Peggy Noonan

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.

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.

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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.

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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.