Peggy Noonan

From the beginning it was a story marked by the miraculous. It was a miracle a six-year-old boy survived the storm at sea and floated safely in an inner tube for two days and nights toward shore; a miracle that when he tired and began to slip, the dolphins who surrounded him like a contingent of angels pushed him upward; a miracle that a fisherman saw him bobbing in the shark-infested waters and scooped him aboard on the morning of Nov. 25, 1999, the day celebrated in America, the country his mother died bringing him to, as Thanksgiving.

And of course this Saturday, in the darkness, came the nightmare: the battering ram, the gas, the masks, the guns, the threats, the shattered glass and smashed statue of the Blessed Mother, the blanket thrown over the sobbing child’s head as they tore him from the house like a hostage. And the last one in the house to hold him, trying desperately to protect him, was the fisherman who’d saved him from the sea — which seemed fitting as it was Eastertide, the time that marks the sacrifice and resurrection of the Big Fisherman.

[Header] Holiest Time

It is interesting that this White House, which feared moving on Iraq during Ramadan, had no fear of moving on Americans during the holiest time of the Christian calendar. The mayor of Miami, Joe Carollo, blurted in shock, “They are atheists. They don’t believe in God.” Well, they certainly don’t believe the fact that it was Easter was prohibitive of the use of force; they thought it a practical time to move. The quaint Catholics of Little Havana would be lulled into a feeling of safety; most of the country would be distracted by family get-togethers and feasts. It was, to the Clinton administration, a sensible time to break down doors.

Which really, once again, tells you a lot about who they are. But then their actions always have a saving obviousness: From Waco to the FBI files to the bombing of a pharmaceutical factory during impeachment to taking money from Chinese agents, through every scandal and corruption, they always tell you who they are by what they do. It’s almost honest.

All weekend you could hear the calls to radio stations, to television, from commentators, from the 40% who are wounded, grieving and alive to the implications of what this act tells us about what is allowed in our country now. “This couldn’t happen in America,” they say, and “This isn’t the America we know.”

This is the America of Bill Clinton’s cynicism and cowardice, and Janet Reno’s desperate confusion about right and wrong, as she continues in her great schmaltzy dither to prove how sensitive she is, how concerned for the best interests of the child, as she sends in armed troops who point guns at the child sobbing in the closet. So removed from reality is she that she claims the famous picture of the agent pointing the gun at the fisherman and the child did not in fact show that.

The great unanswered question of course is: What was driving Mr. Clinton? What made him do such a thing? What accounts for his commitment in this case? Concern for the father? But such concern is wholly out of character for this president; he showed no such concern for parents at Waco or when he freed the Puerto Rican terrorists. Concern for his vision of the rule of law? But Mr. Clinton views the law as a thing to suit his purposes or a thing to get around.

Why did he do this thing? He will no doubt never say, a pliant press will never push him on it, and in any case if they did who would expect him to speak with candor and honesty? Absent the knowledge of what happened in this great public policy question, the mind inevitably wonders.

Was it fear of Fidel Castro — fear that the dictator will unleash another flood of refugees, like the Mariel boatlift of 1980? Mr. Clinton would take that seriously, because he lost his gubernatorial election that year after he agreed to house some of the Cubans. In Bill Clinton’s universe anything that ever hurt Bill Clinton is bad, and must not be repeated. But such a threat, if it was made, is not a child custody matter but a national security matter, and should be dealt with in national security terms.

Was it another threat from Havana? Was it normalization with Cuba — Mr. Clinton’s lust for a legacy, and Mr. Castro’s insistence that the gift come at a price? If the price was a child, well, that’s a price Mr. Clinton would likely pay. What is a mere child compared with this president’s need to be considered important by history?

Was Mr. Clinton being blackmailed? The Starr report tells us of what the president said to Monica Lewinsky about their telephone sex: that there was reason to believe that they were monitored by a foreign intelligence service. Naturally the service would have taped the calls, to use in the blackmail of the president. Maybe it was Mr. Castro’s intelligence service, or that of a Castro friend.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to. A great and searing tragedy has occurred, and none of us knows what drove it, or why the president did what he did. Maybe Congress will investigate. Maybe a few years from now we’ll find out what really happened.

For now we’re left with the famous photo, the picture of the agent pointing his gun at the sobbing child and fisherman, the one that is already as famous as the picture taken 30 Easters ago, during another tragedy, as a student cried over the prone body of a dead fellow student at Kent State. It is an inconvenient photo for the administration. One wonders if it will be reproduced, or forced down the memory hole.

We are left with Elian’s courageous cousin, Marisleysis, who Easter morning told truth to power, an American citizen speaking to the nation about the actions of the American government. We are left with the hoarse-voiced fisherman, who continues trying to save the child. We are left wondering if there was a single federal law-enforcement official who, ordered to go in and put guns at the heads of children, said no. Was there a single agent or policeman who said, “I can’t be part of this”? Are they all just following orders?

We are left wondering if Mr. Clinton will, once again, get what he seems to want. Having failed to become FDR over health care, or anything else for that matter, he will now “be” JFK, finishing the business of 1961 and the missile crisis. Maybe he will make a speech in Havana. One can imagine Strobe Talbot taking Walter Isaacson aside, and Time magazine reporting the words of a high State Department source: “In an odd way Elian helped us — the intensity of the experience, the talks and negotiations, were the most intense byplay our two countries have had since JFK. The trauma brought us together.”

[Header] What Reagan Would Do

And some of us, in our sadness, wonder what Ronald Reagan, our last great president, would have done. I think I know. The burden of proof would have been on the communists, not the Americans; he would have sent someone he trusted to the family and found out the facts; seeing the boy had bonded with the cousin he would have negotiated with Mr. Castro to get the father here, and given him whatever he could that would not harm our country. Mr. Reagan would not have dismissed the story of the dolphins as Christian kitsch, but seen it as possible evidence of the reasonable assumption that God’s creatures had been commanded to protect one of God’s children. And most important, the idea that he would fear Mr. Castro, that he would be afraid of a tired old tyrant in faded fatigues, would actually have made him laugh. Mr. Reagan would fear only what kind of country we would be if we took the little boy and threw him over the side, into the rough sea of history.

He would have made a statement laying out the facts and ended it, “The boy stays, the dream endures, the American story continues. And if Mr. Castro doesn’t like it, well, I’m afraid that’s really too bad.”

But then he was a man.

It is, of course, all that Republicans are talking about: So what do you think of John McCain? What do you think of what’s happened? A lot of them seem not only surprised but delighted. Unexpected history is happening, and politics is fun again.

It is tempting to see in the political contest between George W. Bush and John McCain the clash of two mythic American archetypes, the Flyboy and the Boss’s Son. The Flyboy at the moment is making a strong impression. The Boss’s Son at the moment seems lost. Republican primary voters are the girl who will choose between them.

Mr. McCain of course is the Flyboy. He flew in on a wing and a prayer, dashing, sardonic and slightly hung over, like Dana Andrews in “The Best Years of Our Lives.” You met, he took you dancing, you marveled at the medals on the damp and smoky wool of his uniform. Later he fell asleep on your mother’s couch, where he had flashbacks: “Jump, Kowalski, jump!”

“Capt. McCain, Capt. McCain, you’re having a nightmare!”

[Header] Authentic and Adorable

You laughed together at the hypocrisies of the local burghers—he’s an outsider, and deep down you’ve always felt like an outsider too. There’s a downside—they say he has a temper; there was a scandal with a banker; he hangs out with those boys on the bus, whom you’ve never liked. Sometimes the things he says are self-contradictory, or don’t quite hold together. But he’s different—authentic, and brave, and adorable.

He has captured your imagination. This may get serious. He seems such a relief from—from that other man in your life, George W., the Boss’s Son. He’s not from a war movie, he’s—he’s Rodney in “Peyton Place”! No, he’s Cliff Robertson in “Picnic”—the factory owner’s boy, affable, competent, clean and good, with soft brown hair and a boyish smile. He’s destined to run the family business and be a town leader, surrounded by dependable family retainers and advisers. He’ll be a good provider, and a good father, too. But you perceive within him a diffidence, and maybe an ambivalence. Does he even want to take over dad’s job and settle down?

You’ve been dating him for a year, and everyone thought marriage was in the cards, but now—now there’s Flyboy. And suddenly you realize one of the biggest reasons you couldn’t get serious about the Boss’s Son is that your parents wanted you to! Mom and pop—let’s call them “the Republican establishment”—kept telling you he’s a catch. They kept pushing you, for your own good. Well, heck—let them marry him!

*   *   *

The McCain phenomenon seems to me less a crusade than a crush, and this is all so un-Republican it is breathtaking. Republicans have tended to vote on issues. They agreed with Ronald Reagan in 1980 and ’84; it wasn’t his charm. They agreed with George Bush père in ’88. In ’92 they were mad at him—because of what he’d done on the issues! Nineteen ninety-six was just one long mess but now, in 2000, won’t Republicans return to their usual ways?

Maybe not. Gov. Bush talks more about the issues Republicans care about, and takes the kind of stands they support. Sen. McCain doesn’t talk about the issues they care most about, and when he does, when he talks about something like defense, his position is hard to understand. He wants to improve military readiness, fill out the hollowed-out armed forces—and by the way, spending should stay at Clinton levels.

It is all so surprising and fascinating. And God bless him, only Bill Clinton could have brought us to this pass. It is yet another example of Clinton-shock. The effect of Mr. Clinton on Republicans, as much as it has been talked about, is still not fully appreciated. But the sheer concussive affect of having a president who Republicans think is a bad man, not a patriot, a truly harmful presence in American life—the effect of Bill Clinton on on-the-ground Republicans has been so utterly jarring, that it has left them abandoning the logic that has long guided them, and supporting in droves a man they don’t especially agree with, for the simple reason that they feel sure he is not Bill Clinton.

Mr. McCain seems in fact the opposite of Mr. Clinton. Bill Clinton dodged the draft and watched the war on TV, John McCain lived it in the Hanoi Hilton; Mr. Clinton is big and glib, Mr. McCain is bantam-like and peppery; Mr. Clinton is smooth, Mr. McCain sputters; Mr. Clinton transparently lives by the polls, Mr. McCain relishes telling Portsmouth, N.H., they may have to close the base; Mr. Clinton is famous for lying, Mr. McCain rides a bus called the Straight Talk Express.

They seem different. But one of the reasons for the anger of the Republican establishment—the mom and dad of this piece—is that they think in their hearts that Mr. McCain is another Clinton. He looks different and sounds different and has a different history, but he’s a similar kind of man—a strange and self-promoting egotist, one who is unpredictable, inconsistent and vain. They’ve worked with him for years, know him, and think the anti-Clinton is really Clinton II. And what some thoughtful Republicans are trying to puzzle out is whether the Washington establishment dislikes Mr. McCain because he is so much his own man, or because he is so much a flawed man.

For a lot of other Republicans, Mr. McCain right now has three big advantages. First, “mom and pop” don’t like him, and he and the voters are relishing the rebellion. Second, the Flyboy wants it. And when you want it, you don’t mess yourself up with things that keep you from getting it. Does the boss’s son want it? If he wants it he can probably have it, but if he really is at heart ambivalent . . . well, ambivalent men don’t win the presidency. They usually don’t get the girl, either.

[Header] Message: Himself

Third, Mr. McCain already has his message: himself. The antiestablishment hero who’ll come in and clean up the mess in Washington, who can see through its hypocrisies and do something about them. Mr. Bush’s job is harder: to retool a message for the changing, and concussed, conservative base.

What a year, what a surprising struggle, and as to how it will turn out, Hollywood offers mixed signals. In “The Best Years of Our Lives,” the girl goes with Flyboy, and everything works out right. In “Picnic,” she rejects the Boss’s Son, and you can tell it’s not going to end happily.

New York’s Central Park, 6:43 a.m. on a Thursday in late September, a morning dark, cool and rich with something latent. I walked along head down, lost in thought, trying to understand how a brilliant man could write, would write, such a base botch of a book. If only I were with him and could ask. Suddenly I stepped upon an acorn, and an electric shock tore through me. Suddenly, in an almost occult sense, I was there! In his office, in the townhouse on Capitol Hill. The rows of shelves groaning and gleaming with books, the long gray filing cabinet below and, within it, the famous yards of cards, the ones he showed so proudly on “60 Minutes,” each marked in careful, spidery script with a Mont Blanc pen whose use signifies a commitment to calligraphy, a writer’s love of sparkly things, or nothing much.

“Edmund,” I said, “I’m writing like a nut because I’m imitating you! I agreed to review your book because I was sure you’d been unjustly criticized. I expected something of breadth, depth and sweep—something serious. Not this—this high-dive belly-flop into the pools of Narcissus.”

He looked at me—wire-rimmed glasses, soft bangs and beard. Why, he looks like Lytton Strachey! (Later, from my notes: “His unconscious homage to wiggy but groundbreaking Bloomsburian biographer?”) At first he was dismissive—the criticism is the sort of thing that “always greets any kind of original idea.” Then he was pleading. Fourteen years of expectation, 14 years of the elusive Reagan, and all the while as each year passed he got closer to … the battlefield. When his book on Teddy Roosevelt came out in 1979 Teddy was long dead, the historical case long settled. But Ronald Reagan is alive, the argument rages, there is still no settled opinion! The editors, reviewers and social figures with whom Mr. Morris dines—Mr. Reagan is, still, their full moon; they see him, they bay. And sometimes bite.

“Do you know how all this pressure left me?” he asked.

“Don’t say barking mad.”

“No—unnerved, in time enraged, at last quite desperate. So I got someone else to write the damn thing, a made-up character with a made-up life who has made-up interactions. I called him ‘Edmund Morris.’ If you don’t like the book you can bloody well blame him.”

*   *   *

I will.

But where to start.

Edmund Morris’s “Dutch” (Random House, 874 pages, $35) is a shocking book, not a work of sustained scholarship but a mere entertainment, and not an entertaining one. It is at turns bilious and cold, corny and cynical, manic and flat. It is also almost heartbreaking in that it marks such a waste—of history’s time, the Reagans’ faith, the writer’s talent.

The famous central literary device, as I think we all know, does not work; it confuses, frustrates, obscures what it was meant to illumine. The reader never quite understands who is talking and whether he is being given a fact, a joke, a serious opinion, a bit of speculation or a guess. The fictitious “Edmund Morris” is a bore, tedious and windy, and a distraction from the more compelling story, fitfully told, of Ronald Reagan.

From beginning to end a badly written meanness permeates. Mr. Reagan goes to “a hayseed school” where the girls have “ugly names” and wear “cheap perfume.” His first radio broadcasts appeal to “Dust Bowl brats like little Hughie Sidey.” His early California supporters are patriotic and honest but, tragically, lack “irony.” They are “aesthetically blind, culturally retarded … they view all threats to the Constitution—their Constitution—with the utmost seriousness.” Silly them. At White House dinners Mr. Morris puts up with more tacky people, a boring female theologian and a Palm Beach socialite “stiff with jewels.”

When he is not mean he is English, not necessarily the same thing. He has no feel for the Midwest, and when he gives his characters dialogue—“There was more ‘nuff roasted chicken and corn as evening came on” and “Jay Russell got him a new Buick”—they sound like extras in “Show Boat.”

His portrait of America in the ‘60s seems written by someone who wasn’t there; cliches are not avoided but seized upon and held high. The free-speech battles at Berkeley get deservedly long attention, but the central characters are not Mr. Reagan and university president Clark Kerr but Mr. Morris and his fictitious son, “Gavin,” who calls the Black Panthers “bad cats I dig in Oakland.” You will, literally, wince.

[Header] Cheap and Corny

The political perceptions and assertions are almost uniformly common wisdom. For all his references to dusty archives and the pains of research (one wonders why he makes so many) much of what Mr. Morris says about Mr. Reagan’s presidency reads like clippings from Time magazine. A troika rules the White House, Edwin Meese has a messy briefcase, pragmatists and hardliners disagree, David Stockman is tense, supply-side economics silly. SDI, the missile defense system Mr. Reagan fought to research and deploy, is presented, cheaply and cornily, as an idee fixe whose appeal to Mr. Reagan is its similarity to sci-fi novels and B-movies. Mr. Morris does, however, allow others to make the case that holding to SDI at Reykjavik changed everything in the U.S.-Soviet relationship and was a key element in the Soviet collapse.

The book’s judgments on Mr. Reagan are mixed but not balanced, and the language deployed seems an attempt to cloak the author’s indecisiveness. The result is a striking inconsistency. Mr. Reagan is an apparent airhead. Mr. Reagan has a clean, orderly, serious mind. Mr. Reagan tells pointless stories. Mr. Reagan’s stories have a serious allegorical purpose. Mr. Reagan is a yahoo, Mr. Reagan is a reader with a high enjoyment of style and a writer of crystalline clarity. Mr. Reagan lacks compassion and heart, Mr. Reagan’s emotions well over when he speaks of that which he deeply cares. Perhaps strangest of all, “Reagan was America, and he wasn’t much else.” What a sentence. You have to be very strange to think that isn’t quite enough. The flaws of the book were reflected (and perhaps rehearsed) in Mr. Morris’s “60 Minutes” interview last Sunday, in which he dismissed Mr. Reagan’s character and gifts and then posed, weeping, as he read the president’s last letter to the country.

“Dutch” has some moments. The reporting of the John Hinckley assassination attempt has the simple force and power of that old popular classic, Jim Bishop’s “The Day Lincoln Was Shot.” Mr. Morris’s rendering of the blacklist era, almost thwarted by the insertion of fictional movie scripts and song-and-dance patter, is tugged along by the sheer force of Mr. Reagan’s actions, which are presented as courageous and idealistic. The sections on the Reagan-Gorbachev summits are strong. All of the author’s interruptions, conceits and bizarre devices cannot derail these few but solid narratives. Mr. Reagan’s function in this book made me think of what was said of FDR: He is like the Staten Island ferry, big, unstoppable and bringing all the garbage along in its wake.
[Header] What Really Happened?

I am not sure what to make of the quality of the reporting and suspect we will be hearing more about it. It is simply not believable, as Mr. Morris contends, that Mr. Reagan “secretly despised” George Bush. He secretly despised no one, and you didn’t have to know him well to know that. Mr. Morris’s attribution of an “upstairs downstairs” social resentment between the Reagans and the Bushes seems similarly bizarre, and one can’t help believe President Bush when he says it isn’t true. A small anecdote in which I figure, expressing concern about Mr. Reagan before a speech, is weirdly hyped up but happened. I’m not sure other things did. The story that young Ronald Reagan wanted to join the communist party but was turned away because he wasn’t bright enough (yes, Hollywood communists were famous for turning away rising stars who weren’t bright) comes from the gossip of an aging left-wing Reagan foe and is confirmed by no one. Colin Powell is reported boasting to Mr. Morris, on the last morning of Mr. Reagan’s presidency, that Mr. Reagan’s filmed office goodbye was great: Once again he, Mr. Powell, and the senior staff “directed [Reagan] and scripted him and made him up and gave him his cues.” It is hard to believe that Mr. Powell would talk like that, but if he did he is a conceited and ungrateful man, and quite stupid, too.

One senses this scene is in the book—that many stories are in it—not in an attempt to shed light, or make us understand, or explain Mr. Reagan, but merely to generate Bob Woodward-type headlines. This is unworthy of the author of “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.”

There is one other scene, at the end of the book, that is striking. The author sees Nancy Reagan leave the North Portico for the last time as first lady. “I blew her a kiss, feeling absolutely no emotion,” he writes. This actually is revealing, and for once you know exactly which Edmund that is.

A final note. I think this book’s great purpose may be to demonstrate decisively, and perhaps finally, contemporary biography’s obsession with the small. It is as if modern biographers cannot handle greatness and feel compelled to reduce it to petty and irrelevant things. This is puzzling and pointless. It is also tired, and, because it so often seems driven only by rage and inadequacy, tiresome. You’d think it would fall out of style, if only for the reason that, as is demonstrated here, it does damage not to the subject, but to the historian.

Hand it to her. Hillary Clinton had a spectacular day yesterday as she stood on the edge of a rolling field on Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s upstate farm and announced that she may announce. It was as deft and clever a political presentation as I’ve seen, a marvel of spin and more. She was poised, articulate, both cool and warm and—a first for her—modest.

She was in fact a natural.

I watched all morning rapt as CNN and MSNBC went live, and I think I saw some of what the future will hold.

[Header] ‘Listening Tour’

The media presence was huge, a reported 200 journalists, and most if not all seemed transported. “The listening tour” they breathed as they filled time. “Hillary Clinton’s listening tour is about to begin.” It is of course not a listening tour but a talking tour aimed at defusing bombs and getting good press, but the reporters called it the magical listening tour because—well, because her people told them that’s what it is. And if there’s one thing her people know it’s them people.

It wasn’t only a lack of skepticism from the elite press but a presence of enthusiasm. CNN’s Bruce Morton said of the day: “It’s really the voters’ show. . . . The point is to hear what they have to say.” But that was not the point, as he surely knew. MSNBC’s Chris Jansing made a sad-clown face and said of Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy, “It all began in the depths of her depression.” Ms. Jansing asked reporter Chip Reid how Hillary was feeling now—excited, nervous? Mr. Reid, reporting from the White House, said he thought the first lady was excited. “She’s running on Clinton time,” a now-happy Ms. Jansing said of Mrs. Clinton’s lateness.

Martin Kettle of London’s Guardian newspaper lightened things up just by answering questions. “Why are you here?” he was asked. “Hillary Clinton’s a world figyah!” he replied. Does she have star power? “Well she’s been well received in Britain—she has a huge stah following!”

Now we saw Mrs. Clinton walking, live, down a lane as she chatted with Sen. Moynihan in full, lanky gentleman-farmer-by-way-of-Harvard button-down shirt and khakis. He introduced her to the press—“Hi, Gabe!”—saying: “I hope she will go all the way. . . . I think she is going to win. . . . I think it will be wonderful for New York.”

Then Mrs. Clinton stepped forward—no notes, no text, standing behind a bare standup mike, looking exposed and undefended, a brave woman entering the arena, which is how her people wanted her to look. Surrounded by the huddling press she explained her candidacy.

“The last few months have been quite extraordinary for me,” she said. “I’m humbled and surprised to be standing here today.” She suggested she had in fact been drafted—hundreds of New Yorkers had come to her, and she listened to their excitement, and soon she too was excited by what she could do with them and for them. They e-mailed and sent notes and phoned. It would not have been gracious to ignore them. And so she will “spend the next few weeks and months listening.”

“I care deeply”, she said. “I am concerned that we work together to face the challenges that face New York and the people of New York.” She’ll be “listening hard, trying to figure out how to serve the people of New York.”

She said she wants to help improve education and health care, and specifically to help “the crown jewels, the teaching hospitals” of New York. Her husband has cut their federal funding. She has announced she opposes his move. Just watch, the Republican political consultant Jay Severin said yesterday: Mr. Clinton will announce a plan, she will oppose on the grounds it hurts New York, he will change his mind based on the eloquence of her arguments, and she will call news conferences announcing her triumph.

“I’ve been a tireless advocate all my life,” she said in a note of self-congratulation that was her one mistake of the day. Hearing how she’s worked so hard to help us reminded me of how the Clintons are always saying that they’ve devoted their lives to public service. When politicians say, “I’m in politics,” it may or may not be possible to trust them, but when they say, “I’m in public service,” you know you should flee.

The press threw softballs, and she neatly hit them deep into left and right, but the carpetbagger issue she hit out of the park. “It’s a fair question,” she said, conceding the obvious with grace. “I have some work to do to demonstrate that what I’m for is more important than where I’m from.” They must have worked for weeks on that one. (Mrs. Clinton did prep sessions in the White House this past weekend, and a Clinton supporter said she was excellent from the beginning.)

She said she takes seriously New Yorkers’ legitimate questions about what skills she’d bring to the state and to the Senate. She said in effect that she brings not a lack of ambition but a gift for advocacy.

She was disciplined. A question about Monica got the mantra response: I’m looking forward to meeting with New Yorkers. A question that might have been tough was rendered soft in the phrasing: How will she respond to charges regarding the $100,000 profit in cattle futures? She’s looking forward to creating a new future with New Yorkers.

The press was impressed.

Mrs. Clinton right now is doing two important things. First, she is nailing down her base. This means building excitement in the left wing of her party by convincing them that she is one of them and worth fighting for. Thus her blunt attack on vouchers the other day before the National Education Association. A year from now, when it matters, she will speak not as a “progressive” but as a moderate; her base, knowing the game, will not take offense. Yesterday’s speech was a departure, but Mrs. Clinton will be talking to the left for the next few months. This will garner renewed criticism, some of it fierce, from those who are not of the left. But that doesn’t matter, because of the second thing she is doing.

[Header] Rope-a-Dope

That is absorbing attacks, every day. For the next nine months or so she’ll be playing rope-a-dope, exhausting her foes by taking every blow they can throw. She’s doing this now because right now it doesn’t matter what is said of her. A year from now, when it matters, if New York’s pundits—the Dunleavies and Dowds, the Brookhisers and Breslins—are still attacking her, they will look obsessed and winded. She will look long suffering and glistening. The criticisms of ‘99 will be but a memory. Reporters will be reduced to covering her latest proposals. She knows this. Her people know this. It’s why, right now, they don’t mind attacks.

Yesterday was a very good day for Mrs. Clinton because it gave her wall-to-wall great coverage. But that may turn out to be good news for Republicans, in the same way that an alarm clock going off at the right time is good news. It rings, you hear it, you wake up and get dressed and stop dreaming and go to work.

NEW YORK—“To think of all they’ve put us through—and now they won’t even go away. Who are these people? And why do they think they are necessary to us?” So said a nice liberal Democrat from Manhattan, colorfully indignant recently at Hillary Clinton’s intention to become a senator from the state of New York. Most of the women I know feel the same way. One, a writer and reporter who votes Democratic, told me, “This is how I feel: Lady, keep your hands off my state.” These people are Mrs. Clinton’s base.

Their resistance is understandable. For Mrs. Clinton to launch this candidacy because (as a conservative would see it) she wants to fill the vacuum in her life with our money and our freedom, to launch it (as a liberal might put it) because she’s working out some revenge psychodrama and thinks New York should pay for the therapy;

To say to a state that you have no connection to, no history with, no previously demonstrated interest in—to say to a state whose greatest city you have treated for seven years as your own personal cash machine, a city where your greatest impact has been the traffic nightmares you cause as you motorcade north from Wall Street to Park and 96th in your relentless search for campaign money—

To say to this great state full of gifted people that you deserve to be its senator is an act of such mad boomer selfishness and narcissism that even from the Clintons—the Gimme and Getme of American politics—it is an act of utter and breathtaking gall.
And of course she may well win.

Modern people have a way of absorbing the brazen, factoring it in, in time discounting it. For some New Yorkers, gall isn’t a flaw but a lifestyle choice, one of the seven habits of highly effective people. Mrs. Clinton is a star, and New York likes stars. She will have the support of unions, and New York has unions. She is slippery and pragmatic and won’t play the part of the liberal. She has a human shield in the Secret Service, and won’t be as exposed as other candidates. She’ll raise a lot of money with ease, and she’ll have top-flight media.

She is already running a shrewdly calculated campaign. Take the not so slowly accelerating number of trips to New York that began three months ago—Hillary with children, Hillary at a school, Hillary meeting with local mayors, etc. She knows that this early in a campaign everything is a blur on a TV screen; the blur-impression she is creating is that Mrs. Clinton is here a lot. In another three months it will be Hillary kind of lives here . . . she must have an apartment here . . . she sure cares about us. On Election Day a year and a half from now, some New Yorkers will think she is already our senator, running for re-election. Take the almost accidental slipping into “we New Yorkers” and “our state.” When she first did this two months ago, she knew it would be the lead on the 11 o’clock news: Was it a slip or a declaration? Hillary Clinton says we New Yorkers lead the nation in apple production. The next time she said it, smaller headline. Now she says it with no headline, just the steady drumbeat—we, our, us.

All of this is an attempt to create an impression that will fool the distracted. And if there’s one thing the Clintons have learned in 25 years in politics, it’s that a lot of voters are distracted. This is the word they use when they’re being polite.

What comes next? How will she run? As we think about this, we should keep in mind Nora Ephron’s comment of some years back: “No matter how cynical I get, I just can’t keep up.”

When Mrs. Clinton announces, she will make a virtue of necessity and request, with a straight face, that she be treated like any other candidate in New York. (Upcoming headline from the New York Press: “Welcome Ms. Putzhead!”) But many people, as she knows, will find it hard to oblige. They can’t help treating a first lady with particular respect.

There will be a war room—there is always a war room with the Clintons—staffed by spinners. They will tell her to act out humility. “Be modest on the stump—admit you don’t know everything. That’s how to put it, ‘everything.’ Say, ‘I love New York and I want to be its advocate, to speak for this state in a national platform and uphold its interests in Washington. But I’m not gonna pretend I know everything. So I want to hear your concerns, so we can begin our dialogue.’”

*   *   *

There will be a speech in which she talks about the first time she came to New York, and saw the glittering towers, and fell in love with the vitality and energy on the streets, and hoped one day to return.

The carpetbagger issue will be cleverly spun. George Will asked Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) on Sunday if the Founders didn’t intend a senator from a state actually to be from and of that state. Mr. Schumer said the Founders in their wisdom left it to the states to formulate their own residency requirements. Then he delivered a little homily that was marvelous in its audacity. New York, he said, is full of immigrants who came here to follow their dream. And Hillary too comes here as an immigrant, eager to work and contribute. Mr. Schumer seemed to be road-testing a line. She will use it. Drawing a parallel between herself and new Americans will align her with a growing and significant part of the electorate. Look for speeches in which she speaks of “We newcomers to New York . . .”

Her vinegary, experienced aides will fight like tigers. Harold Ickes, abused in the past by the Clintons, has what appears to be battered-wife syndrome—I can’t leave, he needs me!- -but is a serious ideologue who makes serious use of derived power. James Carville will be even worse than usual. Mr. Carville is on a roll, having just helped to elect Ehud Barak in Israel. He’ll be in charge of spinning her support for a Palestinian state and privately reassuring Jewish supporters. Watch for statements from Mr. Barak a year from now that Israel doesn’t feel at all threatened by Mrs. Clinton’s position.

Because Mrs. Clinton is loyal not to place but to position, she will easily make the leap from patronizing Hot Springs to patronizing Staten Island. She will hide her condescension well and speak to the locals with warmth and humor. The old good-natured crowing about how Arkansas has the biggest watermelons in the country will become new good-natured crowing about the best cannoli in the world.

It will be hard for Republicans to blast her positions in advance, because her pollsters haven’t told her what they are yet. But she will campaign as a moderate. She will stand with police union members on the steps of medium-sized city halls and deliver speeches in which she supports community policing, the death penalty and a ban on “cop killer” bullets. She will stand with nurses’ union members under banners that say “Better Health Care for All” and say we have to fight “so that the hard working people of New York aren’t bankrupted by hospitals and ignored by HMOs.” There will be no specifics.

She will spend a lot of the campaign in grade schools, reading to children and speaking with indignation about how “the forces of cynicism and shortsightedness” want to “take money from our public schools to finance their experiments”—vouchers, charter schools—”and leave our new citizens, our immigrants and those who have been left behind in a brutally broken system.”

She will tirelessly front for the teacher’s unions and oppose the school-liberation movement that she knows would probably help the children she claims to stand for. But she will hew to the party line, gambling that no one will nail her on it.

Which brings us to the media. While they are not in the tank for Mrs. Clinton, they will practice a rampant, subtle, unspoken self censorship. No one in the elite media, the networks and big stations, the national magazines or big newspapers will go after her. They don’t like her, but they associate themselves with her politics, and they will not press her on her previous statements, on the financial scandals, the hidden billing records, the private eyes, the Republican FBI files illegally gotten by the former barroom bouncer she hired. They will congratulate themselves on avoiding sleaze and innuendo. In return they’ll get exclusive interviews.

Intrepid reporters who break from the pack will be reduced to yelling “What about Juanita Broaddrick?” as Mrs. Clinton hurries by the rope line. They’ll be called hecklers and harassers; NBC, CBS and ABC will do pieces on “Hillary Faces the Gauntlet,” taking a wry look at the famously irreverent New York press. Cut to the guy yelling “How did you make that hundred grand?” and then a close-up of Hillary being interviewed by a sympathetic anchor. She’ll says she understands how passionate people get about politics, but that our political process has gotten uglier, which is sad. She will be noble. She may bite her lip.

The entire campaign will be animated by the central insight she has derived in the years since 1991: Voters can be fooled, and mesmerized by repetition. A word here on the strange way they learned. Twenty years ago Ronald Reagan used words and events to communicate truths: America is good; democracy is the best form of government; the government should be our servant and not our master; the Cold War can be won.

Hillary’s generation of liberal political operatives watched, learned and added a variation: They would use words and images not to reveal but to obscure, not to clarify but to confuse. They would mislead their way to power. They felt they were justified: They didn’t think anything Mr. Reagan said was true, and yet the people supported him. Ergo they were manipulated. Ergo we will manipulate too.

Hillary’s New York campaign will show whether they’ve run this way of campaigning into the ground, or turned it into yet another victory.

“I know it’s an amendment. I know it’s in the Constitution. But you know what? Enough is enough.”
—Rosie O’Donnell

Enough is. The audience at Ms. O’Donnell’s show applauded yesterday, and I would have too if I’d been there, not for her call to ban all guns but because Rosie O’Donnell was as genuinely moved by the Colorado shootings as the rest of us, and was at least trying to come up with an answer. The political sentiment expressed was radical but was also the expression of a fact: People have had it. Something is different about this story. We’ve been through it before but the reaction this time suggests some critical mass has been reached.

You could see it even in the unnerving sameness, the jarring predictability of what we saw on television as this very specific tragedy unfolded. We all know the Kabuki now, we know it by heart. First the aerial shots of kids fleeing the shooting, then the shot of the girl sobbing in the arms of her friends; after that the Associated Press photo of the boy with his baseball hat turned backwards, gesturing over a body; then the memorial at the local church with kids sobbing and a stricken pastor speaking; then the yearbook pictures of the perpetrators—”He was kind of quiet, kind of a weird guy”—then the neighbor’s testimony about video games and Marilyn Manson; then the debate: “It’s the gun culture.” “It’s the community.”

We all know how to do this now. We have been here before, and too often. The children, in the midst of the horror, all know how to speak to the cameras and give the reporters what they need.

[Header] Groping for Answers

We all know our part. We all know what’s next. The difference this time, so far, is that the finger pointing seems wan, halfhearted. People seem to be groping for that elusive thing, a satisfying answer—or partial answer—or a piece of the puzzle.

Here’s mine. The kids who did this are responsible. They did it. They killed. But they came from a place and a time, and were yielded forth by a culture.

What walked into Columbine High School Tuesday was the culture of death. This time it wore black trench coats. Last time it was children’s hunting gear. Next time it will be some other costume, but it will still be the culture of death. That is the Pope’s phrase; it is how he describes the world we live in.

The boys who did the killing, the famous Trench Coat Mafia, inhaled too deep the ocean in which they swam.

Think of it this way. Your child is an intelligent little fish. He swims in deep water. Waves of sound and sight, of thought and fact, come invisibly through that water, like radar; they go through him again and again, from this direction and that. The sound from the television is a wave, and the sound from the radio; the headlines on the newsstand, on the magazines, on the ad on the bus as it whizzes by—all are waves. The fish—your child—is bombarded and barely knows it. But the waves contain words like this, which I’ll limit to only one source, the news:

. . . was found strangled and is believed to have been sexually molested . . . had her breast implants removed . . . took the stand to say the killer was smiling the day the show aired . . . said the procedure is, in fact, legal infanticide . . . is thought to be connected to earlier sexual activity among teens . . . court battle over who owns the frozen sperm . . . contains songs that call for dominating and even imprisoning women . . . died of lethal injection . . . had threatened to kill her children . . . said that he turned and said, “You better put some ice on that” . . . had asked Kevorkian for help in killing himself . . . protested the game, which they said has gone beyond violence to sadism . . . showed no remorse . . . which is about a wager over whether he could sleep with another student . . . which is about her attempts to balance three lovers and a watchful fiancé . . .

This is the ocean in which our children swim. This is the sound of our culture. It comes from all parts of our culture and reaches all parts of our culture, and all the people in it, which is everybody.

It is corny to lay it out like this because we all know this. What I’m writing is not news. It is part of the reason that Hollywood people, when discussing these matters, no longer say, “If you don’t like it, change the channel.” They now realize something they didn’t realize 10 years ago: There is no channel to change to. You could sooner remove an ocean than find such a channel.

Who counters the culture of death? The good parents and good families of our children. They are kind enough, sensitive enough to give them religious belief, the knowledge of a God, a sense that life has coherence and purpose. They are generous enough, and loyal enough to the future, to show through their actions that doing your best to show love is good, doing your work is good, contributing is good. “This is what we do,” they do not say but show. “This is how to live.”

But there aren’t enough to go around. Most of the children who get into terrible trouble and wind up with guns in their hands don’t have anyone to counter the culture. There are a number of reasons, but lately I think a great one is this: So many parents themselves are bound down by the culture, by the sickness of it, which they bear as a weight on their shoulders.

And there’s more. We forget, those of us who are middle-aged, that we grew up in a time of saner, less sick-making images and sounds.

For instance, the culture of crime only began to explode in the 1960s. We have lived in it for 30 years, and most of us turned out OK. So we think our children will be OK too. But they never had a normal culture against which to balance the newer, sicker one. They have no reference points to the old, boring normality. We assume they know what we know: “This is not right.” But why would they know that? The water in which they swim is the only water they’ve known.

The television executive Roger Ailes, who runs Fox News Channel, is a modern man, a smart man who lives in the world. A few years ago I was on his TV show to sell a book. He asked me why I am concerned about violence in the media. After all, he said, television and movies are full of comedy and the country isn’t breaking out in laughter. I laughed and said that was true, but here’s the difference: Violence is an inspiration to the unstable. People who are frailer, less stable, are more subject to the dark images they see. Teenagers, who are by nature in greater thrall to sweeps of emotion and sadness, are most vulnerable. If Holden Caulfield with all his angst had lived in modern America—well, that would be a book.

A man called into Christian radio this morning and said a true thing. He said, and I am paraphrasing: Those kids were sick and sad, and if a teacher had talked to one of them and said, “Listen, there’s a way out, there really is love out there that will never stop loving you, there’s a real God and I want to be able to talk to you about him”—if that teacher had intervened that way, he would have been hauled into court.

[Header] Things in Common

Yes, he would have. It occurs to me at the moment that a gun and a Bible have a few things in common. Both are small, black, have an immediate heft and are dangerous—the first to life, the second to the culture of death.

One more thing: I think every intelligent person I know has been having thoughts like this for years, and they don’t want to, and they’re right not to want to, because it just may be true that this is one problem our resourceful and brilliant country cannot solve. The dark genie is out of the bottle, and swims in the seas.

I’ll tell you who could make some progress though, maybe. Hillary Clinton. All the big media people, the owners and anchors, the studio heads and producers, the creators and disseminators, they all admire her. They support her. She could talk to them, She could ignite a “national conversation.” She could get tough. She could take names. It might cost her—they give her money. But she’s an important member of the community. And you know, it takes a village.