Peggy Noonan

If Hillary Clinton loses, does she know how to lose? What will that be, if she loses? Will she just say, “I concede” and go on vacation at a friend’s house on an island, and then go back to the Senate and wait?

Is it possible she could be so normal? Politicians lose battles, it’s part of what they do, win and lose. But she does not know how to lose. Can she lose with grace? But she does grace the way George W. Bush does nuance.

She often talks about how tough she is. She has fought “the Republican attack machine” that has tried to “stop” her, “end” her, and she knows “how to fight them.” She is preoccupied to an unusual degree with toughness. A man so preoccupied would seem weak. But a woman obsessed with how tough she is just may be lethal.

Does her sense of toughness mean that every battle in which she engages must be fought tooth and claw, door to door? Can she recognize the line between burly combat and destructive, never-say-die warfare? I wonder if she is thinking: What will it mean if I win ugly? What if I lose ugly? What will be the implications for my future, the party’s future? What will black America, having seen what we did in South Carolina, think forever of me and the party if I do low things to stop this guy on the way to victory? Can I stop, see the lay of the land, imitate grace, withdraw, wait, come back with a roar down the road? Life is long. I am not old. Or is that a reverie she could never have? What does it mean if she could never have it?

We know she is smart. Is she wise? If it comes to it, down the road, can she give a nice speech, thank her supporters, wish Barack Obama well, and vow to campaign for him?

It either gets very ugly now, or we will see unanticipated—and I suspect professionally saving—grace.

I ruminate in this way because something is happening. Mrs. Clinton is losing this thing. It’s not one big primary, it’s a rolling loss, a daily one, an inch-by-inch deflation. The trends and indices are not in her favor. She is having trouble raising big money, she’s funding her campaign with her own wealth, her moral standing within her own party and among her own followers has been dragged down, and the legacy of Clintonism tarnished by what Bill Clinton did in South Carolina. Unfavorable primaries lie ahead. She doesn’t have the excitement, the great whoosh of feeling that accompanies a winning campaign. The guy from Chicago who was unknown a year ago continues to gain purchase, to move forward. For a soft little innocent, he’s played a tough and knowing inside/outside game.

The day she admitted she’d written herself a check for $5 million, Obama’s people crowed they’d just raised $3 million. But then his staff is happy. They’re all getting paid.

Political professionals are leery of saying, publicly, that she is losing, because they said it before New Hampshire and turned out to be wrong. Some of them signaled their personal weariness with Clintonism at that time, and fear now, as they report, to look as if they are carrying an agenda. One part of the Clinton mystique maintains: Deep down journalists think she’s a political Rasputin who will not be dispatched. Prince Yusupov served him cupcakes laced with cyanide, emptied a revolver, clubbed him, tied him up and threw him in a frozen river. When he floated to the surface they found he’d tried to claw his way from under the ice. That is how reporters see Hillary.

And that is a grim and over-the-top analogy, which I must withdraw. What I really mean is they see her as the Glenn Close character in “Fatal Attraction”: “I won’t be ignored, Dan!”

*   *   *

Mr. Obama’s achievement on Super Tuesday was solid and reinforced trend lines. The popular vote was a draw, the delegate count a rough draw, but he won 13 states, and when you look at the map he captured the middle of the country from Illinois straight across to Idaho, with a second band, in the northern Midwest, of Minnesota and North Dakota. He won Missouri and Connecticut, in Mrs. Clinton’s backyard. He won the Democrats of the red states.

On the wires Wednesday her staff was all but conceding she is not going to win the next primaries. Her superdelegates are coming under pressure that is about to become unrelenting. It was easy for party hacks to cleave to Mrs Clinton when she was inevitable. Now Mr. Obama’s people are reportedly calling them saying, Your state voted for me and so did your congressional district. Are you going to jeopardize your career and buck the wishes of the people back home?

Mrs. Clinton is stoking the idea that Mr. Obama is too soft to withstand the dread Republican attack machine. (I nod in tribute to all Democrats who have succeeded in removing the phrase “Republican and Democratic attack machines” from the political lexicon. Both parties have them.) But Mr. Obama will not be easy for Republicans to attack. He will be hard to get at, hard to address. There are many reasons, but a primary one is that the fact of his race will freeze them. No one, no candidate, no party, no heavy-breathing consultant, will want to cross any line—lines that have never been drawn, that are sure to be shifting and not always visible—in approaching the first major-party African-American nominee for president of the United States.

*   *   *

He is the brilliant young black man as American dream. No consultant, no matter how opportunistic and hungry, will think it easy—or professionally desirable—to take him down in a low manner. If anything, they’ve learned from the Clintons in South Carolina what that gets you. (I add that yes, there are always freelance mental cases, who exist on both sides and are empowered by modern technology. They’ll make their YouTubes. But the mad are ever with us, and this year their work will likely stay subterranean.)

With Mr. Obama the campaign will be about issues. “He’ll raise your taxes.” He will, and I suspect Americans may vote for him anyway. But the race won’t go low.

Mrs. Clinton would be easier for Republicans. With her cavalcade of scandals, they’d be delighted to go at her. They’d get medals for it. Consultants would get rich on it.

The Democrats have it exactly wrong. Hillary is the easier candidate, Mr. Obama the tougher. Hillary brings negative; it’s fair to hit her back with negative. Mr. Obama brings hope, and speaks of a better way. He’s not Bambi, he’s bulletproof.

The biggest problem for the Republicans will be that no matter what they say that is not issue oriented—“He’s too young, he’s never run anything, he’s not fully baked”—the mainstream media will tag them as dealing in racial overtones, or undertones. You can bet on this. Go to the bank on it.

The Democrats continue not to recognize what they have in this guy. Believe me, Republican professionals know. They can tell.

In the most exciting and confounding election cycle of my lifetime, Rudy Giuliani, the Prince of the City, is out because he was about to lose New York, John Edwards is out, the Clintons are fighting for their historical reputations, and the stalwart conservative New York Post has come out strong and stinging for Barack Obama. If you had asked me in December if I would write that sentence in February, I would have said: Um, no.

If there is a part of you that loves politics, loves the sheer brunt force of it, the great game of it, you are waking up each morning with a spring in your step. “What happened last night?”

Both races continue to clarify, if not resolve. On the Democratic side, a great rebellion, a coming together of former officials, members of the commenting class, and the Kennedy family to stand athwart the Clintonian future and say, Stop. They are saying, as Jack Kennedy did when pressed to endorse a hack for governor of Massachusetts, “Sometimes party loyalty asks too much.”

On the Republican side an embrace, but an awkward and unfinished one. It’s like the man-hug the pol at the podium now feels he must give to the man he’s just introduced. They used to just shake and say, “Thanks, Bob,” and go to the podium. Now they embrace, with an always apparent self-consciousness. Can you imagine JFK doing this? Or Reagan?

It is this kind of embrace many in the Republican party are giving John McCain. He has real supporters. He keeps winning. But he’s not getting even close to half the vote, as the presumptive nominee should. And he has been at odds with his party on so many things.

*   *   *

As much attention as the decision of the stars of the Kennedy family to endorse Sen. Obama received this week, it has still not been given its due. This was a break with the establishment and from the expected, and it may carry a price. The Clintons are deeply wired into their party, they run many money lines and power lines, and Hillary Clinton is still, in the Super Tuesday states, in the lead. Will the lives of those who rebelled against her be made more pleasant if she wins? The Clintons have never had the wit to be forgiving.

But all parties, all movements, need men and women who will come forward every decade or so to name tendencies within that are abusive or destructive, to throw off the low and grubby. Teddy’s speech in this regard was a barnburner. He went straight against the negative and bullying, hard for the need to find inspiration again.

He is an old lion of his party, a hero of the base. But people do what they know how to do, and objects at rest tend to stay at rest, and Teddy has long led a comfortable life as a party panjandrum who knew to sit back and watch as the dog barked and the caravan moved on. In a way he seemed to rebel against his own tendencies. He put himself on the line.

“I love this country,” he said, “I believe in the bright light of hope and possibility. I always have.”

As a conservative I would say Ted Kennedy has spent much of his career being not just wrong about the issues but so deeply wrong, so consistently and reliably wrong that it had a kind of grandeur to it. So wrong that I cannot actually think of a single serious policy question on which I agreed with him. But I remember the night President Reagan spoke of Sen. Kennedy’s brother at a fund-raiser for the JFK Library, and I remember the letter Reagan got from Teddy. “Your presence itself was such a magnificent tribute to my brother. . . . The country is well served by your eloquent graceful leadership, Mr. President.” He ended it, “With my prayers and thanks for you as you lead us through these difficult times.”

Liberals are rarely interested in pointing out, and conservatives by and large may not know, but everyone who knows Teddy Kennedy knows that he holds a deep love for his country, that he feels a reverence for the presidency and a desire that America be represented with grace abroad and stature at home. He has seen administrations come and go. And maybe much of what he’s learned came forward, came together, this week.

His principled and uncompromising rebellion seemed to me a patriotic act, and adds to the rising tide of Geffenism. When David Geffen broke with Mrs. Clinton last summer, and couched his disapproval along ethical lines, he was almost alone among important Democrats. It took some guts. Now others are joining his side. Good.

*   *   *

The Republican contest may well end on Tuesday, but I sense little relief and much unease. In terms of avowed programs, policies and approaches, Mitt Romney was the more conservative candidate, and his even-keeled air won many friends. He offered executive experience and business acumen. As for how he came across, here is Mike Deaver on Ronald Reagan: “This is a face that when the baby sees it, the baby smiles.”

His supporters tell me he will fight to the end. The conservative establishment still has hopes. But the great unruly base may be doing some redefining.

If you go by the Florida returns, maybe this year positions aren’t everything. Republicans on the ground think the conservative is the one who suffered 5½ years in the Hanoi Hilton. Republicans on the ground think the conservative is the one who has endured a lifetime in the rounds in Washington and survived as antispending, antiabortion and pro-military. Republicans on the ground think the conservative is the old fighter jock who’ll keep the country safe in a rocky time ahead. And maybe Republicans on the ground are saying: He earned it.

The conventional wisdom is Mr. Romney can’t win it while Mike Huckabee’s in it. If Mr. Huckabee dropped out, Mr. Romney might pick up his conservatives. But Mr. Huckabee seems very happy running, and perhaps happy thinking of his future as the Mitt slayer in the party of John.

Mr. McCain seems to me to have two immediate problems, both of which he might address. One is that he doesn’t seem to much like conservatives, and never has. They can’t help admire him, but they’ve disagreed with him on so many issues, and when they bring this up his demeanor tends to morph into the second problem: He radiates, he telegraphs, a certain indignation at being questioned by people who’ve never had to vote in Congress and make a deal. He’s like Moe Greene in “The Godfather,” when Michael Corleone tells him he’s going to buy him out. “Do you know who I am? I’m Moe Greene. I made my bones when you were going out with cheerleaders.” I’ve been on the firing line, punk. I am the voice of surviving conservatism.

This doesn’t always go over so well. Mr. Giuliani seems to know Mr. McCain is Moe Greene. Mr. Huckabee probably thought “The Godfather” was kinda violent. Mr. Romney may be thinking to himself, But Michael Corleone won in the end, and had better suits.

We begin, as one always must now, again, with Bill Clinton. The past week he has traveled South Carolina, leaving discord in his wake. Barack Obama, that “fairytale,” is low, sneaky. “He put out a hit job on me.” The press is cruelly carrying Mr. Obama’s counter-jabs. “You live for it.”

In Dillon, S.C., according to the Associated Press, on Thursday Mr. Clinton “predicted that many voters will be guided mainly by gender and race loyalties” and suggested his wife may lose Saturday’s primary because black voters will side with Mr. Obama. Who is raising race as an issue? Bill Clinton knows. It’s the press, and Mr. Obama. “Shame on you,” Mr. Clinton said to a CNN reporter. The same day the Web site believed to be the backdoor of the Clinton war room unveiled a new name for the senator from Illinois: “Sticky Fingers Obama.”

Bill Clinton, with his trembly, red-faced rage, makes John McCain look young. His divisive and destructive daily comportment—this is a former president of the United States—is a civic embarrassment. It is also an education, and there is something heartening in this.

There are many serious and thoughtful liberals and Democrats who support Mr. Obama and John Edwards, and who are seeing Mr. Clinton in a new way and saying so. Here is William Greider in The Nation, the venerable left-liberal magazine. The Clintons are “high minded” on the surface but “smarmily duplicitous underneath, meanwhile jabbing hard at the groin area. They are a slippery pair and come as a package. The nation is at fair risk of getting them back in the White House for four years.”

That, again, is from one of the premier liberal journals in the United States. It is exactly what conservatives have been saying for a decade. This may mark a certain coming together of the thoughtful on both sides. The Clintons, uniters at last.

Mr. Obama takes the pummeling and preaches the high road. It’s all windup with him, like a great pitcher more comfortable preparing to throw than throwing. Something in him resists aggression. He tends to be indirect in his language, feinting, only suggestive. I used to think he was being careful not to tear the party apart, and endanger his own future.

But the Clintons are tearing the party apart. It will not be the same after this. It will not be the same after its most famous leader, and probable ultimate victor, treated a proud and accomplished black man who is a U.S. senator as if he were nothing, a mere impediment to their plans. And to do it in a way that signals, to his supporters, How dare you have the temerity, the ingratitude, after all we’ve done for you?

Watch for the GOP to attempt swoop in after the November elections and make profit of the wreckage.

*   *   *

As for the Republicans, their slow civil war continues. The primary race itself is winnowing down and clarifying: It is John McCain versus Mitt Romney, period. At the same time the conservative journalistic world is convulsed by recrimination and attack. They’re throwing each other out of the party. Republicans have become very good at that. David Brooks damns Rush Limbaugh who knocks Bill Kristol who anathematizes whoever is to be anathematized this week. This Web site opposes that magazine.

The rage is due to many things. A world is ending, the old world of conservative meaning, and ascendancy. Loss leads to resentment. (See Clinton, Bill.) Different pundits back different candidates. Some opportunistically discover new virtues in candidates who appear at the moment to be winning. Some feel they cannot be fully frank about causes and effects.

More on that in a moment.

I saw Mr. McCain this Tuesday in New York, at a fund-raiser at which a breathless aide shared, “We just made a million dollars.” What a difference a few wins makes. There were a hundred people outside chanting, “Mac is back!” and perhaps a thousand people inside, crammed into a three-chandelier ballroom at the St. Regis. When I attended a fund-raiser in October there was none of this; perhaps 200 came, and people were directed to crowd around the candidate as if to show he had support. Now you had to fight your way through a three-ring cluster. (When I attended a Giuliani fund-raiser this summer I saw something I wish I’d noted: The audience was big but wasn’t listening. They were all on their BlackBerrys. That should have told me something about his support.)

Mr. McCain is in the middle of a shift. Previous strategy: I’m John McCain and you know me, we’ve traveled through history together. New strategy: I’m the old vet who fought on the front lines of the Reagan-era front, and I am about to take on the mantle of the essentials of conservatism—lower spending, smaller government, strong in the world. He is going to strike the great Reagan gong, not in a way that is new but in a way that is new for him.

In this he is repositioning himself back to where he started 30 years ago: as a Southwestern American conservative veteran of the armed forces. That is, inherently if not showily, anti-establishment. That is, I am the best of the past.

Mr. Romney, on the other hand, is running as I Am Today. I am new and fresh, in fact I’m tomorrow, I know all about the international flow of money and the flatness of the world, I know what China is, I can see you through the turbulence just as I saw Bain to success.

It will all come down to: Whom do Republicans believe? Mr. Romney in spite of his past and now-disavowed liberal positions? Or Mr. McCain in spite of his forays, the past 10 years, into a kind of establishment mindset that has suggested that The Establishment Knows Best?

Do conservatives take inspiration from Mr. Romney’s newness? Or do they take comfort and security from Mr. McCain’s rugged ability to endure, and to remind?

It is along those lines the big decision will be made.

*   *   *

On the pundit civil wars, Rush Limbaugh declared on the radio this week, “I’m here to tell you, if either of these two guys [Mr. McCain or Mike Huckabee] get the nomination, it’s going to destroy the Republican Party. It’s going to change it forever, be the end of it!”

This is absurd. George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other. He did this on spending, the size of government, war, the ability to prosecute war, immigration and other issues.

Were there other causes? Yes, of course. But there was an immediate and essential cause.

And this needs saying, because if you don’t know what broke the elephant you can’t put it together again. The party cannot re-find itself if it can’t trace back the moment at which it became lost. It cannot heal an illness whose origin is kept obscure.

I believe that some of the ferocity of the pundit wars is due to a certain amount of self-censorship. It’s not in human nature to enjoy self-censorship. The truth will out, like steam from a kettle. It hurts to say something you supported didn’t work. I would know. But I would say of these men (why, in the continuing age of Bill Clinton, does the emoting come from the men?) who are fighting one another as they resist naming the cause for the fight: Sack up, get serious, define. That’s the way to help.

One way to see what happened Tuesday is that it was an anti-coronation backlash. Iowa said: We are not here to crown Queen Hillary. New Hampshire said: We’re not here to crown King Barack. The polls said they would. People don’t like to be told what they’re going to do.

Other ways to see it: Women saved her. The working-class sisterhood beat the white-collar snots of the mainstream media. Middle-aged women body-slammed young professionals who were carrying on as if history had never happened before because it had never happened to them.

Students were still on Christmas vacation. Hillary had been bruised in Iowa, and people are more inclined to give a second chance to a bully who’s been hurt.

The Democrats of New Hampshire resented the media pile-on, in which national reporters and editors, liberated by what they thought her impending demise, rushed to get on record as never having liked her. In this understanding of events it was the mainstream media that, in effect, showed up at Mrs. Clinton’s last rallies to chant “Iron my shirt.”

But the smartest thought came from a Democratic woman who watched from New York with experienced eyes. She saw it this way. When she was a young woman, she learned to drive on an old Buick. She drove it for seven years. Then she made some money and got to look at other cars. Showrooms, convertibles, long gleaming fins. But she’d come back from a test drive, get back into the Buick, and think: This old leather seat fits me, it feels good. Why complicate life? Why not stick with what’s comfortable? And she did.

She left Mr. Obama on the showroom floor.

I would say: All of the above. And more.

While everyone beats the hell out of the media, which is never wholly a bad idea, one should point out what everyone in politics and journalism knows: Hillary Clinton’s own people knew she was going to lose. Major supporters and fund-raisers thought so and said so, for weeks, off the record.

And they were not heartbroken about it. I saw no tears. They were shocked, not saddened; shaken, not stirred. One told me the problem was the campaign had been so obsessed from day one with showing she was a commander in chief that they never thought to urge her to be a woman among women. She used her sex—the boys are picking on me!—but she never assumed her sex. Then, tired and with nothing to lose, she allowed her eyes to well. It was an arresting sight because it suggested the presence of a soul in the machine.

Let’s look at the tears before they harden like resin into cliché. Quickly. She was taking questions in a diner, a woman asked how she does it each day, she started talking about how hard it is, and she got misty-eyed, her voice soft for once—conversational, not hectoring.

Exactly 100% of the people who saw it on the news and on YouTube had one reaction. It was to ask a question: Is that real or artifice? With the Clintons you always have to ask, which is the great Clinton problem.

In the end, Democratic women seem to have felt sympathy. I suspect the sympathy was connected to one great universal moment between men and women, the one in which in the middle of the fight she gets teary eyed and he, in terror and resentment, says, “Don’t go crying now!” as if her tears were a strategy and not . . . honest tears.

In any case, Democratic women showed no interest in parsing the exact level of narcissism betrayed by Mrs. Clinton’s choked tale of woe. They understood the moment, thought no less of her, and maybe more.

*   *   *

But I think the crying moment, as it is called, though she didn’t cry, gained extra force because it occurred just as Mr. Obama, as a personality, was settling in as rather a chilly fellow. Sleek and elegant, yes, but cold, or at least cool at the core.

Barack Obama is up against a lot of tropes, a lot of assumptions and understandings about what it is to be young, gifted, black and a major political figure. He’s not Jesse Jackson, he’s not Dr. King, he’s not Andrew Young. He’s trying to break a mold, make it new, be who he is, anticipate expectations, upend clichés, startle you into seeing him clear. He plays down emotionalism in terms of his visage (not his words), keeps his guard up, wears dignity like a cloak. When he appeared with Oprah in Des Moines, she vibrated at the podium like a puppy. He came on cool and loping, always using his hands in the frame in a slow and deliberative manner, to show he never gets a tremor, doesn’t break a sweat. He’s cool. Is that a universally beloved attribute in a national candidate? Is it a plus that carries a minus?

Was what is called sexism part of the story? I suppose, and in a number of ways. When George Bush senior cries in public, it’s considered moving. Ditto his moist-eyed son. But in fairness, they have tended to appear moved about things apart from themselves, apart from their own predicaments. Mrs. Clinton was weeping about Mrs. Clinton. If a man had uttered Mrs. Clinton’s aria—if Mr. Obama had said, “And you know, this is very personal for me . . . as tired as I am . . . against the odds,” and gotten choked—they would have laughed him out of town.

*   *   *

The night Mrs. Clinton won, she referred to the crying moment by saying she had now, with the help of New Hampshire, found her voice. After 60 years. “High five, fraudbot” was the reaction of the dizzy children at Wonkette, who had it about right. I suspect Mrs. Clinton was attempting to echo Eleanor Roosevelt, of whom it was famously said that she found her voice late in life, in the coal mines of West Virginia and in her husband’s White House.

But one must ask of Mrs. Clinton what one would never ask of Mrs. Roosevelt: Will the new voice have a new accent? She’s going down to South Carolina soon. This could get painful.

And if we are to believe the new voice will be a softer, more conciliatory and more engaging one, how to square that with what is going on at HillaryIs44.com, a Web site that is for all intents and purposes a back door to her war room? There you will see that federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald will soon “destroy” Barack Obama in a “scandal” involving an “indicted slumlord” who is Mr. Obama’s “friend of 17 years” and with whom Mr. Obama has been involved in “shady deals.”

This isn’t a new voice, it is the old one, the one we know too well. The item was posted on Thursday, two days after Mrs. Clinton announced her new approach.

Between sobs she is going to try to destroy Mr. Obama. She is going to try to end him. She will pay a price for it—no one likes to see the end of a dream, no one likes a dream killer. But she will pay that price to win, and try to clean up the mess later.

And so it begins.

We wanted exciting, we got exciting.

As this is written, late on the night of the caucuses, the outlines of the decisions seem clear: Barack Obama won.

Hillary Clinton, the inevitable, the avatar of the machine, lost.

It’s huge. Even though people have been talking about this possibility for six weeks now, it’s still huge. She had the money, she had the organization, the party’s stars, she had Elvis behind her, and the Clinton name in a base that loved Bill. And she lost. There are always a lot of reasons for a loss, but the ur-reason in this case, the thing it all comes down to? There’s something about her that makes you look, watch, think, look again, weigh and say: No.

She started out way ahead, met everyone, and lost.

As for Sen. Obama, his victory is similarly huge. He won the five biggest counties in Iowa, from the center of the state to the South Dakota border. He carried the young in a tidal wave. He outpolled Mrs. Clinton among women.

He did it with a classy campaign, an unruffled manner, and an appeal on the stump that said every day, through the lines: Look at who I am and see me, the change that you desire is right here, move on with me and we will bring it forward together.

He had a harder row to hoe than Mrs. Clinton did. He was lesser known, too young, lacked an establishment. He had to knock her down while building himself up. (She only had to build herself up until the end, when she went after his grade-school essays.) His takedown of Mrs. Clinton was the softest demolition in the history of falling buildings. I think we were there when it happened, in the debate in which he was questioned on why so many of Bill Clinton’s aides were advising him. She laughed, and he said he was looking forward to her advising him, too. He took mama to school.

And so something new begins on the Democratic side.

Something new begins on the Republican side, too.

Everyone said Mike Huckabee was a big dope to leave Iowa Wednesday to fly to L.A. to be on Jay Leno, but did you see him on that thing? He got off a perfect line on why he’s doing well against Romney: “People are looking for a presidential candidate who reminds them more of the guy they work with rather than the guy that laid them off.” The studio audience loved him. And you know, in Iowa they watch “The Tonight Show” too.

Mr. Huckabee likes to head-fake people into thinking he’s Gomer Pyle, but he’s more like the barefoot boy of the green room. He’s more James Carville than Jim Nabors.

What we have learned about Mr. Huckabee the past few months is that he’s an ace entertainer with a warm, witty and compelling persona. He won with no money and little formal organization, with an evangelical network, with a folksy manner, and with the best guileless pose in modern politics. From the mail I have received the past month after criticizing him in this space, I would say his great power, the thing really pushing his supporters, is that they believe that what ails America and threatens its continued existence is not economic collapse or jihad, it is our culture.

They have been bruised and offended by the rigid, almost militant secularism and multiculturalism of the public schools; they reject those schools’ squalor, in all senses of the word. They believe in God and family and America. They are populist: They don’t admire billionaire CEOs, they admire husbands with two jobs who hold the family together for the sake of the kids; they don’t need to see the triumph of supply-side thinking, they want to see that suffering woman down the street get the help she needs.

They believe that Mr. Huckabee, the minister who speaks their language, shares, down to the bone, their anxieties, concerns and beliefs. They fear that the other Republican candidates are caught up in a million smaller issues—taxing, spending, the global economy, Sunnis and Shia—and missing the central issue: again, our culture. They are populists who vote Republican, and as I have read their letters, I have felt nothing but respect.

But there are two problems. One is that while the presidency, as an office, can actually make real changes in the areas of economic and foreign policy, the federal government has a limited ability to change the culture of America. That is something conservatives used to know. Second, I’m sorry to say it is my sense that Mr. Huckabee is not so much leading a movement as riding a wave. One senses he brilliantly discerned and pursued an underserved part of the voting demographic, and went for it. Clever fellow. To me, the tipoff was “Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?”

My sense is that Mr. Huckabee’s good supporters deserve a better leader.

His next problem may be not so much New Hampshire as Ed Rollins, the Reagan White House political aide who came in a week ago to manage his campaign. Mr. Rollins began his tenure announcing to respectful young reporters that he—“the grizzled veteran,” the “old battler”—would like to sink to his knees and “shoot Romney in the groin” and “punch his teeth out.” Such class is of course always welcome on the trail, but one senses the verbal ante will constantly be upped, and I’m not sure that will work well for Mr. Huckabee. Self-inflated dirigibles, especially unmoored ones, can cast shadows on parades.

By next week politically active Iowans will have met and tallied their votes. Their decision this year will have a huge impact on the 2008 election, and a decisive impact on various candidacies. Some will be done in. Some will be made. Some will land just right or wrong and wake up the next day to read raves or obits. A week after that, New Hampshire. The endless campaign is in fact nearing its climax.

But all eyes are on Iowa. Iowans bear a heck of a lot of responsibility this year, the first time since 1952 when there is no incumbent president or vice president in the race. All of it is wide open.

Iowa can make Obama real. It can make Hillary yesterday. It can make Huckabee a phenom and not a flash, McCain the future and not the past. Moments like this happen in history. They’re the reason we get up in the morning. “What happened?” “Who won?”

This is my 2008 slogan: Reasonable Person for President. That is my hope, what I ask Iowa to produce, and I claim here to speak for thousands, millions. We are grown-ups, we know our country needs greatness, but we do not expect it and will settle at the moment for good. We just want a reasonable person. We would like a candidate who does not appear to be obviously insane. We’d like knowledge, judgment, a prudent understanding of the world and of the ways and histories of the men and women in it.

Here are two reasonables: Joe Biden and Chris Dodd. They have been United States senators for a combined 62 years. They’ve read a raw threat file or two. They have experience, sophistication, the long view. They know how it works. No one will have to explain it to them.

Mitt Romney? Yes. Characterological cheerfulness, personal stability and a good brain would be handy to have around. He hasn’t made himself wealthy by seeing the world through a romantic mist. He has a sophisticated understanding of the challenges we face in the global economy. I personally am not made anxious by his flip-flopping on big issues because everyone in politics gets to change his mind once. That is, you can be pro-life and then pro-choice but you can’t go back to pro-life again, because if you do you’ll look like a flake. The positions Mr. Romney espouses now are the positions he will stick with. He has no choice.

John McCain? Yes. Remember when he was the wild man in 2000? For Republicans on the ground he was a little outré, if Republicans on the ground said “outré,” as opposed to the more direct “nut job.” George W. Bush, then, was the moderate, more even-toned candidate. Times change. Mr. McCain is an experienced, personally heroic, seasoned, blunt-eyed, irascible American character. He makes me proud. He makes everyone proud.

Barack Obama? Yes, I think so. He has earned the attention of the country with a classy campaign, with a disciplined and dignified staff, and with passionate supporters such as JFK hand Ted Sorensen, who has told me he sees in Obama’s mind and temperament the kind of gifts Kennedy displayed during the Cuban missile crisis. Mr. Obama is thoughtful, and it would be a pleasure to have a president who is highly literate and a writer of books.

Is he experienced enough? No. He’s not old enough either. Men in their 40s love drama too much. Young politicians on fire over this issue or that tend to see politics as a stage on which they can act out their greatness. And we don’t need more theatrics, more comedies or tragedies. But Mr. Obama doesn’t seem on fire. He seems like a calm liberal with a certain moderating ambivalence. The great plus of his candidacy: More than anyone else he turns the page. If he rises he is something new in history, good or bad, and a new era begins.

Hillary Clinton? No, not reasonable. I concede her sturdy mind, deep sophistication, and seriousness of intent. I see her as a triangulator like her husband, not a radical but a maneuverer in the direction of a vague, half-forgotten but always remembered, leftism. It is also true that she has a command-and-control mentality, an urgent, insistent and grating sense of destiny, and she appears to believe that any act that benefits Clintons is a virtuous act, because Clintons are good and deserve to be benefited.

But this is not, actually, my central problem with her candidacy. My central problem is that the next American president will very likely face another big bad thing, a terrible day, or days, and in that time it will be crucial—crucial—that our nation be led by a man or woman who can be, at least for the moment and at least in general, trusted. Mrs. Clinton is the most dramatically polarizing, the most instinctively distrusted, political figure of my lifetime. Yes, I include Nixon. Would she be able to speak the nation through the trauma? I do not think so. And if I am right, that simple fact would do as much damage to America as the terrible thing itself.

Duncan Hunter, Fred Thompson, and Bill Richardson are all reasonable—mature, accomplished, nonradical. Mike Huckabee gets enough demerits to fall into my not-reasonable column. John Edwards is not reasonable. All the Democrats would raise taxes as president, but Mr. Edwards’s populism is the worst of both worlds, both intemperate and insincere. Also we can’t have a president who spent two minutes on YouTube staring in a mirror and poofing his hair. Really, we just can’t.

I forgot Rudy Giuliani. That must say something. He is reasonable but not desirable. If he wins somewhere, I’ll explain.

Because much of the drama is on the Democratic side, a thought on what might be said when they win or lose. If Mrs. Clinton wins, modesty is in order, with a graceful nod to Mr. Obama. If she loses—well, the Clintons haven’t lost an election since 1980. For a quarter century she’s known only victory at the polls. Does she know how to lose? However she acts, whatever face she shows, it will be revealing. Humility would be a good strategy. In politics you have to prove you can take a punch. I just took one. (On second thought that’s a bad idea. She might morph at the podium into Robert DeNiro in “Raging Bull” and ad-lib the taunt: You didn’t knock me down Ray! I’m still standing!)

For Mr. Obama: a lot of America will be looking at him for the first time, and under the most favorable circumstances: as the winner of something. This is an opportunity to assert freshly what his victory means, and will mean, for America. This is a break with the past, a break with the tired old argument, a break with the idea of dynasty, the idea of the machine, the idea that there are forces in motion that cannot be resisted . . . But what is it besides a break from? What is it a step toward, an embrace of?

Good luck, Iowa. The eyes of the nation are upon you.

I didn’t see the famous floating cross. What I saw when I watched Mike Huckabee’s Christmas commercial was a nice man in a sweater sitting next to a brightly lit tree. He had easy warmth and big brown puppy-dog eyes, and he talked about taking a break from politics to remember the peace and joy of the season. Sounds good to me.

Only on second look did I see the white lines of the warmly lit bookcase, which formed a glowing cross. Someone had bothered to remove the books from that bookcase, or bothered not to put them in. Maybe they would have dulled the lines.

Is there a word for “This is nice” and “This is creepy”? For that is what I felt. This is so sweet-appalling.

I love the cross. The sight of it, the fact of it, saves me, literally and figuratively. But there is a kind of democratic politesse in America, and it has served us well, in which we are happy to profess our faith but don’t really hit people over the head with its symbols in an explicitly political setting, such as a campaign commercial, which is what Mr. Huckabee’s ad was.

I wound up thinking this: That guy is using the cross so I’ll like him. That doesn’t tell me what he thinks of Jesus, but it does tell me what he thinks of me. He thinks I’m dim. He thinks I will associate my savior with his candidacy. Bleh.

The ad was shrewd. The caucus is coming, the TV is on, people are home putting up the tree, and the other candidates are all over the tube advancing themselves and attacking someone else. Mr. Huckabee thinks, I’ll break through the clutter by being the guy who reminds us of the reason for the season, in a way that helps underscore that I’m the Christian candidate and those other fellas aren’t. As a break from the nattering argument, as a message that highlights something bigger than politics, it was refreshing.

Was the cross an accident? Please. It was as accidental as Mr. Huckabee’s witty response, when he accused those of questioning the ad of paranoia, was spontaneous. “Actually I will confess this, if you play this spot backwards it says ‘Paul is dead, Paul is dead, Paul is dead,’ “ he said. As Bill Safire used to say of clever moves, “That’s good stuff!”

Ken Mehlman, the former Republican chairman, once bragged in my presence that in every ad he did he put in something wrong—something that went too far, something debatable. TV producers, ever hungry for new controversy, would play the commercial over and over as pundits on the panel deliberated over its meaning. This got the commercial played free all over the news.

The cross is the reason you saw the commercial. The cross made it break through.

Mr. Huckabee is a telegenic presence, fluid and unself-conscious. The camera is his friend. It is not the potential exposer of his flaws but the conduit by which his warmth and intelligence can be more broadly known. This gift, and seeing the camera this way is a gift, carries greater implications in American politics than, say, in British politics. In Britain, public persona is important, as Tony Blair showed, but there you rise up in the parliamentary system. You have to learn to play well with the other children. You have to form alliances, handle a portfolio, create coalitions, lead within the party and then the country.

In American politics you don’t have to go through that grueling process. You can be born on TV. Some candidates for president have a closer relationship with the makeup woman at “Hannity” and the guy who mics you up on “Meet” than they do with state party chiefs and union leaders. Experience, background and positions can be trumped by killer spots or a dominating debate performance.

*   *   *

This is some of Mr. Huckabee’s power. There’s the fact that he’s new, and the fact that Americans are in a funny historic moment: The lives they lead are good, and comfortable, but they sense deep down that the infrastructure of our good fortune is in many ways frail, that Citi may fall and Korea go crazy and some nut go kaboom. In such circumstances some would think a leader radically different—an outsider, a minister, a self proclaimed non-establishment type—might be an answer.

Mr. Huckabee reminds me of two governors who became president, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Like Mr. Clinton, he is a natural, charming, bright and friendly. Yet one senses something unsavory there, something not so nice. Like Mr. Bush, his approach to politics seems, at bottom, highly emotional, marked by great spurts of feeling and mighty declarations as to what the Lord wants. The problem with this, and with Bushian compassionate conservatism, which seems to have an echo in Mr. Huckabee’s Christianism, is that to the extent it is a philosophy, it is not a philosophy that allows debate. Because it comes down to “This is what God wants.” This is not an opener of discussion but a squelcher of it. It doesn’t expand the process, it frustrates it.

Mr. Huckabee is clever. He puts forth his policies, such as they are, based on a faith-based understanding of public policy, and if you disagree with his policies, or take a hard shot at them, or at him, he suggests the reason is that you look down on evangelicals. This creates a new fissure in a party already riven by fissures. He has been accused by some in the conservative press of tearing the party apart, but it was being torn apart before he got on the scene. His rise is not a cause of collapse but an expression of it.

He plays the victim well. Others want to “trip him up,” but he’ll “get my message out there.” His foes are “Wall Street-Washington” insiders, elitists. On the “Today” show he said his critics are the type who never liked evangelical Christians. When one of them runs, these establishment types say “ ‘Oh my gosh, now they’re serious, they don’t want to just show up and vote, they actually would want to be part of the discussion and really talk about issues that include hunger and poverty and things.’ “

This is a form of populist manipulation. Evangelical Christians have been strong in the Republican Party since the 1970s. President Bush and Karl Rove helped them become more important. The suggestion that they are a small and abused group within the GOP is strange. It is as if the Reagan Democrats, largely Catholic and suburban, who buoyed the Republican Party from the late ‘70s through 2004, and who were very much part of the GOP coalition, decided to announce that Catholics have been abused within the party, and it’s time for Christmas commercials with floating Miraculous Medals.

*   *   *

Does Mr. Huckabee understand that his approach is making people uncomfortable? Does he see himself as divisive? He’s a bright man, so it’s hard to believe he doesn’t. But it’s working for him. It’s getting him his 30 points in Iowa in a crowded field.

Could he win the nomination? Who knows? It’s all a bubbling stew on the Republican side, and no one knows who’ll float to the top. In an interview this week with David Brody of CBN, Mr. Huckabee said people everywhere were coming to him and saying, “We are claiming Isaiah 54 for you, that the weapons formed against you will not prosper.”

Prayer is powerful. But Huckabee’s critics say he’s a manipulator with a mean streak and little knowledge of the world. And Isaiah 54 doesn’t say anything about self-inflicted wounds.

What is happening in Iowa is no longer boring but big, and may prove huge.

The Republican race looks—at the moment—to be determined primarily by one thing, the question of religious faith. In my lifetime faith has been a significant issue in presidential politics, but not the sole determinative one. Is that changing? If it is, it is not progress.

Mike Huckabee is in the lead due, it appears, to voter approval of the depth and sincerity of his religious beliefs as lived out in his ministry as an ordained Southern Baptist. He flashes “Christian leader” over his picture in commercials; he asserts his faith is “mainstream”; his surrogates speak of Mormonism as “strange” and “definitely a factor.” Mr. Huckabee said this summer that a candidate’s faith is “subject to question,” “part of the game.”

He tells the New York Times that he doesn’t know a lot about Mitt Romney’s faith, but isn’t it the one in which Jesus and the devil are brothers? This made me miss the old days of Gore Vidal’s “The Best Man,” in which a candidate started a whispering campaign that his opponent’s wife was a thespian.

Mr. Huckabee has of course announced that he apologizes to Mr. Romney, which allowed him to elaborate on his graciousness and keep the story alive. He should have looked abashed. Instead he betrayed the purring pleasure of “a Christian with four aces,” in Mark Twain’s words.

Christian conservatives have been rising, most recently, for 30 years in national politics, since they helped elect Jimmy Carter. They care about the religious faith of their leaders, and their interest is legitimate. Faith is a shaping force. Lincoln got grilled on it. But there is a sense in Iowa now that faith has been heightened as a determining factor in how to vote, that such things as executive ability, professional history, temperament, character, political philosophy and professed stands are secondary, tertiary.

But they are not, and cannot be. They are central. Things seem to be getting out of kilter, with the emphasis shifting too far.

The great question: Does it make Mr. Huckabee, does it seal his rise, that he has acted in such a manner? Or does it damage him? Republicans on the ground in Iowa and elsewhere will decide that. And in the deciding they may be deciding more than one man’s future. They may be deciding if Republicans are becoming a different kind of party.

I wonder if our old friend Ronald Reagan could rise in this party, this environment. Not a regular churchgoer, said he experienced God riding his horse at the ranch, divorced, relaxed about the faiths of his friends and aides, or about its absence. He was a believing Christian, but he spent his adulthood in relativist Hollywood, and had a father who belonged to what some saw, and even see, as the Catholic cult. I’m just not sure he’d be pure enough to make it in this party. I’m not sure he’d be considered good enough.

*   *   *

This thought occurs that Hillary Clinton’s entire campaign is, and always was, a Potemkin village, a giant head fake, a haughty facade hollow at the core. That she is disorganized on the ground in Iowa, taken aback by a challenge to her invincibility, that she doesn’t actually have an A team, that her advisers have always been chosen more for proven loyalty than talent, that her supporters don’t feel deep affection for her. That she’s scrambling chaotically to catch up, with surrogates saying scuzzy things about Barack Obama and drug use, and her following up with apologies that will, as always, keep the story alive. That her guru-pollster, the almost universally disliked Mark Penn, has, according to Newsday, become the focus of charges that he has “mistakenly run Clinton as a de facto incumbent” and that the top officials on the campaign have never had a real understanding of Iowa.

This is true of Mrs. Clinton and her Iowa campaign: They thought it was a queenly procession, not a brawl. Now they’re reduced to spinning the idea that expectations are on Mr. Obama, that he’d better win big or it’s a loss. They’ve been reduced too to worrying about the weather. If there’s a blizzard on caucus day, her supporters, who skew old, may not turn out. The defining picture of the caucuses may be a 78-year-old woman being dragged from her home by young volunteers in a tinted-window SUV.

This is, still, an amazing thing to see. It is a delight of democracy that now and then assumptions are confounded, that all the conventional wisdom of the past year is compressed and about to blow. It takes a Potemkin village.

A thought on the presence of Bill Clinton. He is showing up all over in Iowa and New Hampshire, speaking, shaking hands, drawing crowds. But when he speaks, he has a tendency to speak about himself. It’s all, always, me-me-me in his gigantic bullying neediness. Still, he’s there, and he’s a draw, and the plan was that his presence would boost his wife’s fortunes. The way it was supposed to work, the logic, was this: People miss Bill. They miss the ‘90s. They miss the pre-9/11 world. So they’ll love seeing him back in the White House. So they’ll vote for Hillary. Because she’ll bring him. “Two for the price of one.”

It appears not to be working. Might it be that they don’t miss Bill as much as everyone thought? That they don’t actually want Bill back in the White House?

Maybe. But maybe it’s this. Maybe they’d love to have him back in the White House. Maybe they just don’t want him to bring her. Maybe they miss the Cuckoo’s Nest and they’d love having Jack Nicholson’s McMurphy running through the halls. Maybe they just don’t miss Nurse Ratched. Does she have to come?

*   *   *

It is clear in Iowa that immigration is the great issue that won’t go away. Members of the American elite, including U.S. senators, continue to do damage to the public debate on immigration. They do not view it as a crucial question of America’s continuance. They view it as an onerous issue that might upset their personal plans, an issue dominated by pro-immigration groups and power centers on the one hand, and the pesky American people, with their limited and quasi-racist concerns, on the other.

Because politicians see immigration as just another issue in “the game,” they feel compelled to speak of it not with honest indifference but with hot words and images. With a lack of sympathy. This is in contrast to normal Americans, who do not use hot words, and just want the problem handled and the rule of law returned to the borders.

Politicians, that is, distort the debate, not because they care so much but because they care so little.

Hillary Clinton is not up at night worrying about the national-security implications of open borders in the age of terror. She’s up at night worrying about whether to use Mr. Obama’s position on driver’s licenses for illegals against him in ads or push polls.

A real and felt concern among the candidates about immigration is a rare thing. And people can tell. They can tell with both parties. This is the real source of bitterness in this debate. It’s not regnant racism. It’s knowing the political class is incapable of caring, and so repairing.

Did Mitt Romney have to give a speech on religion? Yes. When you’re in a race so close you could lose due to one issue, your Mormonism, you must address the issue of your Mormonism. The only question was timing: now, in the primaries, or later, as the nominee? But could he get to the general without The Speech? Apparently he judged not. (Mr. Romney’s campaign must have some interesting internal polling about Republicans on the ground in Iowa and elsewhere.)

But Mr. Romney had other needs, too. His candidacy needed a high-minded kick start. It needed an Act II. He’s been around for a year, he’s made his first impression, he needed to make it new again. He seized the opportunity to connect his candidacy to something larger and transcendent: the history of religious freedom in America. He made a virtue of necessity.

He had nothing to prove to me regarding his faith or his church, which apparently makes me your basic Catholic. Catholics are not his problem. His problem, a Romney aide told me, had more to do with a particular fundamentalist strain within evangelical Protestantism. Bill Buckley once said he’d rather be governed by the first thousand names in the Boston phone book than the Harvard faculty. I’d rather be governed by Donny and Marie than the Washington establishment. Mormons have been, in American history, hardworking, family-loving citizens whose civic impulses have tended toward the constructive. Good enough for me. He’s running for president, not pastor. In any case his faith is one thing about Mr. Romney I haven’t questioned.

It is true that some in his campaign thought a speech risky, but others saw it as an opportunity, and a first draft was ready last March. In certain ways Mr. Romney had felt a tugging resistance: I’ve been in public life—served as governor, run the Olympics, run a business. I have to do a speech saying my faith won’t distort my leadership?

In May he decided to do it, but timing was everything. His campaign wanted to do it when he was on the ascendancy, not defensively but from a position of strength. In October they decided to do the speech around Thanksgiving. Mr. Romney gathered together all the material and began to work in earnest. Then they decided it would get lost in the holiday clutter. They decided to go after Thanksgiving, but before Dec. 15. The rise of Mike Huckabee, according to this telling, didn’t force this decision but complicated it.

The campaign fixed on Dec. 6, at the College Station, Texas, library of George H.W. Bush, with the former president introducing him, which would lend a certain imprimatur (and mute those who say his son’s White House is pulling for Rudy Giuliani).

It is called his JFK speech, but in many ways JFK had it easier than Mr. Romney does now. The Catholic Church was the single biggest Christian denomination in America, representing 30% of the population (Mormons: 2%, six million). Americans who had never met a Catholic in 1920 had by 1960 fought side by side with them in World War II and sat with them in college under the GI bill. JFK had always signaled that he held his faith lightly, not with furrow-browed earnestness. He had one great question to answer: Would he let the Vatican control him? As if. And although some would vote against him because he was Catholic, some would vote for him for the same reason, and they lived in the cities and suburbs of the industrial states.

*   *   *

Mr. Romney gave the speech Thursday morning. How did he do?

Very, very well. He made himself some history. The words he said will likely have a real and positive impact on his fortunes. The speech’s main and immediate achievement is that foes of his faith will now have to defend their thinking, in public. But what can they say to counter his high-minded arguments? “Mormons have cooties”?

Romney reintroduced himself to a distracted country—Who is that handsome man saying those nice things?—while defending principles we all, actually, hold close, and hold high.

His text was warmly cool. It covered a lot of ground briskly, in less than 25 minutes. His approach was calm, logical, with an emphasis on clarity. It wasn’t blowhardy, and it wasn’t fancy. The only groaner was, “We do not insist on a single strain of religion—rather, we welcome our nation’s symphony of faith.” It is a great tragedy that there is no replacement for that signal phrase of the 1980s, “Gag me with a spoon.”

Beyond that, the speech was marked by the simplicity that accompanies intellectual confidence.

At the start, Mr. Romney was nervous and rushed, his voice less full than usual. He settled down during the second applause, halfway though the text—”No candidate should become the spokesman for his faith. For if he becomes president he will need the prayers of the people of all faiths.” From that moment he was himself.

*   *   *

He started with a full JFK: “I am an American running for president. I do not define my candidacy by my religion. A person should not be elected because of his faith, nor should he be rejected because of his faith.” No “authorities of my church” or any church, will “ever exert influence” on presidential decisions. “Their authority is theirs,” within the province of the church, and it ends “where the affairs of the nation begin.” “I will put no doctrine of any church above the plain duties of the office and the sovereign authority of the law.” He pledged to serve “no one religion, no one group, no one cause, and no one interest.” He will not disavow his religion. “My faith is the faith of my fathers. I will be true to them and to my beliefs.”

Bracingly: “Some believe that such a confession of my faith will sink my candidacy. If they are right, so be it.” Whatever our faith, the things we value—equality, obligation, commitment to liberty—unite us. In a passage his advisers debated over until the night before the speech, Mr. Romney declared: “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind.” He made the call. Why? I asked the aide. “Because it’s what he thinks.”

At the end, he told a story he had inserted just before Thanksgiving. During the dark days of the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, someone suggested the delegates pray. But there were objections: They all held different faiths. “Then Sam Adams rose, and said he would hear a prayer from anyone of piety and good character, as long as they were a patriot. And so together they prayed.” At this point in Mr. Romney’s speech, the roused audience stood and applauded, and the candidate looked moved.

There was one significant mistake in the speech. I do not know why Romney did not include nonbelievers in his moving portrait of the great American family. We were founded by believing Christians, but soon enough Jeremiah Johnson, and the old proud agnostic mountain men, and the village atheist, and the Brahmin doubter, were there, and they too are part of us, part of this wonderful thing we have. Why did Mr. Romney not do the obvious thing and include them? My guess: It would have been reported, and some idiots would have seen it and been offended that this Romney character likes to laud atheists. And he would have lost the idiot vote.

My feeling is we’ve bowed too far to the idiots. This is true in politics, journalism, and just about everything else.

I will never forget that breathtaking moment when, in the CNN/YouTube debate earlier this fall, the woman from Ohio held up a picture and said, “Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama, Mr. Edwards, this is a human fetus. Given a few more months, it will be a baby you could hold in your arms. You all say you’re ‘for the children.’ I would ask you to look America in the eye and tell us how you can support laws to end this life. Thank you.”

They were momentarily nonplussed, then awkwardly struggled to answer, to regain lost high ground. One of them, John Edwards I think, finally criticizing the woman for being “manipulative,” using “hot images” and indulging in “the politics of personal destruction.” The woman then stood in the audience for her follow up. “I beg your pardon, but the literal politics of personal destruction—of destroying a person—is what you stand for.”

Oh, I wish I weren’t about to say, “Wait, that didn’t happen.” For of course it did not. Who of our media masters would allow a question so piercing on such a painful and politically incorrect subject?

I thought of this the other night when citizens who turned out to be partisans for Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama and Mr. Edwards asked the Republicans, in debate, would Jesus support the death penalty, do you believe every word of the Bible, and what does the Confederate flag mean to you?

It was a good debate, feisty and revealing. It’s not bad that the questions had a certain spin, and played on stereotypes of the GOP. It’s just bad that it doesn’t quite happen at Democratic debates. Somehow, there, an obscure restraint sets in on the part of news producers. Too bad. Running for most powerful person in the world is, among other things, an act of startling presumption. They all should be grilled, everyone, both sides. Winter voting approaches; may many chestnuts be roasted on an open fire.

*   *   *

In New York I find more and more people who think this week’s political scandal, Rudy Giuliani and the cost and means of payment of his visits to the Hamptons, following so closely the indictment of his former police commissioner, will fatally damage his candidacy. I don’t know. The specifics on both stories aside, I’m not sure scandal is what it used to be.

Two things are true in the modern media environment, and they collide with each other and may tend to cancel each other out. One is that a scandal makes its way around the world and into the bloodstream right away and with full force, through the Internet and cable. The other is that a lot of scandals have made their way around the world and into the bloodstream in the past 10 years. Immediacy and broad knowledge collide with sheer glut. Everyone has heard so much about so many. At some point, don’t voters start to see all of public life as one big polluted river? And if they do, don’t they stop saying things like “That’s a busted tire floating by” and “That’s an old shoe”? If they’re familiar with the principle, as Thoreau said, don’t they become less attentive to its numerous applications?

Add to that the fact that in the past decade, concurrent with the rise of new media, the Clintons perfected a new method of scandal management that starts with “These are lies spread by a partisan conspiracy,” proceeds to “That’s old news,” and ends a few years later, when detailed books come out, with “That’s rehash for cash.” This strategy is not a constructive contribution to our political culture, but it has worked in the new environment. They’ll teach it in political science media management courses in the future.

*   *   *

Mrs. Clinton is acting as if she’s scared. She insists to Katie Couric that she’s the next president—“It will be me”—and she’s back to using the language of aggression — there’s been a lot of “beat,” as in they’ve been trying to “beat me.” In the first 60 seconds of her Couric interview she used some variation on the word “attack” five times. If Mitt Romney talked like this, they’d be asking who put the Red Bull in his milkshake.

She continues her political kleptomania in terms of themes from the 1988 presidential campaign, which seems to preoccupy her. A few months ago she was saying she was born in the middle of America in the middle of the century, which is what George H.W. Bush said of Dan Quayle. She proceeded to call herself famous but unknown, which is what was said of Mr. Bush at the time. Now she calls herself ready from day one to be president. Old Bush’s tag line in his ‘88 commercials was “Ready on day one to be a great president.”

This is the first time she’s faced a real threat, in Barack Obama, and it’s left me thinking about how being The Inevitable is a high-risk game. You can get far being the inevitable choice. A lot of people will believe it and support you, especially the weak, and the pragmatic. They give you early support and early money. Others see the endorsements and contributions. Another level of giver and supporter kicks in. It starts to show in the national polls. Everyone knows you’re inevitable.

But there are two problems with this strategy. One is that your support is by definition broad but shallow. You have a lot of people, but they won’t crawl over broken glass for you. When I talk to Hillary supporters they mostly enact a facsimile of what they think passion is, and are reduced to a dulled aggression. “We’re gonna win.”

The second part of the inevitability problem is that once you seem no longer inevitable—once the polls stop rising or start to fall, once that air is out of the balloon and the thing that made everyone fall in line is gone—well, what do you do? If the main argument of your candidacy is you’re inevitable and suddenly you’re evitable, where does that leave you? What does it leave you with? Mere hunger. Insistence: “It will be me.”

And anger at this nobody who wasn’t even in the Senate when you took the big votes, this cream puff who was a functionary in Chicago when you were getting your head beaten in by Ken Starr. What does Mrs. Clinton do when she’s feeling angry? What has she done in the past? Goodness, this won’t be pretty.

*   *   *

Inevitable is a good game to play until it doesn’t work anymore. A while back I was speaking to a Democrat who supports Mrs. Clinton, and I mentioned in passing that Obama might win the nomination. “Nothing is written.” The Clinton supporter said, “Well I would love to support Obama if that happens.” It was a standard thing to say, and yet the Clintonite said it awful quick.

In any case, there’s something that comes like relief, like a boost, when politics turns out to be surprising, when the inevitable gets evitable, when the machine is slowed. It reminds you who really runs the place, that for all our mess it still comes down to the person in the precinct walking to the caucus site on ground that crunches from the cold. Here’s to surprise. It’s a great antidote to cynicism.