troop leader. They won’t let him be a troop leader because he has declared he is an atheist. The BSA sees it as part of its mission to encourage the love of God in the young. An atheist, in their reasoning, is unlikely to help young boys love God. So they don’t want him to be a scout leader.

He, naturally, is threatening to sue. How dare the scouts deny him his right to be an atheist!

But the scouts aren’t denying him his right to be an atheist. They’re denying him the right to be a BSA troop leader.

The young man has received much sympathetic press suggesting he is a victim of narrow-mindedness.

But he’s not. He’s a victim of not knowing you pay a price for where you stand.

In the America of 50 years ago and a 100 years ago and 1776, this is how it went:

You, a citizen, decide you want to belong to a group but you believe in “A” and they believe in “B.” There is a clash. Here the old American myth kicks in. You, the citizen, stick with what you believe, and don’t join the organization. You won’t lie about what you believe, and they won’t change what they believe. So they don’t let you in. You pay a price for where you stand. But you can keep standing there.

You keep your integrity, and maybe in time the group will change and you and your suffering will be the reason. (This is the story of, among others, Dr. King in the Birmingham jail.) Or maybe the group won’t change its ways, ever. But you have your integrity and they have their rules and this is America.

Now that rough old myth has been disturbed. Now it’s, “I have my views and your group has its views. If you don’t accept me with my views you’re wrong, and will suffer in court.” Now you insist on joining. You insist they change to accommodate you. You don’t respect their position, you insist they alter it. You get a lawyer. You weep and rend your garments.

This is not a good way to convert people. It is however a good way to push people around.

We are a big muscle-bound nation. We are so physically strong! We have muscles and missiles and more. But how did we, as individuals, get so wussy, so weak, so whiny when it comes to our ability to stand for what we stand for and take the world’s blows?

Why do we celebrate those who complain? Why don’t we celebrate stoics who can take it? They’re the ones who move history forward.

*   *   *

Let me not pick on a teenager, for teenagers are by definition unfinished. They often confuse their needs and wants with the world’s. Let’s pick on adults. Let’s pick on Tom Daschle.

He, as a leader of a great political party, is an example-setter for the young. Some of them might look to him as a famous man who knows how to be an adult. After the dreadful showing of the Democrats in the election he held a news conference in which he famously blamed Rush Limbaugh and other conservative radio talk show hosts for inciting people to . . . well, to not liking Tom Daschle. Rush says mean things about Tom. His listeners, who Tom Daschle subtly suggests are possibly unstable and insane—how could they not be, they’re conservative—get a little too excited when they hear Rush, and start to make rude sounds. “The threats to those of us in public life go up dramatically,” says Tom Daschle.

Oh, please. Boo hoo. When people disagree with you they criticize you. When you’re trying to tell an entire nation how to live, which is what big-time politics comes down to now, some people will fight back with terrible weapons such as sarcasm, irony and vulgarity. They will sometimes be mean. So what?

Tom: Grownups pay a price for where they stand! Being put down by conservatives is the price you pay. Is it really too much?

Rush Limbaugh has 20 million listeners. If Tom Daschle wants to make progress for his side why doesn’t he go on his show and talk to them? Take call-ins, explain your views, be a man, move the ball forward.

The same week Tom Daschle made his remarks I read of comments made by the columnist Anna Quindlen. She said, as she has in the past—she says it a lot, actually—that she gets a lot of hate mail because of the views she holds. I don’t doubt it. But when she speaks of it she always seems to be suggesting she has a lot of courage to write what she writes. See what I have to put up with, and see how I persevere. There’s an air of indignation. Do you believe what a nice liberal has to put up with from these right-wing primitives?

Well Anna, and Tom, I have never written of this or even spoken of it, but let me tell you something.

My political philosophy is conservative. I am pro-life. I live in New York City, surrounded by modern people. They are mostly left-wing, they are all pro-choice, many of them passionately and even furiously so. I have written books saying Ronald Reagan is a great man and Hillary Clinton is a bad woman. I know something about being a target, and I know something about hate mail. I have received not hundreds but thousands of the most personal and obscene denunciations; I have received death threats; I have been threatened with blackmail; I have been informed that I do not deserve to live; I have received a three page typed double spaced letter with perfect grammar and syntax the first sentence of which was “Dr. Ms Noonan, Let me explain to you why you are a . . .” and here I cannot suggest the word used. But damned if he didn’t make a good case. I used to hear regularly from a woman who’d tell me she hopes I have a brain hemorrhage.

I have never talked about this because I would consider speaking of it both self-pitying and self-aggrandizing. But there’s another reason. I’m a grownup. I know you pay a price for the stands you take.

It’s a disputatious world. Rocks get thrown. I could make myself safer by changing my views, but why would I abandon what I think is true so that people I think are wrong will like me? That doesn’t make sense. So I stand where I stand and pay. And you know what? Too bad. Tough. That’s life. Nothing is free. If you hold a controversial position you will draw controversy and its cousins: denunciation, dislike, etc. It’s the price you pay. And unlike Tom Daschle, I pay it without a taxpayer-funded security team to keep me safe.

*   *   *

So that’s what I think our culture is losing and wants to get back: The old stoic sense that you pay a price to stand where you stand. This, ultimately, is the story not only of all adults who fully take part in the world but of America itself. It is the story of all political and personal heroism (here’s to you, Pilgrims); it is the story of all progress (here’s to you, fighters of the Civil War) and the story of all hope (a final tip of the hat to you, Martin Luther King Jr.; and another to you, Ronnie).

The great question, as Diana Trilling once said, is how high a price you’ll pay, how much you’ll suffer. That’s a question we all answer every day by the way we live our lives.

So that’s what I think. If I have offended you or you disagree with me, press the reply button at the end of this piece and feel free to tell me what a jerk I am. I can take it. It’s the price an adult pays.

Rudolph Giuliani loves opera—big, lush, over-the-top opera, with sobbing clowns and jubilant courtesans. And this makes sense because Mr. Giuliani is a very emotional man. He thinks about the city, about the Yankees and the subways and the people and parades, in an emotional way.

He doesn’t just fight crime, he acts a whole drama out for you. When he thinks some downtown guys broke the law he doesn’t call them in, he handcuffs them on the trading floor and hauls them away in shackles. When the police do something wrong he defends them stoutly, hotly, because they put their lives on the line for us every day. His critics aren’t just wrong, they’re people who better go home and take their medicine and get over it. When reporters get on his nerves he bickers with them and calls their editors and yells. He has so many big fights because everything is important and life is a battle and everything is so, so emotional.

This makes Rudy a pretty good fit for New York. Ed Koch was emotional too, and he was also a big success for a long time. Still, it is ironic that in the ongoing Senate campaign the man painted as cold and dry has proved himself once again this week to be anything but.

[Header] Being Opera

Sometimes you become what you love. And I was thinking this week, after the mayor’s announcement that he and his wife would separate, which was followed by her pained aria, all of which came to a head after the death of their friend, Cardinal John O’Connor, and all of it reported with the real life-and-death issue of the mayor’s cancer looming in the background as starkly as that stately old set, Gracie Mansion—I was thinking that the mayor now not only loves opera, he is opera.

But at least not the kind we’ve all grown used to. Wednesday’s dramatic statements that Mr. Giuliani was separating from his wife, Donna Hanover—and Ms. Hanover’s pained reaction—weren’t coolly planned and calculated. They were unscripted, more like blurts than announcements, and all involved seemed nothing if not forthcoming. There was no finger wagging, no calling this lady a stalker and that one a liar, no perjury, no sending out a wife and appointees and aides to divide and conquer. It was all more ragged and human than that.

Much of it springs, no doubt, from the fact that the mayor whose father died of prostate cancer is now suffering from the same disease, which would be challenging for anyone under the best of circumstances. In the midst of all the roiling, a friend tells me, the mayor hasn’t even had a chance to choose what kind of therapy, radiation or operation or chemotherapy or a combination, to undergo for his illness.

He is in a crisis in his life. But it is a political crisis, too.

Sometimes things reach a tipping point, a moment of negative critical mass. Rudy Giuliani’s Senate campaign has reached the moment at which a viable candidacy becomes wounded beyond repair. It’s not the lady, or the wife. It’s not the cancer, or “The Vagina Monologues” (in which Ms. Hanover was planning to star), or the other lady, or the history of intemperate statements, or the pugilistic personality. It is all of these things rolled up in one big snowball and rolling inexorably down the hill. Its speed will increase, not slow, with time.

This candidacy isn’t going to work. And one senses Mr. Giuliani knows it, and those around him do, too. He’s in the kind of mess that needs time and space and a quiet area in which to play itself out.

One hopes the mayor will step up like a gent and step down. He should get out now, while others can still get in. He should stay on as mayor, and keep pushing the levers he’s always loved pushing. It really is the job he was born to do. And in this way his municipal achievements will not be slowly and quietly undone by his would-be successor, Democrat Mark Green, the city’s No. 2 elected official.

A Giuliani departure, of course, would leave the Republican Party in the lurch, and in need of rescue. And the best candidate for rescuer would be New York Gov. George Pataki. Ol’ sleepy George is smart and smooth and intelligent. He would make a formidable candidate against Hillary Clinton, and would probably beat her. Unlike her, and the mayor, the governor actually has a legislative personality. He would do well in the Senate. And as a big, tall, moderate New York Republican who saved us from Hillary, he’d be on the Republican leadership’s list of people to please. Moreover George Bush, who may be the next president, likes him a lot. They went to Yale together.

Mr. Pataki would be an important senator just by showing up and filling the Moynihan seat.

Mrs. Clinton meanwhile—has anyone noticed this?—is moving forward each day, making progress, pushing through and claiming new ground like a tough little tank, as if she were Hillary Rommel Clinton. In the past few days she got free airtime for a full hour on Rosie O’Donnell, a full hour on the “Today” show, and a full hour on Joan Hamburg’s radio show—all successful and supportive appearances in which Mrs. Clinton was friendly, funny and down home.

She has changed her accent—she’s lost the mild Arkansas twang she adopted in 1982, when her husband ran for re-election—and now sounds more clipped, with a slightly higher and more youthful pitch, like a Westchester mom. She has a new voice now to go with her new look and her new approach, intense one-on-ones with supportive interviewers and small groups of women. The men aren’t noticing, but her numbers among white women will be up next time there’s a new poll, maybe dramatically. Slowly but surely she’s winning.

[Header] Jump In, George

There’s only one candidate who can probably beat Mrs. Clinton at this point, and that is Gov. Pataki. The problem, though, is that he is happy as governor. He likes the job. He doesn’t aspire to the Senate. He’s just the perfect candidate for it. Unlike Long Island Rep. Rick Lazio, he will not have to be introduced throughout the state. Unlike wealthy businesman Ted Forstmann, he has held office, and successfully. I wrote a speech with him once, a few years ago, and, though I could not call myself a friend, I did see him enough to know that he is intelligent and serious. These are good things in a candidate.

Gov. Pataki would give Mrs. Clinton a real challenger, a tough one, and help bring down the numbers of the Democratic ticket, which is topped by Al Gore.

This could actually make New York competitive on the presidential level. Gov. Bush is a friend of Gov. Pataki’s, and has his home number. One hopes he also has an itchy dialing finger.

The big things to say about the recent JFK allegations—amazing, isn’t it, that “recent JFK allegations” is still an operative phrase in 2002?—are obvious.

Illnesses as serious, varied and potentially debilitating as JFK’s, which included Addison’s disease, chronic and intense back pain due to the collapse of bones in his spinal column, intestinal problems including colitis and ulcers, chronic prostatitis and urethritis, frequent fatigue, high fevers, increased vulnerability to infection, frequent headaches, diarrhea and a chronic abscess in his back, should have been fully divulged to the American people before they voted in the 1960 election.

The medications he took, including corticosteroids, procaine, antispasmodics including Lomotil, testosterone, amphetamines to help combat fatigue and depression, Nembutal and, for a few days, an antipsychotic drug were, as we now say, inappropriate in a sitting president, and a standing one too, if he could stand.

That this information, much of which existed for more than four decades, was suppressed, including by his presidential library, which in effect has used taxpayer money to keep secrets from taxpayers, is a scandal, and the rules and regulations by which presidential libraries operate should, as they say in Washington, be revisited.

But other thoughts arise. When the brilliant journalist Dorothy Thompson watched JFK’s inauguration she—a longtime liberal and FDR supporter—fretted to a friend: “There’s something weak and neurotic about that young man.” She knew his story, knew of the charming monster of a father who was an isolationist in foreign affairs and a constant interventionist in all other spheres, especially his family. In Clark Clifford’s memoirs, the old Democratic Party warhorse-in-lawyer’s-pinstripes wrote of his first meeting with Sen. Kennedy, in the 1950s. JFK was pliant, pleasing, needed legal assistance. During their meeting old Joe called to bark instructions and yell at the senator and the attorney. Clifford found it chilling. JFK handled his father coolly. To read the scene with recent revelations in mind is to wonder what toll the facts of his life took on JFK, and to ponder a paradox. Old Joe’s blind ambition probably made his son president; old Joe probably made his son sick, too.

*   *   *

Robert Dallek, the historian to whom the JFK records were made available, is careful to say in his Atlantic Monthly article that JFK’s refusal to complain about his pain was gallant. I would add: and old school. He didn’t feel your pain; he felt his, and kept it to himself. You find yourself feeling more personal admiration for him after the revelations, not less. Sick as a dog from childhood, he lived as a wit, an activist, a rake.

But Mr. Dallek is perhaps too quick to assert that none of the drugs JFK took, or the conditions he suffered from, seem to have impaired his leadership. He notes that JFK had three doctors treating him, one of whom, the famous “Dr. Feelgood,” Max Jacobson, was giving him amphetamine shots during his first summit with Krushchev. There, JFK displayed an utter inability to defend free-market capitalism in the face of Krushchev’s coarse onslaughts on the superiority of Marxism. Kennedy flailed. After the meeting Krushchev operated with a new belligerence, cutting Berlin in two with a wall and placing missiles in Cuba.

Two other points. Someday a bright and diligent historian will take a look at the spectacle of JFK celebration in the media that commenced upon his death and has never fully abated. The endless magazine covers, the made-for-TV movies, the pictures, the poems, the bestsellers. All of this involved not just manipulation of the media but enthusiastic and over-the-top media complicity, which created a still-weird dynastic myth that continues in the Democratic party: Kennedys are gods. And this from the party of the working man. If you wonder why even your teenagers are affected by the myth of Camelot, know that the artists, writers, producers, network heads and magazine editors who now dominate the media were children during the great Kennedy celebration. Its images and assertions are embedded in their brains.

*   *   *

The revelations also underscore that JFK was very much a man of his time. He was of the Sinatra generation; they got through the Depression, fought the war, and came home too hip for the room. People think the boomers discovered sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, but it was their parents, really—second-generation Americans home from Anzio and the South Pacific, beginning to leave the safety and social embarrassment of their immigrant parents’ religion, informed by what they’d been taught as children about World War I and what happened at Versailles, influenced by Scott and Ernest and the lost generation. Add some Marx and the man in the gray flannel suit, throw in some Vat 69, and some pills. Put that all together, shake it, add a pinch of Freud and pour it out; what you get is party. The greatest generation on Saturday night.

They were a great generation and they were more than that, and less. They created the boomers, the welfare state, the world we live in. They were one rocking group, and JFK was very much of them.

There’s a lot to think about this week—the rise of Nancy Pelosi, the meaning of the Republican triumph—but my thoughts keep tugging toward a group of people who are abused, ostracized and facing a cold winter. It’s not right what we do to them, and we should pay attention.

I saw them again the other day, shivering in the cold, in the rain, without jackets or coats. The looked out, expressionless, as the great world, busy and purposeful, hurried by on the street. They were lined up along the wall of a business office. At their feet were a small mountain of cigarette butts and litter.

They are the punished, the shamed. They are the Smokers. As they stood there—I imagined a wreath of smoke curling round their shoulders like the wooden collar of the stocks of the 17th century—I thought: Why don’t we stop this?

*   *   *

For a decade now we have been throwing them out of our offices and homes and public spaces. We have told them they are unclean. We treat them the way India used to treat the untouchables.

We have removed them from our midst because they take small tubes of soft white paper with flecks of tobacco stuffed inside, light them on fire and suck on them. This creates smoke, which pollutes the air.

“Second hand smoke kills.” But—how to put it?—we all know that’s just politically correct propaganda invented by the prohibitionists, don’t we? If you spend 24 hours a day in a 4-by-4-foot room with a chain smoker you’ll feel it, and you’ll be harmed by it. But are you damaged by the guy down the hall who smokes in the office at work? No, you’re not, and you know it. You just don’t like it. Your nostrils are dainty little organs, and your nostrils trump his rights.

But you definitely wouldn’t be harmed if the handful of smokers in your office were allowed to smoke only in a common room with good ventilation. Why wouldn’t that be a civilized and acceptable compromise?

And why is it smoking that is the object of such fierce disdain?

*   *   *

Within blocks of where the smokers stood in front of the office building on Madison Avenue the other day, there were people who last night bought five rocks of crack cocaine. There were people who watch child porn. There were people who drive by with the sound up so you can hear the lyrics of the song they’re listening to, which is about how women are ho’s who should be shot. Talk about air pollution. There were people who gorge on food, people who drink too much, people who perform abortions in the eighth month of pregnancy—the eighth month, so late that the child could almost come out and shake his little fist and say “I wish you had not killed me!”

Within blocks of where the smokers stood there were thousands of purveyors of and sharers in all the mutations and permutations of human woe, sin, malfeasance, messiness and degradation.

And they all get to stay inside. They all get to sit at their desks.

It’s the smokers we ostracize.

It’s odd, isn’t it?

Actually it’s crazy.

*   *   *

I think it is an insufficiently commented-upon irony that cigarette prohibition and the public shaming it entails is the work of modern liberals. They’re supposed to be the ones who are nonjudgmental, who live and let live, but they approach smoking like Carry Nation with her ax. Conservatives on the other hand let you smoke. They acknowledge sin and accept imperfection. Also most of them are culturally inclined toward courtesy of the old-fashioned sort.

If you tried to light up near a left-wing big-city attorney, she would cut off your hand the way Christopher chopped off Ralphie’s the other night on “The Sopranos.” But if you are a smoker and you go visit a nice little unsophisticated Baptist lady in a suburb of Tuscaloosa, she will not only allow you to smoke, she will scurry into the dining room to find the china ashtray she put away 10 years ago under the folded table cloths. She would do this so you could have a nice place to put your ashes. She wouldn’t dream of making you uncomfortable. That would be impolite and inhospitable.

Modern liberals are not culturally inclined toward courtesy. They are inclined toward knowing what’s good for you and passing ordinances to make sure you get the picture. The first Thank You For Not Smoking sign I ever saw was in 1976, on the desk of Massachusetts governor Mike Dukakis. I thought: I have seen the future, and it is puritanical.

*   *   *

Why do liberals punish smokers? Could we discuss this? Is it that it makes them feel clean? Some parts of our culture in which liberals largely call the shots—Hollywood, for instance—are fairly low and degraded. Maybe liberals can’t face this, and make themselves feel clean if they ban unclean air? Or maybe banning smokers makes them feel safe, like they’ll never die.

Maybe it makes them feel in control. Maybe it makes them feel superior.

Or maybe they just want to bully someone.

Which gets me to Michael Bloomberg. New York is still suffering from 9/11, threatened by huge budget deficits, struggling with Wall Street’s downturn, facing draconian tax increases including a brand new commuter tax—that’ll certainly encourage new businesses to come here!—and trying to come to contract agreement with big unions. Our realistic and no-nonsense mayor has surveyed the scene, pondered the landscape, and come up with his answer: Ban all smoking in bars.

In bars, where the people we force out of our business offices seek refuge! In bars, where half of us plan to spend our last hours after Osama tries to take out Times Square. In bars, the last public place you can go to be a dropout, a nonconformist, refusenik, a time waster, a bohemian, a hider from reality, a bum, a rebel, a bore, a heathen. The last public place in which you can really wallow in your own and others’ human messiness. The last place where you can still take part in that great American tradition, leaving the teeming marching soldiers of capitalism outside to go inside, quit the race, retreat and have a drink and fire up a Marlboro and . . . think, fantasize, daydream, listen to Steely Dan or Sinatra, revel in your loser-tude, play the Drunken Misery Scene in the movie of your life, meet a girl, meet a guy, meet a girl who’s a guy. The last public place you could go to turn on, tune in, drop out and light up.

No more, says our mayor. Unclean! In this Bloomberg exhibits for the first time a bad case of mayoral mental illness. Something about being mayor of New York makes you, ultimately, nuts. In David Dinkins it manifested itself this way: Facing deep recession, rising crime and union strife he would contemplate our problems and then call an emergency press conference to announce his answer. The city of New York, he would say, will no longer do business with the racist government of South Africa. In Rudy Giuliani’s case it was government by non sequitur—government by someone who needed an event as dramatic as 9/11 to provide a foe as big as his aggression.

For Mr. Bloomberg now, it is Bloomberg Has Decreed. Mr. Bloomberg doesn’t allow smoking in his east side townhouse, Mr. Bloomberg will not allow it anywhere in New York. Those nasty working-class folk who still suck on cancer sticks while swilling Buds will be put down. Bloomberg Decrees.

What an idiot. What a billionaire snob bullyboy.

*   *   *

A short word on smokers. They are people who’ve made a deal. They are old-fashioned, and it’s an old-fashioned deal. Their sense of life is essentially conservative: They know it is short, they know part of how you say thank you for it is to really feel it and enjoy it, and they know this life isn’t the most transcendent and important one you’ll be living. Smokers are disproportionately Catholic, did you know that? They know that eventually something will kill them. They accept death and illness as part of the equation. They love smoking so much, it so enhances their enjoyment of each day, that they’ll gamble. Some of them, they know, will die in a car accident next year, so it won’t matter if they smoked; some will die of old age at 97; some will get emphysema or lung cancer at 50 and pay the price. Fine. You buys your smokes and takes your chances.

This is a hardy and, as I said, old=fashioned approach to life. It is not modern. Modern people think that if they’re tidy, floss and eat fennel they’ll never die, and if they get sick they’ll clone themselves and go get reborn. Smokers are more stoic and sacramental. They don’t want to be cloned, they want to go to heaven and see grandma. I made up the part about how they’re disproportionately Catholic but I bet it’s true and in any case why shouldn’t I assert phony facts? The other side does.

No, I don’t smoke. I used to. I still have some feeling for my old messier, more anarchic self, but now I don’t like the smell of smoke and don’t think I’ll ever go back to it. But that doesn’t mean no one else can. And it doesn’t mean I won’t let you light up.

We should let the smokers back inside and treat them as if they’re human, because they are. Until then I hope the smokers huddled together in the cold realize they’re outside because of the modern liberals’ war against being human. I hope they organize building to building and raise money to fight the prissy prohibitionists of politics, the Bloombergs and their ilk, who can’t keep you safe from muggings or suitcase nukes but make believe they’re being effective by keeping you safe from a Merit Ultralight.

Every party has a reason for being. The Republican Party was formed in the mid-19th century to achieve a specific historical goal: the end of slavery. From there it became the party of Lincoln, the party that saved the Republic and, ultimately, the party that gave a natural home to those who felt enslaved by big government, high taxes, big regulation.

The Democratic Party had a reason for being too. For the past 100 years it has seen itself as the party of the little guy. It was the natural home of those who felt we must use government to help people in need. The Democrats would take the money of the rich and create with it programs that would ease the lives of the poor and distressed.

That is why the Democratic Party existed. It is why it conceived and fought for a national retirement system for the elderly, and later for free medical care for the poor. It is why it fought too for civil rights, and for equality for all who felt they had not been given equal treatment, from ethnic and religious minorities to women.

Those are the things it stood for a 100 years.

Now jump to 2002, to four days ago. The Democrats took a hard hit. In an off-year election in which the opposition is headed by a sitting president who lost the popular vote by half a million votes in 2000, and whose administration is presiding over recession and war, the Democrats should have cleaned up. At the very least they should have lost nothing. And yet they lost almost everything. They lost Massachusetts to a Mormon! They lost Maryland with a Kennedy! The president and his party picked up support from one end of the country to the other, and the Democrats lost their one national power base, the Senate. Now they have only the media. That’s a lot, but Paula Zahn is not a state, at least not yet, and she doesn’t get a vote in the Senate.

It is a disaster for the Democrats. It has entered the history books. It has launched furious soul-searching.

*   *   *

The good news. Relieved of the demands of leadership and spurred by loss, the Democrats now have time to decide what to do. This is good. Thinking is good.

The argument as many Democrats frame it so far is: Should we tack left, or should we fight it out in the center for the center?

But that is essentially an argument about how to win. The bigger question, the one that really rose Tuesday night and demands an answer, is this: What is the Democratic Party’s reason for being?

Here is the Democrats’ problem: They have achieved every major goal they sought in the past 100 years. The party is losing because it won.

They got Social Security. They got Medicare and Medicaid, with the help of some Republicans. They got civil rights with the help of a lot of Republicans. They supported equality for women, and women are equal. (How many were elected the other night? So many it wasn’t a story, really, because it’s a 30-year trend that just keeps growing.)

They got the New Deal, and they got the Great Society. They got the welfare state. And you can argue they have been undone by their success.

Most of what they got they got long ago—long enough ago that the people of the United States have become used to the benefits, and long enough that they have experienced the costs. For, as we used to say, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. The Democrats’ programs cost plenty. And in time it wasn’t the rich that were paying for it but the rich and the comfortable, and then the rich and the comfortable and the middle class, and then the working-class Joes and the waitresses at the diner.

The Democrats in time came not to seem like the party of the little guy but the party that taxed the little guy so Danny Rostenkowski could go on a junket. To make it worse, the modern Democratic Party, which got its current philosophies during the Depression, is no longer dealing with a nation full of people who see themselves as the little guy.

Even more important, on the issue of using government to help the poor—which is to say, on the issue of the Democratic Party’s reason for being—they have in effect been blocked by the opposition. Every Republican of the modern era has been happily using government to help the needy. George W. Bush can’t spend enough on social programs and scholarships and Head Start and student loans and help for American Indians and more government food inspectors.

Mr. Bush stole the Democrats’ free lunch. That’s what compassionate conservatism is.

Republicans used to oppose mandatory Social Security. Now on the stump they are its loving defenders. They would change it very slightly but keep it forever. They would marry it and have children with it if they could.

When Ronald Reagan became president, he set about trying to right the welfare state’s worst wrongs. He lowered taxes; he tried to cut spending. He launched the great economic prosperity of the past 20 years.

Since him there has been relative stasis. No big directional changes. Bush One tilted moderate-liberal and got clobbered, Bill Clinton tilted moderate-conservative and thrived, Bush Two tilts conservative-but-for-big-government and thrives.

The stasis ended Tuesday.

*   *   *

Now the Democrats are on the mat looking up. In a way they are in the same position as the Republican Party in 1992. For 50 years the Republican Party had existed in part to oppose Soviet communism effectively. They opposed it so effectively in 1980-89 that it died. This was wonderful, a great moment in human history. But it left the party rocking. Republicans had achieved what they wanted. Now what? What did they stand for in foreign affairs?

But the Democrats’ problem now is worse than the Republicans’ in ‘92, because the Democrats’ problem is more organic. The Republicans could continue fighting for a strong defense, a traditional party goal, as the world turned and waited to reveal its new challenges. The big challenge was revealed in 2001. The Republicans now stand for combating terrorism effectively.

The Democrats have to figure out how to survive, and what that survival stands for and means, what its purpose is. For no party thrives without great purpose.

Some Democrats advise the Clever Way: remain the more liberal alternative to the Republicans, blur divisions, obscure party lines and philosophy, wait for the economy to tank or the war to fail, wait for Mr. Bush’s numbers to go down, move in hard when they do. This is the Bill Clinton path. It’s what in essence Mr. Clinton did. It’s how he won.

The upside of the Clever Way: The Democrats stay in the game. And as the holders of almost half the Senate and almost half the House, why not?

The downside: The Clever Way leaves the Democrats open to charges of cynicism, of reading polls all day. People can tell when you’re governed by polls. They don’t like it. It sours them on you, and it sours you too. It means you have to scrounge to survive without political passion. That’s a hard way to do politics.

Prudent poll watching looks like weak me-too-ism and gutless acquiescence. Which both angers and diminishes the base.

*   *   *

The Democrat’s base is left-wing. It is a worse problem for the Democrats than the Republicans’ base is for them. The Republican base is simply essentially conservative; Republicans in power are conservative too but less so; they live in what they call the real world. They achieve what they can, explaining to the base what is possible. Sometimes the base gets balky, but mostly it follows. After all, they’re all conservatives together.

The problem the Democrats have with their base is that it isn’t liberal in the way the Democratic leadership in general is liberal. It is left-wing, and some parts of it are way left-wing. The last socialists are there, the warriors of race and class; there are environmentalists who want to set loggers on fire, people who think George W. Bush killed Paul Wellstone, activists whose only concern in the world is abortion rights, and people who support capital punishment for only one crime, smoking in public. Soon they will demand the death penalty for smoking in private. (Are there radicals and nuts in the Republican base? Sure. But 20 years of observation tells me there aren’t as many and they don’t have the same clout. Moreover, Republican candidates are somewhat protected from them. The protection comes from the media, which hate nutty right-wingers more than they dislike Republicans.)

Reporters rarely ask Democratic candidates about the price their base extracts, but it is big. The base determines primary outcomes. The base changes the shape of policy.

*   *   *

Which brings us to the Less Clever Way: Some say the Democratic Party will survive only if it goes left, way left. Actually they don’t say “way left,” they say “authentically progressive.” This is what some party professionals want. Stand for something, they say. Draw a line, oppose, show it’s us vs. them.

But this path too has a downside. The party would become more extreme, less in tune with the vast American middle. It would become more minority-based, and minorities are by definition in the minority. The party would, in short, suffer at least in the short term. When the Democrats come forward and say, for instance, “We want to raise your taxes,” it is not going to make them more popular but less. Because people by and large think they pay the government enough.

The physical and symbolic expression of The Less Clever Way: The famous Wellstone memorial rally. That was as Us vs. Them as you can get. That was virtuous tribunes of the working man vs. greedy Wall Street plutocrats and their lackeys. It was good vs. evil.

And it probably did more than anything to sink Walter Mondale, old hero of the Great Society, who started talking the language of the New Democratic warriors. See what it got him: the honor of placing the first phone call to Sen.-elect Coleman.

*   *   *

America got what it wanted from the Democratic Party. The party played out its 20th-century string. And now it must answer the hardest question of all: What does this party exist to do now?

If the answer is only we want more—give us more money and more power, and we will give more welfare and more government—it won’t work, not in the short term at least.

The Democratic Party hasn’t had a new idea that is both a big idea and a good idea in at least a quarter century, longer really. It is a tribute to the party’s talent, and a tribute to the sentiment and loyalty of the American people, that the Democrats have lasted this long. The last Democratic president with a program and a philosophy who did big things was LBJ. After that it was the confusion of Jimmy Carter and the cynicism of Mr. Clinton.

My advice to the Democrats?

I don’t know the answers to their essential questions. I wouldn’t want to be them right now. There’s no way out but through, and all the options contain some peril. At the moment they should probably do this. Sit down, breathe in, breathe out. You’re not going to rush an answer to questions this big. You’ll be fighting it out for the next decade. Maybe next week you’ll choose a committed leftist to take the place of Dick Gephardt. Fine—see how it goes, whether it works. Don’t worry so much right now about your base—they’re not going anywhere, at least not soon.

And ponder the big question: Why does the party exist? To do what? The simple act of defining will help you. Do it together sometimes—have a lot of people at the table, but don’t invite academics and intellectuals. They got you into a lot of this mess, and they don’t know anything about America. They think it’s a place with a lot of people. They have no idea.

*   *   *

For the rest of us, non-Democrats who are watching with fascination, I do have advice. The essential questions the Democrats face may in fact be answered by the ultimate rise of a hardy figure who started out as a left-wing ideologue and wound up campaigning for 80/20 issues like child-safety seats in cars. A proponent of liberalism that evades getting tagged as leftism, this major-state senator is a tough partisan who hates the other side but has the discipline not to show it, or not often. Hillary Clinton just may be where the party is going.

She stopped worrying about idealism long ago, and she knows how to win. She also knows how to go with the flow and bend with the moment. If the party goes left and finds new roots, she’ll just be returning to hers.

I will be asked why I didn’t mention foreign affairs in all this, except for the reference to 1992. The reason is that the Democratic Party is uniquely a domestic party. It has not had a coherent philosophy guiding its foreign policy since the Truman administration, the days of George Kennan and the Marshall Plan. It announced a philosophy in JFK’s inaugural, but did not follow it. The Democrats ceded foreign affairs to the Republicans long ago.

That was some debate, the best so far of the political year. Each man was up to the battle. Each revealed what he thinks, how he operates, where he stands.

Norm Coleman won. But Fritz Mondale showed there’s life in the old boy yet.

I wouldn’t have bet that Mr. Coleman would emerge the victor. The narrative of a grand old man taking up the standard of a fallen local hero and waging forth valiantly in spite of age seemed to me the kind of thing most politicians wouldn’t be able to knock down or change.

But Mr. Coleman read the psychological landscape astutely. He knew he had to be both respectful and firm. He understood that Mr. Mondale’s prime aim in the debate was to demonstrate that he still has it—he may be from another time but he’s feisty and all there and ready to stand firm for Minnesota in Washington. Mr. Coleman seems to have known that Mr. Mondale would attempt to show strength by adopting a piercing and pugilistic style. Mr. Mondale did. Mr. Coleman came back with earnestness and a calm desire to find “common ground.” It was the kind of calm and earnest demeanor you use when you’re talking to the cranky old guy in the diner who likes to patronize young people.

You couldn’t see Mr. Mondale’s eyes. The studio lights put a glare on his big Junior Soprano glasses, and it robbed him of any warmth or facial expression.

Mr. Coleman was collected, and prepared to be just as aggressive as he needed to be. Mr. Mondale hit first, suggesting Mr. Coleman was allied with special interests. Mr. Coleman answered by painting Mr. Mondale as Chairman of the Boards, and seemed to suggest boardrooms were an odd place to find a champion of the people. Mr. Mondale shot back with sarcasm: how “charming” that Mr. Coleman was concerned about his business experience.

Mr. Mondale adopted the language of us vs. them. He used the language not of the Democratic Party of his era but of the Democratic Party of today. He name-called. Mr. Coleman is “right wing,” he runs with “the right-to-life crowd,” he is “an arbitrary right-to-lifer.”

Mr. Coleman didn’t insult Mr. Mondale in turn, but he came back strong, challenging Mr. Mondale’s characterization of his stand. He had lost two children early in their lives, and there is “nothing arbitrary” about his support for life. But he called too for “common ground,” especially in the area of parental consent for minors’ abortions.

Mr. Coleman seemed moderate and sober. Mr. Mondale seemed sarcastic. He literally began to point his finger at Mr. Coleman as he made his points. Mr. Coleman didn’t take the bait, and sat with his hands clasped on the table. Mr. Coleman used Mr. Mondale’s aggression against him, suggesting it was a problem: “We have to change the tone.”

Mr. Mondale’s public presentation of himself in the debate may undermine his natural standing as a Grand Old Man—which is his biggest plus as a candidate.

Mr. Coleman seemed to present himself not as radical or right wing or extreme but as a serious man who has and will work across party lines.

Mr. Mondale meant to explain his own record at the end, and an impressive record it is. But his rhetorical repetition—“I know the Senate. . . . I served in the Senate. . . . I was president of the Senate”—made him seem like the father in the old sitcom “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis”—“I fought in WWII, the big one!’ ” He was always doing that to prove he was a big guy who’d lived through big history. The kids were always rolling their eyes. They knew a blowhard when they saw one.

The entire debate will come down to a handful of sound bites on the news in Minnesota tonight. I think the impression voters will come away with is this: Shaky and irritable old lion tries to cuff rising young tiger; young tiger respectfully stands his ground without resorting to viciousness.

I think Mr. Coleman won the election this morning. I think he solidified his rising numbers, and picked up some undecided voters. And I think that considering what has happened in Minnesota the past few weeks that is one amazing story.