Peggy Noonan

Washington

It was like “The Canterbury Tales.”

That’s what it was like last Saturday, in LaGuardia Airport, on the shuttle to Washington packed full of people going to the inauguration of President Obama. A handsome, affluent black woman in first class—fur hat, chic silver jewelry—laughed on a cell phone as a businessman—tall, black, middle aged—hurried down the aisle in black overcoat and Burberry scarf. A young man in slouchy jeans and dark watchman’s cap, iPod buds in place, nodded, in coach, to the tune in his head. Two young white men in beige cowboy hats and gray fleece jackets came on board. Where you from? “Montana!” they said in unison. A boy, 10 or so, learning-impaired, sat with his grandmother. Where you from? I asked him. Shyly: “Detroit. Kentucky.” Middle-aged and older black women in their proud, broad-brimmed hats sat primly, purses clutched on laps. A young black family all in jumpsuits posed for pictures. An air of great sweetness. The tender way people laugh too loud when they’re a little nervous, and excited, and know they’re part of something and it’s big.

Everyone had a story. It was this young woman’s first time on a plane. Two little girls, 8 and 11, with their mother, from West Palm Beach, Fla., had never been to Washington. “We’re going to see Mr. Obama,” the older girl said, noting the obvious to another dullard adult. I told her I’d met him and he’s a very nice man, and her eyes went wide: You can meet him?

We left on time and as we taxied onto the runway the pilot came on. “This is the USAir 4 p.m. shuttle to Washington, D.C.,” he said in the old-fashioned Chuck Yeager style, and from the back of the plane came a roar of cheers and applause. When the sound reached the cockpit, the pilot came on again. “Hope has come to America,” he said. The plane went wild.

The whole experience the next few days was marked for me by a new or refreshed knowledge that those who had not felt included or invited in the past were now for the first time truly here, and part of it all, in great numbers. And I suppose the fact that this would never have come about without the support, the votes, of the traditionally invited and included gave a special air of inclusiveness to the event. There was great kindness between people and true friendliness. No one was different. Everyone, whatever their views or votes, was happy.

This is what you saw. Knit caps, parkas, plaid scarves, face warmers, hoods up, braced against the wet cold, flags on light posts, security tents, motorcades, police vans, checkpoints, flashing lights, people hopping from foot to foot when crowds slowed and they had to stand still. Stately African-American women in sweeping mink coats. A friend, a canny social observer, said, “The antifur people aren’t going to take them on!” I laughed and realized yes, PETA just took one on the chin. Mink wearing will be safe in the new era. A former GOP ambassador told a friend, after walking the streets, “There is a feeling of good.” Not happiness or gaiety, he said, but good—good feeling, good humor.

The traffic was so bad, and so chaotically handled, that everyone had a story. Mine: Stuck for more than an hour near the Mall one night and late for an appointment, I jumped out of a car and hailed an open-air bicycle with a backseat. The driver threw a blanket on me and began to pump the pedals. “What is this called?” I shouted as we raced around limos and town cars. I expected some politically correct name like Energy Saving Mobile Apparatus. He looked back at me quizzically. “A rickshaw!” We got there on time, 15 blocks in four minutes, and like a happy capitalist, the driver, gauging the moment, the need and the competition, opened bidding at $25. I was grateful to pay.

The MSNBC booth was near the Mall, and all day and night hundreds of people gathered and cheered the anchors and guests, and jumped up and down when the cameras scanned the crowd. People were holding cell phones and shouting “Mom, that’s me on TV, in my white jacket, I’m waving!” The audio of the shows was boomed out in big speakers, and whenever a guest said the word “Obama” or “America,” the crowd cheered. It was nice. It wasn’t just Mr. Obama they were cheering, it was America. There was a low-key patriotic fervor. Someone asked if it was like the Reagan inaugural in 1981, and I said yes, but as if the feeling of those days had spilled out of homes and parties and onto the streets, where all could see it. A friend said, Was it Jacksonian? Yes, but nothing got trashed. It was a very special thing, this inaugural. No one who made it to Washington this week, old hand or new, ever experienced anything quite like it, all the peace and warmth in the bitter cold.

*   *   *

Every time a nation does something big, the members of that nation who are 4 feet tall—the children who are 10 and 12—are looking up and absorbing. Forty years ago, in 1968, that grim and even-grimmer-in-retrospect year of war protests, race riots, taunts and assassinations, our 4-foot-tall citizens would have been justified in thinking that America is a scary place marked by considerable unhappiness and injustice. But the past week they could look up and see either harmony and happiness or peaceful acceptance and resolve. Washington was a town full of families and full of kids this week, and they must have picked up this: Anything is possible in America. We decide to go to the moon and soon it’s “Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed.” We decide to cure polio and soon it’s a nation of Wilma Rudolphs, running. We struggle over civil rights and then the young black man raises his hand and says “I, Barack Hussein Obama . . .” We so rock. That’s what 4-foot-tall Americans must have learned this week. A generation that will come to adulthood in 2020 and 2030 and has in their heads this sense of optimism and America-love will likely be stronger for it. It augurs well.

*   *   *

As for Mr. Obama, some thoughts that start with a hunch. He has the kind of self-confidence that will serve him well or undo him. He has to be careful about what he wants, because he’s going to get it, at least at the beginning. He claimed a lot of moderate territory in his Inaugural Address (deepen and expand our alliances, put aside debates on size of government and aim for government that is competent and constructive), but no one is certain, still, what governing philosophy guides him. He would be most unwise to rouse the sleeping giant that is American conservatism. One thing that would rouse it, and begin to bring its broken pieces back together, would be radical movement on abortion, such as pushing the so-called Freedom of Choice Act.

There was another great gathering in Washington this week, of those who themselves are not always invited or included, because of their unflinching views. The Right to Life march was marked, according to participants, by an air of peacefulness, and unusual sweetness. The attitude toward President Obama? They prayed for him. As great Americans, which is what they are, would.

Washington

Teddy Kennedy is gallant. He attended the swearing-in of the new president on Tuesday in the midst of serious illness, white-haired and frail—in his jaunty fedora he looked like his father, old Joe Kennedy, in 1939, when he first burst on the scene as the new American ambassador to the Court of St. James. The senator smiled as he walked toward his seat, sweetly blowing a kiss to a friend in the stands. Later, at the congressional lunch, he collapsed.

Four years ago it was Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who rose from his sickbed to swear in George W. Bush for a second term, and who died 7½ months later of the cancer from which he’d long suffered. Such personal gallantry has long graced our national life, and in its way makes that life possible. And so it should always be noted, with gratitude, and a tip of the hat. As I write I can hear the ambulance that is taking Sen. Kennedy to the hospital. He is a courteous person, much like the Bushes in being an old-school writer of notes and maker of calls, and one suspects very soon we’ll be hearing that he called the new president to apologize for stepping on his story.

All this did have a somewhat subduing effect on the day. But then the Inaugural Address itself was somewhat subdued.

*   *   *

The joyous crowd, an estimated two million strong, did not seem ready to let President Obama speak when he took the podium; they were cheering, clapping and shouting and didn’t seem to want to stop. The new president seemed prepared for this, and barreled through and on, saying “My fellow Americans” with a quieting authority. The audience settled down. But it was a real expression of the feeling of the day, the wave upon wave of cheers and chants that came from the sea of people.

This is what Mr. Obama said:

In a time when all wonder if our nation’s best days are behind us, we need to know that the answer is no. We continue. We go on. This is not journey’s end.

That, I think, is what the-18 minute speech came down to. Are we in a difficult moment? Yes, it is a time of “gathering clouds and raging storms.” There is “a nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.” We face great challenges, but “know this, America—they will be met.” How? We will meet them by being who we are. Our success depends on the American “values” of “hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism.” He said, “These things are old. These things are true.” Like those who’ve long fought in our armed forces, Americans have shown “a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves.”

It was a moderate speech both in tone and content, a serious and solid speech. The young Democrat often used language with which traditional Republicans would be thoroughly at home: The American story has never been one of “shortcuts or settling for less,” the journey “has not been . . . for the fainthearted—for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasure of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things” who have created the best of our enduring history

Obama named in stark terms America’s essential foe: “For those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror . . . we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.” This had the authentic sound of a man who’s been getting daily raw intelligence briefings and is not amused.

It was not an especially moving or rousing speech, but the event itself, the first major address of a new president from a new generation and a previously unrepresented race, was inherently moving. The speech was low-key, sober. There was not a sentence or thought that hit you in the chest and entered your head not to leave. But it was worthy, had weight, and was adult. In fact, Mr. Obama lauded a certain kind of maturity: “In the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.” This was a call for a new nobility that puts aside “petty grievances and false promises” that have marked the oral culture of our modern political life. He seemed to be saying that the old, pointless partisanship of the past does not fit the current moment.

“Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.” For those with enough years to recognize it, that was an echo of a famous World War II-era song by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields. Fred and Ginger sang it: “Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again.”

We come from a hardy people, from those who crossed the seas, “toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth,” and those who fought in “Concord and Gettysburg, Normandy and Khe Sanh.” In that last, the American experience in Vietnam was unselfconsciously valorized by the post-Boomer president. Good.

Domestically, Mr. Obama suggested, somewhat strikingly if now conventionally, that while Ronald Reagan was wrong in saying, in his first inaugural, that “government is not the answer, government is the problem,” Bill Clinton too was wrong in saying, in a State of the Union, that “the era of big government is over.” Such talk, Mr. Obama suggested, is beside the point. “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.” Programs and policies that are effective should move forward, and those that are not “will end.” He said that those who “manage the public’s dollars” are obliged “to spend wisely . . . and do our business in the light of day.” Greater transparency and spending that is not wasteful will “restore the vital trust between a people and their government.”

In foreign affairs Mr. Obama signaled a break with Bush policy through the most memorable assertion in the speech: “Our power grows through its prudent use.” “America,” he said, “is a friend of each nation and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity.” He suggested a new emphasis on “sturdy alliances.” He lauded “humility and restraint,” and the force of “our example.”

*   *   *

I don’t know what the networks will use as the sound bite, that rather ugly word, now some 35 years old, that speaks of the short piece of audio- or videotape they will use to show the highlight of the speech, or capture its essence. This is not all bad. When a speech is so calm and cool that you have to read it to absorb it fully, the speech just may get read.

This was not the sound of candidate Barack Obama but President Obama, not the sound of the man who appealed to the left wing of his party but one attempting to appeal to the center of the nation. It was not a joyous, audacious document, not a call to arms, but a reasoned statement by a Young Sobersides.

Washington

Flying in, we take the route over the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson, the Tidal Basin: the signs and symbols of the great republic. And you’ve seen it all a thousand times but you can’t stop looking, and you can’t help it, your eyes well. After a minute you realize you must have a moony look on your face, and you lean back. The lady to your right, engrossed in a paperback of “Marley & Me,” sees nothing. Your gaze continues across the aisle, and you see another woman looking out the window in the same way, avidly taking it in. Her view includes the Capitol. She leans back.

I know her. A woman of the Reagan era, an old acquaintance, and when we land we greet each other. “Isn’t it something that no matter how many times you see it, it still grabs your heart?” I say. She responds, wonderingly, “I never see it that I’m not moved. To this day.”

We are grownups, we have seen limits and imperfections, compromises and mess, and yet this brilliant thing endures. Lincoln will always be Lincoln, and nothing can mess that up.

The District is braced happily for the onslaught. You can’t fail to see the excitement. The inauguration is all anyone talks about. Everyone seems to preface their observations with how many they’ve seen. “This is my fourth inauguration,” and “This is my eighth time with one of these.” But everyone feels that this one is different.

“The calm before the storm” said the desk clerk in the quiet lobby of a Georgetown hotel. “It starts Friday.” The shops are full of tchotchkes: Obama cocktail glasses and coins, plastic Obamas standing at podiums waving flags. A clerk shows me the Obama wristwatches for $35. I buy a friend an Obama Action Figure whose arms and legs can be configured to walk forward, pointing us toward the future.

A cabdriver crows that he’ll have an easy time getting around next week: “No traffic allowed into town but cabs and limos!” The USAir agents at Reagan National say they’ll be sleeping over in the airport—in cots, right over there where the shuttle security lines are—on Monday and Tuesday nights. Roads in and out of the city will be closed. “A slumber party,” an agent laughed. “At least it’s not for something sad.”

Barack Obama isn’t president yet, but already is he is omnipresent. At the Hay-Adams Hotel, security tents block off the street. Motorcades come and go. He dines at a private home in a neighborhood where you can’t see the numbers of the houses from the street, but it’s clear where the gathering is from the sharpshooters on the roof.

A young Obama staffer comes for breakfast, roots in the pockets of his overcoat, and spills two BlackBerrys onto the tablecloth. He has just been given a tour of the West Wing. He had been warned so many times that it’s smaller than you think that he’s struck by how big it is. And the Oval Office. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve seen it in the movies, the sight of it catches the throat. This is the real one.

This week in the transition headquarters, the president-elect walked by a row of offices. Someone had given him a basketball; he dribbled it as he walked down the hall. Suddenly a young veteran of the campaign turned to another and said, “The black guy with the basketball is the next president.” For them it’s a rolling realization: You know it, lose it in the flow, realize it again, and suddenly it’s new again. The aide says, “He’s in a line with Washington and Lincoln, and luminaries like JFK and Reagan.” He shakes his head wonderingly. I have seen new guys say this about new presidents most of my professional life. I never see it that I’m not moved. To this day.

The first draft of the inaugural address was done by this Tuesday, and it went into staffing for comment. The president-elect and speechwriter Jon Favreau have aimed for short. Mr. Obama had declared it short. But it’s growing longer, as speeches do.

Mr. Obama is a writer, and he sees himself as a writer. It is an important part of his self-perception. He is the author of two books, the first of considerable literary merit. He loves words. It is in writing that he absorbs, organizes data, thinks his way through to views and decisions, all of which adds to the expectations for his speech.

Everyone wants to be part of it. Mr. Obama’s aides and speechwriters have been engulfed with ideas, thoughts and language, as they say, for the speech. An acquaintance of speechwriter Favreau got in a cab, chatted with the driver, and mentioned he knew someone in the new administration. The cabdriver handed him a fully written inaugural address, and asked him to pass it on. Later, thinking of this, unbidden and for no clear reason, the words of the theme of the 1956 movie “Friendly Persuasion” came to mind: “Thee is mine, though I don’t know many words of praise / Thee pleasures me in a hundred ways.” Jessamyn West’s celebration of the Quakers of Indiana during the Civil War is a tale of a community living apart from a great drama and yet within that drama. And so the cabdriver, who works a shift, is up at night writing his inaugural address for Mr. Obama, knowing, this being America, the most fluid country in history, a place of unforeseen magic, that he would meet someone who knows someone. We all want to be together, to work together, we all want to be part of the history, of the time. And why not? Join in. Lightning strikes.

And this has grown old, and maybe it’s the last time to say it, history moving so fast, but there’s something we all know so well that we are perhaps forgetting to see it in the forefront. But a long-oppressed people have raised up a president. It is moving and beautiful and speaks to the unending magic and sense of justice of our country. The other day the journalist John O’Sullivan noted that 150 years after slavery, a black man stands in the place of Lincoln in the inaugural stands, and this country has proved again that anything is possible, that if we can do this we can do anything. That is a good thing to remember at a difficult time.

What is required for full enjoyment of an inauguration, from opening prayers to speeches to marching bands is, in the great 19th-century phrase, the willing suspension of disbelief. If you don’t put your skepticism aside, you will not fully absorb and experience the drama. You must allow it to be real for you. Those two young people on the stage did not really take poison and die, but Romeo and fair Juliet did, and that is the reason the audience, which knows the actors still live, says, with genuine feeling, “Oh, no!”

To believe, suspend disbelief. We have been through this before, the flags and fine speeches, the brass donkey paperweight, the glass elephant, the rise and fall of administrations, the coming and going of figures great and small. It’s good to put that aside for a few days, to remove yourself from politics, partisanship and faction, to suspend your disbelief, to be grateful that the signs and symbols endure, as does the republic, and raise a toast: “To the president of the United States.”

He didn’t seem distracted, like he was thinking about lunch, and he didn’t seem to be deflecting responsibility, but taking it. This was a relief, and rather unusual in a Washington politician, or pretty much any politician. Blago, when he speaks, always looks like he’s thinking, “Are they believing me?” and “How’s this playing?” Barney Frank, in interviews, often looks like he’s thinking, “I’m bigger than you, don’t bore me.” And Harry Reid looks like he’s telling himself, “Remember—use your hands in the frame.” There’s some mad media coach out there telling our political figures to continually gesture with their hands within the TV frame, which is to say just below their heads. Everyone’s doing it. They must stop. They look like Marcel Marceau playing happy and sad. It doesn’t work with words! Nothing works that isn’t authentic.

It struck me as I watched Barack Obama, in giving a substantive economic speech just 11 days before his inaugural address, that he was trying to clear away a lot of brush, and giving the outlines of his plan in advance so as not to weigh down his inaugural with phrases like “solar panels and wind turbines,” “public-private partnership” and “computerized medical records.” So much of modern rhetoric is boring because so many modern phrases are ugly.

The brush-clearing suggests the inaugural itself won’t be programmatic, bureaucratic or factoid-laden but more broadly gauged and reaching at something higher. Will he reach for poetry? I hope so, if poetry is defined as no wasted words on the way to the thought and the thought is worthy and true.

To Thursday’s speech itself. It had a clean and clearly stated but rather grand opening: “Throughout America’s history, there have been some years that simply rolled into the next without much notice or fanfare. Then there are the years that come along once in a generation—the kind that mark a clean break from a troubled past, and set a new course for our nation. This is one of those years.” This may well turn out to be true, but is perhaps best said by others and in retrospect. Mr. Obama scored “an era of profound irresponsibility” that stretched “from corporate boardrooms to the halls of power in Washington, D.C.” Fair enough. He spoke of “our capacity for future greatness” and argued “the very fact that this crisis is largely of our own making means that it is not beyond our ability to solve.” This was a relief. It’s time someone began to speak of the current crisis with optimism, as if it can be handled and got through. This is not a nation of 300 million people in extremis and on a morphine drip; it’s a nation of 300 million people who are alive, alert and ready to go.

Mr. Obama promised “dramatic action” and said that while the cost of his proposals will be “considerable,” so will “the consequences of doing too little or nothing at all.” He again promised a public works program. Much of it seemed designed to answer the question, “What would the WPA have looked like if FDR had been an environmentalist?” In its lack of price tags and specific size and scope of proposals, the plan seemed more a conversation starter, as they say, than a thrown gauntlet.

Toward all this I suspect Americans will maintain a stance of hopeful ambivalence. We are a center-right nation and at least formally oppose gusher-like spending. But once you’ve got a deficit of more than a trillion dollars, two trillion hardly seems worse. You’re in the area of numbers so astronomical as to be unimaginable. It’s like hearing Pluto is 50,000 light years away but Saturn is 48,000 light years away. They’re both pretty far.

As for a big federal public-works program, there’s little sign voters will reject it outright and reason to believe many will embrace it. People are afraid. They want to be part of something. They want to build a road. And they want to be part of something they can see. They want to be able to look back on it 40 years from now and say, “I was part of that. We built that thing.”

In terms of public support, Mr. Obama shouldn’t get too abstract. He should be thinking hardhats. People want to make their country stronger—literally, concretely, because the things they fear (terrorism, global collapse) are so huge and amorphous. Lately I think the biggest thing Americans fear, deep down—the thing they’d say if you could put the whole nation on the couch and say, “Just free associate, tell me what you fear?”—is, “I am afraid we will run out of food. And none of us have gardens, and we haven’t taught our children how to grow things. Everything is bought in a store. What if the store closes? What if the choke points through which the great trucks travel from farmland to city get cut off? I have two months of canned goods. I’m afraid.”

Soon after the speech, Republican Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell reacted with caution. He was low key. He didn’t attack. He said the current projected deficit of $1.2 trillion is “an eye-popping number,” and said he liked the part of Mr. Obama’s program that includes reducing tax rates for the middle class. “We intend to work with the new president . . . to try and get this right,” he said. The Republicans in the Senate are like swimmers ten feet offshore. They’re going to let the Obama wave roll over them, wait for the water level to even out, and then make a move. Who would believe them claiming to be the party of fiscal responsibility and smaller government now anyway? They need more time to pass between the high-spending Bush years and an eventual—and one hopes principled—opposition to Obamanomics.

During the postspeech coverage, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell spoke to a journalist about how presidents get advice and information. Ms. Mitchell noted that people often mean to speak hard truths but then “they walk into the Oval Office and get tongue tied.” She was referring to the awe with which we view the presidency, the White House, and the famous office with no corners in which presidents so often feel cornered.

*   *   *

Here is an idea for everyone in Washington: Get over it. It’s distorting the system. This week we saw the past four presidents standing in the Oval Office for a photo-op on the afternoon of their private lunch. As you looked at the pictures afterward you had to think: How flawed were they? How many were a success?

Did you notice how they all leaned away from Jimmy Carter, the official Cootieman of former presidents? It was like high-school students to the new girl: “You can’t sit here, we’re the Most Popular table.”

The Founders, who were awed by the presidency and who made it a point, the early ones, to speak in their inaugural addresses of how unworthy they felt, would be astonished and confounded by the over-awe with which we view presidents now. We treat them as if they are the Grand Imperial Czar of the Peacock Throne, and we their ’umble servants. It’s no good, and vaguely un-American. Right now patriotism requires more than the usual candor. It requires speaking truthfully and constructively to a president who is a man, and just a man. We hire them, we fire them, they come back for photo-ops. They’re not magic.

And so we enter the first days of the first year of the new era. Much to be happy about. We’re here, to begin with. Still alive. We often forget that little gift. A new administration is about to begin, which will bring a certain freshness to the proceedings in Washington. At this point all is bright promise. The dreadful blunders will come later, and be pounced upon by merciless and grateful critics, or at least that’s my plan.

*   *   *

But everything changed in 2008. A new economic era, begun by a terrible and still barely fathomable crash, is here, and many of us sense deep down that things will never be the same, that the past quarter-century’s fabulous abundance—it was the richest time in the history of man—is over. Novelists of our time will, one hopes, attempt to catch what just passed and is passing, try to capture what it was and keep it for history, as F. Scott Fitzgerald caught the Roaring Twenties, as Thackeray did England’s 19th century in “Vanity Fair,” as Tom Wolfe did the beginning of the age of abundance, in “Bonfire of the Vanities.”

I offer in a spirit of encouragement a free image, or observation. At a certain point in the ’00s, I began to notice, on the east side of Manhattan, that the 3-week-old infants, out for the first time in their sleek black Mercedes-like strollers, were amazingly, almost alarmingly, perfect. Perfect round heads, huge perfect eyes, none of the dents, bruises and imperfections that are normal and that tend to accompany birth. I would ask friends: Why are babies perfect now, how did that happen? The answers were the usual: a healthy, well-fed populace, etc. Then a friend said: “These are the children of the scheduled C-sections of the affluent. They are scooped out, perfect.” They were little superbabies whose handsome, investment banking, asset-bundling, financial-instrument-creating parents commanded even Nature.

But the death of Lehman Brothers was “the day Wall Street died,” as the Journal put it this week, and the day the great abundance did, essentially, too. That is a very big thing to happen in a single year. The proper attitude with which to approach the new reality? Consider it “a nudge from God,” a priest said this week. Consider him to be telling us what’s important and what’s not, what you need and what you don’t, what—who—can be relied on, and can’t.

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We will always have politics. (We will always have awkward segues.) In fact in the future we’ll have more of it, because we’ll have more government. And so a quick look at a story that might be called Inevitability Gets Dinged, Part Two.

The difficulty of Caroline Kennedy’s hopes for appointment to the U.S. Senate is that she was in, or put herself in, a position demanding of more finesse and sophistication than most political veterans have. To succeed as a candidate for appointment, she needed the talents of an extremely gifted natural, which she’s not. She is an intelligent woman who has comported herself with dignity through a quarter-century of private life in Manhattan. She would never steal your money, indulge in dark political dealing, or growl, like Blago, into a tapped line, “I’ve got this blankin’ thing and it’s golden,” though let’s face it, it’s a little sad we’ll never hear that.

But life is complicated. If you’re going to run as the princess of a dynasty, you have to act and be like a princess—something different, rarefied, heightened. Her problem in part has been that she spent a quarter-century trying to blend in and not call attention to herself. She made herself convincingly average—not distinguished. She has her parents’ dignity but not their dash. She radiates a certain clueless class.

Hillary Clinton understood that New York demands glamour. She had less natural clay to work with, and yet she got in the stylists and makeup artists and through her enormous self-discipline transformed herself into a chic, well-groomed, bustling little engine that could. Caroline, as everyone up here calls her, doesn’t seem to have given a thought to presentation. She doesn’t seem to have given a thought to intellectual connection, to why exactly the people of New York should want the governor of New York, himself an accident, to appoint her U.S. senator from New York.

That seems less likely now, and there is another reason. Time passes. To many of my generation, the Kennedys meant a great deal, an old connection to a hero of our childhoods. But those were childhoods long ago. JFK went to Dallas 45 years ago last November. It is as if Jenna Bush, having married and brought up children, decided, in the year 2053, to run for office in a Republican state saying, “Vote for me, I’m a Bush.” The reaction, one assumes, would be: So what? Because time passes. There is no sign that the young of New York are engaged by the Kennedy candidacy.

A final point. People who’ve seen politics up close when young tend to be embarrassed to be in politics. This is because they have seen too much of the show-biz aspects, the balloons and smiles and rallies. They are rarely (and this is odd) tutored in the meaning behind the artifice: that the artifice exists for a purpose, and the purpose is to advance a candidate who will advance a constructive philosophy. And so they find the idea of coming up with a philosophy sort of show-offy, off point and insincere.
This is one reason modern political dynasties tend to have a deleterious effect on our politics. When you get new people in the process who think politics is about meaning, they tend to bring the meaning with them. On the other hand, those who’ve learned that politics is about small and shallow things, and the romance of dynasties, bring that with them. (They also bring old retainers, sycophants and ingrained money lines, none of which help the common weal.) Those who are just born into it and just want to continue it, bring a certain ambivalence. And signal it. They’re always slouching toward victory. It’s not terrible, but it doesn’t do any great good, either.

*   *   *

I end with the new administration, and Barack Obama. For me, the quote of the year was from a Democratic political strategist, a black woman, off air on election night. She walked up to an anchorwoman who is white, and said, “I’m trying to figure out what so moves me and I realize it’s this: You meant it.” The anchor shook her head. “You all said you would vote for a black man,” said the strategist. “You all said you’d judge him on his merits, race wouldn’t stop you. I didn’t know until tonight that you meant it.”

When I heard it, I emailed the strategist, who told me that for a year America’s open-mindedness toward a woman or a black had shown up consistently in the polls. And yet, “It’s still hard to believe it. I grew up believing all things are possible through Jesus. Well, this tops the world of possibilities.”

The thing about America is it is always ahead of the clichés, always one step ahead of an assumed limit. It has been, for all our woes, a good year for ground breaking. And so: onward.

One of the greatest professional gifts of my life was a bit of offhand advice given me about 20 years ago by a writer who said, “Never feel guilty about reading, it’s what you do to do your job.” If he hadn’t said it, I don’t know if I’d read less or read guiltily, but I’m grateful I haven’t felt I had to do either.

I suspect reading is about to make a big comeback in America, that in fact we’re going to be reading more books in the future, not fewer. It is a relatively inexpensive (libraries, Kindle, Amazon), peaceful and enriching activity. And we’re about to enter an age of greater quiet. More people will be home, not traveling as much to business meetings or rushing out to the new jobsite. A lot of adults are going to be more in search of guidance and inspiration. The past quarter century we’ve had other diversions, often expensive ones—movies, DVDs, Xboxes. Books will fit the quieter future.

At any rate, 2008 was my year of reading furiously. I’m not sure why, nor why it involved a lot of rereading, a lot of going back to old texts as if I were on a hunt in which trails had to be retraced. I spent my youth reading novels, and learning life from them. Then at some point in my 40s, all I wanted was what was true. What happened in the war, at the battle, in that important life? I ask people my age, “Do you read mostly nonfiction now?” They almost always say: “Yes.” Is this connected with age? Here’s a twist: Lately I want to turn back to novels again.

*   *   *

I reread Edmund Burke and discovered Conor Cruise O’Brien’s great biography of him. I was moved to see, or to notice for the first time, that Marie Antoinette had learned of Burke’s stirring defense of her, and his portrait of her, before she died. Maybe that’s how she could walk with such dignity to her death on the guillotine: because she knew she had defenders, and she knew they were well-armed. But the French Revolution continues its draw, I think because we sense in it—the heads on the pikes, the terrible dragging down of everything—such a dramatic telling of the demonic at work in history.

I read a lot of biographies this year. “Henry James, the Mature Master” by Sheldon M. Novick was very good, though I continue to wonder why James himself fascinates me when his work, actually, does not. The first volume of Alistair Horne’s admiring and authoritative “Harold Macmillan” set me on a journey for Great Lives Within the Ends of Empires. Or maybe that journey got me to Macmillan. Whichever, the journey continues.

Just before Macmillan there was “The Duff Cooper Diaries,” which gave me great pleasure. Cooper, the 20th-century British diplomat, was a man of real liveliness. He found life delicious when he wasn’t depressed. He was utterly worldly and yet quite down to earth: Half the book is his waking up hung over and wondering how to explain his latest infidelity to the wife he adored. Then he’d go to lunch and stop Hitler. (Cooper’s diaries helped me come down from Arthur Schlesinger’s, a great treat of 2007. He was in his way so small-d democratic and bedazzled by celebrity that he’d write things like, At luncheon I questioned the legitimacy of Tonkin Gulf, and was delighted to see Ann-Margaret had come to see it the same way.)

In foreign affairs I reread Ronald Steel’s “Walter Lippmann and the American Century” published to great acclaim 28 years ago, when I first read it. But this time I thought: There’s not enough here, not enough of this life has been caught. Lippmann, the great journalist, has been popping up in whatever I read lately. In the Duff Cooper diaries he’s offering well-reasoned advice on the organization of the Western alliance at the close of World War II. The other night he was in Gordon M. Goldstein’s “Lessons in Disaster,” about McGeorge Bundy’s late-life attempts to understand the Vietnam War and his part in it. Lippmann is meeting with National Security Adviser Bundy in Lyndon Johnson’s White House, in 1964. Bundy challenges him on his sympathy for the French policy, if that’s the right word, of “neutralization” in Vietnam: Learn from the French experience in Southeast Asia, propose a Geneva conference, include the Chinese. Bundy thinks this vague, impracticable, a recipe for communist hegemony. “Mac, please don’t speak in such clichés,” Lippmann retorts. Some probing, digging young scholar should write a new biography of Lippmann, taking another look at that stupendous, constructive and somehow irritating life and career.

A true delight was “The Blair Years,” Alastair Campbell’s memoir of his service with Tony Blair. No modern American political operative would write, or could write, a book as truthful, half crazy and irreverent as this one. It is a small classic, as is its more magisterial counterpart, “Counselor” by Ted Sorensen, a loving, tough-minded, broadly gauged memoir of his time as speechwriter and adviser to his friend John F. Kennedy. And there was “Mychal,” the journalist Michael Daly’s affectionate and unflinching portrait of Father Mychal Judge, who died in the Towers on 9/11. It contains the best reporting I’ve seen of what happened to the New York City firemen on that day, and of their habitual, and heroic, fatalism.

*   *   *

None of these books were more important in the end than a modest and unheralded book called “Mother Teresa’s Secret Fire” by Joseph Langford, a priest of her Missionaries of Charity and her close friend of many years. You wouldn’t think there’s much new to say here, but there is. Everyone knows that as a young nun in Calcutta, Mother Teresa, then Sister Teresa, left her convent, with only five rupees in her pocket, in order to work with the poorest of the poor in the slums of the city. But what made her do this?

On Sept. 10, 1946, on a train to Darjeeling, on her way to a spiritual retreat, she had, as Father Langford puts it, “an overwhelming experience of God.” This is known. But its nature? It was not “some dry command to ‘work for the poor,’” he says, but something else, something more monumental. What? For many years, she didn’t like to speak of what happened, or interpret it. So the deepest meaning of her message remained largely unknown. Says Father Langford, “What was deepest in her . . . is still a mystery even to her most ardent admirers. But it was not her wish that this secret remain forever unknown.”

In this book, based on her letters, writings and conversations, he tells of how she came to serve “the least, the last, and the lost,” not as a female Albert Schweitzer but as “a mystic with sleeves rolled up.” Father Langford tells the story of her encounter on the train, of what was said, of what she heard, and of the things he learned from her including, most centrally, this: You must find your own Calcutta. You don’t have to go to India. Calcutta is all around you.

It’s better than I’m saying. But this is a good time to have Mother Teresa’s life in mind, and to remember, perhaps, that all can change, that a life—and a world—can be made better all of a sudden, out of the blue, unexpectedly. But you have to be listening. You have to be able to hear. Happy 2009.

It’s become a status symbol in New York to know someone who lost everything, as we now say, with Bernard Madoff, and to provide the details with a tone of wonder that subtly signals, “I of course was too smart for that, but I do feel compassion.” It reminds me of the study I was told of years ago of soldiers who had seen a nearby comrade killed in battle. Their first thought tended to be not “Oh no!” or “Poor Joe,” but “I’m not shot.”

There has been criticism of Mr. Madoff’s investors: How could they not have diversified? But people who were receiving quarterly reports on supposedly broad portfolios run by Mr. Madoff thought they were diversified. They didn’t know he was the original toxic asset.

The most memorable line came from a Palm Beach, Fla., doyenne who reportedly said of his name last week, “I know it’s pronounced ‘Made-off,’ because he made off with the money.” A more sober observation came from a Manhattan woman who spoke, on the night Mr. Madoff was arrested, and as word spread through a Christmas party, of the general air of collapse in America right now, of the sense that our institutions are not and no longer can be trusted. She said, softly, “It’s the age of the empty suit.” Those who were supposed to be watching things, making the whole edifice run, keeping it up and operating, just somehow weren’t there.

That’s the big thing at the heart of the great collapse, a strong sense of absence. Who was in charge? Who was in authority? The biggest swindle in all financial history if the figure of $50 billion is to be believed, and nobody knew about it, supposedly, but the swindler himself. The government didn’t notice, just as it didn’t notice the prevalence of bad debts that would bring down America’s great investment banks.

All this has hastened and added to the real decline in faith—the collapse in faith—the past few years in our institutions. Not only in Wall Street but in our entire economy, and in government. And of course there’s Blago. But the disturbing thing there is that it seems to have inspired more mirth than anger. Did any of your friends say they were truly shocked? Mine either.

*   *   *

The reigning ethos seems to be every man for himself.

An old friend in a position of some authority in Washington told me the other day, from out of nowhere, that a hard part of his job is that there’s no one to talk to. I didn’t understand at first. He’s surrounded by people, his whole life is one long interaction. He explained that he doesn’t have really thoughtful people to talk to in government, wise men, people taking the long view and going forth each day with a sense of deep time, and a sense of responsibility for the future. There’s no one to go to for advice.

He senses the absence too.

It’s a void that’s governing us.

And this as much as anything has contributed to the sense you pick up that people feel all trends lead downward from here, that the great days of America Rising are over, that the best is not yet to come but has already been. It is so non-American, so unlike us, to think this, and yet one picks it up everywhere, between the lines and in asides. The other night a man told me of his four children, and I congratulated him on bringing up so many. From nowhere he said, “I worry about their future.” At another time he would have said, “Billy wants to be a doctor.”

People are angry but don’t have a plan, and they’ll give the incoming president unprecedented latitude and sympathy, cheering him on. I told a friend it feels like a necessary patriotic act to be supportive of him, and she said, “Oh hell, it’s a necessary selfish act—I want him to do well so I survive. We all do!”

This is a good time to remember who we are, or rather just a few small facts of who we are. We are the largest and most technologically powerful economy in the world, the leading industrial power of the world, and the wealthiest nation in the world. “There’s a lot of ruin in a nation,” said Adam Smith. There’s a lot of ruin in a great economy, too. We are the oldest continuing democracy in the world, operating, since March 4, 1789, under a vibrant and enduring constitution that was formed by geniuses and is revered, still, coast to coast. We don’t make refugees, we admit them. When the rich of the world get sick, they come here to be treated, and when their children come of age, they send them here to our universities. We have a supple political system open to reform, and a wildly diverse culture that has moments of stress but plenty of give.

The point is not to say rah-rah, paint our faces blue and bray “We’re No. 1.” The point is that while terrible challenges face us—improving a sick public education system, ending the easy-money culture, rebuilding the economy—we are building from an extraordinary, brilliant and enduring base.

The other day I called former Secretary of State George Shultz, because he is wise and experienced and takes the long view. I asked if he thought we should be optimistic about our country’s fortunes and future. “Absolutely,” he said, there is “every reason to have confidence.” He told me the story of Sumner Schlicter, an economics professor at Harvard 50 years ago. “He was not the most admired man in his department, but he’d make pronouncements about the economy that turned out to be right more often than his colleagues’.” After Schlicter died, a friend was asked to clean out his desk, and found the start of an autobiography. “It said, I’m paraphrasing, ‘I have had a good record in my comments on and expectations of the American economy, and the reason is I’ve always been an optimist. How did I get that way? I was brought up in the West, where the future is more important than the past, in a family of scientists and engineers forever developing new things. I could never buy into the idea that we had crossed our last frontier, because I was brought up with people crossing new frontiers.’”

Mr. Shultz laid out some particulars of his own optimism. There is “the ingenuity, the flexibility, the strengths of the national economy.” The labor force: “We are so blessed with human talent and resources.” And the American people themselves. “They have intelligence, integrity and honor.”

We should experience “the current crisis” as “a gigantic wake-up call.” We’ve been living beyond our means, both governmentally and personally. “We have to be willing to face up to our problems. But we have a capacity to roll up our sleeves and get down to work together.”

*   *   *

What a task President-elect Obama has ahead. He ran on a theme of change we can believe in, but already that seems old. Only six weeks after his election he faces a need more consequential and immediate. In January, in his inaugural, he may find himself addressing something bigger, and that is: Belief we can believe in. The return of confidence. The end of absence. The return of the suit inhabited by a person. The return of the person who will take responsibility, and lead.

Is this the last Christmas of the old era, or the first Christmas of the new? Will people spend in a way that responds to what’s around them (Nothing seems changed!) or to what they know is coming (Did you see this week’s jobless numbers? Highest in 26 years!)? Will they go for some last big-ticket items, sliding the platinum card along the counter with a “We who are about to die salute you” flair, or will spending reflect a new prudence, and the new anxiety? Assume the latter. There’s a new mood taking hold.

The man who sells Christmas trees on Manhattan’s 96th Street and Lexington Avenue, and who knows the habits of a neighborhood that encompasses the wealthy, the not-wealthy and the getting by, said business is slow, “down at least 25%” from last year. He predicted it would pick up, but expected an increase in the people who see a stated price as the starting point of negotiations. “There’ll be more hagglers. ‘The recession, I’m bleedin’, work with me.’”

People talk of the incoming administration’s announced plans for infrastructure spending that will “save or create” 2.5 million jobs. Everything old is new again. I suspect public support for WPA-like endeavors will be high, and not only because of the promise of job creation. Not even only because people want something new, a sense of vigor and focus—a sense that there’s a plan—from the federal government. There’s also, I think, a sense that it would be good to do something as a nation, together, something like the old Mercury and Apollo space programs, something that draws people together. Something that is both literally and metaphorically concrete.

For a generation we’ve been tapping on plastic keyboards, entering data into databases, inventing financial instruments that are abstract, complex and unconnected to any seeable reality. Fortunes were made in the ether, almost no one knows how; there’s a sense that this was perhaps part of the problem. Workers tapped on keyboards and produced work they cannot see, touch or necessarily admire. They’d like to make their country better, and stronger, in a way they can see.

And people want to belong to something. If you’re a vibrant member of a church in America, or a casual member of a vibrant church, you’re part of something. If you’re a member of a family that’s together, you are part of something. A lot of Americans do not have these two things.

Some of the infrastructure ideas put forward are obvious and fine: rebuild roads and bridges. One is unexpected and smart: strengthen the electrical grid. One is so lame as to seem a non sequitur: make sure every classroom has the Internet. In America, you don’t have to worry that kids won’t go online, you have to worry the minute they do. The Internet is not a gifted teacher, but only another limited resource. There is no sign, none, that the Internet has made our nation more literate, or deep, and many signs it has made us less so, u no?

I asked a conservative policy wonk what he thought a new jobs-and-infrastructure program would look like, and he said, “The Democrats will fund union contracts on existing subway and light-rail systems, and build new ones that few people will ride. My favorite Onion headline was ‘95% of Americans Support Public Transit for Other People.’”

Fair enough. You can add to his reservations the inevitability of graft and boondoggles, the potential for corruption surrounding local efforts run by state houses led by people like Rod Blagojevich, and heady new power in the hands of those who used to be called, and are about to be called again, union chieftains. It will be a mess, a scandal a day, and Americans, ever sophisticated about such things, know it. They will support it anyway, for the reasons above. Republicans on the Hill will have a hard time stopping it. The cost is too great? Where did we get a trillion-dollar deficit? The number is so astronomical, so unimaginable, it seems less like a barrier than a challenge. You say one? I say two. Let’s go for it!

There’s something else going on, a new or renewed sense of national shame. Or communal responsibility. Or a sense of reckoning. Whatever it is it’s a reaction to the excesses of the O’s, a reaction against the ways of those who caused the mess on Wall Street and Main Street. It is a reassertion that there actually are rules, and that it is embarrassing to break them in a way so colorfully damaging and destructive to everyone else.

Some data points, as they say: The CEOs of Detroit’s Big Three ran their companies into the ground and want your tax dollars to save them. They famously went to Washington in private jets to make their case. They will not soon forget the drubbing they took for not paying attention to a still-prevailing national expectation of decent behavior. The second time they testified, you could almost feel their embarrassment. A message was sent, and received.

Manhattan billionaire Steve Schwarzman recently spoke ruefully of his celebrated 60th birthday party last year, which cost an estimated $3 million and left him a poster boy for the age of excess. Message sent, received.

Bill Gates said businesses should try to help solve problems, winning, as their reward, the respect of the community. What a concept. Oprah cancelled her luxe annual “favorite things” show. Instead she’s trying to encourage personal renewal and local involvement and giving. Which tracks with the cards a friend is receiving this month from her friends, saying that instead of sending a plant or a book for the holidays, they’re sending money to a local charity. They’re like the Christmas-tree guy on 96th and Lex, who said that every year, late on Christmas Eve or on Christmas Day, the lot leaves behind some trees, and wreaths, for those who couldn’t buy one. He said he had a feeling this year they’d be leaving behind a few more than usual, and that they’d all be taken.

Some of the new mood may reflect a certain Puritanism—there’s always a little of that in the American character. And some of it is mere PR. But not all of it is strategic. Economic collapse concentrates the mind. Some of it is maybe “agenbite of inwit,” the Middle English phrase meaning remorse of conscience. The new mood seems to involve a new modesty, and something a little more humane.

*   *   *

I am not including our newly famous Blago. Rarely has there been such a case in which the sin is perfectly represented by the physical presence of the sinner. I had never seen him until the news this week, and there he was, a lipless, dull-featured, wig-wearing moron with a foul-mouthed harridan of a wife. (Oh, maybe it’s not a wig, but I think Chicago should know everyone in New York thinks it is.) The minute I saw him I thought: That’s exactly what a guy like that would look like! And then I thought: Oh, God bless him, because it’s kind of a gift when things look as they are. Not all is shade and shadow, some things are hearteningly obvious.

He really was abusive. He really was selfish. He really gives you something to react against, a sense of “That’s what not to be.” Rectitude chic, coming to a statehouse near you. Another part of the big reaction.

Washington

To drive through the suburbs of Northern Virginia is to marvel still at the widespread wealth, the mansions and mini-mansions that did not exist a quarter-century ago and that now thicken the woods and hills. It used to be sleepy here; it used to be horse farms. I remember looking at one of the new houses 22 years ago. As I explored the heavy, sprawling concrete basement, the agent said, “We think this would take a 40-megaton bomb.” She meant it as a serious selling point. We were near Langley.

The other night, the big houses were strung with glittering white Christmas lights—not all different colors, as we do in other suburbs, but stately white—and from the Georgetown Pike, heading toward Great Falls, we saw a house with a big glass-walled living room that faced the street, and below it a glass-walled entrance room, and each had its own brightly decorated tree. “Two Christmas trees,” murmured a companion, and it captured the air of prosperity and solid well-being of the area.

It reminded me: Government is our most reliable current and future growth industry, and the near suburbs of the capital are where those who run it, work it, lobby it, feed off it and finagle it live. “You have to go farther out to see the foreclosure signs,” said a friend.

At a sparkling Christmas gathering of mostly Republicans, there was warmth, laughter and a mild sense of confusion: “Are we still important?” A handsome former senator, trimmed down and looking younger than he did in office, held forth in the entryway, near a sunny U.S. ambassador who was home for a few days. The ambassador joked that while the country to which she’s assigned has long been peaceful, she still has a few weeks to go back and cause mayhem.

At such a gathering a month ago, there would have been some angry mutterings at John McCain, but not now. He’s come quietly back to the Senate, where one of his colleagues told him of an amazing thing. The colleague had been touring the young democracies of Eastern Europe during the American election, and he found it wasn’t so much Barack Obama that immediately knocked out observers but Mr. McCain’s concession speech. This is the first American transfer of power they’d seen in eight years, and they couldn’t get over the peacefulness and grace with which Mr. McCain accepted the people’s verdict. “It really impressed them,” the colleague told Mr. McCain, and later me. It gave them a template, a guide to how the older democracies do it. When he told me of this, I remembered the observation of a journalist who had covered Russia. The Russian newspapers had generally played down Mr. Obama’s victory, she said, because it got in the way of the establishment line: that the corrupt American democracy is composed of two warring family machines that have the system wired and controlled with the help of their corporate oligarch cronies. It’s not a real democracy but a pretend democracy, and a hypocritical one. This helps the Russians rationalize and excuse their infirm hold on democratic ways and manners. And then the black man from Chicago with no longtime machine or money is elected . . .

So the Russian press muted its coverage. Mr. Obama’s victory upset their story line. They have to think up a new one now. They will.

Back to the Christmas gathering. There was no grousing about John McCain, and considerable grousing about the Bush administration, but it was almost always followed by one sentence, and this is more or less what it was: “But he kept us safe.” In the seven years since 9/11, there were no further attacks on American soil. This is an argument that’s been around for a while but is newly re-emerging as the final argument for Mr. Bush: the one big thing he had to do after 9/11, the single thing he absolutely had to do, was keep it from happening again. And so far he has. It is unknown, and perhaps can’t be known, whether this was fully due to the government’s efforts, or the luck of the draw, or a combination of luck and effort. And it not only can’t be fully known by the public, it can hardly be fully known by the players at all levels of government. They can’t know, for instance, of a potential terrorist cell that didn’t come together because of their efforts.

But the meme will likely linger. There’s a rough justice with the American people. If a president presides over prosperity, whether he had anything to do with it or not, he gets the credit. If he has a recession, he gets the blame. The same with war, and terrorist attacks. We have not been attacked since 9/11. Someone—someones—did something right.

But here is a jittery reality: We are living through the time of two presidents. Or, if you choose to see it that way, the time of no president, with one on his way in but not arrived, and the other on his way out and without full authority. Histories will be written about this moment, and about the administration’s work with the president-elect’s office. But it is jittery because criminals calculate, they look for opportunities and vulnerabilities. This is a delicate time, with a transition of power, a profound economic crisis, and a nation feeling demoralized around the edges.

*   *   *

We received a reminder of the gravity of the situation this week, with the bipartisan congressional report saying the odds are high the world will see a biological or nuclear terror attack in the next five years. It said, “America’s margin of safety is shrinking, not growing,” and “the risk that radical Islamists—al Qaeda or Taliban—may gain access to nuclear material is real.”

Commission co-chairman Bob Graham, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and an adviser to Mr. Obama’s transition team, was sober in a Q&A with Newsweek. He said he was most surprised at the risk of biological weapons because of “the ubiquitous nature of pathogens”—anthrax, or a resurrected infectious agent such as the one that produced the 1918 influenza epidemic, which has been re-created in the laboratory.

The report hasn’t received the attention it deserves, nor have its recommendations. Rep. Jane Harman, a California Democrat, accused the commission of playing the “fear card” and trying to imitate the Bush administration in alarmism and bellicosity. Mr. Graham, a Florida Democrat and former senator, would have none of it. “Our adversaries are gaining greater capabilities,” he said.

Why does Congress prepare such reports? To inform, and to win support for new plans. To show they are doing something. And to be able to say, in the event of calamity—forgive my cynicism—that they warned us. This hasn’t been the first such report. It won’t be the last. But it comes at a key moment for Mr. Obama, because it gives him a certain amount of cover to be serious about what needs to be done. What’s at stake for him is two words. When Republicans say, in coming years, “At least Bush kept us safe,” Democrats will not want tacked onto the end of that sentence, “unlike Obama.”

*   *   *

By the way, he should both reorder the Department of Homeland Security, that hopeless bureaucracy, and change its name. Homeland is a Nazi-ish word, not an American concept at all. And at this point “Homeland Security” is associated more with pointless harassment than safety. No one knows who came up with it. Probably some guy with two Christmas trees in Northern Virginia.

The hundred days are happening now. That’s the real headline on President-elect Obama’s series of news conferences and his announcements of intended administration policy, such as an economic stimulus package. We don’t really have to wait till after the inauguration on Jan. 20 for the new administration to begin. What the Obama transition has become is historically unprecedented. He is filling the vacuum created by a collapsed incumbency and an acute economic crisis. He is moving forward with what looks like a high, if ad hoc, awareness of the delicacy of the situation. He can’t seem presumptuous or aggressive: “We only have one president at a time.” At the same time he can’t hide. The White House exhibits chastened generosity, refusing to snipe, mock or attempt to undermine.

Mr. Obama’s cabinet picks and other nominations suggest moderation, also maturity, and his treatment of Joe Lieberman shows forbearance and shrewdness. Politics is a game of addition, take the long view, don’t throw anyone out as you try to hit 60. Most of all, leave Mr. Lieberman having to prove every day to the Democratic caucus that he really is a Democrat. There’s nothing in being a maverick now. Mr. Obama’s preternatural steadiness continues. It’s been a while since anyone called him Bambi or compared him to the ambivalent, self-torturing Adlai Stevenson. For all of which—and for the cooperation of the Bush administration, whose desire to be of assistance in what used to be called the transition is classy and a good example—one can be thankful.

We can be thankful we had an election whose outcome was clear, not murky and a continuing trauma. It is good that 2008 was a seven-point win by someone, and not a 50-50 contest forced into resolution in the courts. Imagine what it would be like now, the general tone and feeling of the country, if at this moment we were arguing over hanging chads and bent ballots. I am thankful that more than half the country is, in at least one area, politics, happy, and that the 46% who voted the other way accepted the outcome as America always has, peacefully and with good-natured resentment. So many are hoping for the best, as if hoping for the best is a function or an expression of patriotism, which to a degree it is.

I am thankful for something we’re not seeing. One of the weirdest, most perceptually jarring things about the economic crisis is that everything looks the same. We are told every day and in every news venue that we are in Great Depression II, that we are in a crisis, a cataclysm, a meltdown, the credit crunch from hell, that we will lose millions of jobs, and that the great abundance is over and may never return. Three great investment banks have fallen while a fourth totters, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average has fallen 31% in six months. And yet when you free yourself from media and go outside for a walk, everything looks . . . the same.

Everyone is dressed the same. Everyone looks as comfortable as they did three years ago, at the height of prosperity. The mall is still there, and people are still walking into the stores and daydreaming with half-full carts in aisle 3. Everyone’s still overweight. (An evolutionary biologist will someday write a paper positing that the reason for the obesity epidemic of the past decade is that we were storing up food like squirrels and bears, driven by an unconscious anthropomorphic knowledge that a time of great want was coming. Yes, I know it will be idiotic.) But the point is: Nothing looks different.

In the Depression people sold apples on the street. They sold pencils. Angels with dirty faces wore coats too thin and short and shivered in line at the government surplus warehouse. There was the Dust Bowl, and the want of the cities. Captains of industry are said to have jumped from the skyscrapers of Wall Street. (Yes, those were the good old days. Just kidding!) People didn’t have enough food.

They looked like a catastrophe was happening.

We do not. It’s as if the news is full of floods but we haven’t seen it rain.

I asked an economic expert a few weeks ago if a second Great Depression would come to look at all like that, like a catastrophe, and he said no, not at all. In 1930 we had no safety net. Unemployment benefits, food stamps, welfare, an interlocking system of city, state and federal services—these things will keep it from being so bad.

But in tough times we will surely expand unemployment benefits, and welfare, and food stamps and housing assistance, which will mean more and greatly accelerated spending, which will mean bigger and steeper deficits, and higher taxes, with the one feeding on the other, which may mean an economic death spiral comparable to, say, Britain in the decades after World War II, its economy mired and held down by government control and demands. It continued more than a quarter century, until the change of economic thinking encapsulated in the phrase “the Thatcher years.” Is that what this will be?

Anyway it is odd, surreal, to have the steady downbeat of Great Depression II all over the news, and few signs of GDII on the street, odd that the news we’re hearing is at odds with what our eyes are seeing, at least at the moment.

So where is GDII happening? Right now mostly in conversations between wives and husbands, in families and among friends, about selling, about digging in, about layoffs, and not taking chances, and reduced income, and fear.

As for what we see, in economic stories there’s always a lag. New York in 1990 did not know it was in the midst of coming levels of affluence unseen in all of human history. The storefronts in my neighborhood at that time were tatty, tired. At some point in the next 10 years everything in the neighborhood was updated and started to gleam. There were bright new awnings on the shops, and the windows shining. Everything was washed clean by affluence. The food stores on Lexington Avenue offered more and more varied fruit for sale in thicker stacks outside. Even the dogs were suddenly more beautiful, handsome brushed brown Labs and stately golden retrievers.

I suppose as months and years pass it will all gleam less, with a steady falling off from perfection. It will roughen.

We’ve gotten through roughness before. Of things to be thankful for, I personally include this. I traveled this year, and when I fly I say a prayer that has become a ritual: “Dear God, put your big hands under this plane and lift it up, and carry it forward through the air untouched and unharmed by other objects. And may its inner workings work. And put us down softly in our place of destination, and return us safely to our homes, and to those in whose lives we are enmeshed.”

It occurs to me that is perhaps how many of us are feeling about our country this Thanksgiving: Lord, thank you for our previous safety, and get us through this turbulence.

I close with a nod of small thanks for the title of a book I saw the other day called, “Are You There, Vodka? This is Chelsea.” The stewardess was reading it on a flight from Phoenix to Newark. She was laughing. It was nice.