Peggy Noonan

I left the Philadelphia convention two weeks ago thinking George Bush would probably win. I left Los Angeles fairly certain of it.

In tone and feel the Philadelphia convention was like that of 1980, the Reagan convention of spectacular unity in the face of high stakes. Philadelphia too was unified, and not only by hunger. The Christian Coalition was over here and happy and the Log Cabin Republicans were over there and happy; peace reigned, primarily for two reasons.

One was that Republicans have been concussed to a degree still not fully appreciated by Bill Clinton, whom they think of not only as probably disturbed but strikingly unconcerned about our nation’s security (the nuclear secrets gone, the president uninterested in moving toward protecting us from nuclear attack, etc.). Modern Republicans have never felt this way about an American president, and it shocks them still. It has also concentrated their minds, making internal battles seem secondary and self-indulgent.

The other reason is that the overwhelming majority of Republicans have come to respect George W. Bush, and get what he’s about. He is the next step after Ronald Reagan. Mr. Reagan spent his time awakening an economy in deep REM sleep and beating back Soviet communism. He knocked down walls. Now Bush the younger will spend his time building, doing the unfinished business of greater prosperity and freedom.

So that was the Republican mix in Philadelphia, antipathy plus agreement. Not to mention the hunger that comes from eight years out in the presidential cold. But that time, the convention seemed to suggest, was spent rethinking, bringing up new talent, questioning old ways. When I saw Condoleezza Rice address the convention as the expected next head of the National Security Council, saw Rep. J.C. Watts (R., Okla.), saw so many other fresh talents, I thought of what Andre Malraux told Whittaker Chambers after reading the galleys of “Witness”: “You did not come back from hell with empty hands.”

*   *   *

Los Angeles was different, though equally revealing. The Democrats have returned from heaven with empty hands. Schedules slipped, Joe Lieberman was brought to heel by Maxine Waters, the perpetually enraged California congresswoman who emerged as a party powerbroker, and the best speech of the week, the cleverest and most worthy of deconstruction, was not that of the presidential nominee but of the president, who had a chance to boost Mr. Gore through anecdote and example, and did not.

Gone was the discipline and cleverness of the Clinton era. During big speeches the podium area was crowded with donors and party hacks hugging each other, throwing high fives and blocking the view of the delegates massed to the right and left of the stage. The night of the Gore speech I watched two little black kids happily tossing Lieberman signs in the air as they waited for the candidate. That’s better than the Republicans, I thought, little kids with front-row seats. Then Gore came bounding through the crowd and, pivoting like a man who’d been fully briefed on where his marks were, squatted down to the children and patted their heads. The kids weren’t just props; when Mr. Gore was through, they were obvious props.

Mr. Gore’s speech all but announced the party was returning to habits and assumptions that were not just pre-Clinton but pre-Carter, offering an estimated $1 trillion in new programs. The pose was populist but promised to be problematic: If you’re going to wage class warfare you’d better do it with the passion of George Wallace or Pat Buchanan, and you probably shouldn’t do it at all when the biggest demographic shift in America is the number of new investors.

*   *   *

Bill Clinton was like a big magnet floating over the conventions of ‘92 and ‘96, and whichever way he moved all the pieces of iron filing followed. But in Los Angeles, Mr. Clinton disappeared, and took his magnetism with him. All the pieces of metal on the floor went this way and that and finally slid to the left, just as they had before 1992.

Al Gore is not a magnet. It isn’t just the lack of shades-wearing, sax-playing charm. Mr. Gore lacks the confidence of a great man, or a psychopath, that he should be adored and followed. He is full of doubts and constantly shifts shapes. And he doesn’t have 12 years of loss behind him to help him spur his party. Mr. Clinton played savior, but now the party has already been saved. Now it’s smug.

*   *   *

This is what I realized in L.A.: It wasn’t a newly unified Democratic party that produced a victor named Bill Clinton, it was Mr. Clinton who produced a unified party. He unified them through their hunger, which he matched with his own.

But the changes he brought were not serious, and so not lasting. They were not grounded in the desire to change but in the desire to win. His party could now change back so quickly, could pivot back to the past, because that, now, seems the way to win, at least according to Mr. Gore’s strategists. Clintonian moderation was as evanescent as a Clintonian promise or a Clintonian statement: It was just meant to get through the moment.

It was said of Jimmy Carter when he left the presidency that he’d left no footprints. I thought Bill Clinton was a real bigfoot, he left a real impression, but in Los Angeles it looked as if his footprints too had been washed away in the tide.

*   *   *

The Democrats in Los Angeles also showed another attitudinal change. They acted as if they deserve to lead, not as if they’d better hustle to win leadership. They remind me of the Republicans in ‘92. They seem to have lost their edge, and lost a lot of the bright young men and women of the War Room. A lot of them are gone, some of them broken by the Clinton experience, some in television and consulting. The Democrats’ talent coffers are depleted.

In the 1970s and ‘80s the Democrats weren’t as good as the Republicans at the stagecraft of conventions; they didn’t approach the level of sophistication of the Reagan era. By 1992, however, they’d learned how to have a slicker, smarter convention production, and in ‘96 they blew the Republicans away in stagecraft. They even invented a new art of campaign film biography, with the brilliant Linda Bloodworth-Thomason creating a classic of political propaganda with “The Boy From Hope.”

But this year in Philadelphia the Republicans beat the Democrats at stagecraft, with a message of clarity that broke through the screen: We are diverse and young and moving forward, breaking out of the old era.

*   *   *

There will be dramas in the coming months; it will not be a quiet campaign. There may be government shutdowns and fierce debates and amazingly negative advertising. It isn’t over. But I think I saw the modern Democratic Party begin to crumble again in L.A., and I think I saw the modern Republican Party being born.

Now the campaign proceeds at greater speed and with greater urgency. At the end of both conventions, a hunch. If the Clinton-Gore apparatus is facing its end, its death throes won’t be pretty. Some living things quietly die when badly wounded, but many animals are most dangerous when most endangered.

Al Gore’s acceptance speech was a rhetorical failure and, in my view, a strategic blunder of significant proportions.

It failed as rhetoric not, as his defenders quickly claimed, because it lacked “poetry” and “song,” but because it lacked thought. It was relentlessly banal and formulaic, its sound shaped not by the simple speech of the honest man but by a reflexive politico-bureaucratese: “The future should belong to everyone in this land. . . . We’re entering a new time. We’re electing a new president. . . . In our democracy, the future is not something that just happens to us, it’s something that we make for ourselves together.”

It was boilerplate boob-bait punctuated by tired vows. It has been called specific but was only declarative—specific only in the way a shopping list is. Would that seasoning, even just a bit of pepper, had been on the list.

It seemed written by a committee of second-tier communications aides, but Mr. Gore says he wrote it, and we must take him at his word. It certainly didn’t have much Shrum in it. I had imagined reading it with reporters and producers when the text was released before it was delivered and, finding a word that’s just right or a passage in which thought was linked to feeling, shouting with delight, “Shrummy! Page three, graf seven, Shrum strikes!” But Bob Shrum, the fabled Democratic speechwriter, did not strike—or, if he did, it was perhaps in the second way in which the speech failed, its seeming strategic miscalculation.

Mr. Gore’s speech seemed to aim purely at his base, at the left of his party and the more leftward part of the electorate. The text hit every liberal pleasure point—from creation of a national health care service to affirmative action to no school vouchers to a woman’s right to abortion to a federal pre-school daycare system to class warfare featuring greedy polluting nicotine-head oil-company gangsters vs. decent people like you and me.

It was unleavened by any hint of doubt and unshaded by the assumption that decent people can disagree. It was, in short, amazingly . . . retro. It sounded not at all like what one might have expected—a post-Clinton era rallying cry informed by the insights of the Democratic Leadership Council, and brought to a new level in the new century.

Instead it sounded like Walter Mondale in 1984, or Teddy Kennedy in 1980, or even Hubert Humphrey in 1968. It sounded like something untouched by the history of the past 15 years or so. It sounded like something Rep. Maxine Waters would like. It was playing to the base in a way that seems so narrow, so constricting and unsophisticated that it has left me full of questions I did not expect to be asking at the end of the Democratic National Convention.

Why would Al Gore on his big night play to the left of his party, and ignore most of the assumptions and views of the middle—of independents and Republicans who are still looking around, of McCain people and young professionals?

Because he had to forestall the threat of Ralph Nader on the left and Buchanan on the blue collar-protectionist right?

Because he believes he doesn’t really have his base, even now, and must win it?

Because he thinks he can, in the coming weeks and months, pivot to the center, hoping no one will remember his acceptance speech? Was the speech therefore brilliantly boring in that it effectively communicated to the left in such an unmemorable way that no normal person could be expected to remember any of it? Was it deliberately boring as a tactical matter—that is, did he anticipate that America would turn it off 14 minutes in, while the left would like it and remember it?

Or, as some are asking, does he think he’s going to lose, and if you’re going to lose you might as well lose standing for something? But if he thought he was going to lose, why did he choose Joe Lieberman?

In the entire speech Mr. Gore mentioned Bill Clinton only once, at the very beginning of his speech. He used the word “future” 12 times. By contrast, in his 1988 acceptance speech Vice President George Bush mentioned Ronald Reagan three times by name and devoted several paragraphs to a discussion of the Reagan-Bush administration’s accomplishments. Mr. Bush admired and respected Mr. Reagan and sought to be associated with him.

Clearly in this speech Mr. Gore sought to break from Mr. Clinton, and he at least achieved that. All of those wholesome family films and speeches by family members conveyed the message: I am not a weirdo like Clinton. But to break with Mr. Clinton, was it necessary also to break with the DLC insights Mr. Gore once cared so much for, and to return to the old Mondale-era sound and reality of the Democratic Party?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, and I suppose time will reveal them—or whether the questions were the right ones.

But I must tell you that right after the speech I did some talking-head commentary and tried to express my disappointment, and was told by pols and pundits alike that “this is the real Gore,” and that we should feel some satisfaction that he showed us who he is. Well, if that’s who Mr. Gore is, he’s a loser.

Watching Bill Clinton at his big speech Monday night, and seeing him in the big campaign handoff in Michigan Tuesday afternoon, I realized that though he always wishes to be likened to John Kennedy, he is really like another famously successful operator in American political history. He is like Huey Long, the Kingfish, “the friend of the working man.” Bill Clinton, like Long on the stump in Louisiana, talks about what he gave you, what he did, how he made it all better, and how those bad people tried to stop him but he fought them off, for you.

Al Gore of course apes this, but awkwardly. He is like the white guy who can’t jump. “The powerful interests are gonna go after us with everything they’ve got,” he warned at the handoff, with a dramatic, down home tone. But he looked like the Vice President in Charge of Fear for the Powerful Interests, with his crisp suit and his fitted shirts and his steely pecs and blow-dried hair. He always seems calculating, incapable of candor, spontaneity, the ingenuous.

Mr. Clinton can fake those things because he is the best actor in all of American political history, the prince of the podium. Mr. Gore does not fake them as well. But he does his best, and he and Mr. Clinton together sounded so 1930s, so Southern agrarian populist, that afterward I wondered, as all those in politics and journalism do, How do normal people receive this? Are they impressed? Do they believe what they’re being told? Do they resent being told by Bill Clinton that they have what they have because of him and Al Gore?

*   *   *

Because Mr. Clinton so often tells us what he did, it is remarkable that he cannot explain how he did it. Monday night he took a stab, but only a small one. He suggested he unleashed the economy by raising taxes. But in 1992 he excoriated George Bush for raising taxes, and indeed after Mr. Clinton raised taxes in 1993, he later admitted he’d raised them too much. So the suggestion that we owe our wealth to his tax hike was not fully satisfying.

Normally both parties torture logic, but they stick to the logic they’re torturing. Mr. Clinton seems to throw out old logic and bring in new logic all the time. So he can always keep changing the argument in a way you don’t expect, which leaves his opponents confused when they try to answer him.

I don’t mean a classic political fudging of the facts. Mr. Clinton, for instance, said in his speech over and over that he got rid of the deficit. But he didn’t get rid of the deficit, it was going down when he walked in and continued to go down as he went to fund-raisers. We will continue to build a surplus as the economy expands. What he grew is the budget, but the unstoppable economy overwhelmed even that.

What is slightly confusing is that the federal deficit was so at the center of all of Mr. Clinton’s remarks the past few days, the surplus so at the center of his bragging, that you had to sit back and wonder: When did the Democrats start to care about budget deficits? When Jimmy Carter left office in 1980 with what was at that point a huge federal deficit of $58 billion, the Democratic Party never said boo. The Democratic Party I cheered in the 1960s and 1970s never cared about green eyeshade things like deficits. Only cold, it-all-comes-down-to-money Republicans did. Democrats cared about people.

Now Mr. Clinton and the Democrats, all they care about is the deficit. This is not a change in rhetorical tack but a complete change in the logic of the party.

What is always fascinating is the blithe confidence with which Mr. Clinton says what he says, as if he’s been saying it all his life. When I listen to him I think he’s been saying it all his life, even though I know that’s not true.

*   *   *

But the American people tend to give credit to a president for what happened on his watch, and there is a rough fairness to this. And in truth Mr. Clinton deserves credit for not messing the economy up. He could have. He could have tried to raise taxes again and again and done the bidding of his party on trade and fired Alan Greenspan. But he didn’t. He could have thrown a wrench in the machine. He didn’t. Or not much and not often. The machine booms along.

*   *   *

More attention should be given to the president’s televised walk through the bowels of the convention hall as he made his way to the podium, while his people superimposed phrases like “longest economic expansion in American history” and “lowest unemployment rate” on the screen.

It was majestically tacky and embarrassing, and seemed almost made for the delectation of the brilliant young men and women of Comedy Central, who know goofiness when they see it. (Imagine their “supers”: First president impeached in this century . . . Lost our nuclear secrets and showed profound indifference when he found out . . . Used US military might to distract attention from his scandals . . . Sold access to the presidency.)

I thought that they must be doing it to excite the base, and yet I also thought, Only stupid people would like this, and then I wondered if Mr. Clinton’s people assume their base is stupid. At any rate, the long walk reminded me of the evening Giscard D’Estaing left the presidency of France. He said his farewell in a nationally televised speech and at the end, rather than saying good night, he abruptly walked away from his desk, leaving for the audience to ponder an empty chair. All of France was meant to weep. All of France broke out in laughter.

And yet it was the perfect Clinton moment. He will do anything to convince the American people that he is a success.

*   *   *

I have been surprised in L.A. to find that Democrats on the floor and in the television booths often refer to Monica. You’d think they wouldn’t but they do. They mention “the Monica scandals” a lot. And the reason is this. If they talk about Monica enough it will distract from the other and more dangerous scandals: the selling of the Oval Office, the leaving America undefended from missile attack.

It isn’t Republicans who talk about Monica, it’s Democrats, and they have their reasons. A whole future generation is absorbing the mantra: The guy was a genius who did nothing wrong but make a mistake with a girl, a girl, a girl.

*   *   *

The night of Mr. Clinton’s big speech Democrats were shaking their heads and saying Gore just isn’t like Clinton. But they’re wrong. Mr. Gore is like a Clinton. Unfortunately it’s Hillary. In her speech Monday night she was flat-voiced, dull, predictable, pedantic. “We’ve made great progress in the last eight years but we still have a lot of work to do.” “They made the hard decisions to renew our economy.” Everyone in Los Angeles thinks she delayed her speech in order to get on prime time. If this is true it was a miscalculation, as the speech was a kind of walk through the worst of Mrs. Clinton on the stump.

She was supposed to introduce her husband and speak highly of him; she was supposed to endorse Al Gore, and speak highly of him. Instead she spoke highly of herself—”I worked with a bipartisan coalition . . .” “I thought of the first foster child I represented back when I was in law school . . .” “Years ago, when I worked for the Children’s Defense Fund . . .” “I’ve talked with mothers and fathers on front porches, factory floors and in hospital wards . . .” “I’ve held the hands of mothers and fathers . . .”

At first I was taken aback by what seemed over-the-top solipsism, which could be heard even in the smallest asides, e.g. “I first met Joe Lieberman 30 years ago when Bill and I were law students.” Um, what was Joe at that time? That’s not important. What’s important is Bill and I went to law school.

Then I realized it was very much the kind of speech Mrs. Clinton’s aides would craft after finding out from the latest focus group that Mrs. Clinton strikes them as a cold post-yuppie with no biography, only hunger.

She made a lot of references to her mother and daughter and family and children. Mrs. Clinton was forced to start speaking like this in the 1992 campaign, when a focus group revealed that they thought she was a woman without a family; it was news to them that she even had a child.

It sounded Monday night to me that eight years later the focus groups are still seeing something she has spent eight years trying to knock down. That is not good news for her New York campaign.

But it was all saved in a way by Bill Clinton’s speech, which I think was the best political speech of his presidency in that it was disciplined, had a point, and he stuck to the point. And he was so confident about it that he didn’t fuss with the wording and keep desperately adding words, as he is famous for doing in the back of the limo and in the holding room, but let his writers keep it simple. Which suggested confidence and even, for him, happiness.

On Monday night you deliver the last big speech of your presidency. Or rather the last big political speech in front of a huge crowd, with the whole country listening.

There is in truth one other big speech after Monday night, your farewell address, in December. That, by tradition, is a sober address from the Oval Office. That’s where Eisenhower and Reagan did theirs, and they were the last of the two-termers before you. You probably won’t feel able to speak from the Oval when you say goodbye. what people think about when they see the words “Bill Clinton” and “Oval Office” in the same sentence, or on the same superimposed network caption.

They think of—well, the fundraising things, the meetings with foreign operatives who gave you money. They stood there with their shiny $400 shoes on the presidential seal on the rich blue carpet. And they think of the intern, and all the trauma and embarrassment. So just speaking from the Oval Office, as a president does, makes your constituents think of things you don’t want them thinking of. So maybe your farewell will be inevitably somewhat muted, and maybe you’ll make it in the East Room, or the Press Room, or some other place.

*   *   *

But Monday night—Monday night is a political speech, and you’ll speak where you’re most alive, where you’ve always wanted to be: The man at the big-miked podium, the cynosure of all eyes. You’re probably pumped. You can really help Gore with this speech, and Hillary too.

This is your last speech to the troops, to the Democratic Party that elected you, defended you, derided you behind your back but held high your colors through all the long battle.

You owe them a lot. If they had abandoned you the way the Republican Party abandoned Nixon during his scandals, you’d have been finished. The Republicans in those days couldn’t stomach the whole seamy mess and told Nixon he was over. But the Democrats stayed with you; they were tough and disciplined and went out and took your talking points onto the airwaves. They drew a lot of blood for you.

*   *   *

And maybe you’d like to tell them and us why, what the larger meaning was. This is your chance. You can, looking back from the high point of eight years, define what it is you meant to do, and what it is you did during these two administrations. You can define, if only for three pages of a 15-page speech, what you think Clintonism is, and was. This would implicitly make the case for its continuance—via the election of Al Gore.

It’s amazing that eight years in, most people still don’t know what Clintonism is or what you meant it to be. If asked what word or thought they associate with Clintonism they’d say “Well, the economy’s good,” and then they’d say some variant of “Well, he sure kind of . . . went wild in that place, didn’t he?” With Reagan it was, “Well, the economy’s really come back,” and “He brought down the Wall, Russian communism fell,” and “He made us feel that America was a good force in the world.”

What words or thoughts, in your view, should Americans think of when they think of what you stood for or tried to do?

It would be good for history if you explained this.

*   *   *

You’ll probably have a few pages with a lot of official-sounding numbers. This is where you’ll make the argument Gore does, that before Clinton-Gore, America was in a depression, with Wall Street guys jumping out of windows and unemployed fathers selling apples on the street.

That’s what Gore says, not exactly in those words, and with a blithe and energetic disdain for . . . well, for facts. He knows what the Carter era was, and what the Reagan era was after it. But he’s out there every day saying he and Clinton were FDR and Bush and Reagan were Hoover, and he makes some headway when he says this. The great reason behind the assertion is the wisdom Gore and his people have learned from watching Jay Leno. They watch Mr. Leno’s monologues, as all who are in politics and can stay awake do, in order to get a sense of what middle America is laughing at, and what can be inferred from that laughter.

Gore and his people have watched Leno and seen those street interviews he does where he asks people: “Which American President was in the White House when we fought Hitler?” and a nice 25-year-old guy who’s a paralegal scrunches his brow and says, “George Washington?” And Jay says, “What was the U.S. Civil War about?” and a 30-year-old woman says, “Um, they were killing the Jews? Like, you know, the Schindler list thing?”

Gore and his people seem to think Americans have grown very, very stupid. That’s part of why Gore talks so slowly, so we’ll be able to understand him. Anyway, they clearly think telling people in their 20s and 30s that 1980 marked the beginning of the Reagan depression will work, and really so far there’s no particular reason to think they’re wrong. The crowds cheer when Gore says it.

Will you say it, Mr. Clinton? And if you do, do you think history will notice and correct you?

*   *   *

You probably think: Politics is politics. Don’t matter what’s true as long as what we say seems to be true. All the rest is just some argument on “Crossfire.” Why shouldn’t I fudge the facts? Enough lies were said about me over the years. I’ve been through a dozen campaigns, and like I tell my friends, I can’t take my T-shirt off in public cause they’d see the marks from the flayings.

Actually I heard you say the last part, about the T-shirt and the flayings, way back in 1990, to friends, before you were president. I thought: This fellow sure has a sharp sense of his sufferings.

And you do. But you could give us all a sharp sense of how you see economic history in your speech, and I hope you do. I hope you offer not just the red meat but the hard spine of logic.

*   *   *

After you make the case that the Clinton-Gore administration ended a depression and brought America to new levels of wealth, you’ll probably echo Al Gore in that line he says: “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” It’s a great jaunty line. Gore’s people stole it from Reagan in ‘84. He’d remind people of the recession of the Carter years—inflation and interest rates that topped 20%. Reagan called it the misery index, and as much as anything it did Carter in. All Reagan had to do in ‘84 is point out he’d cut unemployment and inflation in more than half, that interest rates were way down, that the misery index was a thing of the past.

It was true, and he won. Bush did much of the same in ‘88, and what he said was true, and he won.

And now Al Gore is using Reagan’s and Bush’s arguments, and their language. But the facts don’t stack up. Gore is telling the truth when he says things are even better than they were in the ‘80s, at least economically. But they were good in the ‘80s, too. And people knew what Reagan did to get the economy going again. He slashed taxes, and he cut regulation. The economy took off, for the first time in a generation.

Gore has to convince people that you and he did something to make the economy good. He has to explain exactly what you did to make things better, because a lot of people don’t think the Clinton-Gore administration did much of anything. Or rather, they think you kept the economy good by getting beaten back when you tried to raise taxes, beaten back when you wouldn’t balance the budget, and beaten back when you wouldn’t back welfare reform. When these things were forced on you, you did them. The economy moved forward.

This is true, but it’s hard to say you got things better by getting beat.

*   *   *

It would be good in the Monday night speech if we could hear the Clinton-Gore argument for how you created this era of riches. You could tell us in your speech. I wish you would so that we could all look at it and think about it and turn to each other and say, “What do you think, does this hold water?”

I suspect half the country thinks we owe our riches to three things, the fact that entrepreneurial genius can flourish only in freedom, and we’re free; the fact that Silicon Valley has transformed the world; and the fact that investors, stockbrokers and Wall Street guys take Prozac now, so they don’t wake up like bears anymore but like bulls, charging into the day.

A lot of other people think it all began 19 years ago, when President Reagan lowered the top tax rate from 70% to 35%, cut marginal rates and helped free up the money that allowed Silicon Valley to become what it is.

But a lot of Americans have a kind of rough fairness: If you were president when the good stuff happened you get the credit, period. Tell them how they’re right to give it to you and Gore. And tell them what Gore will do to continue these bounteous years.

*   *   *

So you’ve said thanks and you’ve claimed triumph and you’ve bragged on the economy and explained how and what you did to make it expand.

One more thing would be good.

You’ve shown all these years that you’re intelligent and energetic and riveting in terms of your character and personality. But you’ve never shown . . . grace. Courage. Class. A generosity of spirit.

You could on Monday night, though.

And in showing you have some grace, courage and generosity you could do Al Gore a big favor.

You could talk about the triumphs of your time but then admit the things you’ve done that you shouldn’t have done, and claim them as your own, and take responsibility for them. The whole deal, from fundraising to losing our nuclear secrets to girls to . . . unleashing the fierce energy of your hatred into the national bloodstream, and getting all your people out there on television every day to hate for you and bringing the national conversation a few rungs lower.

You really pulled the country into some bad places, and sometimes, at some point, you must know this and admit it to yourself.

Maybe you could admit what went wrong, and point out, if it is true, that Al Gore wasn’t there. And then talk about what did work, and say, if you can, that Gore was there for that, and had a part in it.

Maybe you would, through this honesty, take Gore off the hook. Every day he wriggles like a caught fish because of the things you’ve done, things people associate with him. He can’t turn on you; that would finish him. And he can’t not be honest about you, because if he continues that he’ll lose.

So why don’t you be honest for him. Turn on yourself. You’ve got nothing to lose, really. And you have the respect of history to gain. Historians always smile on candor and kindness, have you noticed? They’re human, and recognize acts of grace.

You could do Hillary a favor, too. Of course you’ll talk about her Senate race, and maybe you’ll throw her a kiss and mouth “I love you” again. Democrats seem to like that a lot, so it will get applause. But I’ll tell you, everyone else cringes. Here’s a way to help her. They liked her a lot in New York when they thought she was your victim. Then the past year when she looked like just another blunderbuss pol, just another maneuverer playing games with things like the FALN terrorists—well, she looked like a much worse version of your average pol.

You’d better remind New Yorkers she was once first lady, and met with people and was nice to them, and you better remind them she’s a victim, if that’s how you and she still see her. She really was more liked when people felt sorry for her. So that’s another reason you might be gracious, and candid.

*   *   *

Why would you do such an extraordinary thing? Because if Gore wins and Hillary wins then you know what History’s headline will say: “Clintonism Endorsed! The People, Yes—They Demand Eight More Years of Good Leadership!” And if Gore and Hillary lose, you know what that headline will be: “Clintonism Rebuffed, America Throws The Bums Out, Clean New Era Begins!”

You’re fighting for history’s headlines. And there’s another thing that motivates you. If the Repubicans win they will be happy. Those greedy narrow-minded frightened bullying hypocrites will be smiling all over the tube.

And you can’t have that. Because you hate them, you really hate them. That’s why you call them Nazis. That’s why you’re thinking, as you prepare this speech, They ain’t gonna win this. You watch. Bubba came to play.

The choice of Joe Lieberman of Connecticut as Al Gore’s running mate is so smart, so clever, so good, so satisfying, so striking that it just may turn this election a bit on its head for a while. Certainly its most immediate effect is going to be a successful Democratic convention next week in Los Angeles, because now the Democrats, badly hit by their own form of Clinton fatigue and acutely aware of the particular charmlessness of their presidential candidate, have something to cheer about. They respect Joe Lieberman. They think he has a center, a moral and ethical view of the world. He is experienced and articulate. He is decent and intelligent. He is independent. The media love him. He is a regular co-star on Imus, and all of the columnists and reporters for the elite newspapers, and all of the electronic pundits and anchors, know him and admire him.

But that is not what is most wonderful. What is most wonderful is that he is an Orthodox Jew. What does this mean? It means a lot of people who love America more than they love parties or politics are happy that a big and great breakthrough has occurred. A friend, a journalist who is politically conservative and Jewish, e-mailed me to tell me he had been weeping all morning, that he’d cried when he heard the news. Another friend, a producer at a TV news show, called and told me she woke her father in California to give him the news and they both got choked up. “This is like 1960,” she said, and I said I know, and I got choked up. It is wonderful when America is at her most American, and breaks down another barrier and says “What’s in your heart is most important.”

If Joe Lieberman had been Joe Lee, and an Episcopalian, Al Gore would have been smart to pick him. He would have been an obvious choice. The only reason he would have hesitated over Mr. Lieberman is that he’s Jewish. Mr. Gore decided that was just fine. I think that I have never seen Al Gore do such an elegant, intelligent and original thing. Well done, Mr. Gore.

*   *   *

I have to tell you, this really does feel like a 1960 moment to me. I was a little girl when a Catholic got chosen to run for president, and I had gathered from the conversation of grownups that You Don’t Elect Catholics to the Presidency. When it happened, it’s hard to describe how exciting and moving and idealism-inspiring it was. It gave a lot of people a lot of joy. It opened things up more. That was a good thing. So is this.

And because this is such a good thing, I hope everyone of whatever politics or persuasion sits back for a few days and feels good about it. Everyone should be nice and not do any political bashing until . . . Friday.

However, I think it’s okay and maybe even helpful to note the following.

Network producers are going to decide, in their bright and touchingly uninformed minds, that the big opponents of the Lieberman choice will be Christian conservatives. That’s where they’ll go for the negative sound bites. But Christian conservatives love Joe Lieberman. They’ve been arm in arm with him in the great cultural battles of the past decade. He was just about the only Democrat who’d give them the time of day. He was on their side.

The last time I saw Mr. Lieberman was last spring, in New York, at a symposium on Hollywood and the culture. I moderated and introduced our guests—Joe Lieberman and Bill Bennett, who are close friends and co-warriors in the values battle. Lieberman and Bennett very frankly talked to the audience of producers and writers and network people and movie stars about how to make television and film and music more decent, more helpful. This is how people on the right think of and have experienced Mr. Lieberman—as a good guy with his head screwed on right.

Many conservative Christians—I think most conservative Christians—see all of those who love God as part of the same “cultural minority.” Conservative Christians don’t feel they have much in common, in terms of their political desires, with atheists and agnostics and leftist Episcopalian bishops and such. But they think they have a great deal in common with Orthodox Jews. They crowd around Rabbi Daniel Lapin when he speaks at a conservative gathering; they crowd around Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, David Horowitz and scores of others. One of the biggest heroes of conservative Christians is an Orthodox Jew called Dr. Laura; the last time I saw her she was wowing them at a born-again Christian assembly at the National Prayer Breakfast last February.

*   *   *

A powerful and respected political officeholder told me Monday that there’s “no upside” to the Lieberman choice. I told him there’s no downside. He was surprised and said, “He can’t even campaign on Saturdays!” I said so what, America would love to see a politician who actually put God first one day a week.

I wish I’d added this: Remember Sandy Koufax? Joe Lieberman not campaigning on Saturday is Sandy Koufax not pitching on Yom Kippur. There were a lot of great sports moments in the 1950s and 1960s, but none greater than the day in 1959 when Mr. Koufax put God before the World Series. What a great guy, what a lesson for a generation of Christian and Jewish kids. And Muslims and everyone else too.

*   *   *

Yes, it’s good news for Hillary. It’s great news for Hillary. It enlivens part of her New York base, it says to New York Jews that the Democrats are the party that did this great thing, it excites people—and may help them forget, or at least not remember so vividly, that the Democratic senatorial candidate has, shall we say, a not fully satisfying relationship with New York’s Jews. A historic choice like the Mr. Lieberman can overwhelm a lot of previous bad static.

But let’s not care about that for now. The headline is not “Is It Good for Hillary?” The headline is: “It Is Good for America.” It is a wonderful country that does something like this, that takes a good man who is a member of a small ethnic/religious minority to be one of its two major vice presidential candidates, and that greets that choice with resounding hurrahs.

This is really a great day. We should all be happy. We really are a maturing democracy.

Imagine him running around the huge circular Olympic track, jumping hurdle after hurdle. And at each one the crowd makes a noise as if they are exhaling, which they are, because they’ve been holding their breath. He’s a good runner but he’s not really known as a guy who makes it over hurdles with ease; they’re never sure he’ll make it.

The first hurdle is the creation of a campaign team; the second, raising money. After that comes meeting America and the press and making a good impression; then winning the primaries. He falls at New Hampshire but picks himself up, wipes the gravel from his shins, resumes running and makes it over the hurdle called South Carolina. Then winning the nomination, then a successful postnomination period, with long speeches laying down a paper trail of seriousness. Then a successful convention, a breakthrough convention—he’s soaring now, gets a second wind; then a successful speech.

And at the end of this lap there’s applause, and the people in the crowd start to turn to each other and say, “That boy can jump.”

Now for the first time the crowd has expectations. And bombastic Bushkin knows it. Ahead is the postconvention-campaign hurdle, and the Labor Day-kick-off hurdle, and the handling-of-the-first-charges-of-serious-scandal hurdle, and the debate hurdles, two or three of them, and the first-rate-television-commercials hurdle, and the strong-finish hurdle . . . and then, if he wins the race, a new race begins the next morning. For to be president is to live every day on the big track.

George W. Bush won big last week, and now he’s winded and walking off, the adrenaline still pumping through his blood. And we turn to the other athlete, the other fortunate son, the senator’s son who has won his share of contests. What happens with him now, how does he run? Or does he not run, but instead put on gloves and box?

*   *   *

Last week in Philadelphia the Republicans gave the Democrats, in the eloquent words of Jeb Bush, a wedgie. Next week in Los Angeles Al Gore must untwist his knickers and produce a successful convention and a strong speech.

The Philadelphia convention was marked, from beginning to end, by good feeling. There was idealism and hopefulness and hunger on that floor, and it shone through on the television cameras whenever the cameras were showing the action to the American people. There was no slash-and-bash oratory, no wild statement from an inebriated Christian in the back of the delegation (and don’t think the media weren’t looking; I certainly was). The Republicans gave the Democrats nothing bad and dark to react to. So the Democrats are now free to produce a happy, hopeful, serious convention, featuring a generous and summoning speech from a newly expansive and enlivened Al Gore.

But people do what they know how to do. They do what they do well. Al Gore doesn’t know how to be sweet, he doesn’t do kindness and joy. Al Gore does attack politics and Al Gore is surrounded by people with a keen sense of . . . well, the nice way to say it is that they remember with fondness the pugilistic politics of another era and seek, almost as if in tribute to the professionals before them, to emulate the burly big-shouldered style of the political battles of yore. Another way to say it is that Al Gore is surrounded by tough, mean operatives whose sole political instinct is to rip out the other guy’s guts and dance in the blood.

Can Al Gore and his men and women not be what they are? Should they attempt to show a big-hearted optimism in their speeches and presentations? Or would it be better to do what they like to do, and do well: play a new and updated game of Class Warfare, with rich Republican lobbyists secretly controlling the bumpkin from Texas as they conspire to steal the very crumbs from the tables of the poor? Do the Democrats fear that the professional chatterers who comment on conventions will knock them if they’re hard and mock them if they’re soft?

We will meet the new and final Al Gore next week in Los Angeles. We know the Gore of the vice presidency and the Gore of the primaries, but we are now about to meet the Gore of the 2000 presidential campaign, and we’re about to find out if he’s a runner or a boxer. If he’s a runner he’ll be Optimistic Al, the man who puts forth Goreism to help our country. He will enter the campaign speaking of our problems and his solutions. If he’s a boxer he’ll come out swinging and try to put Mr. Bush down for the count. This Mr. Gore won’t wear earth colors but the colors of a fighter—bright white, rich scarlet, deep blue. Like a working man at a wedding.

Who will make judgments about the way Mr. Gore puts himself forward at his convention? All of us, and the men in the glass booths. High above the convention floor, overseeing all, they look down on the delegates and speakers with thoughtful expressions; they turn to the camera and characterize the speeches and the action on the floor.

Twenty years ago, when I helped cover conventions for CBS Radio, I used to walk on the floor and look up at the men in the booths and wonder what they were thinking. They looked so beautiful and pensive up there in the lights in their shiny boxes with the crisp network logos. I wondered if they were thinking things like, “Democracy in action at events like this has an inevitable look of silliness, and yet there is something truly moving in the joy of that delegate over there in the elephant hat, whom I’ve interviewed and who is a librarian in Lincoln, Neb., and who, when I asked her why she does this, said with unpracticed simplicity, ‘I just love my country.’”

But, God bless them, that is not what the anchors are thinking. They are thinking, and saying to each other, “Balloons are Republican sex.” They are intelligent and hard-working people, but they have forgotten they are lucky. (The delegate from Lincoln has not; she can’t stop calling her friends from the floor and putting them on with Jack Kemp.) They have been to too many conventions; sophistication can make you sour. One doesn’t know whether to hope they will be bipartisan, and bring their bad mood to both sides, or that they’ll cheer up and give everyone, including the Democrats, a break.

One senses that we will learn a great deal about the shape of the coming campaign from what we see at the Democratic convention, and what tone is established. The Al Gore we will see will be the final Al Gore, because he can only remake himself so many times, and if he adopts any more personas, by the fall he’s going to look not supple but like Sybil, the famous schizophrenic.

Will the campaign be rough-and-tough, vs. slyly large-spirited? We’ll find out next week, but here’s a hunch: When people who are by nature angry and tough go into a bad patch and start to fear they’ll lose everything, it doesn’t make them nicer.

*   *   *

For now the two athletes are separately engaged. One is headed for the shower, the other suiting up. At some point they will meet, and you can’t help but hope that they will end their contest as runners do, winded and euphoric or gutsy and exhausted. But one senses that the runner will be dragged, against his will, into the ring. And when it’s over there will be swollen faces and bloody eyes. Which would be too bad, because when national contests get violent it’s never only the guys in the ring that get hurt.

George W. Bush’s speech was good, and a success. It did what it had to do with verve and persuasive power; it was more full of policy content than had been signaled by the campaign; and the policy was solid Bushian conservatism: pro-missile defense, for tax cuts, for abolishing the death tax and banning partial birth abortion. It was a gutsy speech in these respects, and others.

His vow on Social Security—to change it to include private investment—was accompanied by a firm and uncompromising declaration to those who are on Social Security or about to be on it that there would be “no changes, no reductions, no way.” That’s going to make it harder for Al Gore to demagogue on this issue in the future, though no doubt he will try, and hard.

Mr. Gore definitely won’t be able to use his “risky tax scheme” mantra ever again. He’s going to have to get a new one now that Bush has made a comic buzz phrase of it with his witty observation that if the vice president had been alive in Edison’s time he would have called electricity “a risky anticandle scheme.”

It was good stuff from beginning to end, and it did its job. It told people what Mr. Bush thinks, what he wants to do, what he thinks our problems are and what he will do to solve them; it told voters what a vote for George W. Bush means. Mr. Bush cleverly referred to President Clinton more in sorrow than in anger—what promise that man had, he suggested, and what an emptiness he has wrought.

But what I found most remarkable about the speech is the sense that it was infused by good feeling. There was a largeness, a generosity of spirit in its tone, a kind of hopeful sweetness at the heart of it. This is, these days, unusual in public discourse. No doubt there will be great and one hopes rousing fighting in the future, but for now, on this night, the good heart at the center at the speech seemed just right.

*   *   *

And a fitting ending for a most interesting convention. This certainly wasn’t your father’s GOP, and in some ways that were truly good. This was a breakthrough convention for the GOP in that one of the big things it has been trying to do in a big way since 1968, finally really got done. A particular reality the Republicans want to establish has finally been established—because it is now a reality.

What I am referring to of course is the GOP’s desire to look and be inclusive, as in: Everybody’s welcome. Everybody has been welcome in the Republican Party for a long time, but every time the party tried to show this—by having black and women speakers, by highlighting Asians and Hispanics and immigrants—it always seemed like window dressing. But this time it didn’t, although the press insisted that is precisely what it was.

There were many images of the convention that I take home, but for me the most important was Condoleezza Rice at the podium. She is, as you know, black, 45, an academic, a former member of the National Security Council under President Bush, a brilliant and accomplished person who has more than earned her place at the table. And she was speaking not as a woman or a minority but as the leading national-security voice within a future presidential administration.

That was the breakthrough; that and Colin Powell, the esteemed civic leader and retired general, and Rep. J.C. Watts, one of the most respected voices in the party. And, most rousingly, the black minister who preached in full-throated soar to his roused and rousing congregation about why George W. Bush should be elected president.

It was all something. And it never would have occurred when I was a kid, and for me it was moving and beautiful.

*   *   *

The media hated it. From green room to live shot on the floor they complained that it was all phony. A wonderful fellow with whom I sometimes work, a Gentleman of the Tube, said to me at one point, “Ya know the difference between a black Republican and a black Democrat?” I was a little taken aback, and asked if this was the beginning of a racist joke. He shook his head. “Black Republicans feel like they’re guests. Black Democrats feel like they’re home.”

I wondered how he knew this, as he isn’t black. I told him I didn’t think it was true, and then added that I would walk up to every black delegate and party official I bumped into and would quote him without using his name and ask if it was true. And I did it many times the next day. I started with a handsome couple in their 30s or 40s, as we walked together into the big gala lunch for the Bushes and Cheneys on Wednesday. I introduced myself, explained what I wanted to ask them. I quoted the Gentleman of the Tube, and the woman’s face went . . . blank is a good word.

“He didn’t mean his observation as a racist comment”, I said.

The woman looked at me and said, dryly, “Oh, well that’s a relief.”

We started to laugh, and she and her husband told me they didn’t feel at all like guests, that they were Republicans, that they felt completely comfortable because they were among Republicans. And they were tired, very tired, she said, of being asked by eager interviewers what it was like being black and here.

Every black person I talked to echoed their sentiments. What I am going to tell the Gentleman of the Tube is this: Black Republicans feel mildly harassed and abused by the liberal media, but not by their fellow conservatives.

He’ll smile. “You’re a riot,” he’ll say, with affection, because he knows my political philosophy probably dulls my eyes. I always wonder if he understands that his dulls his.

*   *   *

But back to why I think this was a breakthrough convention. Normal humans, unlike reporters and political people, don’t sit, as we all know, for four hours straight and watch conventions. The television is on in grandma’s room and she’s got the door open and someone walks in and sees the convention and watches for a minute and then goes to check the pork chops or fix the doorbell. Most people get pieces of conventions. They get an impression of them. And that, ultimately, is why conventions have become so impressionistic—paintings full of dots and marks that together create a whole, a tree or a lady in a hat.

The impression a distracted viewer got when he walked by the set or turned on the radio was of diversity. Everyone’s welcome, everyone’s part, come join. This is very good. All of America should be more like this. And it is wonderful that the GOP has finally become what it wanted to be—what it struggled over many years, awkwardly and self-consciously and with inconsistent grace, to be.

*   *   *

However. There was one compelling and accomplished and brilliant black man who is a famous Republican who was very much not involved in the proceedings, and that was Alan Keyes. He was not on the podium because he is that inconvenient thing, an eloquent and unstoppable social conservative who will never not tell you what he thinks.

The party seems to have done away with such things, and we all know why. Because they refuse to give the media any opportunity to use words like “red meat” and “extreme.” And indeed our friends in the media were so desperate to use those words—it’s as if they packed them in the briefcase next to the laptop, and have to throw it out now lest an unused epithet weigh down their bag on the way home—that they actually called Dick Cheney’s speech “red meat.”

Dick Cheney’s speech was critical, in a mild and rather reserved way, of eight years of Clinton-Gore. He was critical because he is in politics, and politics is an argument in which you assert and defend. He was making a political speech in which he asserted that the Clinton-Gore administration has, in many ways, been lacking.

Some red meat. Today, Thursday, reporters were calling it an example of negative campaigning. I sit back and wonder: Do they know how silly they sound?

Let me tell you of an unknown hero, a very smart and professional young producer/researcher at MSNBC. He was watching Mr. Cheney’s speech and picking up the media buzz, and he thought, as an intelligent man would, that the reporters were way off base. He remembered Al Gore’s acceptance speech at the ‘92 convention, in which he accused Bush-Quayle of causing “decay,” of creating a “crisis of the spirit,” of having left millions of Americans “betrayed by a government out of touch with our values and beholden to the privileged few,: of having “nourished and appeased tyrannies”; “they have embarrassed our nation”; “they have demeaned our democracy”; “the American people are disgusted.”

And that’s just in the first page.

Finding and handing out copies of Mr. Gore’s speech quickly dampened the growing media fervor regarding Mr. Cheney’s supposed slash-and-burn tactics. I think the researcher turned around a whole media river that night, or at least redirected it.

I don’t remember that the Gore speech—which truly was red meat, and, more than that, was quite vicious and extreme—was called any of those things. I think I remember it was called strong and passionate.

Really it is babyish to decry the massive and monolithic, unthinking and sly liberal political bias of the elite American media. It is not new; it is a fact of our lives; but I must say, every four years it jumps out at you like a child in the bushes on Halloween, making its ooh-ooh sounds and flapping its arms beneath the ghost costume. It has an endless power to startle you, and make you suck in your breath.

It isn’t television that has most changed the conventions, it’s bias, and the endless attempt to get around it.

*   *   *

But we cannot end sadly, as we are not sad.

I’ll end with this, my favorite Republican moment off the convention floor. In line to get a cab to the convention hall. Long line, no taxis. I make friends with three strangers—a Hispanic woman who’s a delegate from California, a young black woman delegate from the same state, and a Stetson-wearing guy in jeans from the Texas delegation. We share the next cab.

On the long ride to the hall, cell phones are ringing; everyone is giving radio interviews or print interviews with reporters back home. For a moment there is silence. Someone says—there has been no talk of religion—”We should pray for the convention.” The Texan leads us in prayer, that only words of wisdom and kindness and truth come from our mouths this day, and we ask that God bless our efforts to help our country.

As we bow our heads we all join hands through the hole in the plastic seat divider that protects the driver. We pray and say “Yes, Lord” as the cab weaves and turns at great speed. We finish—”Amen and thank you, Lord.” There is quiet. For 40 seconds. And our phones begin to ring and we resume our busy talking.

We were beige, black, white and white and we loved and understood each other and vowed to be friends. We hugged goodbye. The tenderness of these good people takes my breath away.

And so it begins. Everything up to now has been winning the nomination and meeting America. Next week the campaign proper starts. Just about every voter in the country will, even if just for a moment, tune in to watch your big speech Thursday night at the convention. It’s been on your mind in a big way for a long time. When I saw you two weeks ago, you said you were in the fourth draft, working with the gifted Gerson and Hughes and Rove. You were happy with the policy elements and what you called the general thrust, but you keep reworking the text so you can hear the sound of you in it.

Not that you think the sound of you is so beautiful, but it’s you. You have a vocabulary, a way of speaking, a way of using humor. It’s your style. And the speech has to be you or it won’t succeed.

What is your sound? Direct, common, colloquial. A modern American man from the West, with a life in business and politics. Flat, not soaring. Almost dry and dusty. Dry and dusty as an old pair of cowboy boots. That’s what you want in the speech, something that’s strong and tough as an ol’ boot, with a little color, a little fancy stitching, but not too much. Sharp slope on the heel, sharp toe to do some kicking.

You’re sure the speech has to be good. You’re right. A bad one will give you a solid month of bad press and bad jokes. But don’t worry too much and overwork it. You know that a great acceptance speech doesn’t bring victory; a great acceptance speech gives meaning to victory. It can even give a mandate. Victory is made of other things; usually in politics you find victory in the day-to-day, not in the big moments. More important is a good campaign. So far yours has been textbook.

And part of the campaign, the kickoff of the contest, is the speech. A great acceptance speech defines what a candidacy is so that the candidate and the voters together have the words that explain what the election is about. The candidate internalizes the speech, explains himself to himself with it. When it works, all his stray thoughts, ideas, policies and proposals come together and hold together like a length of strong rope. Like a lasso you can take hold of and throw out to a crowd.

So that’s what you want, a boot and a lasso.

*   *   *

You want to tell people, “This is who I am. This is what I believe. These are my intentions. This is why you want to come walk with me and be part of this big thing I’m doing.” And you have to do all that in about 45 minutes. Which is hard, especially when you remember that about 15 of those minutes are sheer, spontaneous, happy applause. With, in your case, a lot of whomp-em, stomp-em from the Texas delegation.

You want to flesh out compassionate conservatism, because it’s at the heart of what and who you are. In a way, compassionate conservatism is a matter of facing the unfinished business of the 1980s. Back then, President Reagan and your father had a lot to do, pushing down the Berlin Wall, and many other walls. In the ‘80s the modern economy was invented, taxes and regulation came tumbling down, money was freed up, geniuses like Jobs and Gates and ten thousand others built the new America.

We are living in the economy the men of the ‘80s made. It is one of the great lies of the Clinton era that he did it. And you might, in speaking of this, use it as a refrain: “Bill Clinton didn’t do this—you did it.” Bill Clinton, one wag has observed, was the car salesman on the floor when the billionaire came in and bought a fleet of Caddies. He didn’t make the car; he didn’t make the money that bought the car. He wrote up the order and went out to dinner.

But with new wealth, and with what we’ve learned about what helps the poor, and with the accumulated wisdom of 50 years of trying hard to bring everyone along—with all that and in all that, compassionate conservatism was born. It’s a good thing. It’s what in the Reagan White House we used to call being a bleeding-heart conservative.

Talk about this. You have a refrain you use: “It’s compassionate to want to help the poorest children get a good education—but it’s conservative to demand standards and embrace choice and competition.” Use that. Every time you use it on the stump, people listen.

There’s a phrase you’ve been using for a long time: “every willing heart.” You want to help create a society in which no one is left behind, in which every willing heart gets the lift it needs. Use that too. It’s you.

You have another refrain. I saw it at a speech in New York. “I’m runnin’ for a reason.” You talk about something you want done, and then you say, ‘I’m runnin’ for a reason,” and the audience starts to clap. It made me think that maybe you’re influenced, in your speaking, by local ministers in Texas churches. And again, it was natural to you.

*   *   *

You’ll want to demonstrate somehow that you’re a Texan born and bred. I asked you the first time I talked to you what accounted for the difference between your political perceptions and your father’s. And you said: “Midland, Texas.”

Your dad as a boy went to Greenwich Country Day in a chauffeur-driven limousine at the height of the Depression. At the same age you lived in a little suburban ranch house and played in the street in your undershirt and jeans. You drove your bike through vacant lots. You didn’t even know your parents had money and standing until you were a teenager, because they didn’t live like they did.

When your father got out of the East and away from his family, from the mother of tennis lessons and father of the three-piece suit, when he went to war, he mixed with poor guys and normal guys and wealthy guys, and he loved it. And he became a guy who gets up Sunday morning and walks around in his boxers and makes scrambled eggs for the kids. He became normal. You grew up normal. You breathed in Texas with hungry lungs and became a Texan, because Texas is the kind of place that has a soul to give, and that lets you become it.

You were spiky where the old man was smooth. You learned to lean back on a chair with cowboy boots tilted. You grew up in a Texas where boys wanted to be Hud, or James Dean and Rock Hudson in “Giant.” That great old movie, the official movie of Texas if you don’t count “The Last Picture Show,” ends with a beautiful, sentimental little close-up: two little babies in a crib, cousins, the Anglo baby and the Mexican baby.

Just like your family. So you’ve had a different experience and a very American experience. If somehow you could summon or evoke or refer to that. Well, Edna Ferber needed a whole novel, and you just have 45 minutes. But maybe some time in the future.

Anyway, about dad. And conservatism. It would be wonderful if you could define what a modern conservative is. I asked you when I talked to you that time why you are more conservative than your father, and you looked surprised. You felt you weren’t like some old-time conservatives, that you feel strong compassion for people and look to help them solve problems with conservative solutions. You see yourself as a moderate, and your father as a moderate, but you don’t think you’re moderate in the same way.

The old man was moderate in that he thought conservatives had certain insights and liberals did too, and you make your choices weighing the balance and considering the lay of the land, the play of the press, the state of the polls, and your gut sense of what you can do. The old man bowed to a lot of liberal assumptions.

But you don’t. You’re another generation, and a Texan. You don’t think the left has the moral high ground, you don’t bow to their professed intentions, because you’re not sure they’re their real intentions. You suspect that mere power is the thing they want. You might want to talk about some of this.

And you might think about this: You seem to have a particular Bush virtue, a familial virtue that the old man has in spades. It is a softness born of love. Love is what it’s all about with the Bushes, a huge affection that operates below the shrewdness, sourness and spite of big-league politics, below the father-son competitiveness and the brotherly competition. You all have soft hearts. It makes you all soft in a way that sometimes serves you well and sometimes doesn’t. America’s going to love you eventually because you’ve got a soft heart; but you better show in time that you’re tough too, even hard, because presidents sometimes have to be hard.

You probably don’t want to dwell on Clinton. You get what he is, and you don’t like it much, and it’s shrewd to ignore him. Your candidacy isn’t about opposing Clinton; it’s about governing the country in a better, healthier, principled way. You probably don’t want to talk about Gore either.

But consider whether you’d be doing the country a service if you would take one sharp hard paragraph and define what Clintonism—and by inference what Goreism—is and has been for our country. This might be cleansing, and bracing. It also might have long-term benefits. Some of the chickens Clinton-Gore let out of the yard will roost in your White House. It might be good now to lay the predicate of what he did and didn’t do. And it’s not as if people won’t believe you. They know who he is. Anger and conviction could make you too sharp, or too sarcastic, when you speak of this. Avoid that. Speak of it as what it is, and was: a tragedy for our country, a tragedy whose last echoes are yet unheard.

*   *   *

One way to make your views and intentions clear is obvious to you, and I’ll be listening to hear it. When you are the governor of a state you lead that state. You’re not one voice of many in a Senate; you’re the man who makes the decisions in the statehouse. Make the right decisions and the state can flourish; make the wrong ones and it can’t. People judge on the record. Tell us your record. Tell us what you did or tried to do in Texas, and what you mean to do for the country.

But back to the most important thing, something I mentioned earlier. Nothing works long-term in politics but love. Of course, you can win quick victories, even a series of them, through demagoguery, jabbing, fighting, even hating. But all enduring victories, all administrations with meaning, have love at the heart of them. Ronald Reagan loved America; that’s why he felt so protective of it, wanted it to be strong and rich. Your old man loved America. And the Bushes have the love thing. That time in New Hampshire when your father came out to help you, and hurt you instead—”this son of mine, this boy”—the whole event collapsed because you were supposed to make a speech but seeing and hearing your father made your eyes fill up and you couldn’t speak. And you never told why it didn’t work afterward, because you didn’t want to hurt the old man—who, like Joe Kennedy, wants to be part of this.

Look at your father’s book of letters. The whole subtext—family, country, children—is all about love.

You Bushes, under the Brooks Brothers, you’re all wearing it on your sleeve. And you, since you became a Christian, for you love is bigger now and deeper.

Honest love is a beautiful thing. Let it infuse your speech. As a matter of fact, Dwight Eisenhower, as I recall, once ended one of his big speeches with that very word: “love.” Reagan did once too. That’s a little tradition worth continuing. Just your little one-word nod to the family you came from and the nation you wish to lead.

“I’m feeling like a president.” George W. Bush was standing greeting New Yorkers before a speech 12 days ago in Manhattan. He was tanned, smiling, looked like he’d been getting his jogging in. A sinus infection that had left him gobbling Advil from New Hampshire through South Carolina was finally gone. He was feeling good.

I leaned toward him, not hearing in the hubbub, and he repeated what he’d said. (Actually: “Uhm feeln lahk PRESSdint.”) I had written once of how his father had started to feel like the president after Election Day 1988, that suddenly he was standing straight and filling out his suit. I looked at his son, who said, “That’s what the primaries are for, in part. What the long season is for.” To give you time to become what you mean to be. And he wanted it known he was becoming it.

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I thought of that yesterday when Gov. Bush took the podium in Austin, relaxed and in something like command. These days he’s Bush in bloom, expansive and settled, and the selection of Dick Cheney reflects his new confidence. Some bad luck (a Concorde down, a Mideast peace process gone bust) and some leaking (never let your father call the doctor and expect the neighbors not to hear) dulled the impact of the announcement, but it was still the story of the day, not only on its own terms but because of what it revealed about Mr. Bush. He didn’t choose someone who’ll help him win, he chose a man who’ll help him govern. He is certain he is going to win. He is thinking of the future.

Thus the choice. If you were president, Dick Cheney is precisely the kind of man you’d want working down the hall. He was chief of staff to President Ford a quarter century ago at age 34, was Wyoming’s only congressman for six terms, was President Bush’s successful secretary of defense for four tumultuous years encompassing a major war in the Persian Gulf. Talk about been there, done that.

But he was not an obvious choice. He is the darling of no part of the party, does not bring a big state, brings nothing to the Electoral College, is not a political pugilist and will not go after the other team hammer and tong. No one has ever called him a great campaigner, and he looks like one of those public servants who find shaking hands on the stump mildly embarrassing, if not germy. He brings nothing to the ticket but seriousness, experience, integrity, maturity, wisdom and a thoughtful conservatism.

Mr. Cheney is the un-Clinton. Bill Clinton is dramatic, full of sparks; he loves to pose reaching for hands and being engulfed in the love of the people. Dick Cheney does not appear to want or need public adoration. Those who know him say he will prove to be a gifted debater, but I see no sign of that. He keeps his own counsel and ponders, does not thrust and parry, does not love the cha-cha of politics, the dance. That’s why he wound up in public service—not what the Clintons and Kennedys call public service, by which they mean politics, but real public service, i.e., serving the public.

A small anecdote about a large facet of his personality. Once, in the summer of 1992, I was invited to a dinner upstairs in the White House. I’d never been there before, and wondered what I’d see. I saw a handful of people talking politics, commenting on the upcoming election, and sat near Dick Cheney, whom I did not know and who was sitting quietly on a sofa listening to everyone. He looked grave and friendly. President Bush’s sister turned to him and said she hoped he would someday write a book, and hoped he was keeping a diary. He sort of winced, and looked down. No, he said, “unfortunately you can’t keep diaries in a position like mine anymore.” He explained that anything he wrote could be subpoenaed or become evidence in some potential legal action. “So you can’t keep and recount your thoughts anymore.” We talked about what a loss this is for history. It concerned him. It was serious; so is he. Then everyone started talking politics again.

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There would be problems with any GOP vice presidential choice because the media, which got one of the great stories of the 1980s with “Dan Quayle is a numbskull,” is looking for another good story, and who’s to blame them. It’s summer, we need a good story. The best shot with Mr. Cheney was touched on by a weatherman on Fox News Tuesday morning who jokingly pointed to a weather map full of clouds and rain and said, “Cheney fever is sweeping the nation!”

He looks like a boring, white, middle-aged male Republican. And though he’s famous to some, he’s wholly unknown to many and has been out of the public eye through most of the 1990s. If you are older than 45 or so, you might think Dick Cheney is a gifted public servant with a long history of dazzling achievement. If you are in your 20s or 30s, he’s a round guy with a bad ticker. Mr. Cheney will have to be introduced to a significant portion of the electorate.

And because he was famous long ago, and because even in his mid-30s he had premature gravitas and seemed 50, a lot of people think he’s old. It is amazing to think he is only five years older than George W. Bush. He seems five years older than Gov. Bush’s father. His cardiac problems will have to be addressed clearly and honestly again and again. Doctors say he’s fine after his triple bypass, but a heart problem can be a political problem. It didn’t help Bill Bradley. It didn’t hurt Lyndon Johnson, however: He had a massive heart attack three years before JFK chose him as vice president. He got out of the hospital, stopped smoking, lost weight, and a year into his own active presidency people had forgotten he’d ever been sick.

*   *   *

The not-so-secret weapon, and the growing story will be Mr. Cheney’s wife, Lynne Vincent Cheney, who is something new as a vice presidential spouse. She will probably be somewhat controversial, not in the usual tabloidy way of vice president’s wives—“Betty Ford’s Addiction,” “Tipper’s Secret Agony”—but because she is an authentic intellectual, a scholar engaged in the culture wars, a brilliant writer and thinker with a doctorate in British literature (her dissertation was on Matthew Arnold).

She has operated the past 20 years not through the power derived from a successful husband but through her own independent efforts. She was head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and wrote “Telling the Truth,” about the tendency of modern academia to allow politically correct thinking to shroud and obscure the truth. As the second lady, she will be news. Mrs. Cheney is currently at work on a book about problems in public education, including fuzzy math, creative spelling and the abandonment of phonics. Maybe later we will finally get a White House memoir written by a principal that is not only informative, but literature.

Looks like she’s the un-Clinton, too.

The choice of Dick Cheney seems so grounded, mature and constructive that, as a citizen, I am astonished. An adult has been picked for an adult job. We appear to be entering a new era. Perhaps it will be called the restoration.