Peggy Noonan

Well, that was an interesting first week from Mr. Bush. He became president, established himself as the new top dog. It’s always surprising how quickly new presidents seem to look comfortable signing orders and holding meetings with the congressional leadership.

An important Democratic senator (Georgia’s Zell Miller, who took the late great Paul Coverdell’s place and seems to be showing Coverdellian courage) surprised everyone by deciding to join Texas’ Phil Gramm in sponsoring Mr. Bush’s tax cut. The new president put forth comprehensive, moderate and apparently fully thought-through legislation on education, and rescinded a presidential order on abortion. By doing so seemed to put a big fat headline on week one: Extremism Is Over, Normality Is Back.

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Rescinding the abortion order—a Clinton order that used U.S. tax dollars to support groups that provided abortions and abortion counseling for Third World women and even lobbied governments for changes in abortion laws—seemed tough but was in fact moderate, a happy combination for a new president. Mr. Bush was returning to U.S. policy before the Clinton era.

Bill Clinton, in breaking with that policy, had taken a radical step that severed policy from prudence in a stark and showy way. It was strange to decide to fund groups that give foreign women abortions.

When there is an issue that is so charged, so divisive that for more than a quarter century it has disturbed the peace of your huge and passionate nation, does it make sense to export that issue so it can roil other nations? Is that wise, or even friendly? Or is it conceited and aggressive: I’m sick, and if you had any understanding of how superior I am you’d share my sickness. It is as if America, roiling from the slavery question in 1855, decided the most helpful thing it could do to settle the issue is make sure the Ottoman Empire is able to maintain slavery too.

The Clinton decision to export and disturb reflected the way abortion in the past eight years became an issue dominated by radical thinking, by extremist views. If we like abortion then you must like abortion; if we like abortion then any restriction on it whatsoever, any limit, even in the eighth month, is bad, and must be stopped. If abortion is a legitimate act then it is legitimate at all times and in all ways. And if you have qualms or questions about this then you are the enemy, you are insufficiently supportive of women’s rights, you must be defeated at all costs.

It was all so radical. And it may ultimately prove the undoing of abortion proponents. They have ceded all claim to reasonableness. They look radical. Because they are.

Mr. Bush’s decision seems to reflect a mindset he revealed in one of his election debates with Al Gore, when he said he favored a stance of humility toward the world. He’s so modest he won’t tell other people they should have abortions just because we do, and just because we’ve made abortion into an ideology. This is refreshing, and rather a humble thing. About time.

Mr. Bush’s decision has been compared to Mr. Clinton’s attempt to rescind the ban on active and public homosexuals in the military. But the rescinding of that ban, apart from all issues of rightness or wrongness, practicality or helpfulness, did not have half the country behind it, or a quarter of the country behind it. Nor did it have the American military behind it. It had organized homosexual-rights groups that had funded and supported Mr. Clinton in the just-ended election behind it.

If you ask the American people if they want to spend money to promote abortion overseas, the majority would say: Um, no, we don’t.

The decision is not extreme but mainstream. But Bush gets credit for guts from the press, which cannot believe any scaling back of abortomania could be anything but radical and which played the story as startling and dramatic. Fine. Let the president take ironic bows.

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It seems to me the abortion announcement plus the elements of the education bill—concern for poor students, concern for failing schools, a slow run up to the possibility of vouchers—are a one-two punch that may suggest much about the new president’s style. One seemingly tough move, and one soft and compassionate one. More soft shrewdness, although perhaps it is shrewd softness—tough guy/soft guy. Not bad. And inherently antiextreme.

Mr. Bush may prove tough for the Democrats to negotiate around. They seemed rather flat-footed this week, no doubt in part because, as Rush Limbaugh has noted, they don’t have the White House war room to tell them what to say and how to fight anymore. But Mr. Bush seems to be obscuring their voices by smothering them in a blanket of sweetness and moderation. This will probably be a good combination as long as the sweet part doesn’t turn out to be softness and naiveté.

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A fashionable New York woman told me Laura Bush looked good on Inauguration Day but a little too Texan, to which I thought: Well, the whole country is probably a little too Texan, which is good. Mrs. Bush, in her interview last week on “Today,” in her inaugural appearances and remarks, in her meeting with authors, with her handsome and not too beautiful or too dorky blue coat and dress, is very quietly making a good impression.

What is most interesting about her to me is that she seems as natural and happy as someone who always wanted to be first lady, when of course she never did, and somehow you sense she’d still just as soon not be. This is in sharp contrast to Hillary Clinton, who had always wanted the power of the White House, and who in her first days seemed a whirlwind of unhappiness, dressing her husband down and swearing at him in front of the Secret Service on inaugural morning, castigating her husband and a White House steward the next day, during the Clintons’ first open house. (It was captured on tape and was a humdinger.) I wonder what it tells us that the happy one who didn’t want it is happy and the unhappy one who wanted it and got it was unhappy. Perhaps it just illustrates what Lincoln said. He observed once that he figured most people are just about as happy as they want to be.

Anyway, watching her, one gets the sense of a quiet power being born. They called Barbara Bush the Silver Fox, they called Rosalyn Carter the Velvet Hammer. I wonder what they’ll call Laura Bush.

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Ari Fleischer’s press briefings seem competent and professional. I liked what he said when a reporter pressed him on why the new president chose as one of his first moves the abortion order. “Because he believes in it. Next question.” Already Mr. Fleischer seems to know a lot. He seems amiable and open-featured, not like a furrow-browed mouthpiece for the mob, or a furtive ironist.

The new speechwriting staff looks to be the most weighty and highly regarded in many years. Chief of speechwriting Michael Gerson comes in as a former journalist and respected policy wonk who has been an integral part of the Bush operation since the presidential campaign began. He will be a deputy assistant to the president, the first speechwriter in many years, perhaps a generation, to have an office in the West Wing.

Moreover he has opened his staff not to talented and obscure young people but to the gifted and established—serious talents already proven in their fields. This suggests several important things. That this White House and president will take the written word seriously, and approach it, and writers, with due respect. That speechwriters will be in on the creation of policy, which is very important and has been true in most successful administrations. (Speechwriters, as the elegant writer Landon Parvin has observed, are always the first to know when a policy is shallow or ill thought out, because they’re the first who have to explain it.)

The high place held by Mr. Gerson and the stature of those who will be in the shop suggests President Bush is thinking not of the Carter or Reagan models for his speechwriting staff, but the old FDR-JFK-LBJ-Nixon models: get first-rate talent and integrate it fully in the workings of the machine. This is good and bodes well. It is not how Mr. Bush’s father did it—the speechwriters of his White House weren’t even allowed to dine in the White House mess, and so missed out on the daily information flow by which assistants learn and affect what’s happening.

And it’s not how Ronald Reagan did it, either. Mr. Reagan’s White House was split down the middle between Baker-Deaver-Darman and the famous pragmatists on one hand, and Ed Meese and a dozen conservative intellectuals on the other hand. The speechwriting shop was considered the home of The True Right Wing Nuts, as indeed, God bless us, we were. Every time a speechwriter got near Mr. Reagan, he ended up saying something like “the evil empire” or “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” which the pragmatists (who were not actually very pragmatic) didn’t like at all. They kept us as far from the president as possible. We sometimes called ourselves the mushrooms, after the Beirut hostages—”kept the in the dark and covered daily with manure.”

Mr. Bush the younger may be going back to the days when Ted Sorenson and Arthur Schlesinger had the run of the joint, and went on to write fine (and flattering) histories of the presidents they knew so well.

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Everyone I know is talking about the “pranks” of the departing Clinton-Gore crew on the incoming White House staff—the W’s pried off the keyboards, the garbage left in the vice president’s offices. You just know when you read about it that it’s worse than anyone is saying—the Bush people being discreet because they don’t want to start out with complaints and finger pointing, the Clinton-Gore people because it is in their obvious interests to play it down.

I would like to say the stories did not surprise me, but they did. White House vandalism is actually something new. Some of it—the purloined letters from the computers—was no doubt just silly. But some of it seems proof, yet again, that leaders consciously and unconsciously summon to their side, and work closely with, people who are like them. The Clintons were at heart vandals, tearers-down in many ways and on many levels. As George Stephanopoulos recently told Ted Koppel, the Clinton staff entered the White House without feeling enough respect. They were immature. They left as immature people would, upending trash cans, like rock stars without talent.

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I think the most interesting thing Mr. Bush said this week was not in his announcements of policy or the swearing-in of staff but in the interview with Fox News’s Britt Hume. (Idiotic disclaimer: Like many in the Western world, I am a contributor there.) The president told Mr. Hume that he didn’t think the American people had elected him. “I wish I could, you know, say it was my charming personality or the ability to string a few sentences together,” Mr. Bush said. “The truth of the matter is I am sitting here because I took firm positions on important issues and didn’t back off. And I’m not backing off the minute I arrive in Washington.”

This offered more than the usual insight into his thinking. His father campaigned as a Reaganite in 1988; he ran as Reagan III. He was elected because the people thought he would govern like Mr. Reagan. But he became confused by his landslide, and thought the people had elected him. And so he acted Bushlike, not Reaganesque, got taken to the cleaners by the Democrats in Congress, and lost his presidency.

I wondered if the new president was saying: I learned my father’s lesson, and won’t be making his mistake.

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A note recently from a White House reporting hand, telling me the first Bush week is distressingly peaceful. The Clinton people were full of drama and stories, never a dull moment. The Bush people so far: polite, courteous, dignified, dull. It reminded me of a conversation with a reporter friend years ago. I had asked her how she liked covering the new Bush White House of 1989, and she said it was awful. The Carter people were vicious about each other, the place was full of gossip and back stabbing. And the Reagan White House had been a nonstop war—tongs with full daggers drawn, blood on the floor. But Bush’s White House was so—buttoned down and polite!

I laughed. It started that way, but it didn’t end that way. It ended with Dick Darman being fooled by his friend Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, who decided he would have to publish the Bush team’s finger-pointing recollections of the creation of their recession and budget deals, just in time for election day, ‘92.

Reporters will get a story. Reporters always do. People in White Houses always provide them. Or at least it has always been so.

President Bush’s inaugural address had a specific weight. Some speeches just float away because they’re light and full of air, but this one had weight and stayed and settled. It was a speech that declared the new president’s thinking as he assumes the presidency. This is what he thinks: God is here and asks us to do good.

The tone was properly ecumenical, but the content was God-filled: “We are guided by a power larger than ourselves, Who created us equal in his image”; “Abandonment and abuse are not acts of God, they are failures of love”; “Church and charity, synagogue and mosque, lend our communities their humanity, and they will have an honored place in our plans and laws”; “Sometimes in life we are called to do great things. But as a saint of our times has said, every day we are called to do small things with great love.”

It was the speech of a compassionate conservative, of one who sees need, and who will neither ignore it nor respond to it with the cold buying-off of constituencies. It was the speech of someone who doesn’t think this is all a game.

That is the deeper meaning. As for the political meaning, it seemed full of shrewd softness. George W. Bush did not speak, as many talking heads including my own had said he would, and as his father 12 years ago had, of bipartisanship. He spoke of civility, by which he meant bipartisanship.

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In using civility, his plea was unimpeachable. Who could disagree with the need for more of it? But by not explicitly lauding bipartisanship, he stayed clear of the murky waters of its meaning and mutuality, not to mention what one-way bipartisanism did to his father’s administration. Now, when the Democrats of Congress assault his motives as he puts forth his program, he can sigh, shake his head, and refer to his high hopes for greater civility. This is so clever I would call it Clintonian, except it isn’t sick.

Also, his speaking so much and so feelingly of God’s place and precedence, his speaking so explicitly of poverty and disadvantage as failures of love, puts the Democrats of Congress in another interesting position. If you don’t give room to faith-based help, and freedom-based assistance to children in trouble in school and on the streets, God and I gonna open up a can of whupass on you.

In terms of the rhetoric and presentation, two things: Mr. Bush in the past has sometimes seemed not as good as his material; it lifted him, he didn’t lift it. But in this speech he lifted it. He gave it not just as a president, but like a president, with gravity and sureness. Gone was the squinting, awkward fellow of the acceptance speech; here was the serene and serious man of the new era.

The overall rhetoric of the speech was somewhat less successful than its content. It was fancy, and quite un-Bush-like in its fanciness. At times, at least for me, it was opaque. I had to read the “Angel on the Whirlwind” twice before I took its meaning, but most of those listening at home and in the Capitol did not have a text. There is a simplicity in the best sense to Mr. Bush’s thoughts. There should be an unlabored simplicity to his expressions.

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Mr. Bush’s eyes filled with tears as he took the oath of office—quite possibly a historical first—and people have discussed why. Family redemption, old losses now avenged. Maybe. But I suspect they were the tears of a 54-year-old man who hadn’t amounted to much in his first 40 years—poor student, average athlete, indifferent businessman, all of this in contrast to his father’s early and easy excellence. He had struggled to find himself and his purpose; amazing and fantastic things had happened, and he had gone on to make himself a president—”Called to do great things.”

I think as he stood with his hand held high he felt deep gratitude, deep love, and a hunger to do right, to actually serve and not only dominate his country. Historians should press him on what those tears meant, and see if he can explain.

There was something portentous to the day. The unrelenting overcast, the gloomy skies, the bone-chilling wet; through the slightly tinted glass of the Fox studios the heavy skies made things look like they were happening in a Martian atmosphere. It was dark early. At 4 p.m., the lights of the limousines shone on the slick blacktop of Pennsylvania Avenue. The inaugural parade was marked by protests. It was as if fate, or God, had decided to tell Mr. Bush one last time: Nothing in this will be easy.

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I spent three days at the inaugural. I cannot say I have never seen conservatives so happy—I saw them in 1980 and 1984. But I have never seen conservatives so warm, so grateful, so unified, like still vital veterans come together not only to tell old stories but to plan new campaigns.

They gathered at many places, but one of the most rollicking was the Embassy of Uzbekistan on Massachusetts Avenue on inauguration night, where hundreds kissed and hugged and showed pictures of the kids. It is nice to see conservatives triumphant, but it is better to see them sweet. At least for a night.

As for the former president, Bill Clinton rejected the option of controversial last minute pardons, saying that they would be construed as cynical. He eschewed his weekly radio address as a courtesy to the incoming president on his inaugural speech day. He and Mrs. Clinton accompanied them to the swearing in, where Mr. Clinton ceded the spotlight to Mr. Bush, sitting quietly, almost contemplatively.

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After the inaugural, he and Mrs. Clinton left the Capitol by a side door with a small detail and arrived at Andrews Air Force base, where they met with a band of supporters, quietly bid them goodbye, waved from the door of a military transport and disappeared into the skies to return to Arkansas.

Oh wait, that didn’t happen. Mr. Clinton forced himself into every picture, did the big-chested big jaw through every photo op, held a political rally at Andrews, actually reviewing the troops with trumpets and flourishes. He then reassured the nation that he was not leaving. Then, having insisted on a huge Air Force One-size plane to impress the rubes of New York, he arrived at John F. Kennedy Airport to which he had invited 10,000 supporters for yet another political rally. A thousand came. He called himself Citizen Clinton with his usual false modesty and faux bonhomie. What a disturbed and disgusting individual. What a wonderful thing for our country that he has been replaced as president.

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But let’s not end there. At every inauguration there is a heightened sense of history happening. There is a tenderness. Most everyone feels the heightened sense, which expresses itself in a laughter that you fully understand and a choked-up feeling that you don’t.

We don’t do so much flag-waving in the new America, but suddenly the streets are full of floats with giant American eagles and bucking broncos and men dressed up as Buffalo Bill Cody. I was on the top of the Health and Human Services building early in the morning and in the darkness there were echoes of the music of a band rehearsing, and bright white lights trained on busy little white tents, and cannons being put in place for the salute. Suddenly for me it was Lincoln meeting with his generals in the tents near the Wilderness.

On an inaugural morning there is nervous laughter and banter in the motorcade, in the green room, on the set, in Blair House, in the holding area as the marching chorus waits to be waved into the parade. There are tired eyes that are red-rimmed already at seven in the morning, and the tired sour breath of workers who’ve been up all night—readying the platform, planning the broadcast, lighting the stage, setting the tables.

The morning of the swearing-in, Pope John Paul II sent Mr. Bush a beautiful telegram, which ended with these words: “Upon you and your family and upon the beloved American people I cordially invoke the Lord’s abundant blessings.” When I heard it read aloud—“I . . . ask God, the father of all nations, to guide your efforts”—I thought it was not a telegram but a prayer.

It was the old world talking to the new, the receding world of 1978, the year John Paul was “inaugurated,” to the new world of 2001, the world in which the new president will do his work. Another salute on inauguration day, and it made you want to touch your chest and say, “May it be so.”

The question going into Bill Clinton’s farewell speech last night was this: Is this the last speech of the Clinton presidency, or the first speech of the new Clinton era? It was very much the latter, which is why he never said the word “goodbye” or “farewell.”

There was a time—it lasted more than 200 years—when American presidents came from America, journeyed to Washington to serve and then, when they were done, followed the tradition of George Washington and went back home to America, where they lived out the rest of their lives. The tradition underscored the ideal of citizens who left a good life to serve their country at considerable cost, and who then, work done, returned to normal life and the higher title of citizen.

In modern times Harry Truman did this, and Dwight Eisenhower, and Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter, who went back to the peanut business, and Ronald Reagan, who retired to California. George Bush returned to Houston. But Bill Clinton will never leave, and he made this clear when he said, “My days in this office are nearly through, but my days of service, I hope, are not.”. He has never been much interested in traditions, or their meaning.

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As a speech it was not terrible. He looked, finally, comfortable in the Oval Office, as if he thought he belonged there. In outlining his economic triumphs he congratulated the American people—”you have risen to every new challenge”—in the same tone with which on your bad days you congratulate your child for doing well at school or sports. He said that he had taken the steps and given the leadership that ignited the American economy, but he noted that “I’ve tried to give all Americans the tools and conditions to build the future.”

He claimed to have created “a new kind of government: smaller . . . more effective.” He said, “Our schools are better.” And so a presidency that began essentially with lies ends essentially with lies. There is a lovely egg-like completeness and perfection to this.

The speech was mostly a legacy speech, similar to the dozen or so goodbye speeches and interviews with which Mr. Clinton has been filling his last months in office. (Ronald Reagan gave only one farewell interview and one farewell address, and that in December, so as not to intrude on the new president’s inaugural. But he was old fashioned—and a gentleman.)

Once again, last night, Mr. Clinton argued the case for his greatness—the economy up, a world at peace, Americans never so happy. He refrained, however, from saying, as he has in speeches in the past week, that it is possible some other president will come along some day and be as good as he, nor did he note that the wonderful things he has done he learned first in Arkansas.

He said he wanted to leave the American people with three thoughts. The first was that we must stay the course on fiscal restraint. By this he meant: Don’t pass Bush’s tax cut.

His second point, and a long one it was, was that global poverty “requires more than compassion.” I think a deconstruction of this thought is: It requires programs, i.e., liberal programs. In other words: When Osama bin Laden and his henchmen blow up an American city, it won’t be my fault, it will be President Bush’s.

His third thought was that America is a nation of many ethnic and racial groups, and we must continue to honor this fact and help those in need. We need programs for this, he suggested. “Compassion isn’t enough,” he said, in the speech’s clearest shot at Mr. Bush. What he was really saying was: That compassionate conservative guy is a big phony.

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That the speech was lacking in grace or largeness goes without saying, that it offered seemingly wise and even avuncular words with a subtext of political aggression and competitiveness was in its way perfect. That is what Mr. Clinton’s career has been, aggression offered as sympathy.

I watched the speech with a gathering of Democratic and Republican speechwriters, veterans of the craft who approach presidential speeches with a mixture of sophistication and sympathy. It was a sparkling group, and I always feel honored to be among them, for history walks the room when they are there. Their reviews of the speech:

From a Democrat: “Listening to Bill Clinton is like eating cotton candy. it’s sweet going down but it’s only air.”

From another Democrat: “He didn’t say, ‘So long’; he said, ‘I’ll see you Monday.’ ”

The Republicans were similarly negative.

There is a great cliché in America, among conservatives, that the American elite like Mr. Clinton, while the good common people are more likely to deplore him. But in my experience, no one has contempt for Mr. Clinton like sophisticated Americans, particularly sophisticated and accomplished liberals. I think it is to some degree snobbery—they do see him now as a low-rent oaf with a squat and grasping wife—but it is more than that. They understand what he has done in letting foreign nationals buy U.S. foreign policy, and deep down they are not amused. They think he is a weak egomaniac, a man who’ll do anything from fear and hunger. Also they’ve all been in therapy, and they see his sickness. They know who he is.

But now he is over, or rather his presidency is. He will stay in Washington and New York. I was interested to see that no one back home in Arkansas seemed upset or surprised about this when he went home to speak at the state house in Little Rock this week. They knew he was never coming back, and they knew that he was not really of them, but only using home as a base to stay viable within the system.

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Mr. Bush comes in tomorrow, and that is good. Even if he is a bad president, he will be better than what we’ve got. There is something I hope he does as soon as he gets into the White House. It has to do with a fanciful, perhaps, sense of evil. I think that all places of concentrated power have within them the devil’s little imps—little imps, unseen, sitting on the cornice of the doorway in this office, giggling quietly in a corner on a book case in that one. They are in all places of power I think and they feel very much at home in such places, and the good people working in them don’t even sense their presence, have no awareness of them, but get tripped up by them, tormented by them, even wind up sometimes doing their work for them and not even knowing it.

All White Houses have them. But in the one just ending the imps ran wild. It would be a very good and important thing if Mr. Bush invited in a fine and good priest, a wise and deep rabbi, a faithful and loving minister, and had them pray together in that house, and reanoint it, and send the imps, at least for a while, on their way. Perhaps they could include the prayer of old John Adams, that only good men serve in this great and stately mansion.

It’s good to start out clean. And it’s good to begin any great enterprise with prayers, which seems to be something the Bushes know well.

And so it begins, one week and one day from today. On that bright morning—well, at just about 11:59:59 a.m.—you will place your left hand on the King James Bible your father and George Washington before him used for their swearing-ins, and take the oath of office. I wonder if when you finish you will bend slightly to kiss the big black book, as some new presidents have.

You will shake the hand of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, kiss your wife—president’s wives didn’t stand with their husbands at the swearing-in until Lady Bird Johnson decided she wanted to in 1965, and every president’s wife has since, usually holding the Bible. You’ll kiss your daughters, hug your parents—your mother will be smiling, and your father will have wept—and receive from an aide a dark leather notebook holder containing a print version of your inaugural address. You’ll turn to the podium, open the holder, look out at the crowd, scan the TelePrompTers, and begin.

“My fellow Americans . . .”

*   *   *

Of course you could use “fellow citizens” (JFK, Reagan), “fellow-citizens” (Washington, Jefferson, Monroe, Lincoln in 1861—he meaningfully changed it to “Fellow countrymen” four years later, as the Civil War ended), “my fellow countrymen” (LBJ), “citizens of the United States” (Grant), or “my countrymen” (Harding, Coolidge, Hoover).

Your father used “fellow citizens, neighbors and friends.”

Whatever salutation you choose, and you can create a new one, what follows will go into the history books, as you well know.

An inaugural address is a special thing; we have had only 53 of them since the first, Washington’s in 1789. Each has been a spectacular opportunity for the incoming or re-elected president to appear at his best, with all eyes upon him; to speak unfiltered, uncut and uninterpreted by the press, at least while he speaks and even for some time afterward. (Pundit politesse: Almost no columnist is tough on an inaugural address right away; it feels and seems ungracious.)

An inaugural is a special kind of speech in other ways. It is not an argument for a candidacy, but it can be an argument for a cause. It is not a laundry list of legislation, and it does not speak the language of legislation, or shouldn’t. It’s more like a tone poem. A State of the Union address, which you’ll give in late January, is a policy statement. It lays out specific goals and announces legislation in pursuit of them.

But an inaugural address speaks of root meaning. It declares a way of looking at the world. It tells us directly or indirectly about the new leader’s attitudes and intentions toward the great problems of the day. It is in fact a unique opportunity to define those problems (FDR, economic depression; Lincoln, looming war; Kennedy, freedom endangered; Reagan, freedom besieged.) An inaugural address names what it is we face, and declares the new president’s thinking on it.

You are in a good position. It is the opposite of Lyndon Johnson’s in 1965. Johnson that year gave his inaugural address in the shadow of a murdered president who four years before had given the finest inaugural of the modern age. LBJ was not, and would not be called even if he had been, JFK’s equal in stagecraft and eloquence.

You give your speech four years after the worst inaugural address of modern times, Bill Clinton’s second. It won’t be hard to surpass it. It’s good to follow inadequacy.

*   *   *

Right now you’re still fielding suggestions and getting long e-mails with ideas and “language,” the word used in politics and business to mean this is not only an idea, this is how you should speak of the idea. Old friends and relatives are sending you bits of poems and verses of Scripture and saying, “Use this, George.” And you’re smiling and saying thanks and promising you’ll look at it later.

People, especially oddly enough people in politics, usually think the great challenge with an inaugural address is how to say things. How to come up with an “Ask not what your country can do for you” or a “Let us go forth to lead the land we love” or a “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” But the real challenge is deciding what to say, not how to say it.

FDR decided first that he must reassure the American people that they would make it through the Depression. It was after he’d made that decision that he and his speechwriters came up with “nothing to fear.” The key moment was when he decided reassurance was necessary. The style of the reassurance followed.

Right about now, today, you’re still deciding what’s necessary. You’ve been jotting down notes and getting them to Michael Gerson, your speechwriter. And since everyone is still giving you ideas, I will too.

You have often referred to the need for more elevated attitudes in Washington, for bipartisanship. This is appropriate, and good. But with a Democratic Party and apparatus emboldened by Linda Chavez’s collapse and gunning for John Ashcroft and Gale Norton, your references to bipartisanship might seem like the gratitude of the young missionary who thought his new friends the cannibals were awfully nice to have him for dinner, when of course they were having him for dinner.

Your father spoke of bipartisanship in his inaugural address. “The people did not send us here to bicker,” he said, to great applause. Your father meant it, as you well know. He put out his hand and offered it to the opposition. And you know what his bipartisanship yielded: a one-way street that led to a single term. It yielded bad policy, and produced Ross Perot and Bill Clinton.

Are you going to speak of bipartisanship? Maybe you can do it in a way that makes it clear what you mean when you use the word. What is your vision of it, how do you conceive it, how will you achieve it, what will you not sacrifice to get it?

What is compassionate conservatism? You have spoken of it often, it is the phrase that stands for you. But in a concrete and specific way, how does it differ philosophically from the Democrats’ kind of compassion, which is in their view a harnessing of government resources to help the disadvantaged? How does your philosophy differ? Does it accept liberal concerns but differ with traditional liberal remedies? Does it amount to a philosophical shift in how the government will be encouraged or allowed to approach the disadvantaged?

This is a chance to talk about your philosophy. How does it differ from the old conservatism, from the thinking of Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater, and then Ronald Reagan, and of Bill Buckley when he was young (for he too was a great leader of the conservative philosophy)? Compassionate conservatism is what you stand for domestically. You can reach a lot of people in your explanation of it in your inaugural, and make it memorable for them, more than a phrase.

*   *   *

You will speak of America and the world. What is our country’s position now, and what should it be? The old bipolar world of U.S.-Soviet dominance, the old bipolar disorder, is over, and no one in politics has quite defined or argued for what must replace it. What is our place in the world now? Are we its leader? What does that mean and entail? What are we leading for, what are we trying to achieve, how do we mean to achieve it?

What is the biggest challenge facing our country now? Many of us, a minority but one senses a growing one—and one also senses that you’re one of us—feel that the great issue facing us, the one history will talk about years from now with wonder and horror, is an issue that shows up nowhere in the polls and has not had a national leader, a national voice.

And that is homeland security. The fact that we have virtually nothing protecting our continent from nuclear attack, from missile attack, that we have no infrastructure created to deal with nuclear terrorist attack, no strong broad civil-defense system to deal with chemical or biological attack, that we are utterly open to and vulnerable to cyber-terrorism, that we have an essentially unwarned populace. And this when everyone in Washington knows what’s coming, and knows that the only question is when.

You would do a great service to speak of these things in your inaugural. But it would cost you because it would be unpleasant. People won’t like it. But they need to hear it. They need someone to say, at least somewhere and soon if not next week: This is going to happen, and we have to unite and take strong measures now. (Maybe this is best for the State of the Union. And maybe a way to approach it is to make the Federal Emergency Management Agency, long a backwater, one of the most crucial government agencies. Maybe you signaled your intentions by putting Joe Albaugh, your friend and confidante, in charge of it.)

*   *   *

Those are a few ideas on what is necessary. As for how to say it, you’ll follow your instinct and speak the way you speak—with simplicity, with common words. You speak the language of business and politics. It’s part masculine, part Texan, part modern, sporty. You say things like “the bottom line” without irony.

That’s fine. You can do a lot with plain words humbly spoken.

Mr. Clinton’s second inaugural was so bad because he never decided what he wanted to say, and finally just strung together a bunch of high-sounding phrases that sounded to him as if something serious were being said. He tried to camouflage with faux eloquence the fact that he had nothing to say. A famous historian turned to me, furious, in the moments after the speech was given and said, “It was junk! Just junk!” But he did not say that in public.

You, Mr. Bush, can do the opposite of Mr. Clinton. Don’t worry about how to say it, give your attention now to what to say. You don’t need fancy phony phrases, you don’t have to do “ask not” and “let us go forth.” Hold the “let us.” The country’s heard every one of these overblown, orotund phrases the past 40 years. Plain speaking would come like a blessing and be received like a gift.

A few small things that maybe aren’t so small. Dick Hauser, a Washington attorney and member of the Reagan class of ‘80-’88, has suggested you include some meaningful symbolism that would be a concrete benefit to the District of Columbia, and to all Americans. Announce that you are going to reopen Pennsylvania Avenue, the great broad thoroughfare that in the Clinton years was closed to traffic in front of the White House. You can make it a great dynamic boulevard again, make it a place of movement and commerce again, and give us all a sense of spaciousness returned and energy restored, on a two-way street.

Something else. Jack Kennedy did a moving and beautiful thing to his father the day he was inaugurated. Old Joe was up on the parade reviewing stand as the beginning of the inaugural parade came by in front of the White House. At the beginning of the parade was his son, in an open car. As JFK’s limo passed in front of the stand, the new president saw his father, stood and doffed his top hat to the old man.

Your parents will be in that reviewing stand too, including Barbara Bush, the first woman since Abigail Adams to be both first lady and mother of a president. If that doesn’t deserve a tip of the hat, what does?

Do good. An inaugural is a golden trumpet a president gets to blow at most twice in his life. Blow hard and true.

Bring your joy. Surprise people with your excellence. Give your foes second thoughts, and your friends new certitude. As your old man used to say, “Onward.”

I return from 10 days away to find on the front page of every newspaper in America the official swearing-in of Hillary Clinton, Sen. Clinton, dressed in a pantsuit of robin’s-egg blue, her right hand raised, a radiant smile upon her face. Moments later, Strom Thurmond rose and asked if he could hug her, which made everyone in the chamber chuckle.

And so it begins. And appropriately enough with what appears to be another of Mrs. Clinton’s transformations. She appears to be in the middle of another metamorphosis. The last was of her outward appearance—there is almost no recognizing the Hillary of 1997 in the Hillary of the campaign trail three years later. But the latest transformation seems to be connected to personality, or even character—from full of presumption to lit by humility, from imperious to collegial, enraged to endearing. She no longer seems like the kind of person who, in Dick Morris’s words, sets off the alarms when she walks past a bank.

Since her victory in November, gone has been the Hillary of the Angry Visage. As she breezes into parties and past the press, as she greets her new colleagues and makes sure other, lesser known freshmen get in the picture, she seems not at all like the strange and cunning lady who railed bitterly at the White House staff, got Billy Dale canned, attacked conservatives, maneuvered and misled.

This is a sudden change, and there are probably two kinds of people who can change so suddenly. The first is a person with a lot inside, a person of true depth who is capable of true growth, and who might be transformed by desire and commitment, by a hunger to be a better human being, and who might get the strength for this mighty work from religious conversion, or a serious and successful therapy.

The second kind of person might appear to change, and easily and quickly, not because he is so full but because he is so empty. If your inner self is essentially absent, or is only a bundle of desires and habitual responses to them, it’s no great deal to change, or seem to. It’s like turning a ship with an empty hull: It takes less strength. A change of course can be made quickly, with little strain, and more changes can follow.

Mrs. Clinton, of course, has a great deal to be happy about—a new kind of political power, an independent base, a bright future in her party, new wealth. Good fortune makes most of us smile, and perhaps it’s only that.

*   *   *

One of the things that is most amazing and impressive is how Mrs. Clinton continues to get politically like-minded individuals and groups to underwrite her career. The great institution of American publishing, for instance, which is, in general, politically and culturally liberal, is giving her $8 million for a book—which she reportedly demanded in a lump-sum advance. This shows that she truly is not a normal writer, and I say this meaning that she is different not only in that she cannot write.

The agreement looks for all the world as if she were being given money not as an advance, but to advance an agenda—her own. Or perhaps it is simply a shrewd investment. Mrs. Clinton will soon be in a position to smile or frown on the interests of the publisher’s parent company, Viacom, a communications empire with much, always, at stake in Congress and before numerous government agencies. With the $8 million, the publisher pays for her new Washington mansion, where the senator can function as a powerhouse fund-raiser for other candidates for national office, who will, when they win, pledge their loyalty to her, and to Clintonism. When Hollywood shows the home of a senator in a movie, it’s a McLean mansion, but most senators share apartments or have houses out of town. Mrs. Clinton’s living arrangements will be truly extraordinary.

But what is important to note is that this is the left underwriting the left, not with the usual fellowships and grants and MacArthur “genius” awards, but underwriting Mrs. Clinton’s daily concrete ability to proselytize for, and build, and institutionalize, her particular kind of leftism in America.

The publisher has suggested that the $8 million advance is in lieu of the stratospheric sales that will be spurred by Mrs. Clinton’s stunning revelations. This, they seem to be saying, will move millions of books. But they must know this is not true. Mrs. Clinton has been many things the past eight years, but forthcoming is surely not one of them; she has shown no tropism toward the truth, and in any case would be foolish to start telling it now. She is more like what was said of Nixon, that he doesn’t think honesty is the best policy but he does think it’s a policy. If she now tells the full truth about the scandals, from Travelgate to the Puerto Rican FALN terrorists, she will undermine her own past statements and insistences.

All she can do now is repeat with new words. Nor is she likely to tell the truth about her politics, which, again, she has not done in the past. She will continue to cloak, with words like “concern” and “compassion”—for those who bowl alone, for those who suffer from various diseases—her apparent desire for a maximum accrual of wealth and power to a government run by those whose higher understanding entitles them to run it. That would be her, and her friends.

In the broadest sense, Mrs. Clinton, like Tony Blair, like every sophisticate in Europe and bureaucrat in Brussels, seems to be in pursuit of one world—of the end of nations, and the beginning of a world federation. This would make a bleaker world—more regimented, more uniform, more controlled by the values and desires of an elite, less free, less spacious.

But I don’t imagine Mrs. Clinton will start talking about that, whatever the promptings of the person who ultimately writes the book, or those who publish it, whose motives are no doubt more immediate. Mrs. Clinton knows what the $8 million is about, and what it can be used for, and will no doubt use it well.

At the end of the week in which President-elect Bush finally came to Washington, the reports are: So far, so good. From public cabinet appointments to private meetings, those who see Mr. Bush in action respond with one word: Good.

Colin Powell? Good. Condi Rice? Good. Mel Martinez? Good. When Paul O’Neill was nominated for Treasury, people were burning up the phone lines from Washington to Wall Street asking: “Is this good?” Within a day and after much head scratching the common wisdom was: Good.

As for meetings, a case in point was this Monday’s 9 a.m. gathering in Trent Lott’s office between Mr. Bush and the Senate Republican leadership—Don Nickles of Oklahoma, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, Larry Craig of Idaho, Bill Frist of Tennessee, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, along with some 20 Senate staffers and a handful of Bush aides.

It was the first time Mr. Bush had met with all of them in the Capitol, and the first time as president-elect. In the 40-minute meeting Mr. Bush was “relaxed, gracious, and lighthearted” in the words of one participant.

He knew what he wanted to say, and he said it. He began by telling them that not only is he president-elect but he is absolutely convinced that he won the presidential race. He said that having won the race he means to carry out his program. “It wasn’t rhetoric,” the participant quoted him. Mr. Bush said he wanted to move forward on the issues he’d campaigned on: a real across-the-board tax cut with rate reductions for everyone, Social Security reform, Medicare reform and education reform. Mr. Bush went on to say, again according to the participant, “There are two things that I think we need to deal with right up front—the first, the energy crisis, both short term and long term. And the other is the state of our national defenses.’ ” He said may be time to take another look at nuclear power.

Mr. Bush didn’t go into details; he painted in broad strokes. Another who was there said the president-elect revealed some of what his leadership style will be. “You got a sense of the way he’ll work with Congress—’Here’s what I want, now you tell me how you can get there.’ He didn’t say, for instance, ‘I am going to stand on absolute ground that we have to have all the tax cuts.’ It was more of a ‘That’s what I like, that’s what I want, but if you tell me we have to go incremental, we’ll go that way.’ ”

Mr. Bush invited each senator to speak, said he’d welcome advice. A few spoke about energy, some about taxes. When it was Strom Thurmond’s turn, he said: “Wuhk hahd!”

Everyone laughed, and the 98-year-old Mr. Thurmond looked at them. “He duh that, he be a great prezdint!”

Mr. Bush was engaged. He listened; he quipped. “It was the first day of the honeymoon,” the participant said. The senators left the meeting “feeling the man is wonderfully charming and engaged in small groups like that. I think he is easier just to like than his father or even Reagan was, because his personality is so easygoing. Reagan had a sharper direction, and he had two or three ideas, not six. He would have been simpler, and he would have been more eloquent.” But Mr. Bush “was one of the gang—no pretense, none at all.”

*   *   *

Privately, senators talk about and worry over the difference between the Bush in the room and the Bush at the podium. In a room, in small meetings, he is sharp, funny, knowing. A senator told me, “When he was with us, the words didn’t trip; the grammar and usage were perfect, no mispronunciations.” But “he stiffens up in front of the TelePrompTer.”

Senate Republicans want the American people to see the Bush they see—the Bush in the room—when he is at the podium. Because the Bush in the room is reassuring—his persona and personality, his Teddy Roosevelt-like brio, his quickness and quick understanding are reassuring. People leave him feeling confident in him, and impressed.

The man at the podium, however—the man who makes the cabinet announcements and who answers the questions from the press on whether he’s damaging the economy by talking it down—is not so reassuring, because he looks nervous. His nervousness is understood by viewers—by the American people—to suggest fear: fear of the job, of the reporters, of the viewers, of the microphones.

The good news: Mr. Bush is not afraid. Those who meet with him can see it. The bad news: He looks afraid when he speaks in public, which is where the vast majority of people see him.

The good news: This is a fixable problem. Eight years ago that old smoothie Bill Clinton walked clumsily, didn’t know how to salute the Marine at the door of the helicopter, jogged around in little shorts, took forever to make his appointments and then spent a month taking them back: Bye, Lani; sorry, Kimba; see ya, Zoë.

Mr. Clinton now is sleek and sure, but that’s not how he started. He had to work at it. So does Mr. Bush. Everyone who supports him wants him to devote time now to working seriously and with commitment at the particular demands of the public presentation of the presidency. Every day he should be taking half an hour to work on the TelePrompTer, and like his father he should work with a speech coach. Why every day? Because it will get rote and boring. And once it begins to feel rote and boring he will begin to lose his self-consciousness.

Bad news: Mr. Bush tends to see public presentation as a phony part of the job, and he doesn’t love it. But it’s not a phony part of the job. It is the job. A presidency is a public thing.

Good news: Karen Hughes and others around Mr. Bush understand all this.

*   *   *

A second concern Republican officials on Capitol Hill have about Mr. Bush: Does he know how hard the Democrats are going to be on him? All presidents who’ve been governors unconsciously take their statehouse experience with them into the Oval Office and think it will form some kind of paradigm for their White House experience. And they are, as we all know, always wrong, because the presidency is different not only in size but in type. It’s a different animal.

The Democrats of Capitol Hill are not the Democrats of Austin. Texas Democrats are more like Republicans. Congressional Democrats are sui generis. Sometime back a member of Congress told me: “Tom Dashle is like George Mitchell, he’s so nice and sincere and reasonable—on the outside. He has a soft voice and demeanor. You’d go to dinner with him and think what a good guy. But he’s intractable, he looks for the advantage at every point, and he’s mean.” The Democrats of Austin made deals and stuck to them; arm twisting and cajoling and charming and pressuring were part of the game. But the Democrats of Capitol Hill are ideological, and so they are ferocious.

The Republicans of Capitol Hill are wondering if Mr. Bush understands this. The president-elect keeps saying he knows what to expect and he’s ready. But as a Senate veteran told me, “You never know what to expect and you’re never ready.”

Mr. Bush seems confident when he talks about the Democrats. Which leaves Republicans wondering if he knows more than they do or they know more than he. They’re hoping he knows more.

Republicans in the Senate expect a tough year. The scenario might become brighter if some of the newly elected Democrats who have been Governors, and who have worked with legislatures, become part of a functioning moderate majority. The new members—Thomas Carper of Delaware, Ben Nelson of Nebraska—could find themselves voting with moderates like Louisiana’s John Breaux and senators who are up for re-election in two years like the other Louisianan, Mary Landreau. This could be good news for the Republicans, and for Mr. Bush.

Another potential challenge Republicans speak of quietly on Capitol Hill is John McCain. In the Senate, as every schoolchild knows, one man can stop everything through the power of the filibuster. So watch Mr. McCain, who made his agenda clear last week in a meeting of Republican senators. He told his colleagues that he has a bigger constituency than they: “I’ve made promises to the American people.” His agenda of course is not Mr. Bush’s—not tax relief or Social Security or Medicare reform—but campaign-finance reform. In the words of a colleague, “He’s just gonna do his own thing and it doesn’t matter what impact it has on anyone else.”

So while Mr. Bush is thinking he is going to begin the people’s business with the issues he campaigned on, John McCain means to do the people’s business with those he campaigned on.

Stay tuned.

*   *   *

It is a matter of wide and hopeful belief on the left, and among those who ask questions on talk shows, that the right is ready to eat Mr. Bush for breakfast, that “right wingers” will soon make his life impossible with demands, that conservatives will bring him to heel if he makes the wrong move.

This is not true, and is a wonderful example of thinking that what was true in 1989 must be true today.

But the left’s expectation of trouble is good for Mr. Bush. He will be his moderate-conservative, compassionate-conservative self, and will not begin his presidency with a conservative version of gays in the military. And for being himself and not doing something stupid, he will receive credit from the establishment for standing up to pressure that wasn’t there. Plus, since there’s always someone who wants to stand up and scream—since some conservative is going to want to be The First One to Denounce Bush—that person will be given serious and respectful treatment in the press, and Mr. Bush again will receive establishment credit when he ignores him.

The fact is there is not a conservative leader in America who is not acutely conscious of the position Mr. Bush is in. Beyond that, conservatives leaders feel they know Mr. Bush as they didn’t know his father, and they trust him as they didn’t his father. They think they know his heart. And conservative leaders have mellowed. They’re all older and more seasoned than they were 20 years ago when Ronald Reagan came to town and they came to power. They’re mellower in part because they’ve spent the past 10 years observing their country and concluding that the great concern is not which program passes or doesn’t, but who we’ve become as a people and what kind of culture we live in together. That’s the big ballgame now; tax policy and Social Security reform are important, but who we are trumps everything, and is not so answerable and healable in Washington.

How the right means to treat Mr. Bush was made clear Thursday morning in a Washington Times essay by Paul Weyrich, a dean of Washington conservatism and head of the Free Congress Foundation. He outlined the “responsibility” of conservatives in the new era: “We have to realize that Mr. Bush is in a position like no other president has been in more than a century. We have to cut him some slack. . . . We cannot sit here in judgment of his every move waiting to pounce on him.”

That from the man whose fierce torpedoing of John Tower as Defense Secretary in the first days of the first Bush presidency was a blow from which the first President Bush never wholly recovered.

*   *   *

The president-elect had a good week. His cabinet appointments have been uniformly well received and demonstrated unshowily that Mr. Bush meant it when he presented a party convention last summer of striking ethnic diversity. The president-elect has a tropism toward Republicans who are members of minority groups. He is impressed by them, understands the courage it takes to be them, wants to support them. All to the good.

The staff decisions he has made so far have been unsurprising. The Texas power grid that gave shape to his governorship and presidential candidacy will give shape to his White House. They earned it, they’re talented and discreet, they work hard, and they know their man. They’re Texans and they seem like Texans, and that’s good too.

I remember visiting President Bush’s White House eight and nine years ago and talking to people. It seemed to me as I walked the halls and chatted with people in offices that what I was seeing was a universe of tennis players. The middle level and some of the upper levels of the staff seemed stocked with people who had played on the courts of Houston’s clubs. I’d meet someone and then be taken aside and told with hushed voice, “He was Jebbie’s doubles partner.”

They were good people. They were attractive and courteous and believing and idealistic and dim. They seemed to me decent dullards, and though the cliché about the Bush White House was that it was John Sununu and a thousand interns, I always thought of it as a bunch of guys in whites.

George W. Bush, on the other hand, has the cowboy thing, not the patrician thing. His brio—the swagger, the shorthand, the nicknames, the joshing—seems working-class. I don’t know why he has a Texas accent and Jeb doesn’t, or why something in him seems working-class or middle-class and the rest of the family doesn’t. But it’s good.

I hope he has Midland oil men and businessmen and librarians and roustabouts on his staff, I hope he has born-agains and former delinquents, academics and intellectuals and poets. But no tennis players. No sparkling people in white. Or very few, and only for diversity’s sake.

America now knows who its next president is, and this is cause for joy. But think how hard it was to end the Clinton-Gore era. It may well be that hard for the next president to get out from under its shadow.

One of the biggest things George W. Bush has in his favor is the realization that the facts of his presidency—the famously split Senate, House, country, vote—will be so challenging as to be almost insurmountable. He’ll get a lot of credit for surmounting.

*   *   *

Those of us who expected a solid Bush win, one that would allow him to claim a meaningful mandate, now turn to the fact that the close win yielded only one unarguable mandate: to help clean up voting and registration so that Florida never happens again. The next president will have to lead the movement to raise and regularize standards, and to restore trust in the system on which democracy depends.

There was no mention of that in the Bush victory speech. But Mr. Bush and Al Gore, in their own ways, signaled some of what the future holds.

Mr. Gore’s speech was the better of the two, which was too bad. America needed a great hello more than a good farewell.

Mr. Gore’s compressed and almost elegant address had an obviously dramatic text: I lost and I’m leaving. It had a lively subtext too: I’ll be seeing y’all again.

He’s going home “to mend some fences.” He regrets he “didn’t get a chance to stay and fight for the American people over the next four years.” He says, “It is time for me to go.” This is how political figures talk not when they’re dead but when they’re very much alive but want you to find them poignant for a while.

It is an odd thing that American political figures often give the best speeches of their lives when they lose. It’s as if defeat jars them enough to let the eloquence out. This was true of Richard Nixon in his famous free-verse goodbye—”My mother was a saint/ And I think of her. . . .” It was true when Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan, and when Ted Kennedy lost to Mr. Carter—”The cause endures, the dream will never die.” And it was true, on Wednesday, of Mr. Gore.

As he said his father used to tell him, and let’s not check this story out, “Defeat may serve as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out.” He also looked younger, refreshed, as if he’d been washed clean of anger. Mr. Gore will be watching and Mr. Gore will be back, and when he returns he’ll be a better candidate than the man who just lost.

Mr. Bush’s speech, on the other hand, was not deeply impressive. Having decided to follow Mr. Gore and not let him have the evening, he spoke late and without energy. He was surrounded by tired people acting out joy.

But there were hints of what we can expect. His remarks had a saving and salutary dullness, like a political address from the old days, formulaic and clunky.

Mr. Bush as president is probably going to be more interesting than his pronouncements. He spoke of compassionate conservatism, making clear that that philosophy will not suffer the fate of Bill Clinton’s “new covenant,” on which Mr. Clinton campaigned throughout 1992, and which was never heard of again from the moment he made it to the White House.

“I believe things happen for a reason,” Mr. Bush said, and this seemed particularly genuine. He believes there is a God who is an actor in history, who touches and changes lives. He has been thinking about what the past five weeks have meant. He has probably been wondering if the contested election was a chastening, a warning about unbridled confidence. He had been too secure; he has been brought up sharp now, and humbled.

A supporter of his told me, “This is the best thing that ever happened to him,” and he is not alone in that observation. A reporter who covers him with sharp eyes told me that Mr. Bush and his aides reminded him of John Kennedy and his, and that the election drama may have kept a Bush Bay of Pigs from ever happening.

Ultimately, the address did not seem quite equal to the moment. Mr. Bush did not speak as much and as seriously about the five weeks as he might have, about the meaning of the wait and the meaning of its end. He spoke not to the American people but to the people in the room.

There was a feeling of fatigue in the room, which was understandable, and the crowd applauded as if they’d been told not to get too excited. They didn’t.

If it had been a Clinton crowd, they would have been exhorted to show wild support. The lighting and music would have been dramatic. He would have stood with one arm around Hillary and one around Chelsea, all of them looking up. He would have glistened like young Kennedy. Mr. Bush, on the other hand, didn’t know if he should kiss his wife when the speech was over—Ick, I’ll look like Clinton—and would look at her quickly and look away.

He seems to enjoy his awkwardness and to be proud of his modesty, as if he thinks they show that he’s not handled by handlers, not a born political manipulator. He’s not. But after eight years of Clintonism it is not clear that that will be an unalloyed benefit.

Mr. Bush’s speech said more than hello to the American people. It said a big goodbye too. Not to the Clinton-Gore era, but to Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, to the producing by Hollywood of an American presidency. There will be no bridge-too-far moments, like Mr. Clinton’s marching through the bowels of a convention center as manly music blares. But there may be a lot of bridge-not-far-enough moments. We may be entering the new awkwardness.

Republicans used to be better at producing the presidency than Democrats, but mostly it came down to Ronald Reagan and bright balloons, to Reagan being Reagan. He used stagecraft to underscore his points. The Democrats, the party of Walter Mondale, were no match. But in the Clinton era they became the party of a sleek Hollywood-produced presidency, with the stagecraft itself as the point. Mr. Gore would have continued this. Mr. Bush seems uninterested in it.

For eight years, the American people have had an actor/rock star in the White House. He brought his own narrative with him; he brought stories and filled the White House with them, and soon the airwaves were thick with them. Was the first lady subpoenaed? The movie star slept in the Lincoln bedroom? What did he tell the grand jury—and will it be on TV? The woman said Mr. Clinton did what? The guy died in a park? Did you hear she said her cat was threatened?

Mr. Clinton brought his own long-running drama to the national stage, and we all watched it unfold each day, grabbing our hankies and roaring with laughter and throwing tomatoes. It was drama, utterly confounding and often riveting, sick but nonetheless seductive. Eight years of that. A lot of people are hooked on it.

Can we go cold turkey from drama boy to boring boy? From a strange and fascinating bad man to a normal and fairly predictable good one? Can the American people return to normalcy? That of course was the phrase Warren Harding’s men used to describe his coming to the presidency on the heels of the dramatic Woodrow Wilson. “Will he get us into war?” “They sank our ship!” “Will he live?” “Is Mrs. Wilson running the country?” Stay tuned!)

*   *   *

Maybe Mr. Bush should begin to think in terms of his own narrative. Maybe the real question is whether he and his people will write it, or whether it will be imposed on him by the media.

One thing is sure. The media abhor a vacuum. If they find one, they’ll fill it. Which suggests the Republicans, who have despised the sleek savvy of the Clinton years, may have to emulate it to some degree. Mr. Bush has not only got the White House. He’s got a great, grand stage. Mr. Clinton strutted there. Mr. Gore would have too. And Mr. Bush? Will he develop a sharper stagecraft to go with his statecraft? Now that he’s on stage—a large, grand stage—he needs a greater narrative, and a bolder sense of drama.

To: Vice President Al Gore
From: Communications Staff, Gore-Lieberman 2000

Sir, we understand from a friend of Mrs. Gore who was overheard this morning talking on the phone with a cousin of Drew Schiff that you are going to drop out. If this is true, sir, we’re here to help.

Our thoughts:

First, you’re obviously right. You know the old saying, when riding a dead horse it’s best to dismount. This is over, but you’ll ride again.

Second, your speech tonight will have a lot to do with how people remember this whole fracas, and your role in it. So it’s important for history that you get it right, and it’s important to the American people, but it’s also important to you. It may dictate whether you have a future in politics.

Remember what happened after Richard Nixon made his bitter, crazy concession speech in California in 1962—”You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” He was finished. Jack Kennedy watched it in the White House and shook his head. “No class,” he said. He was right. It took a war in Vietnam to get Nixon back into the game.

You’re in a great position. Focus on it. Just about exactly half the country voted for you and not Bush. You won a plurality of the popular vote; you may have won the whole election, no one will ever know. Probably a quarter of the electorate will always think Bush won on a technicality. So you’re not History’s Big Loser, you’re The Guy Who Came Within an Inch and Bowed Out With Class.

We know you’re feeling anger, and frustration, but please don’t second-guess yourself. Don’t listen to those advisers who are diehards; don’t let them sway you. They want you to stay in because there’s a 1% or 2% chance you can still win. And they wouldn’t mind seeing you spend your last personal capital on that 1% or 2%, because if lightning strikes they emerge as winners, and get more clients and billable hours. They’ve got an agenda. So do you, but it’s not theirs.

You must step down tonight and concede, fully. Do it gracefully and with a kind of height. Do it so well in fact that Americans across the whole country watch you and then turn to their wives and husbands and say, “Darlin’, I am wondering this moment if we’ve gotten ourselves the right man.”

The way to hurt George W. Bush is to save yourself, to be so graceful he looks puny. Then you can come roaring back in time.

So this is not a defeat. It’s a tactical retreat.

*   *   *

All right, tonight. A speech in prime time. We recommend that you speak, for the first time in history, live from the vice president’s office, just down the hall from the Oval, in the West Wing. Nice big desk, nice bookcase, nice pictures in the background. We’ll get a few more flags.

It should be a full and formal TelePrompTer address, no more than 15 minutes and preferably 12.

All nets and cable will obviously cover it live. Every eye in the country will be riveted on you. That’s probably never happened to a vice president before.

Be gracious. Don’t be afraid to show it hurts; hurt is endearing, especially from you.

Don’t mention that you “won the popular vote.” Everyone knows. The newscasters will come out of your address noting it for you. You’ll get credit for not saying it.

You’ll have to help Bush. He’s the next American president, and he begins his presidency in extraordinary circumstances. So you’ll have to help him by lauding him and asking your supporters to come together behind him. This is the patriotic thing to do. It also appears to be the patriotic thing. Again, you’ll get a lot of credit.

Keep in mind that nobody wants to beat you up tonight; they want to say nice things. So don’t argue your case anymore, don’t defend your actions. Others can do that for you. Tonight is for grace.

The world has to know that America is together, because the moment people think our country is divided beyond healing, the world becomes a more dangerous place. Emphasize the point:

To those leaders and members of other countries far away, I hope our peaceful resolution of this great disagreement has been as educational and even inspiring for you as it has been for us. But make no mistake. While Americans have different views and different philosophies, and while we have great disputes, too, we always ultimately walk down the same path. And we walk down it together. Always have, always will. We are united in our love of country, our commitment to democracy, our protectiveness of liberty.

*   *   *

Again, ask your supporters to support the new president. They won’t, most of them, but you’ll get credit for asking.

Mention your allies, the activists and unions, Jesse Jackson. “I have urged the Rev. Jackson to meet with the new president . . .”

That will make you look big, like a peacemaker. It also puts Bush on the spot. He’ll look churlish if he doesn’t meet with Jesse the way he wouldn’t meet with you. And anyway, the reports that minority neighborhoods got the oldest voting machines is a true scandal. It’s just wrong. Someone ought to put it on Bush’s plate right away. The only mandate he really walks in with now is this: a mandate to clean up the American electoral system. Ask him to do that as his first act. Again, it makes you a big-picture man; you’ll get credit. And he’ll have to do a lot of heavy lifting.

We think the tone should be The Full Shrummy—kind of magisterial, something with a certain formality and bigness:

In the past five weeks there has been much movement and action—clamor, and anger, and hopes. We have been in a Great Disagreement. But now it is over, now the clamor recedes, and we accept, fully and without reservation, the outcome.

And now we must continue together as a people, and surely we will. “We are not enemies but friends,” Abe Lincoln said. And so we are.

Beyond this big house the Potomac flows and the lights of Virginia glitter. Life goes on, the great nation goes on. I and my party have had a loss, but it is a small thing in the long history of the oldest democracy in the world. And though I have been defeated, the principles for which I fought have been upheld.

Mr. Bush will become President. The governor fought a long and hard campaign, one that in many respects deserves admiration. He is in a particular position now. He will need all our help. And we will give it to him. I personally will offer any encouragement or advice I have, and I urge you all to do the same.

In just a moment I will walk from this room. I will see you all again at the inauguration of Mr. Bush, when I as vice president of the United States peacefully take my part in the transfer of power, the peaceful transfer that has always distinguished our country.

I love our country enough to drop this challenge, I love our country with a great protectiveness, with great respect. I wish Mr. Bush well and remain at his service. And I ask you to join me in this thought, which is really a prayer, and one that has been answered every day for more than 200 years: “May God bless the United States of America.”

Well—something like that. Something bigger than you, and this, and what happened.

*   *   *

Then get out.

No meetings with the press, just walk out. And go away.

Go back to Tennessee. Don’t go regal. Take a train or bus if you can, no reason to take Air Force II. Leave that stuff to the new guys. Let them run it into the ground. Harry Truman walked to the train station the day he left the White House. Go like that.

Say you’ll depart the stage now for a while. Remember what Reagan used to say—he quoted some old Scots ballad when he lost to Ford in ‘76—”And I will lay me down and bleed a while, and then I will rise up and fight again.”

Really disappear from the scene for a year. People, to be frank, won’t miss you, not right away. Every time they see you the next few months it’ll remind them of The Big Mess. The Dems are mad at you for losing, the Reps for suing.

Sometimes you gotta give people a chance to miss you. So disappear. Let them watch Bush undistracted by your presence. They’ll get tired of him. Then you can rise your head, in the spring of 2002, and say, “I’m here!” You are knocked within and without your party for forever putting your own interests before the party’s. Make it up to them. When you come back in ‘02, come on strong, campaigning hard for the Dems in the off-year elections. By then people will have thoughts about their criticisms of you. Show the party you can play as part of a team.

In the next 18 months, rest and replenish. Government service, as Henry Kissinger said, is all intellectual outgo; you bring what wisdom and information and perspective you have in with you, and spend it each day in the White House. Get some intellectual income. You need it. Read some books. Ponder. Do things you don’t have to do. Recover your joy.

*   *   *

A last thought. The day before Christmas you can be seen taking stuff out of the vice president’s residence, old rocking horses and baseball mitts and stuff. Put it in a Ryder truck in the driveway. Jeans, turtleneck sweater. Tipper. Hug. Turn back to the house and then turn left, notice the press 40 yards away taking pictures, and wave.

Good shot. Kind of poignant.

There will probably still be a few right-wing nuts on Massachusetts Avenue, chanting “Get out of Dick Cheney’s house!” Go over and give them hot chocolate and pose for pictures and chat. Tell them you don’t agree with their views, never did and never will, but will defend to your death their right to hold them.

Your grace will be a hard cold lump in their throats.

On second thought, you don’t really have to be that gracious. Heck, who was it, Reagan? Rocky? He gave some protesters the finger and mouthed “We’re No. 1!” Go ahead. You’ve earned it.

Let’s not talk about Florida and Bush and Gore. That story is stuck. It’s as if we’re all living in a big muted mosaic. The lawyer gesturing at the lectern on CNN is a piece, and the legal scholar commenting on the lawyer’s arguments on Fox is another. The headlines and cartoons and editorials are pieces, the rally with Jesse Jackson exhorting the crowd is a piece, David Boies with his wonderful calm-madman’s style is a piece, as are the e-mail jokes and the tapes of fat ladies singing. We’re struggling through the last days of a trauma that we all feel is over, know must be ending, can’t imagine continuing much longer. We are waiting for a big and final wave to come and wash the mosaic away in history’s tide.

While we wait, let’s think about something instructive and constructive that happened yesterday.

Candor broke out on Capitol Hill, and a few hearts got worn on a few blue pinstriped sleeves. Members of the U.S. Senate stood on the floor of their chamber and spoke, usually without text or notes and often at some length, about a man they admired. What they said offered a heartening picture of clarity, and maybe even of hope.

*   *   *

The Senate stopped in its tracks to honor and mark the departure of Slade Gorton, the Republican member from Washington state whose defeat by 2,229 votes last week erased the Republicans’ clear Senate majority.

Politicians of course like to honor people. There’s no downside to being moving and eloquent about a friend, or a foe, especially a vanquished one. There’s usually no price to pay for being generous. And you can use the formal honoring of another to honor yourself: If it weren’t for his constant encouragement I wouldn’t have been able to pass the major legislation I’ve authored and shepherded lo these many years . . .

But this was different. It was personal and passionate and bipartisan. Democrats stood to honor him, with moving words from Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota. Democrat Patty Murray, soon to be Washington state’s senior senator, spoke, and a letter from Joe Lieberman was read, praising among other things Mr. Gorton’s bipartisanship during President Clinton’s impeachment trial.

Republicans spoke with a sense of loss that seemed apart from the obvious blow of losing a majority.

Gordon Smith of Oregon read from the Bible and asked who now would stand for the loggers, the lumbermen and fishermen of the Pacific Northwest. Pete Domenici of New Mexico said Mr. Gorton “has to come out near the top of the list of influential senators in the conduct of occurrences of great significance in the United States Senate.” Mr. Domenici said Mr. Gorton had usually exercised that influence with blunt words behind closed doors, and that during Mr. Gorton’s 18 years in the Senate, few pieces of legislation had moved through it without his fingerprints.

Mr. Gorton’s colleagues invoked some of the great senators of history. New Hampshire’s Judd Gregg compared him to Daniel Webster. “As you look around this institution, you think ‘He reminds me of so and so . . .’ The highest praise for me would be ‘You remind me of Slade Gorton.’ I consider him one of the finest if not the finest senator I know.” Phil Gramm of Texas compared him to Sam Houston, “also voted down by the people of his state . . . yet he is among the most honored of our citizens.” Mitch McConnell of Kentucky called him “one of the great senators of the 20th century” and compared him to Arthur Vandenberg.

The speeches were so emotional, so much like eulogies, that the senators had to keep reminding themselves out loud not to use the past tense. But they couldn’t help it, any more than they can help feeling that when you’re a senator and you lose your seat you’re dead. But also because, as each made clear, they couldn’t stand the thought of losing all the experience, talent, shrewdness and seriousness that Mr. Gorton had brought to the chamber. That’s why when Mr. Dorgan, a Democrat, heard what was being said, he joined in. He said that often he would “get the glassy eyed look” from senators with whom he was trying to discuss the issues of the day. “But not Slade. He did his homework.”

*   *   *

“It was real, and so much of this town is not real,” Tony Williams, Mr. Gorton’s chief of staff, said later. “Gorton is—they call him E.F. Hutton because when he speaks, everybody listens. But what makes him unique among senators is they may not agree with his thinking on a subject but they all want to hear it. He’s one of the rare people in this town who can ‘stop traffic’—he can force people to put aside their agendas and listen. He is not a self-promoter and they know it, so they think, ‘I better put down the paper and listen to this guy.’ ” Williams added, “He’s the best senator that no one’s ever heard of.”

Over and over Thursday the speakers spoke about two things. Because Mr. Gorton was wise and calm and highly intelligent, he was listened to. And because he wasn’t a showboat, he was respected. He wouldn’t just pop off with a statement and hope to get credit for it. He was the last to run for the microphones, though he wasn’t above noticing who did. He spoke on the floor less often than some other senators; he spoke in private councils. He probably authored fewer bills, but shaped more law through advice and addendum.

In all of the praise you could hear the sound of an institution defining itself, showing through what it said what it values and honors.

I think it was saying this: In the clamor of big egos bumping into daily events that is Congress, we do notice who gets things done, who really works. Who really thinks, who contributes, who has a long-term historical view, who is a patriot, who doesn’t care who gets credit, who will quietly counsel and help you with your problem and not capitalize on it or use it against you, who stands not only for the party but the country and not only for the job but for the institution—the Senate, this august chamber, which can actually make a difference in people’s lives, and which is a strong and necessary element in our republic.

It is good when politicians define an ideal. It is good when they say they believe they’ve seen it, or something like it.

Maybe in the arduous year ahead they can go back and look at what they said about Slade Gorton, and remember what it is they admire and honor.

*   *   *

People who write for newspapers don’t really get to be very positive about people in politics very often. It’s sort of a sign of being a sissy. You get the best laughs, and you’re quoted most often, by putting someone down in a witty or interesting way. To do the opposite—to laud someone in politics—is like wearing a sign that says This Guy Fooled Me.

But it’s good to write about those you admire, and to explain why. It’s constructive I think. So now, inspired by the Senate, I’m going to do some more of it about Slade.

He has been famous in his 18 years in the Senate for several things, one being that he often called influential columnists, friends, and political operatives to lobby them in support of important pieces of . . . literature. He is a voracious and possibly compulsive reader of novels and history, and in the middle of meetings he will phone a friend to remind him to get A.S. Byatt’s “Possession,” or Mark Helprin’s “A Soldier of the Great War,” or Paul Johnson’s “Modern Times,” or “Correlli’s Mandolin,” a novel by someone whose last name is De Bernieres, which I know because that’s what I wrote when I put Slade’s Post-It on my bookshelf two years ago.

I met Slade 10 years ago, when he wrote me after my first book came out. He asked specific and acute questions about writing and speechwriting. Soon afterward I met him in Washington and became a friend, which meant joining his informal book club and taking regular phone calls that tested the political and personal weather.

I want to say he is unusual for a political figure but actually he is unusual, period: a genuine intellectual who lives in the world of ideas and yet a person who is simply delighted to be alive. Everything he does is so much fun. This sounds corny, and sometimes is, but every stranger he meets is interesting and says the smartest things. Every hockey game yields up fascinating glimpses into his athletic young niece’s character. His constituents, especially the recent immigrants, are simply the most brilliant and hardworking people in the world. And his wife just said the most amazingly on-target thing about Al Gore, would you like to hear it?

He has zest. I have simply never known anyone who enjoys life as much as he does. He is 72 and has seen a great deal. He is now boasting that his doctor last week said he has the heart and lungs of a man in his 20s.

Among political figures, rarely have shrewdness and idealism been so intertwined. His career has been marked by the pursuit of progress within a framework of politics as the art of the possible, as they used to say. He has a conservative’s insights and a moderate’s instincts.

He is from an old eastern family, the Gortons of Gorton’s seafood fame, but he’s not at all high-hat, and is so approachable and easygoing that his staff calls him “The Nerdy Professor” and other names, some unprintable, and he thinks it’s a riot. When he tells me how his staff is fighting him, colorfully, on some issue, I am sometimes surprised. Once I said, “You let kids on your staff talk to you like that?” He said, “We pay them to talk to me like that. That’s why they’re here!” They are not allowed to call him Senator, only Slade.

It has led in his office to a creativity born of lack of fear. “We hammer him,” says Tony Williams. “ ’You’re gonna wear that out here? I don’t think so!’ He’s very easygoing. He looks formal but he’s not.”

*   *   *

What was saddest for his fellow Republicans about Slade’s cliffhanger loss was that it was only in the past five years that he came to be a leader. Before that he was a bright senator from the minority party and a not-too-important state. Also, he didn’t have a wonderful senatorial look, the way Jay Rockefeller and Fred Thompson do.

Slade is a thin and wiry man, a marathoner, with a large and longish head and big eyes, on which for many years he wore contact lenses, which often irritated his eyes, leading to a great deal of blinking. He looked like an intelligent light bulb going on and off. It put some people off. Then he got that eye operation that makes you see 20/20, and the blinking stopped. Before that the Republicans took control of the Senate, and that was the point at which he rose to become the closest advisor to the majority leader, Trent Lott.

I asked Mr. Lott about Mr. Gorton’s departure, and he said, “It means a great deal not only to me but to the Senate. He’s one of the most intelligent if not the most intelligent senator we have in this body. He’s become my closest confidante. He’s the best—solid, committed, working across the aisle. And when you ask for his advice, he doesn’t tell you what he thinks; he tells you what you need to know.”

All the talk of advice prompted me to call Slade and ask if he had a secret. He said it’s not so much a secret as a way of operating. You have to remember that the purpose of advice is not to make you look smart but actually to help the person seeking it. When someone asks you for advice, you don’t give it as yourself, with your needs and realities and views. You take a moment and put yourself in his shoes. “You try to put yourself in exactly the circumstances that that person faces, and you think of what would be best for them to do under those circumstances. Not necessarily what you would do yourself, but what they should do themselves. I try not to be Slade Gorton, with his philosophy and circumstances, but to be a particularly thoughtful Joe Shmoe.”

*   *   *

Slade was elected to the Senate in the Reagan landslide of 1980, lost his re-election bid in 1986, and then came back to win Washington state’s other Senate seat in 1988. I asked him what his biggest achievement was in those 18 years. “If I did one thing that had a profound impact on a significant number of lives that changed people’s lives it was after Tiananmen Square. It was the bill that allowed Chinese students and other Chinese nationals to stay in the U.S. and not be required to go home, to stay permanently if they wished.”

The bill passed in 1992, and it was tough getting it through the Bush administration, because they were trying to be nice to the Chinese government. To Slade it served a dual purpose. “America is a land of immigrants, and some of these students were in danger, and certainly deserved the right to stay here. But I like it when immigrants bring something to our society. They were a lot of the most brilliant people China has produced—physicists and physicians and engineers. They were not only a benefit to the United States but their loss was an appropriate punishment of communist China for the way in which it treated its people.”

The Chinese Student Protection Act directly affected some 45,000 students and professionals and their families. They’re here because Slade persuaded and led and pushed and built support.

*   *   *

The bad news is all that capacity for work and wisdom has been removed from the Senate, where it did a lot of good. The good news is that a new administration is about to begin, with many leadership appointments yet to be made. Mr. Lott’s loss could be President-elect Bush’s gain. The new administration will need respected nominees who will get a fair hearing in the evenly split Senate. “Slade was not just a member of the club, Slade was an admired member,” Mr. Lott told me. “I think he would be overwhelmingly favorably received for any position. Solicitor general—he’s got the demeanor, the experience. He could be an attorney general, a Supreme Court justice.”

Maybe that’s what they were saying Thursday morning and afternoon in the Senate.