Peggy Noonan

MEMO
To: Democrats
From: Paul Wellstone
Date: Oct 30, 2002

My friends, I miss you and send you love.

That memorial rally was . . . something. I watched it from where I am, in the place beyond. It’s wonderful here. You’ll be amazed at what I think is one of the best parts. Two words: No politics. I love it. Who knew?

But we have to talk. I know what you were trying to do the other night, or what you sort of meant to do. But it was bad.

I know why you did it, or what was immediately behind it. Politics is a hard business. The U.S. Senate is up for grabs in a time of war. You wanted to get out the vote, rev up the troops. And of course you want to keep the Senate, of course you want to hold on to my seat, of course you want to win. I loved winning.

But I have to tell you, I know things now that I didn’t fully know before. You learn things here quickly. And you’ll all learn them sooner or later and that’s how it supposed to be. But up here your vantage point is altered. Your level of observation is changed. You can literally see the big picture. You can see people’s souls.

And I want to talk to you about that, and what you did the other night.

*   *   *

You hurt a lot of people. You didn’t mean to, you meant to be Happy Warriors. But you offended and hurt and antagonized more than half the country. And you have to think about why.

Here, I think, is the reason: a dulling of the senses, a kind of despair that has led you to let politics completely take over your lives. That’s the reason you treated a reflective and loving occasion as . . . well, as a big vulgar whomp-’em-stomp-’em rally with jeers and cheers and my casket as the stump from which you lambasted the foe.

This is what I feel you have to think about. You can make your life sick and small, you can fill it with poison, when you turn everything into politics. And what makes me sad is not that you used my death to get out the vote. It’s not that you were cold. It’s that the only way you could show any warmth was through politics.

That memorial was the triumph of politics at the expense of the personal. At the expense of what makes you human.

Look at it this way with me for a minute. Indulge me.

Imagine Trent Lott died in a plane crash last week. Please—stop cheering. That’s the problem. Knock it off.

Imagine Trent Lott dies, and there’s a big memorial back home in Mississippi in some big auditorium. Half the Senate shows up to show respect: Trent was a nice guy. But they show up for another reason too: to show solidarity with democracy. To show we’re all Americans together, and we respect the ballot together, and we are big enough to feel regard and respect across party lines. You know, where I am, party lines are nothing—they’re a mirage, an old joke you half remember.

But Lott’s dead and the Democrats who worked with him in the Senate show up. I walk in—Paul Wellstone walks in, out of respect—and the 30,000 people in the auditorium jeer me. Ted Kennedy’s behind me—he gets hoots and boos. Paul Sarbanes, same thing.

The crowd doesn’t honor our presence; the crowd lets us know we’re the enemy.

And then some Republicans get up and speak, and they jeer the Democratic party and say Democrats are the enemy. They use Trent Lott’s corpse to make partisan gains, to get the turnout up next Tuesday. They turn mourning into mischief.

What would you think if you saw that? Would you say, “What a great moment in the history of our democracy”? I don’t think so.

Let me tell you, when I watched the memorial and how you acted, I wasn’t alone. Jack Kennedy was here, and you’re not going to like this, but he said what he said the day Nixon had his meltdown in ‘62. He looked at you and said, “No class.”

John Adams is here too. He turned away from you in disgust. “Faction!” is what he said. It was no compliment.

*   *   *

I’m telling you this because I care about you.

You know what I know now in a deeper way than ever, in a new way? You can only push it forward with love and respect. No, I haven’t turned into a wuss. You got to have hunger for better things, for more justice and a heightened life for everyone, but you can’t get it through hate. It doesn’t work! Or if it works it doesn’t last.

I want you to sit down for a minute and look at yourself. If you operate each day in politics with anger and resentment and finger pointing—“We’re compassionate, the other guy’s a bum”—it doesn’t just reflect on your politics, it reveals your politics. It shows that what you say is a desire for justice is really a desire to push people around—“I hate those comfortable people, let’s hurt ‘em.”

That’s just envy and revenge and resentment. That’s just small-time, small-bore nothing.

When you say you believe in good things but you give yourself license to be vicious in the pursuit of the good—well, you corrupt more than yourself.

It’s no good.

When the rally was over, I grieved. And I have to tell you—this is very personal to say, but where I am it’s the soul that counts and I’m talking soul:

A lot of you—you need to stop, sit down, think, question yourself, look at your actions and ponder what you’ve become. And how somehow love for your side in the fight became hatred for the other.

Let me be very candidly specific. Some of you need to get a good psychologist and a good holy man or woman, a priest or rabbi or minister—or how about all three—and figure out why you’re turning everything in your life into politics. Because I have to tell you what I know: Politics is the biggest, easiest way in all of America to avoid looking at yourself, and who you are, and what fence needs fixing on your own homestead.

A lot of you are in politics not beacuse you want to lead, but because you want to run. From yourselves.

When you’re in politics not to live life but avoid it, you become especially susceptible to a kind of polar thinking. You become convinced you’re with the good team and the good people over here. You become convinced anyone who doesn’t want the same policies you want must be bad. After all, you’re good, so if they disagree they must be bad. When you’re polar like that you dehumanize the people on the other side. And when you dehumanize them—well, then you wind up booing them at a funeral. And worse.

I don’t mean you can’t be tough and honest in your judgments. There are some bad folks on the other side, it’s fair to say it. But most of them? All of them? They’re all the enemy? How could that be?

There are people with the same sickness on the other side too. But I’m telling you, this polar thinking thing has gotten worse on our side the past few years. It’s becoming the Democratic disease. This embittered sense of constant war with a wicked foe, and anything you can do to defeat the wicked is justified, and a corpse will do as a podium. And we have to stop it, both because we’re better than that and because it isn’t good for democracy. And democracy is still what Churchill said: the worst form of government except for all the others.

So please ponder what I say. And if it applies to you, or you think it might, stop, sit down and figure out a plan to do something about it.

That’s what I have to say. Hope I didn’t anger you; I just meant to warn you. And let me tell you: I miss you. They say up here the missing leaves, but it hasn’t so far with me. Maybe it will with time. But I hope it doesn’t embarrass you if I speak here as I would at a memorial for you. You meant the world to me. Every one of you changed my life. And I love you. Whether you win or lose.

Paul

Liberals don’t appreciate conservatives enough. Conservatives don’t appreciate liberals enough either. Here’s an appreciation of Paul Wellstone, who died a few hours ago in the middle of a great battle in the heart of the great democracy.

I met him only once, in Washington, in 1996. I wish I’d taken notes and could refer to them now. We met in the halls of the Senate, introduced by a mutual acquaintance, and what I remember is Wellstone was funny and modest and shy, and I thought: Good guy. It was an instinctive response, an instinctive read, and I trusted it.

A few minutes ago on CNN, Candy Crowley, a reporter one of whose gifts is an obvious sense of humanity toward those she covers, said that Wellstone was “a pure liberal”—meaning he wasn’t kidding; his liberalism wasn’t a jacket he put on in the morning to fool the rubes and powers—he meant it. He seemed to be a politician who was not a cynic, who was not poll driven, who was not in it just for the enjoyments of power. He operated from belief. And as beliefs do, his sometimes cost him. It’s possible, perhaps likely, that his belief that an American invasion of Iraq was wrong was costing him in Minnesota, his state, which he was furiously stumping, hop-scotching over the snow banks in a chartered plane, in an effort to hold on to his Senate seat.

*   *   *

It’s good to have men and women of belief in Congress. It’s tragic to lose one. It’s amazing to live in a time when these Allen Drury-type “Advise and Consent” plot twists yank the drama of the coming election off its predictable tracks. And it seems to me more and more in our country that we’re getting these dramatic and unpredictable and novelistic plot changes, whatever that means and for whatever it’s worth.

But here’s what I really want to say. Democracy requires warriors. It requires leaders. It requires people who will go out there and fight for their vision of a better country in a better world. It requires men and women who will go into politics, and who will, in going into politics, in a way lose their lives. Or lose the relaxed enjoyment of daily life.

Politicians live lives of constant movement and effort, lives in which days are broken up into pieces that don’t always cohere—up at 5, first breakfast at 6:30, run all day, on the plane, on the bus, into the van, to the fund-raiser, to the speech, to the dinner for the union supporter, to the late-night meeting with reporters; and don’t forget to sound confident, to have the facts, to seem engaged. The exhaustion of constant extroverting; the fatigue of the modern politician. The only good reason to live like that is the desire to pull forward and push into being your vision of How Things Ought to Be. Those who do it for other reasons—well, as George Orwell said, they wind up with the faces they deserve.

It takes commitment and hunger to live a political life. But when the person living it brings other qualities—a sincerity, a seriousness of purpose, a respect for the meaning of things—and when it is accompanied by a personal style of natural modesty twinned with political confidence, well, it’s a moving thing to see. It’s inspiring. It reminds you that there are good people in politics. And modern democracies need all the reminders they can get.

*   *   *

When conservatives disagree with liberals, and they’re certain the liberal they’re disagreeing with is merely cynical, merely playing the numbers, merely playing politics, it’s a souring experience. When liberals disagree with conservatives and they’re sure the conservative they’re disagreeing with is motivated by meanness or malice, it’s an embittering experience. But when you disagree with someone on politics and you know the person you’re disagreeing with isn’t cynical or mean but well meaning and ardent and serious—well, that isn’t souring or embittering. That’s democracy, the best of democracy, what democracy ought to be about.

Paul Wellstone was a good guy. His friend Sen. Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican, spoke at some length this afternoon about his “caring and belief.” When tough old Pat Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, spoke of Wellstone this afternoon on CNN, he began to weep. And when Pete Domenici, tough old Republican of New Mexico, followed Mr. Leahy on CNN, he too began to weep, and had to beg off the interview.

Senators ain’t sissies. They can be one cold crew. But Wellstone touched them in a way that was special, and that I think had something to do with democracy, and those who grace it.

It’s sad to lose a good man. Good for America for raising him; good for Minnesota for raising him to the Senate; good for Wellstone for being motivated by belief and the desire to make our country better.

It’s over. Or at least it appears to be. Black October is over, and the children around Washington can once again feel safe, or as safe as children these days are allowed to feel. They’re all little veterans of national trauma now.

When I told my son Thursday morning—I stuck my head in his room and said, “They caught the snipers, it’s over”—relief washed across his face like a series of small waves. “Who was it?” he asked. “Are they sure?” He wanted the facts so he could put a picture together in his mind. The picture would be of a monster locked hard behind bars, an unarmed monster in chains.

The national relief is palpable. So is the sense of surprise. Half the people I know feared the sniper would never be caught, or would remain at large for months or years. Half the people I know, and half the time this included me, had little faith in Chief Moose or the FBI. We were wrong. What a relief to be wrong. It’s cause for joy, as if our luck is back.

What a surprise, the profile of the oldest suspect. I imagined a brilliant Ted Bundy-type serial killer, not a more competent Richard Reid or a more elusive Timothy McVeigh, which is how John Allen Muhammad looks to me, at least at the moment. No one who knew him is talking so far of his intellectual gifts. I was also imagining a cell of al Qaeda operatives, not an unaffiliated two-man crew. But then soon we may find out what mosque Muhammad frequented, if any, and what friends he had there, if any, and what assistance he received, if any, and the story may change.

*   *   *

I realized yesterday that this story, the sniper story, had all along reminded me of November 1963. I was a child then, when the great trauma happened, and I remember how it seemed to cut into the natural order of things.

Almost 40 years ago, in the hours after the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald, political sophisticates across the country held their breath. Was the man who shot JFK a right-wing nut, like the people who’d spat at and jeered Adlai Stevenson a month earlier when he spoke in Dallas? Conservatives feared he was, feared his act would seem to undermine their political philosophy. Liberals assumed, and some hoped, that Oswald was of the right. If JFK’s murderer were a right-winger, his death would be a martyrdom. It would have a theme. I remember the sense of surprise among people on TV when it turned out Oswald was, in words later attributed to Jackie Kennedy, “a silly little communist” who’d once defected to the Soviet Union, and who handed out Fair Play for Cuba Committee literature on American streets.

It seemed so at odds with expectations, at variance with assumptions.

The profile of the older suspect arrested yesterday is just as jarring, but somehow it is also almost jarringly familiar. An American Gulf War vet, a former Army mechanic, a black man who last year changed his surname from Williams to Muhammad, whose life was impressively sketched by a team of Seattle Times reporters in the hours just after his arrest: “Interviews with law enforcement sources, former wives and acquaintances created an emerging portrait of Muhammad: A Muslim convert and former Fort Lewis soldier sympathetic to Islamic terrorists. A man who had gone through at least two wives, with bitter custody battles over his children. A neighbor who was friendly but a control freak who kidnapped his own children.”

A man, that is, who’d been rocked by the storms of modern life, whose personal history was marked by loss and an inability to sustain connection or achieve hopes, and who’d taken refuge in the seeming safety of an all-encompassing ideology.

Just like Lee Harvey Oswald.

Soon we’ll probably see the pictures of Muhammad posing in the backyard with his rifle, as we did with Oswald. Soon we’ll probably hear reports of abuse of his wives, as Oswald abused his. Soon we’ll hear the facts of his conversion to his new belief. Communism, radical Islam—authoritarian ideologies always seem to promise a sense of coherence to the truly lost.

*   *   *

The most surprising part of the story is perhaps the 17-year-old alleged accomplice, the high school student who is reportedly the stepson of Muhammad but who, it turns out, may or may not be related. No one seems sure at this point what the relation between the two of them is.

If they are charged and tried it is hard not to guess that it will be some trial, with Muhammad making speeches, perhaps demanding to represent himself, perhaps eager to tell America how it is evil, a victimizer of the weak of the world, a victimizer of the Muhammads of the world.

But for now, the day after the arrests, there is reason to feel satisfaction, and even joy. Our law-enforcement agencies did what they had to do: They got the guy, or guys. In the age of Osama, this is heartening.

The sniper horror didn’t last for months or years, but weeks. Parents are relieved. Life returns to normal. People can gas up the cars again. Kids can go back to school, and homecoming weekends can be held in the Washington area. A whole generation of kids is learning or relearning that adults working together with commitment and intelligence can bring down a monster.

All of this is so profoundly to the good.

Here is something that is not. We learned again this month what we learned in 1963: that one man with a gun can change everything. But we also are reminded of what we learned in 2001. We in this country—and our foes in the world—have been reminded that this mighty nation is amazingly delicate, amazingly touchable if you will. Modern America is like a filigreed network of fine wires—huge, extensive, sophisticated, highly technologized and profoundly disturbable.

You can bring this nation to its knees with a box cutter. You can paralyze its capital with a rifle and a van. Modern America, though vast and vibrant, is vulnerable; and we have to think more about this. It’s not good that one man, or two, or 20, can stop the greatest nation in the world in its tracks, if even for a few weeks. And no, I don’t have an answer and don’t know if there’s an answer. But I feel certain it’s the real topic, the true topic that needs addressing.

John Paul II marked the start of the 25th year of his papacy, now figured to be the fourth longest in history, with a startling announcement in St Peter’s Square: He does not intend to resign but will let the Boss decide when he should leave, and by the way he has decided to change the rosary, the daily devotion Catholics have recited for 900 years. Now the pope has many issues vying for his attention, including his decision Thursday for reject the American bishops’ plan for dealing with clergy sex abuse, but it is actually hard to imagine a more dramatic and far-reaching decision than the addition of the “luminous mysteries,” for it will literally change how millions of ardent believers pray each day for peace.

We have all seen rosary beads—a small cross, a series of beads, then a circular arrangement of five strands of 10 beads each separated by a lone bead. Each bead in the string of 10 gets a Hail Mary; the lone beads are the Lord’s Prayer. The point and purpose of the rosary, however, is not to recite rote prayers but to repeat prayers you know by heart as you contemplate—actively meditate on—a mystery of Christianity. A mystery in this context is an important event whose whole meaning you won’t fully understand in this world.

For 900 years there have been three series of mysteries: the joyous (Christ enters the world) the sorrowful (Christ is killed) and the glorious (Christ and Heaven). What the pope has done is add a new set of areas of contemplation—the luminous mysteries, which encompass Christ’s ministry, his teachings.

The most startling thing about his announcement is that it doesn’t seem so much an addition to a tradition as the filling of a gap. The new mysteries seem like something that had originally been there but was somehow lost to time. The joyful mysteries end with Christ being found, at age 12, teaching in the temple. The sorrowful mysteries start with Christ suffering in Gethsemane the night before his death. It was odd to contemplate the joyfuls one day and jump to the sorrowfuls the next; something was missing. That would be what he said and did as an adult. That is what the pope added this week.

But the rosary had been as it was for almost a millennium. Why did John Paul change it now? “He is making a statement at the end of his life about what’s important to him,” says Father C.J. McCloskey of Washington’s Catholic Information Center. “By adding these mysteries he is saying, ‘This is another invitation to look closely at the life of Christ—to contemplate and meditate.’ ”

“To think,” I offered.

“No, not to think. To let the life of Christ sink into you.”

*   *   *

The timing of the announcement is interesting. The rosary is by long tradition a prayer for peace in the world. Of the church-sanctioned visitations of Mary—there have been more reported in the past 150 years than in all the previous centuries combined—she has asked in almost all cases that the rosary be said for peace. This week, for the first time in his roiling reign, John Paul dedicated the coming year to the rosary. And he made his announcements in a way that was embracing of other Christian traditions. He began by asserting that the rosary is “Christocentric,” a way of thinking about Jesus through and with the mother who gave him and witnessed his life. This was a not-at-all-subtle invitation to all Christians to take a new look at an old devotion, one Protestants, for instance, have found unhappily Mary-centered in the past.

And so this Mary-loving pope who, as all who know him will tell you, feels her hand literally redirected the bullet aimed at his heart when he was shot in St. Peter’s Square 21 years ago, and who had that very bullet placed in the gold crown of the statue of Mary at Fatima, has managed to show, at the end of his reign, his special devotion, and use it as a vehicle for ecumenical invitation.

In the pope’s letter he used the words luminous or light 29 times. That reminded me of something. In the unofficial but ever-interesting prophecies of St. Malachy, mystic of the Middle Ages, each coming pope is named with a phrase that seems to denote his work. The nicknames seem uncannily accurate. The pope’s predecessor, John Paul I, who reigned for a month, from waning moon to waning moon, got the nickname “Of the Half Moon.” John Paul II is “Of the Labors of the Sun.” Which is of course the brightest, most luminous star, the bringer of light to the world. I used to wonder what his nickname meant, but not now.

*   *   *

It’s worth saying a few more words on the difficulties of contemplation. The pope said in his letter that he sensed a greater hunger in the world for meditation, and made clear he meant to help feed it in part with the offering of the new mysteries.

I am only a recent regular rosary sayer, but I have been struck by the difficulties of meditating and contemplating. I found some helpful counsel in the pope’s letter, and thought I’d pass it on.

I didn’t know how to meditate when I began saying the rosary. So I’d just start out imagining particular scenes in my mind. In the first joyful mystery, for instance, the Angel Gabriel comes to girl of perhaps 14 or 15 and announces that she is to become the mother of God. She says Yes, what the Lord wants is what should be done. This scene is described in the Gospels. I try to imagine it as it was. Then the phone rings and I listen to see if the message light comes on, and an ambulance goes by, and suddenly I’m not imagining what we know anymore. Instead I’m wondering why Mary is never reported to have been shocked that an angel walked into her garden and started talking to her. Maybe she’d been seeing angels for years. Maybe she thought they were her playmates when she was a child. Maybe they were commonplace to her, and that’s part of the reason she seems to have moved through life with that rarest of qualities, an unbroken calm.

The third joyful mystery is the birth of Christ in a manger. It’s not hard to imagine this. It’s hard to control one’s imaginings. I imagine the trek to the manger, the disheartened young husband, the sound of the eating area of the inn as they trudge on, hungry and alone. And then a car alarm goes off. And suddenly I’m wondering: Did she have a hard labor? Did God want her to know from the beginning that her joy would be ever accompanied by pain? Did she weep him into the world? Maybe it was an easy birth. God knew she was barely more than a child, with a young husband and no help, just the two of them in the cold in a hut on a hill.

When the child was born, did he cry aloud with a great wail, and did the cry enter the universe? Did it become a sound wave of significant density? Is it still out there, radiating out into the stars, and did the Voyager II bump into it? If, as an astronaut, you traveled through that sound wave in the year 2063, would it jostle your space capsule and disturb your small universe? Would you hear something? What?

Did someone unrecorded by history see a light in the hut on the hill and come to help Mary and Joseph that night? Maybe there was an old woman with moles and wens and a sharp bent nose, a woman almost comically ugly, like a witch in a child’s Halloween book. Maybe she lived in isolation, never left her small hovel, but she felt called to assist, tugged by some wonder that pierced her estrangement. She helped with the birth, and hers was the first face he saw. Her outer appearance was an expression of the inner wounds he came to heal. As if she were the physical representation of the state of man’s soul. Maybe it was she who wrapped him in rags; maybe she bent down, breathed him in, her face bathed in the warm mist of a brutal birth on a frosty night. Maybe when she returned home she was beautiful. But no one knew, and it all went unrecorded, because she never left the house again. And never knew she had been made lovely.

Or maybe she did leave the house, and the next day in the market came upon a looking glass, and . . .

You see my problem. I can’t concentrate on what we believe we know. You’re supposed to contemplate about what happened. And I do, until there’s a sound or a thought or a ray of light hits a vase on the window, and then we’re off to the races.

What was Christ thinking about that night in Gethsemane? That is the first of the sorrowful mysteries. I start to think and then . . . Maybe he knew that in spite of the pain he was about to be subjected to, in spite of his self-sacrifice, the world was going to continue to be a miserable place. Maybe the evil one sneaked into his mind and showed him a film of the future—Thomas More being put to death as a Christian by Christians for the sake of Christianity, Edmund Campion and John Fisher the same. The Inquisition, the Holocaust, cardinals of the church who would be incapable of compassion for the families of children sexually abused by priests. Maybe all of that is what made him sweat blood.

Also: He must have loved life. He must have been in love with life on earth. Why else would he ask that the cup pass? He must have wanted to grow old. Why? Did he love bread, changes in the weather, wine, the feel of rain? He must have liked being a carpenter’s apprentice. Woodwork is satisfying: You can see the results of your labor; you can feel it in a smooth finish. Maybe he made a chair once. Maybe it’s in the Museum of Natural History now in a case with a card that says, “Child’s chair, circa 100 B.C.E.” Maybe there’s a guard in the museum who’s in love with the girl in the gift shop. Maybe they first talked in front of the case that houses the chair and something happened.

*   *   *

You see where I am. But here is the pope in the letter on the rosary: To announce each mystery as you begin to pray, to focus on it, is “to open up a scenario.” The words you are saying direct “the imagination and the mind” toward a particular “episode.” In Catholic spirituality, “visual and imaginative elements” help in “concentrating the mind.” You said it, pops!

The pope cautions that the process is “nourished by silence.” “One drawback of a society dominated by technology and the mass media is the fact that silence becomes increasingly difficult to achieve.” You must try to both be silent, and find a quiet place to let thoughts come in and sit down. So try not to hear the phone and the siren; open your mind to the images and words with which you are feeding it; let your imagination go as long where it goes is a good place to be.

This seems good advice, and is a real relief, too. I’m going to contemplate it.

Even though everyone says Sept. 11 changed everything in America, I’m not sure we’ve fully noticed how much it’s changed everything. And here’s a paradox: All that change may well yield a kind of stasis, at least immediately, at least in the midterm elections.

Politically, people are realigning (Pat Buchanan continues to build support on the left) and unaligning (Christopher Hitchens and Ron Rosenbaum leave the left). Culturally more people seem to be taking to their couches like Victorian virgins with the vapors, watching reruns of “Seinfeld” on new plasma TVs. If the apocalypse comes they will watch it in high resolution. Some previous couch dwellers, on the other hand—that would be you, Former Slacker—are energized, taking to the streets as an antiwar movement begins.

In New York City there’s a kind of capitalist kabuki going in which the bright people who own the great office buildings think, in their deepest hearts, that New York’s ascendancy is over, and yet continue hustling space to the bright people who buy office buildings, who buy on 57th Street for the new Armani flagship. Everyone is doing what they did, with the same old arrogance and shine. Because people do what they know how to do. Just because you’re pessimistic doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make a deal.

Anyway, they’re all waiting for the next Manolo Blahnick to drop.

The whole country is.

*   *   *

This weekend I watched the ragtag end of a Central Park antiwar demonstration march down 96th Street in Manhattan. They were mostly young, college age, and they seemed to me also, as I listened to their chants and watched them pump the air with their fists, like my friends at the antiwar demonstrations of 1968, passionate and confused. My friends meant to be for peace and wound up, almost inevitably, hurling bitter bile at America. It’s funny how peace movements are so good at hating.

In 1968 the Democratic Party split. Today it could split over Iraq, too. Anyone who’s seen Rep. Charlie Rangel on a cable news show the past month knows some Democratic leaders have strong convictions against the war. Yesterday the Washington Post quoted former Gore campaign manager Donna Brazile launching a rocket at the Democratic National Committee: “Our liberal base wants us to stand up and challenge Bush on the war.” Members of the Democratic coalition, she said—voters in low-income neighborhoods, blacks, liberal suburbanites—are unhappy that “no one is talking to us, no one is addressing our issues” on the economy. “There is a real danger out there.” Direct-mail contributions to the DNC are plummeting. Democrats fear a low turnout on Nov 5.

Departing House GOP leader Dick Armey fears the same for his team. He said last week that he is worried about two things: the potential for Democratic voter fraud and a low turnout from Christian conservative Republicans who have yet, he said, to be fired up.

So people are realigning and unaligning, the Democratic Party could split, and the leaders of both parties worry about low turnout because voters are uninspired.

How could all of this be happening at the same time?

We have everything to be passionate about, war and recession. But the man leading the potential war, George W. Bush, hasn’t made himself very hateable. On the economy his opposition, the Democratic Party, says it has the answers to our problems, but it has not, as they say, made its case. One senses—one is taking a leap here, but one is a pundit, and therefore allowed—that Americans do not uniformly blame Mr. Bush for the recession, or certainly not in the numbers that they credited Bill Clinton for the expansion. They blame Sept. 11, market cycles and the inevitable burst of the Clinton bubble. In any other year the incumbent president’s party would be clobbered at the polls for a suffering economy. But this year one senses the rough justice of the American voter might be suspended.

A lot of people would like to love Mr. Bush because they think he’ll have the guts to fight a hard but needed war. But who, really, loves war, especially in the age of weapons of mass destruction? A lot of people seem as if they’d like to hate Mr. Bush, too, but he’s made that hard. He’s branded himself on the American psyche as a pretty good man, and a normal one, too.

*   *   *

At any rate, the great 2002 paradox: Everything is changing, and not much in this election seems poised to change.

We are suspended.

We are waiting to see if there is a war, waiting to see how the world reacts, waiting to see if the war is simple and clean or long and brutal, waiting to see if the war makes us safer or less safe in the long run or short.

Until then, until the war, one can’t help but expect a continuance of suspension. That’s how it looks to me today at any rate. Movement that brings stasis, action that maintains the status quo. It seems freaky. But it’s a freaky time.

New Jersey is hot as a pistol. “The Sopranos,” Bruce Springsteen, Bob Torricelli, a state Supreme Court that expresses its latent creativity by taking a broad and even artistic approach to the law. New Jersey is front-page news.

You got a problem with that?

*   *   *

I happen to love New Jersey. It’s not a hard place to love. I went to high school and college there, I lived there a few years ago, and there is something poignant and moving in it. Jerseyites all know they’re part of a national punch line—“I’m from Jersey!”—and they accept it with grace and a shrug and play along with the joke if it’ll make you happy. They are unpretentious.

And Jersey is colorful. It is not a beige state like Virginia, where everything—the hair color of the girls at the mall, the hills, the buildings of Tyson’s Corner—comes in shades of brown. New Jersey has a broad palette; there’s a full ethnic mix, and people have a shock of red hair and black hair and blue eyes and green eyes and freckles and round ebony faces. The grandchildren of the immigrants of Eastern and Western Europe are there, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of black Americans who came north in the 20th century are there, and so are new immigrants from all over the world.

It has the same ethnic mix as New York but less conceit. Instead of vanity it has an accommodating brassiness. The Jersey I like best is hard-hat, not high-hat, and working-class. In its old train stations and its black steel bridges—TRENTON MAKES, THE WORLD TAKES—it looks like the America of “On the Waterfront,” that masterpiece of estrangement, loyalty and love. My Jersey looks like America when America was young and tough.

Of course Jerseyites wince when you write things like this because it seems like you’re reducing the state to clichés. And that’s the politicians’ job.

*   *   *

Forty years ago, in “The Making of the President, 1960,” the big book that transformed modern political reporting, Theodore White called New Jersey the most corrupt big state in the union and said the reason was that it was the least covered by the media of the day. The great newspapers and the broadcasters with the most resources were in New York and Philadelphia. Jersey media couldn’t hold on to first-rate writers and reporters; those who showed conspicuous talent were quickly lured to the big pay and big bylines of the big cities.

I first read White’s observation when I was in high school. I thought to myself: By the time I’m grown up it will have changed. But it hasn’t entirely.

Which has been both good and bad.

Good: Jersey longer than many states got to continue as itself, unruined by outsiders. It is still distinctive and still capable, at least to some degree, of producing kids with a bona fide regional accent.

Bad: Its rich tradition of corruption continues, if not largely unchecked then only slowly checked. Bob Torricelli would not, I think, have lasted quite so long in New York.

*   *   *

Others will castigate New Jersey’s Supreme Court, political leadership and senior senator. But I want to castigate Bob Torricelli’s withdrawal speech. It was really interesting and revealing. In fact I think it was a masterpiece of political manipulation that failed.

First, what worked.

The speech was timed and presented in a way that showed savvy and discipline. Mr. Torricelli and his staff kept his decision under wraps until the day he stepped down. That morning they began to leak to media bigfoots. TV cable channels and radio stations trumpeted all day that a big announcement was coming. They did it to hold viewers, which built Mr. Torricelli’s audience. Mr. Torricelli’s people did not put out an advance text of the speech, to the extent there was one, so TV and radio producers didn’t know when to cut to the speech and show the withdrawal. So they had to run the whole speech. Mr. Torricelli made good use of the time, presenting reality as he wished it to be understood. Of course he saved the specific announcement of his withdrawal for the end of the speech, so CNN wouldn’t switch away from his remarks.

This was all really well done.

Mr. Torricelli got maximum exposure and used it to give a last will and political testament. And for a good while it was a good speech.

He began by putting himself in context. He told us “The Story of Torricelli”—the tale of a young Jersey college kid whose mother and sister put his name up for local office. He enters politics. As a young man he meets Anwar Sadat and boldly declares himself to be a future member of the United States Congress. He hungers for political greatness.

There was an elegiac feel to this part of the speech. His review of his life had height. “Thirty years have passed. I’ve loved almost every moment. I fought for everything I believed in, with all the fiber in my body. . . . I’ve had the life that I wanted.”

Then he spoke of something that isn’t spoken of enough: the meaning of a political life. The purpose of politics, he says, is to offer a stage for the betterment of man. He candidly asserts his partisanship, saying that people denigrate partisanship but that he is proud to wear the label: “I have believed in the Democratic Party all my life.”

There was something fresh in this. First, it seemed true. But also, it can be argued that in some ways we don’t have enough partisanship in modern politics. Conservatives like me see the GOP as the party more reflective of their views, and thus deserving of regard and respect. But we don’t “believe” in it. Most of my friends who are Democrats are similarly liberal, and see the Democratic Party as the vehicle of liberalism. They are loyal to it insofar as it is the party of the left. But there is something to be said for direct and declared partisanship. It keeps things clear. It helps move the ball forward, helps propel events and decisions. And it helps the center hold.

Mr. Torricelli then jumps to the day he walked into the Senate. Here he captures what is rarely expressed these days by political figures in public: the romance of the endeavor. He speaks of the old and spontaneous Senate tradition dating back 200 years in which every senator has carved his name, before he left, in the desk he used on the floor of the chamber. The day Bob Torricelli entered the Senate he lifted the lid of his new desk to see whose names were there: “Hubert Humphrey’s name, and Fulbright, and Wayne Morse.” The old liberal giants. He wanted to be among them, to be part of their tradition. “I’ve tried in my own way to add a little bit to whatever they left.”

This is good stuff too.

At this point, about halfway through the speech, I thought: People are going to say this was the speech of his career, and Jersey is going to thank him for going out with style.

*   *   *

But soon it was clear I was wrong, and I thought of what John Kennedy is supposed to have said of Richard Nixon after his bombastic bowing out of politics in 1962: “No class.”

What happened to turn Mr. Torricelli’s speech bad?

He went too far. He strained credulity and then broke it.

Why was he leaving now? Because he had concluded staying might hand the Republicans a new Senate seat. But it was immediately clear that the timing was related to new allegations that he had attempted to get a pardon from the Clinton White House for a supporter who’d given him $20,000 in illegal contributions. He asserted that withdrawal was his idea, but it quickly appeared to be more largely the result of decisions by national Democratic leaders. He suggested his mistakes were small ones when they were essential ones: the gross peddling of political influence. He suggested the people of New Jersey had been ungenerous in not forgiving him. And there were embarrassing moments such as his apology to Bill Clinton “for not having his strength.”

But the moment when the bad in the speech crystallized was when Mr. Torricelli eulogized himself.

“Somewhere today in one of several hospitals in New Jersey, some woman’s life is going to be changed because of the mammography centers that I created. . . . Somewhere tonight in Bergen County, if a woman is beaten . . . she’ll spend the night in a center that I created. . . . Somewhere today, because I changed the gun laws . . . . Some child in Bergen County will play in a park that I funded, in land that I saved. . . . Somewhere all over New Jersey, some senior citizen who doesn’t even know my name . . . will live in a senior center that I helped to build.”

I created, I funded, I saved, I did. I, I, I. And they don’t even know my name.

This is—well, where to start? It is poor political etiquette, and it is more than that.

Imagine a JFK or a Ronald Reagan talking like that. “I brought the Berlin Wall down—I did it,” “I put Castro in his place.” “I cut taxes and you didn’t even say thanks.” And now you won’t have Torricelli to kick around anymore.

Ronald Reagan and JFK would not speak that way, and not only because each had grace. They also had more understanding of the facts. Mr. Reagan knew it was the patriots and bravehearts of the world who brought the wall down.

But what is sad is that what Mr. Torricelli had to say is more and more how modern politicians talk. And because he seemed to believe what he said.

He did it, he is great, we owe him.

The kind of politicians who do this are the kind who never say they’re in politics. They always say they’re in public service.

*   *   *

As for who owes whom what: A political figure such as Bob Torricelli should attempt to lead in a certain direction. He may think it good to take taxpayer money—that is, your money, the money you worked for—and dedicate it to the building of a local day-care center. He will push for it and get his bill through. When the day-care center is built the politician will show up on the day it is opened and cut the ribbon. He will get in the papers. He will make a statement. He will appear to be effective, the kind of leader who makes a difference. People will say, My son goes to that center Torricelli built.

This isn’t bad politics. And if you agree that the day-care center should have been built, and should have been taxpayer funded, you will look kindly on him.

But he didn’t “do it., You did. You paid for it. With your taxes. And he was among its chief beneficiaries.

He should thank you.

He should thank the people who paid for the facility he wished to see built and whose existence he will claim as part of his legacy.

The facility serves his interests, in some cases in ways that are not officially sanctioned. The politician, for instance, may see to it that a contractor who is a major contributor gets the bid for the building of the facility. He may see to it that the cousins of his biggest supporter in Essex County work in the facility.

The political figure, that is, can, if he chooses, benefit big time from the building of the facility.

And we all know it. And all of us pretty much accept it. Politics is messy and imperfect. But it is grating to be told by a politician all the things he gave us.

*   *   *

Here is a rule you can rely on: The kind of politician who insists he is in “public service” and not in “politics” is the kind of politician who’ll ultimately think that his constituents owe him.

And so a speech that started out strong wound up weak, a goodbye that started out moving ended up as merely manipulative, and a testament that started out seeming candid ended sounding like mere blowhardism.

Too bad. I thought Mr. Torricelli would go out like a Jersey guy—straight, unpretentious, humble and tough.

The battle is joined, the debate begun in earnest. In the past 48 hours we have witnessed Bush vs. Daschle, Hitchens vs. Cockburn, Democrats vs. Republicans, The American Conservative vs. The Weekly Standard and National Review, paleocons vs. neocons, compassionate conservatives vs. the left. In New York we debate whether strong criticism of Israeli policy is prima facie evidence of anti-Semitism. In Washington it’s two questions: Who owns conservatism, and is the modern left more than a collection of depressives, America-lasters and anti-Semites?

The background music to all this has underscored the drama of the moment: It is the plaintive wilderness fiddle of PBS’s “The Civil War,” repeated each night all week. You can walk the dog in the evening in the upscale neighborhoods of the East and hear the fiddle’s lonely tune coming from the screened windows of neighbor after neighbor. It’s what you hear as you walk along, wondering how the question of war will be resolved.

We wanted interesting lives, and we got them.

*   *   *

What is at issue as we discuss war on Iraq? The safety of America, of untold numbers of people, the position of our country in the Mideast and elsewhere—and that’s just the beginning. The debate has already become personal. This one is “a repulsive character,” that one is “another middle-aged porker of the right.” Personal viciousness is probably inevitable, but this fight should be serious.

It should be epochal.

One question has already been settled. The war will be the great issue of the 2002 elections. Some Democrats says this is Karl Rove’s plan to restrict the national conversation to foreign policy, where Republicans are traditionally strong, and away from the economy. Maybe that is Mr. Rove’s plan, and if it is, it’s not without logic—what is more important than war?

But as plans go it’s not without danger. Opponents of the war will now gather their forces, their resources, their arguments and data. They’ll be all over trying to make their case. They’ll have no trouble being heard.

So far they’ve not done well. They have argued that there are grave risks to action, but this is not an argument. There are grave risks to inaction, too. They have argued that America will have a hard time establishing a new Iraqi government. Well, yes. That doesn’t mean it must not or cannot be attempted.

More is needed from the opposition.

The Bush administration says Saddam Hussein is sinister and vicious. Let me, with confidence and admitted presumption, assert on behalf of the majority of Americans: We believe it. Saddam has used poison gas, has already invaded two neighboring countries, has murdered people in the coldest of blood. The administration says Saddam is gathering weapons of mass destruction, and again: We believe it. There is plenty of evidence, and there is also proof. They say he is pursuing nuclear arms. Again: We believe it. He would.

The opponents of war, it seems to me, must face the questions that flow from what we know.

If you know Saddam is wicked, know he’s gathering weapons of mass murder, know madmen are likely to ultimately use the weapons they stockpile, and know, finally, that he wishes America ill, then why not move against him? And why not now? Wouldn’t inaction be irresponsible?

*   *   *

But the administration still has questions to face, too. Among them: What has stopped Saddam from using the weapons he has, and has had for some time? Isn’t it deterrence—the sure knowledge that if he launches missiles weighted with weapons of mass murder he can wave goodbye to Baghdad, to his own life and those of many, many of his countrymen? The era of Saddam the Great would end.

If we move against Saddam now, this inhibiting incentive is lessened or removed. What will stop Saddam from going out in a great blaze of “glory”? He can kill millions.

Why is deterrence no longer operable?

The Democrats on Capitol Hill have so far failed to mount a principled, coherent opposition. I am not shocked by this, are you? One senses they are looking at the whole question merely as a matter of popular positioning: Will they like me if I say take out Saddam? Will they get mad at me if we try to take him out and it’s a disaster? Will they like me if I say there’s no reason to go to war? Have I focus-grouped this? Such unseriousness is potentially deeply destructive. It is certainly irresponsible. And here’s the funny thing: If some Democrat stood up and spoke thoughtfully and without regard for political consequences about what is right for us to do, he’d likely garner enhanced respect and heightened standing. He’d seem taller than his colleagues. At any rate, more than usual, I am missing Pat Moynihan and Sam Nunn.

Members of the administration, on the other hand, seem lately almost inebriated with a sense of mission. And maybe that’s inevitable when the stakes are high and you’re sure you’re right. But in off-the-cuff remarks and unprepared moments the president and some of his men often seem to have missing within them a sense of the tragic. Which is odd because we’re talking about war, after all. Leaders can’t lead by moping, but a certain, well, solemnity, I suppose, might be well received by many of us.

*   *   *

At any rate, the battle is joined. It will be waged over the next six weeks. It is going to be hot. It is going to dominate public discourse. This is good. We need and deserve a debate that is worthy of the moment, and worthy of the people—the millions of them—who could be affected by America’s decision one way or another.

And by the way, it is not bad for a critical world to see how a great democracy, the world’s oldest, goes about resolving questions of the utmost gravity. This is a good time to remind them who, and what, we are.

The story is over. It’s yesterday’s headline.

Everyone involved has begun to recede back into normal life insofar as they had normal lives. But before it becomes just another strange memory of 2002, a worthy wave goodbye.

Eunice Stone of Georgia is reportedly recovering from the chest pains that led her to check herself into a local hospital. The diagnosis was stress. The three young Muslim men with whom she had her now-famous encounter have reportedly announced they will not sue her, which is certainly gracious of them.

I wasn’t there, but I listened to everyone who spoke of it and watched the story closely. And it’s not hard to imagine what probably happened that day at Shoney’s.

Three young Mulsim men walk into the middle-class chain restaurant in a Georgia town. They are dressed in what customer Eunice Stone apparently understood to be Mideastern dress. As for Sikh, Saudi, whatever, she probably didn’t know. She probably knew as much about Muslim culture as the three young Muslim men knew about American Indian culture. Which is to say: probably nothing.

So they’re all in a small southern town, at a local chain restaurant, and when the three young Muslim males walk in, the locals—Southerners, Americans, neighbors—look at them. Maybe hard. Maybe up and down. Who are those guys?

And here we might ask: Who are the Southerners? They are likely, being Southerners, Americans who take a rather protective and even loving interest in their country. They are painfully aware that America had, just one year before, been brutally attacked by groups of people who were young Muslim males. They left 3,000 dead—innocent people, civilians, young people just starting out. It grieved a great country. It grieved them.

The Southerners know, for they keep a close eye on the news, that there are now in our country cells of young Muslim males loyal not to the United States but to the grievances and leadership of terror masters. They mean us ill. A bunch of men allegedly meeting this description were arrested last week in Buffalo, N.Y. More are said to be lying low in Michigan, Florida, New Jersey and other states. They move among us with confidence, taking advantage of the freedoms we guarantee, and taking advantage too of our cultural reluctance to jump to conclusions based on a person’s look or sex or ethnicity.

*   *   *

So the Southerners are eyeballing the young Muslim males. Maybe these guys are bad guys. They allow themselves to think this in part because one of the things Americans regret most since Sept. 11 2001 is their lack of suspicion. We’re all very live-and-let-live. Before Sept. 11, young Muslim males could tell someone in passing that soon those towers in New York will go boom. And fearing to offend, fearing to hurt the feelings of another person, we’d let it pass. We’d mind our business, give them the benefit of the doubt.

And now we wish we’d been less friendly, less trusting, less lazy or frightened. We wish we’d been skeptical. Hell, we’re the only nation on earth that is now nostalgic for paranoia.

But it’s the anniversary of Sept. 11, and now we’re trying to be alert, to look out for things.

So the Southerners eyeball the young Muslim males, and the young Muslim males feel the vibe.

And they don’t like it. They resent it.

Here they had two clear choices: Try to understand the emotions of the people around them—people who’ve been bruised, who’ve seen their country take a roundhouse right from history—and choose to be polite and friendly. The young Muslim males could smile and nod, for instance. This probably would have gone far in making progress between peoples, for one thing we’ve all read about the terrorists of Sept. 11 is that they never bothered to be nice. They tended to treat the Americans with whom they interacted with Sullen Dead Face—the inexpressive look young men put on so it will be hard for you to read them. Because they don’t want to be read. Because they want to convey an air of some menace.

They could have introduced themselves to the waitress, mentioned they’re on their way to medical school. They could have been quiet, minded their business, chatted softly.

But they didn’t bother to be nice. They wanted things on their terms.

So they took option two.

They sensed the questioning within the gazes, and they thought it would be amusing to show these stupid and uneducated Southern people, these dumb crackers, these yokels, who was boss. You think we’re bad guys? We’ll show you bad guys.

And so one of them or a few of them said the things Eunice Stone says she overheard. Talk about explosions, references to Sept. 11, talk about how Sept. 13 will be even bigger.

And Ms. Stone, alarmed, put herself on the line. She called the police and told them what she’d heard. She was interviewed by them repeatedly and exhaustively. She did everything she could to see that the young Muslim males were stopped.

The young Muslim males took off in their cars, driving south. They were stopped in Florida, where police closed a highway for an entire day as robots searched their car. The young Muslim men, the police said, were not entirely cooperative. They had attitude. Certainly in their interviews after they were released, after nothing was found in their cars, they displayed plenty of attitude. They were an unsympathetic bunch, in both ways. They showed scant sympathy for those they’d inconvenienced and alarmed, and they also inspired no sympathy for their plight. Later, a sister of one of the young men went on CNN to declare that this was the South, and you know how the South is: “It has a reputation of racism.”

I thought, as I watched this: It has a reputation for patriotism, too. It’s why Southern men and women join the armed forces in such high numbers, and why, if the sister were ever attacked by a terrorist, they’d risk their lives to save her sorry, sanctimonious little . . . Well, as I watched I got a little mad.

The South’s reputation for patriotism may be why Eunice Stone put herself on the line, and wound up overwhelmed by insults and unwanted fame, in the hospital, and ultimately being patronized—We won’t sue you—by the three young Muslim males.

*   *   *

But they were right about one thing, and it’s a big thing. This really does appear to have been a story about bigotry.

There was someone who was prejudiced, who made assumptions based on newspaper reports and urban legends; there was someone who didn’t like “the other” and assumed bad things about them; there was someone who was insensitive, lacking in compassion and aggressive.

And it wasn’t Eunice Stone. It was the three young Muslim males, the young would-be doctors, the college-educated men, who thought they’d have some fun with their social, intellectual and moral inferiors.

*   *   *

And now it’s over. The hospital they said they were on their way to visit for training told them to go elsewhere. Good hospital. Florida’s Gov. Jeb Bush privately called Ms. Stone and told her he thought she’d done the right thing. Good governor. The media, which covered the story wall to wall, did not indulge in a reflexive “poor minority person is abused by bullying whites” narrative. They questioned the men closely, and sometimes sharply. And Ms. Stone is said to be recuperating at home. May she recover fully, quickly and with the knowledge that the vast majority of Americans understand what she did and why, and appreciate it.

As for the three Muslim males, they plan to continue their studies. Perhaps they could take a course in bias reduction. It would be nice if they were assigned a paper that answers the question: “Why might a people who had just been attacked by young Muslim males feel a heightened sensitivity and awareness in the presence of young Muslim males? Discuss.”

Perhaps they could learn from Hippocrates, the father of medicine, whose advice to young doctors was timeless and is applicable here: “First, do no harm.”

George W. Bush is back, big time. In fact with a roar.

He seemed to lie low this summer, but Wednesday he re-emerged to lead the nation and stand for all it has been through this year. He spoke of mourning and memory, of our purpose and our plans. He was inspiriting.

Did you see him with the families of Flight 93 in Pennsylvania, and then with the mourners in New York, at Ground Zero? He was a genuine comfort. A genuine one. He understood it was about them and not him, and in each case he gave the families what they signaled they needed. If they wanted to talk he stopped and talked; when they wanted to hug him and weep, he took them in his arms. He was there to serve, to give and to represent. Even now, two years after the previous president, it is still a relief—an enormous relief—to have a president who doesn’t make every event a sickness-tinged drama in which he simulates emotions he does not feel and draws the cameras with the heat of his need, his persona, his never-sated ego. Smarmy bathos is gone. Thanks again, God.

But let’s go to yesterday and Mr. Bush’s speech at the U.N. It was big and it was shrewd in its rhetorical approach. The U.N. expected Mr. Bush to make the case for an invasion of Iraq based on Saddam’s threat to the security of the United States. Mr. Bush didn’t do that. Saddam he said, as if noting the obvious, “has made the case against himself.” Saddam has brazenly and consistently defied the United Nations. Saddam endangers the peace the U.N. member states so understandably desire. Saddam threatens them. But it’s all right: The United States will come to the U.N.’s aid and protect its member states from Saddam.

It was something. And it left the administration’s foes in the audience looking, at the end, as if they were thinking: Man, how do I knock this one down?

*   *   *

Kofi Annan, it seemed to me, did Mr. Bush a favor when he spoke first, and with great gravity. Mr. Annan was expected to voice strong opposition to independent American action on Iraq, but that was not quite his subject. His subject: regional threats to world peace. Nothing he said was objectionable, and soon enough he was speaking of Saddam’s record of defiance of past U.N. resolutions. He did not explicitly or even implicitly refute what he knew of Bush administration thinking on Iraq. He called for a peaceful resolution to the problem, through United Nations offices.

But it was Mr. Annan’s gravity, his moral seriousness, that provided a platform for the words of the visiting American president.

This is what Mr. Bush said: We in the United Nations have an “urgent duty” to protect lives. The peace of the world must not be disturbed by “the will and the wickedness of any one man.” Yes, our common security is threatened by regional conflicts, but an even greater threat is “outlaw groups and regimes,” those in terror camps and terror cells who wish to fulfill “mad ambitions.” And they will, if Iraq supplies them with the weapons of mass destruction they so desire.

We did not “appease” Iraq when it unlawfully moved against Kuwait in 1990. The U.S., with the U.N., forced Saddam back. He accepted defeat in clear agreements. He has since broken “every pledge.” He promised to stop abusing his people, but he uses “summary execution and torture” against them. “Repression is all pervasive.” He is brutal and sadistic; his means of repression is “a totalitarian state.”

Saddam promised to return prisoners of war from the Gulf War. “He broke his promise.” He is in “direct defiance” of a series of U.N. directives. Saddam said he would stop encouraging terrorism—he didn’t. He said he would stop attempting to assassinate international foes—he hasn’t. He agreed to destroy his stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and not develop new ones. “Iraq has broken every aspect of this fundamental pledge.”

The Iraqi “regime” (never “government” in this speech) is developing chemical weapons, and has admitted to a crash nuclear weapons program. It has the infrastructure to build nuclear weapons. If Saddam gets fissile material, he will have them in a year. “There is little doubt about his appetite” for them. He is building long range missiles, and “madly” buying arms for “mad ends.”

Mr. Bush told the U.N.: You know Saddam has defied all requests for cooperation and information, because you have denounced his behavior in the past, and you were right to denounce it.

“The history, the logic and the facts lead to one conclusion,” Mr. Bush said. “Saddam Hussein’s regime is a grave and gathering danger.”

Will the U.N. “gamble” the lives of “millions” on mere hopes that Saddam will change? Must we wait to discover he has nuclear weapons “the day he uses one”?

Saddam has given you nothing but “a decade of defiance”; he is a threat to U.N. authority and standing.

If Iraq wants peace, it will reveal and destroy its weapons of mass destruction, it will renounce terrorism, it will refrain from repression, it will release all Gulf War prisoners.

America will work with the U.N. Security Council on the question of Iraq. But “action will be unavoidable” if Iraq does not change. And if it does not, the regime, which has already “lost its legitimacy,” will “lose its power.”

Mr. Bush gave no timetable, but the very force of his words said: Act now, it will be worse if you wait. He did not refer to any possible U.N. actions, such as new demands for weapons inspections or agreements. He left the subject open, but in a way that challenged the U.N. to come up with something as strong as the speech.

And his message was clear. If the U.N. does not feel it can stand up for the very values it represents and was created to advance, the United States itself will step in to defend them for it.

*   *   *

This was a speech that gave the world a lot to chew on, ponder and face. It was a speech that piled fact upon fact, like a legal dossier. It is a speech that, through its very specificity, requires that those who disagree with Mr. Bush, specifically respond to the facts, and either counter them persuasively or let them stand. It is a speech that will be reprinted in newspapers throughout the world. It is a speech that with clarity and logic makes clear Mr. Bush’s commitment without opening him to charges of cowboyism.

And I think it was a speech that is going to move this story forward. All the world now will have to respond to the text. We will learn much from their responses.

We have already learned something of the unity of Mr. Bush’s said-to-be-fractious cabinet. Leading the applause for the president and sitting most prominently in the U.S. delegation was the secretary of state, Colin Powell, the famous dove. He didn’t look unhappy. One wonders how his support of the speech was secured; one suspects it has to do with the fact that Mr. Bush gave no timetable for action, and left open the possibility of U.N. attempts to improve the situation.

*   *   *

Chris Matthews asked last night if Mr. Bush was “a cowboy.” He is not. Every Republican president who takes stark and independent American action in the world is called a cowboy, and it’s not the worst thing you could be called. Mr. Bush obviously wants and would be grateful for international support. The sentiment of nations is important. His father demonstrated this when he created the great Gulf War coalition.

But George W. Bush is by nature and habit of mind an American exceptionalist. (In this, and in being called a cowboy, he is like Ronald Reagan.) Mr. Bush believes America is different among nations, invented on the basis of what is, literally, a heavenly idea: God created all men equal, and they must therefore move through the world, through life, with equal rights. We are uniquely blessed, uniquely situated between the oceans, uniquely the natural home of those born elsewhere who yearn to be free. And so we have special responsibilities, and a special role: We lead, and for the good of the world.

Mr. Bush’s leadership this past year has reflected a fully absorbed, and perhaps romantically held, commitment to this ideal. His speech to the U.N. underscored it.

Do I think he “made the case” for U.S. action against Iraq? I think he made a first and serious one but not the final one; I think his words and approach showed an appropriate respect for the opinion of mankind; I think more will, and should, follow. I think this story has not reached its crisis. Something tells me Saddam himself will continue to make the case against his regime. Something tells me that in the end, most all of us are going to give the American president the benefit of the doubts we hold, and back him. Something tells me that in the end we’ll be glad we did, and so will the members of the U.N.

Rudy Giuliani said the other day that he wasn’t absolutely sure the next morning, on Sept. 12, that the sun would actually come up. When it did, he was grateful. And so we are today, as we mark the anniversary of the day that changed our lives.

We are all busy remembering. A friend in Washington e-mails in the middle of the night yesterday: She cannot sleep because jets are roaring overhead, and because this is the anniversary of the last time she talked to Barbara Olson. Another e-mail, from an acquaintance: “Last year this time we were comforting eachother in instant messages.” Most everyone is getting and sending these messages.

I thought it would be flatter, this formal time of remembering, and not so authentic. Days that are supposed to be rich in meaning often aren’t. But people seem to be vividly re-feeling what they experienced a year ago, and being caught unaware, mugged by a memory. Last week a friend was telling me where he was, and in the middle of the telling a sob rose from nowhere and cut off his words. Yesterday on CNN Rosalynn Carter seemed taken aback by welling tears when she was asked how she had explained terrible events to her children when they were young. She told them, she said, that bad times didn’t mean God wasn’t there. Bad times meant God was weeping too.

Washington is marking this day with patriotism and a certain martial dignity. New York is approaching the anniversary with solemnity and respect. We are immersing ourselves in the trauma to free ourselves of the preoccupation. The great words of great presidents will be read, and some school children will hear the Gettysburg Address and the preamble to the Constitution for the first time.

A company of bagpipers will cross the Brooklyn Bridge, retracing the route of the hardy firemen of Brooklyn who roared across the bridge toward Manhattan a year ago this morning. Sirens blaring, they craned their necks to see the smoking ruins of the place where they would make their stand. For six months after that day, bagpipes were the sound of New York in mourning. They were played at all the funerals. None of us in New York will ever hear their rich and lonely wail in the same way again.

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What we are doing is taking a last hard and heartbreaking look at what happened last year. In time we will put the memories away, pack them away in a box with a pair of old gloves, and a citation and a badge, and some clippings and pictures. This is what Emily Dickinson called “the sweeping up the heart.” She said it was “the solemnest of industries enacted upon earth.”

But before we put it all away, there is a story to remember. There was a glittering city, the greatest in the history of man, a place of wild creativity, of getting, grabbing and selling, of bustle and yearning and greed. It was brutally attacked by a band of primitives. The city reeled. We knew what to expect: The selfish, heartless city-dwellers would trample children in their path as they raced for safety, they’d fight for the lifeboats like the wealthy on the Titanic.

It didn’t happen. It wasn’t that way at all. They were better than they knew! They saved each other—they ran to each other’s aid, they died comforting strangers.

Then the capital city was attacked, and there too goodness broke out. And sleeping boomers on planes came awake and charged the cockpit to keep the plane from hitting the home of the American president.

And then the mighty nation hit back at the primitives, and hit again.

This is, truly, some story. This is not a terrible thing to have to tell our children. It is a warm story. But now a certain coldness is in order.

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The sun rises tomorrow on the new era, the post-9/11-trauma era. We will make our way through the next year without the wild emotional force of 9/11 pushing us forward. We can be cool now, and deadly if need be.

This can be the year when we find Osama bin Laden. This, the next 12 months, can be when we deal the death blow to the Taliban, for this drama will not even begin to end until we have laid Osama and Osama-ism low. This is one case in which justice and vengeance are intertwined.

This is the year when the president and his advisors will or will not make the case, as they say, on Iraq. The president thinks a key part of the war on terror will be moving against Saddam Hussein and liberating Iraq from his heavy hand. But if Mr. Bush is to make the case it will not be with emotional rhetoric, with singing phrases, with high oratory. It will not, in this coming cooler time, be made with references to evil ones. All of that was good, excellent and Bushian the past passionate year. But now Mr. Bush should think in terms of Sgt. Joe Friday. “Just the facts, ma’am.”

“Saddam is evil” is not enough. A number of people are evil, and some are even our friends. “Saddam has weapons of mass destruction” is not enough. A number of countries do. What the people need now is hard data that demonstrate conclusively that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction which he is readying to use on the people of the U.S. or the people of the West.

If Mr. Bush has a good case, he will make it and the people will back him. If he does not, he will not convince the American people that blood and treasure must go to this endeavor. The people must believe, as Mr. Bush does, that their children are endangered. There was a time—I think it was Sept. 10, 2001—that Americans may not have been able to accept such an assertion. That time has passed.

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There’s another area where coldness is called for. The folly of what is happening to our airline industry is due to a wet and weepy conception of what is fair. People are afraid to fly because they see what a politically correct joke our airline security is. Searching for every last toenail clipper, forcing 85-year-old people with walkers to stand spread-eagled as some oafish wand-wielder in a blue jacket humiliates them—this is absurd and cowardly. Let’s get coldly serious: Arm the pilots, fortify cockpits, man flights with marshals, and profile passengers. We don’t have a transportation secretary who is willing to do these things. Someday when something terrible happens we’ll wish we did. Why not coldly remove Norman Mineta now?

Warm tears, honest remembrances, passionate tributes, giving credit where it’s due, absorbing 9/11, teaching our children what it meant and means: These are good things. And a little coldness starting at sunrise tomorrow: That will be good too.