Peggy Noonan

Monday morning, 11:30:39 Eastern Standard Time, and I had just hit send. I was in a wide-body 767, high above the continent. “This is so exciting,” I wrote to a friend. “I am on an airplane going over the Rockies. I am sending you an email. Down there the settlers went in covered wagons. Up here on American Airlines flight something to L.A., I am surfing the Internet. There are ruts baked into the soil down there from the heavy wagons pushing west. I have never been on Wi-Fi on a plane before. I am looking down at the Rockies. ‘These are the days of miracles and wonders.’ “ My friend, an Internet pioneer, a brave and steely-eyed entrepreneur, shot back a reply: “We fly higher than mere birds can fly.” When I got home, I taped our exchange to a bookcase near my desk. In hard times we should not forget the magic of life, and the mystery.

I thought on the plane, for the first time in a long time, of the feeling of awe I had in 1990 and ‘91 and ‘92. I heard a man named Nathan Myhrvold speak of a thing called Microsoft. I saw a young man named Steve Jobs prowl a New York stage and unveil a computer that then we thought tiny and today we’d call huge. A man named Steve Wozniak became a household god as my son reported his visionary ways. It was a time so full of genius and dynamism that it went beyond words like “breakthrough” and summoned words like “revolution.” If you were paying attention, if you understood you were witnessing something great, the invention of a new age, the computer age, it caught at your throat. It was like hearing great music. People literally said what had been said in the age of Thomas Edison: “What will they think of next?” What a buoyant era.

And for a moment, as I sent and received my first airborne Wi-Fi emails, I was back there. And I was moved because I realized how much I missed it, how much we all do, that “There are no walls” feeling. “Think different.” “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’ “ That was 25 years ago. The world was on fire.

It has cooled. And the essential problem with the crash we’re in is no one can imagine quite feeling that way again. People can remember it, but they can’t quite resummon it.

This isn’t like the stock market crash of 1987 or the collapse of the dot-com bubble in 2001. People are not feeling passing anger or disappointment, they’re feeling truly frightened.

The reasons:

This isn’t stock market heebie-jeebies, it’s systemic collapse.

It’s not just here, it’s global.

It’s not only economic, but political. It wasn’t only mortgage companies that acted up and acted out, so did our government, all the governments of the West, spending what they didn’t have, for a decade at least.

And at the center of the drama is your house—its worth, or its ability to see you through retirement, or your ability to hold onto it. An extra added angst bonus: Those thinking now about retirement are just old enough to remember America before the abundance, before everyone was rich, rich being defined as plenty to eat, a stable place to live, and some left over for fun and pleasure. For them, the crash has released old memories. And it’s spooking people.

Have you witnessed a foreclosure, or seen the growing log of pictures on the Internet? It happened to my family when I was a kid, and I didn’t know how much it was with me until a woman in Los Angeles the other day mentioned she had a new chocolate Lab she’d adopted from a shelter. He’d been left behind when a family was foreclosed on. “They left him in the house with a bowl of water and a tennis ball.” A neighbor heard him, saved him, and now he was hers. This story hurt like an old wound. There are a lot of such wounds out there. It’s part of why people are hunkering down.

The best report on how the young are experiencing it all came this week from the Web site Boing Boing, from the writer Cory Doctorow, who asked readers, “How are you coping with collapse-anxiety?” He wrote, “For me, I think it’s the suspense that’s the killer. What institutions will survive? Which ones are already doomed? Which of the items in my calendar are likely never to come to pass? Will my bank last?” He continued, “What are you telling yourself? How are you all sleeping at night? Are you hedging your bets with canned goods and shotguns, or plans for urban communal farming? Are you starting a business? Restructuring through bankruptcy? Moving back in with your parents?”

His readers wrote back, creating a stunning thread that said, essentially, all of the above, and more. They went from the wry—one reader is “drinking more . . . feeling disconnected from reality . . . watching more TV and movies”—to the tough—one said, “When the world turns crazy the crazy turn pro.” A number were moving in with relatives. In fact it sounded like the old days, before the abundance. Some were planting gardens. One said he was learning the ukulele so he could be a wandering minstrel. Mr. Doctorow told me the reaction was “stupendous” not only in terms of numbers but in terms of seriousness: These were people truly sharing their anxieties.

All of this hunkering down has stopped the great churning, the buying, selling and buying that was at the heart of our prosperity. In private equity firms, the churning was life. They bought a company, removed the fat, sold it at a profit, and bought another one. They kept moving. That’s over. No one is buying now, and no one can sell.

Perhaps the biggest factor behind the new pessimism is the knowledge that the crisis is not only economic but political, that we’ll have to change both cultures, economic and political, to turn the mess around. That’s a tall order, and won’t happen quickly. One thing for sure: Our political leaders for at least a decade, really more, have by and large been men and women who had fortunate lives, who always seemed to expect nice things to happen and happiness to occur. And so they could overspend, overcommit and overextend the military, and it would all turn out fine. They claimed to be quintessentially optimistic, but it was a cheap optimism, based more on sunny personal experience than any particular faith, and void of an understanding of how dark and gritty life can be, and has been for most of human history.

I end with a hunch that is not an unhappy one. Dynamism has been leached from our system for now, but not from the human brain or heart. Just as our political regeneration will happen locally, in counties and states that learn how to control themselves and demonstrate how to govern effectively in a time of limits, so will our economic regeneration. That will begin in someone’s garage, somebody’s kitchen, as it did in the case of Messrs. Jobs and Wozniak. The comeback will be from the ground up and will start with innovation. No one trusts big anymore. In the future everything will be local. That’s where the magic will be. And no amount of pessimism will stop it once it starts.

A moment last Monday, just after noon, in Manhattan. It’s slightly overcast, not cold, a good day for walking. I’m in the 90s on Fifth heading south, enjoying the broad avenue, the trees, the wide cobblestone walkway that rings Central Park. Suddenly I realize: Something’s odd here. Something’s strange. It’s quiet. I can hear each car go by. The traffic’s not an indistinct roar. The sidewalks aren’t full, as they normally are. It’s like a holiday, but it’s not, it’s the middle of a business day in February. I thought back to two weeks before when a friend and I zoomed down Park Avenue at evening rush hour in what should have been bumper-to-bumper traffic.

This is New York five months into hard times.

One senses it, for the first time: a shift in energy. Something new has taken hold, a new air of peace, perhaps, or tentativeness. The old hustle and bustle, the wild and daily assertion of dynamism, is calmed.

And now Washington becomes the financial capital of the country, of the world. Oh, what a status shift. Oh, what a fact.

If you want to feel the bruise of what’s happened, pick a neighborhood full of shops and go up and down the street. Here’s Second Avenue in the 80s. A jewelry and consignment store on 84th has a new sign on the window: “We Buy Gold.” Paul is at the counter, spraying the tarnish off a silver chain. How’s business? “No buyin’, no sellin’, no nothin’. It’s a joke. People scared. They’re in shock.” Nearby, an empty storefront, a bar that had been in business only 10 months. The sign on the window—you see it all over Manhattan now—says, “Retail Space Available.” Next door, in a small beauty salon, the owner says “We’re trying to survive.” In September business plummeted. It’s down “at least 30%,” she says. July and August had been surprisingly good; her clients didn’t go away on vacation. In the fall they were fired. “They lost the job, so they don’t need to cut and color so much.”

In a liquor store just off 82nd, the owner, from India, says volume is still high but profits are down. “In business, if you have a product under $15, is good. People used to spend $70, $80 on a bottle of wine, all the bankers, the young kids. Nothing moving more than $15.”

On 81st, the kosher restaurant has closed. On 79th, the Talbots is gone. “Left a few months ago,” says the doorman next door.

Turn down to Madison Avenue in the 80s. A high-end butcher who’s been in the neighborhood more than 30 years is moving to the West Side because his rent has been raised more than he can afford. Why are landlords raising rents in a recession? It’s not landlords, he says, you can reason with them, it’s co-op boards that own a building. The people in the apartments upstairs are paying high maintenance, and they’re worried about their jobs, their businesses, their bonuses. So they raise the rent on the shop downstairs to cut their maintenance. When the shopkeeper says he’ll move and who’ll take his place in this economy, the boards say, “It’s Madison Avenue, we’ll be able to rent it.” He says, “They will for a while. But not if it gets worse.”

The windows of the Jil Sander shop on Madison off 79th are newly covered in paper. A sign says they plan to relocate. How’s business in the small art gallery down the street? “It’s soft,” the owner says, discreetly. At 84th and Madison, a ladies boutique has a new sale: “Buy 2 sale items (already marked down 50% off) 3rd item Free!” The Boltons on 86th and Madison, gone. The shoe store three doors down, gone. The children’s boutique off 87th, gone. Not all the news is bad—there’s a new department store coming in—but people don’t close up shop when the immediate future is promising. And every day there’s a new surprise. Wednesday it was the little French dress shop on 91st and Madison. The sale sign in the front window said 80% off. “Is she moving?” I asked a woman in line for the dressing room. “She’s closing,” she said.

Politicians keep saying, “People have to begin to understand we’re in bad shape,” and “People should realize it’s a crisis.” I think they know, Sherlock. Do you? Our political leaders are like a doctor who rushes to the scene of a terrible crash, bends over a hemorrhaging woman and says, “This is serious, lady, you can’t take it lightly.” She looks up at him: “Help me, do something, I’m bleeding out!” The doctor, to the local TV cameras: “I hope she knows she’s in trouble.”

There’s a sense that everyone’s digging in. President Obama has dug in on this stimulus bill: Pass it or see catastrophe. Republicans are dug in: Pass it and see catastrophe. The digging in is a way of showing certitude, and they’re showing certitude because they’re lost.

We hire politicians to know what to do about empty stores, job loss, and “Retail Space Available.” But they don’t, and more than ever we know they don’t.

*   *   *

And there’s something else, not only in Manhattan but throughout the country. A major reason people are blue about the future is not the stores, not the Treasury secretary, not everyone digging in. It is those things, but it’s more than that, and deeper.

It’s Sully and Suleman, the pilot and “Octomom,” the two great stories that are twinned with the era. Sully, the airline captain who saved 155 lives by landing that plane just right—level wings, nose up, tail down, plant that baby, get everyone out, get them counted, and then, at night, wonder what you could have done better. You know the reaction of the people of our country to Chesley B. Sullenberger III: They shake their heads, and tears come to their eyes. He is cool, modest, competent, tough in the good way. He’s the only one who doesn’t applaud Sully. He was just doing his job.

This is why people are so moved: We’re still making Sullys. We’re still making those mythic Americans, those steely-eyed rocket men. Like Alan Shepard in the Mercury rocket: “Come on and light this candle.”

But Sully, 58, Air Force Academy ’73, was shaped and formed by the old America, and educated in an ethos in which a certain style of manhood—of personhood—was held high.

What we fear we’re making more of these days is Nadya Suleman. The dizzy, selfish, self-dramatizing 33-year-old mother who had six small children and then a week ago eight more because, well, she always wanted a big family. “Suley” doubletalks with the best of them, she doubletalks with profound ease. She is like Blago without the charm. She had needs and took proactive steps to meet them, and those who don’t approve are limited, which must be sad for them. She leaves anchorwomen slack-jawed: How do you rough up a woman who’s still lactating? She seems aware of their predicament.

Any great nation would worry at closed-up shops and a professional governing class that doesn’t have a clue what to do. But a great nation that fears, deep down, that it may be becoming more Suley than Sully—that nation will enter a true depression.

All week the word I kept thinking of was “braced.” America is braced, like people who are going fast and see a crash ahead. They know huge and historic challenges are here. They’re not confident they can or will be met. Our most productive citizens are our most sophisticated, and our most sophisticated have the least faith in the ability of our institutions to face the future and get us through whole. They have the least faith because they work in them.

*   *   *

Tuesday I talked to people who support a Catholic college. I said a great stress is here and coming, and people are going to be reminded of what’s important, and the greatest of these will be our faith, it’s what is going to hold us together as a country. As for each of us individually, I think it’s like the old story told about Muhammad Ali. It was back in the 1960s and Mr. Ali, who was still Cassius Clay, was a rising star of boxing, on his way to being champ. One day he was on a plane, going to a big bout. He was feeling good, laughing with friends. The stewardess walked by before they took off, looked down and saw that his seatbelt was unfastened. She asked him to fasten it. He ignored her. She asked him again, he paid no attention. Now she leaned in and issued an order: Fasten the seatbelt, now. Mr. Clay turned, looked her up and down, and purred, “Superman don’t need no seatbelt.”

She said, “Superman don’t need no airplane. Buckle up.” And he did.

We all think we’re supermen, and we’re not, and you’re lucky to have a faith that both grounds you and catches you.

But during the part in which I spoke in rather stark terms of how I see the future, I think I saw correctly that the physical attitude of some in the audience was alert, leaned forward: braced. Again, like people who know a crash is coming. Afterward I asked an educator in the audience if I was too grim. He looked at me and said simply: No.

A sign of the times: We had a good time at lunch. It is an era marked by deep cognitive dissonance. Your long-term thoughts are pessimistic, and yet you’re cheerful in the day to day.

*   *   *

On Wednesday, in an interview with Politico, Dick Cheney warned of the possible deaths of “perhaps hundreds of thousands” of Americans in a terror attack using nuclear or biological weapons. “I think there is a high probability of such an attempt,” he said.

When the interview broke and was read on the air, I was in a room off a television studio. For a moment everything went silent, and then a makeup woman said to a guest, “I don’t see how anyone can think that’s not true.”

I told her I’m certain it is true. And it didn’t seem to me any of the half dozen others there found the content of Cheney’s message surprising. They got a grim or preoccupied look.

The question for the Obama administration: Do they think Mr. Cheney is essentially correct, that bad men are coming with evil and deadly intent, but that America can afford to, must for moral reasons, change its stance regarding interrogation and detention of terrorists? Or, deep down, do the president and those around him think Mr. Cheney is wrong, that people who make such warnings are hyping the threat for political purposes? And, therefore, that interrogation techniques, etc., can of course be relaxed? I don’t know the precise answer to this question. Do they know exactly what they think? Or are they reading raw threat files each day trying to figure out what they think?

The bad thing about new political eras is that everyone within them has to learn everything for the first time. Every new president starts out fresh, in part because he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. Ignorance keeps you perky.

*   *   *

On the economy, I continue to find no one, Democrat or Republican, who has faith that the stimulus bill passed by the House will solve anything or make anything better, though many argue that doing absolutely nothing will surely make things worse by not promising at least the possibility of improvement through action.

Meanwhile, the inquest on President Obama’s great stimulus mistake continues.

His serious and consequential policy mistake is that he put his prestige behind not a new way of breaking through but an old way of staying put. This marked a dreadful misreading of the moment. And now he’s digging in. His political mistake, which in retrospect we will see as huge, is that he remoralized the Republicans. He let them back in the game.

Mr. Obama has a talent for reviving his enemies. He did it with Hillary Clinton, who almost beat him after his early wins, and who was given the State Department. He has now done it with Republicans on the Hill. This is very nice of him, but not in his interests. Mr. Obama should have written the stimulus bill side by side with Republicans, picked them off, co-opted their views. Did he not understand their weakness? They had no real position from which to oppose high and wasteful spending, having backed eight years of it with nary a peep. They started the struggle over the stimulus bill at a real disadvantage. Then four things: Nancy Pelosi served up old-style pork, Mr. Obama swallowed it, Republicans shocked themselves by being serious, and then they startled themselves by being unified. But it was their seriousness that was most important: They didn’t know they were! They hadn’t been in years!

One senses in a new way the disaster that is Nancy Pelosi. She was all right as leader of the opposition in the Bush era, opposition being joyful and she being by nature chipper. She is tough, experienced, and of course only two years ago she was a breakthrough figure, the first female speaker. But her public comments are often quite mad—we’re losing 500 million jobs a month; here’s some fresh insight on Catholic doctrine—and in a crisis demanding of creativity, depth and the long view, she seems more than ever a mere ward heeler, a hack, a pol. She’s not big enough for the age, is she? She’s not up to it.

Whatever happens in the Senate, Republicans have to some degree already won. They should not revert to the triumphalism of the Bush era, when they often got giddy and thick-necked and spiked the ball. They should “act like they been there before.” They should begin to seize back the talking mantle from the president. And—most important—they must stay serious.

The national conversation on the economy is frozen, and has been for a while. Republicans say tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts. Democrats say spend, new programs, more money. You can’t spend enough for the Democratic base, or cut taxes enough for the Republican. But in a time when all the grown-ups of America know spending is going to bankrupt us and tax cuts without spending cuts is more of the medicine that’s killing us, the same old arguments, which sound less like arguments than compulsive tics, only add to the public sense that no one is in charge.

It looks like a win but feels like a loss.

The party-line vote in favor of the stimulus package could have been more, could have produced not only a more promising bill but marked the beginning of something new, not a postpartisan era (there will never be such a thing and never should be; the parties exist to fight through great political questions) but a more bipartisan one forced by crisis and marked by—well, let’s call it seriousness.

President Obama could have made big history here. Instead he just got a win. It’s a missed opportunity.

It’s a win because of the obvious headline: Nine days after inauguration, the new president achieves a major Congressional victory, House passage of an economic stimulus bill by a vote of 244-188. It wasn’t even close. This is major.

But do you know anyone, Democrat or Republican, dancing in the street over this? You don’t. Because most everyone knows it isn’t a good bill, and knows that its failure to receive a single Republican vote, not one, suggests the old battle lines are hardening. Back to the Crips versus the Bloods. Not very inspiring.

The president will enjoy short-term gain. In the great circle of power, to win you have to look like a winner, and to look like a winner you have to win. He did and does. But for the long term, the president made a mistake by not forcing the creation of a bill Republicans could or should have supported.

Consider the moment. House Republicans had conceded that dramatic action was needed and had grown utterly supportive of the idea of federal jobs creation on a large scale. All that was needed was a sober, seriously focused piece of legislation that honestly tried to meet the need, one that everyone could tinker with a little and claim as their own. Instead, as Rep. Mike Pence is reported to have said to the president, “Know that we’re praying for you. . . . But know that there has been no negotiation [with Republicans] on the bill—we had absolutely no say.” The final bill was privately agreed by most and publicly conceded by many to be a big, messy, largely off-point and philosophically chaotic piece of legislation. The Congressional Budget Office says only 25% of the money will even go out in the first year. This newspaper, in its analysis, argues that only 12 cents of every dollar is for something that could plausibly be called stimulus.

What was needed? Not pork, not payoffs, not eccentric base-pleasing, group-greasing forays into birth control as stimulus, as the speaker of the House dizzily put it before being told to remove it.

“Business as usual.” “That’s Washington.” But in 2008 the public rejected business as usual. That rejection is part of what got Obama elected.

Instead the air of D.C. dithering continues, and this while the Labor Department reported Thursday what everyone knew was coming, increased unemployment. The number of continuing claims for unemployment insurance as of Jan. 17 was 4.78 million, the highest in the 42 years they’ve been keeping records. Starbucks, Time Warner, Home Depot, Pfizer: The AP’s count is 125,000 layoffs since January began.

*   *   *

People are getting the mood of the age in their inboxes. How many emails have you received the past few months from acquaintances telling you in brisk words meant to communicate optimism and forestall pity that “it’s been a great ride,” but they’re “moving on” to “explore new opportunities”? And there’s a broad feeling one detects, a kind of psychic sense, some sort of knowledge in the collective unconscious, that we lived through magic times the past half-century, and now the nonmagic time has begun, and it won’t be over next summer. That’s not the way it will work. It will last a while.

There’s a sense among many, certainly here in New York, that we somehow had it too good too long, a feeling part Puritan, part mystic and obscurely guilty, that some bill is coming due. Hard to get a stimulus package that addresses that. (The guilt was part of the power of Blago. He’s the last American who doesn’t feel guilt. He thinks something is moral because he did it. He’s like a good-natured Idi Amin, up there yammering about how he’s a poor boy who only wanted to protect the people of Chicago from the flu. You wish you could believe it! You wish he really were what he is in his imagination, a hero battling dark forces against the odds.)

I think there is an illness called Goldmansachs Head. I think it’s in the DSM. When you have Goldmansachs Head, the party’s never over. You take private planes to ask for bailout money, you entertain customers at high-end spas while your writers prep your testimony, you take and give huge bonuses as the company tanks. When you take the kids camping, you bring a private chef. Goldmansachs Head is Bernie Madoff complaining he’s feeling cooped up in the penthouse. It is the delusion that the old days continue and the old ways prevail and you, Prince of the Abundance, can just keep rolling along. Here is how you know if someone has GSH: He has everything but a watch. He doesn’t know what time it is.

I remember the father in the movie script of “Dr. Zhivago,” inviting what’s left of his family, huddled in rooms in what had been their mansion, picking up the stump of a stogie and inviting them to watch the lighting of “the last cigar in Moscow.”

When you have GSH, you never think it’s the last cigar.

But you don’t have to be on Wall Street to have GSH. Congress has it too. That’s what the stimulus bill was about—not knowing what time it is, not knowing the old pork-barrel, group-greasing ways are over, done, embarrassing. When you create a bill like that, it doesn’t mean you’re a pro, it doesn’t mean you’re a tough, no-nonsense pol. It means you’re a slob.

That’s how the Democratic establishment in the House looks, not like people who are responding to a crisis, or even like people who are ignoring a crisis, but people who are using a crisis. Our hopeful, compelling new president shouldn’t have gone with this bill. He made news this week by going to the House to meet with Republicans. He could have made history by listening to them.

*   *   *

A final point: In the time since his inauguration, Mr. Obama has been on every screen in the country, TV and computer, every day. He is never not on the screen. I know what his people are thinking: Put his image on the age. Imprint the era with his face. But it’s already reaching saturation point. When the office is omnipresent, it is demystified. Constant exposure deflates the presidency, subtly robbing it of power and making it more common. I keep the television on a lot, and somewhere in the 1990s I realized that Bill Clinton was never not in my living room. He was always strolling onto the stage, pointing at things, laughing, talking. This is what the Obama people are doing, having the boss hog the screen. They should relax. The race is long.

As a matter of fact, they should focus on that: The race is long. Run seriously.

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.

*   *   *

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.