Peggy Noonan

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.

*   *   *

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.

*   *   *

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.

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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.

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!

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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.