Peggy Noonan

You’re in a plane and you’re flying over the campaign at a level of about 10,000 feet, and you look down and see: Not much has changed. Battle lines fixed, topography the same, troops pretty much where they were.

But land the plane, walk around and talk to people, and you realize: This thing is moving. Things are shifting around a bit. That’s what I see looking back at the past four weeks.

For the first time the idea began to take hold that John McCain can win this thing. You saw the USA Today-Gallup poll this week, with Mr. McCain gaining six points since late June among those Gallup dubbed likely voters. Mr. McCain took the lead, 49% to 45%. Among registered voters, it’s still Barack Obama, 47% to 44%. A poll came out saying people are tired of hearing about Mr. Obama. Mr. McCain took the lead in YouTube hits. Small stuff, and there will be a lot of twists and turns before this is over, but there’s movement down there beneath the crust of the Earth.

Mr. Obama got tagged the past month as something new, not the candidate from Men’s Vogue but arrogant, aloof and somehow ethereal. There is no there there. Everyone I know plays the game of “This election is just like 1932,” or ‘52, or whatever. “It’s 1960—the youthful charismatic JFK versus the boring and so Republican Nixon.” “No, it’s ‘92 and the youthful charismatic Clinton versus the tired old Bush.” This election is, in fact, exactly like the 2008 election. But the other day a friend said something I hadn’t heard before: “This is 1948, and Obama is Tom Dewey”—the sleek, well-groomed, inevitable one who lost. I pondered this and said maybe he’s Dewey, but Mr. McCain’s not Truman, not so far. He is still, on the trail, his scattered self, not “Give ‘Em Hell Harry.” But the point is, even the clichés have begun to shift.

The daring and exciting European trip was probably a wash, and possibly a mistake in the bridge-too-far sense. During the coverage, pundits were always saying the trip leveled the playing field on foreign affairs between Sens. Obama and McCain. But Mr. McCain isn’t Mr. Obama’s problem in foreign affairs. Mr. McCain early on positioned himself, reasonably or unreasonably, depending on your view, as the candidate of possible new wars. I don’t think people want new wars. Mr. Obama’s problem on foreign affairs is his own youth and inexperience. In a time of high stakes, do we want Mr. Untried and Untested?

What Mr. Obama has been doing, and this started before the European trip and continued throughout, is making people see him as president. He’s doing this when he ambles back to the back of the plane and leans over the reporters, in his shirtsleeves, speaking affably into their held-up mics and recorders, at the end of the victorious tour. That’s what presidents do. He speaks to rapturous crowds in foreign capitals. That’s what presidents do.

He isn’t doing this to show he’s inevitable and invincible. He’s doing it to give voters the impression that they’ve already seen President Obama. That he’s kind of already been president, he’s done and can do all the things presidents do, to the point that by the middle of October a certain portion of the country is going to think he already is president.

And he needs to give them this impression because he’s a young black man from nowhere who’s been well-known for less than a year. And he knows one of his biggest problems with older white voters is they just can’t imagine a young black man from nowhere as president. He’s helping them imagine.

It’s not vanity, it’s strategy.

However. Mr. Obama consistently shows that he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. It’s a theme with his talented, confident staff. They don’t know what they don’t know either. Because they’re young and they’ve never been in power and it takes time to know what you don’t know. The presidential-type seal with OBAMA on it, the sometimes over-the-top rhetoric about healing the earth and parting the seas. They pick the biggest, showiest venue for the Berlin speech, the Brandenburg Gate, just like a president, not realizing people would think: Ya gotta earn that one, kid. Going to Europe was fine, but they should have gone in modestly, with a modest venue, quietly spread word that his speech was open to the public, and then left the watching world awed by the hordes that showed up. For they would have. “We couldn’t help it, they love him!” It would have looked as if Europe was coming to him, and let that sink in back home.

Anyone can carp like this in retrospect, but when you know what you don’t know, you can plan like this in advance.

*   *   *

Two weeks ago a journalist, a moderate liberal, spoke to me of what he called Mr. Obama’s arrogance. I said I didn’t think it was arrogance but high self-regard. He said there’s no difference. I said no, arrogance has an air about it of pushing people around, insisting on your way. Mr. Obama doesn’t seem like that. He took down a machine without raising his voice. Extremely high self-regard, though, can itself be a problem.

“What’s wrong with that?” my friend said. “You want a self-confident president.”

I said yes, but it brings up the Churchill question. Churchill had been scored by an acquaintance for his own very high self-regard, and responded with what was for him a certain sheepishness. “We’re all worms,” he said, “but I do believe I am a glowworm.” He believed he was great, and he was. Is Mr. Obama a glowworm? Does he have real greatness in him? Or is he, say, a product of the self-esteem campaign, that movement within the schools and homes of our country the past 25 years that says the way to get a winner is to tell the kid he’s a winner every day? You can get some true people of achievement that way, because some people need a lot of reinforcement to rise. But you can also get, not to put too fine a point of it, empty suits that take on a normal shape only because they’re so puffed up with ego.

Is Mr. Obama’s self-conception in line with his gifts, depth, wisdom and character? That’s the big question, I suspect, on a number of minds.

As for Mr. McCain, I think he had the best moment of the month this week at the big motorcycle convention in Sturgis, S.D., when he was greeted with that mighty roar. And his great line: “As you may know, not long ago a couple hundred thousand Berliners made a lot of noise for my opponent. I’ll take the roar of 50,000 Harleys any day.” Oh, that was good.

There’s a thing that’s out there and it’s big, and latent, and somehow always taken into account and always ignored, and political professionals always assume they understand it. It has been called many things the past 50 years, “the silent center,” “the silent majority,” “the coalition,” “the base.” The idea of it has evolved as its composition has evolved, but the fact that it’s big, and relatively silent, and somehow always latent, maintains. And watching that McCain event—vroom vroom—one got the sense it is perhaps beginning to pay attention to the campaign. I see it as the old America, and if and when it reasserts itself, the campaign will shift indeed, and in ways you can even see from 10,000 feet.

It was May 1944, and 22-year-old John Whitehead of Montclair, N.J., an ensign on the USS Thomas Jefferson, was placed in charge of five of the landing craft for the invasion of Europe. Each would ferry 25 soldiers from the TJ, as they called it, onto the shore of France. John’s landing site was to be a 50-yard stretch of shoreline dubbed Dog Red Beach. It fell near the middle of the sector called Omaha Beach, which in turn fell in the middle of the entire assault.

The TJ sailed to Portsmouth Harbor, which was jam-packed with ships. On June 1 the Army troops arrived, coming up the gangway one by one. “They were very quiet,” John said this week. Word came on June 4 that they’d leave that night, but they were ordered back in a storm. The next morning, June 5, the rain was still coming down, but the seas were calmer. Around 8 that night, they cast off to cross the channel. The skies were dark, rain lashed the deck, and the TJ rolled in the sea. At midnight they dropped anchor nine miles off the French coast. They ate a big breakfast of eggs and bacon. At 2 a.m. the crew began lowering the Higgins boats—“a kind of floating boxcar, rectangular, with high walls”—over the side by crane. The soldiers had to climb down big nets to get aboard. “They had practiced, but as Eisenhower always said, ‘In wartime, plans are only good until the moment you try to execute them.’ “

The Higgins boats pitched in the choppy water. The soldiers, loaded down “like mountaineers” with rifles, flame throwers, radio equipment, artillery parts, tarps, food, water, “70 pounds in all”—had trouble getting from the nets to the boats. “I saw a poor soul slip from the net into the water. He sank like a stone. He just disappeared in the depths of the sea. There was nothing we could do.” So they boarded the boats on the deck and hoisted them into the sea.

It took John’s five little boats four hours to cover the nine miles to the beach. “They were the worst hours of our lives. It was pitch black, cold, and the rain was coming down in sheets, drenching us. The boats were being tossed in the waves, making all of us violently sick. We’d all been given the big breakfast. Hardly anyone could hold it down. Packed in like that, with the boat’s high walls. A cry went up: ‘For Christ’s sake, do it in your helmet!’ “

“Around 4 a.m. the dawn broke and a pale light spread across the sea, and now we could see that we were in the middle of an armada—every kind of boat, destroyers, probably the greatest array of sea power ever gathered.”

Now they heard the sound, the deep boom of the shells from the battleships farther out at sea, shelling the beach to clear a path. Above, barely visible through clouds, they saw the transport planes pushing through to drop paratroopers from the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions. “Those were brave men.”

At 5 a.m. they were close enough to shore to see landmarks—a spit of land, a slight rise of a bluff. In front of them they saw some faster, sleeker British boats trying desperately to stay afloat in the choppy water. As the Americans watched, three of the boats flipped over and sank, drowning all the men. A British navigator went by in a different kind of boat. “He was standing up and he called out to my friend in a very jaunty British accent, ‘I say, fellows, which way is it to Pointe du Hoc?’ That was one of the landmarks, and the toughest beach of all. My friend yelled out that it was up to our right. ‘Very good!’ he cried out, and then went on by with a little wave of his hand.”

Closer to shore, a furious din—“It was like a Fourth of July celebration multiplied by a thousand.” By 6 a.m. they were 800 yards from shore. All five boats of the squadron had stayed together. The light had brightened enough that John could see his wristwatch. “At 6:20 I waved them in with a hard chop of my arm: Go!”

*   *   *

They faced a barrier, made a sharp left, ran parallel to the shore looking for an opening, got one, turned again toward the beach. They hit it, were in a foot or two of water. The impact jarred loose the landing ramps to release the soldiers as planned. But on John’s boat, it didn’t work. He scrambled to the bow, got a hammer, pounded the stuck bolt. The ramp crashed down and the soldiers lunged forth. Some were hit with shrapnel as they struggled through to the beach. Others made it to land only to be hit as they crossed it. The stuck ramp probably saved John’s life. After he’d rushed forward to grab the hammer, he turned and saw the coxswain he’d been standing next to had been hit and killed by an incoming shell.

The troops of Omaha Beach took terrible fire. Half the soldiers from John’s five boats were killed or wounded. “It was a horrible sight. But I had to concentrate on doing my job.” To make room for the next wave of landings, they raised the ramp, backed out, turned around and sped back to the TJ. “I remember waving hello to the soldiers in the incoming boats, as if we were all on launches for a pleasure cruise. I remember thinking how odd that such gestures of civility would persist amid such horror.”

Back at the TJ, he was told to take a second breakfast in the wardroom—white tablecloths, steward’s mates asking if he’d like more. He thought it unreal: “from Dog Red Beach to the Ritz.” He heard in the background the quiet boom of the liberation of Europe. Then back to a Higgins boat for another run at the beach. This time the ramp lowered, and he got off. Dog Red Beach was secure. The bodies of the dead and wounded had been carried up onto a rise below a bluff. He felt thankful he had survived. “Then I took a few breaths and felt elated, proud to have played a part in maybe the biggest battle in history.”

*   *   *

John went on to landings in Marseilles, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. After he came home, he went on to chair Goldman Sachs, work in Ronald Reagan’s State Department, and head great organizations such as the International Rescue Committee. He is, in that beautiful old phrase, a public citizen.

But if you asked him today his greatest moment, he’d say that day on the beach, when he was alive and grateful for it. “At that moment, dead tired, soaked to the skin, I would not have wanted to be anywhere else in the world.”

It is silly to think one generation is “better” than another. No one born in 1920 is, by virtue of that fact, better than someone born in 1960. But it is true that each era has a certain mood, certain assumptions—in John’s era, sacrifice—and each generation distinguishes itself in time, or doesn’t. John’s did. He himself did. And what better day than today to say: Thanks, John.

The big political headline this week, of course, involves John McCain’s endless and humiliating attempts to placate Mitt Romney by bowing to demands he hire his operatives and pay his campaign debt. So far all he’s got is a grudging one-sentence endorsement from that rampaging rage-aholic Ann Romney.

Oh wait, got confused, that’s Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

The way it used to be is you ran and lost and either disappeared or pitched in. Mrs. Clinton continues making Mr. Obama look the dauphin to her embittered and domineering queen.

What a hothouse of egos and drama the Democratic Party has become.

Mr. McCain just can’t get as much coverage as Mr. Obama, or the coverage is dutiful and therefore deadly. “McCain Unveils Proposal.” “McCain Responds.” At Google News there are 97,000 stories on Mr. McCain as I write this column, 138,000 on Mr. Obama. You know Mr. McCain’s problems. He’s old, he’s angered everyone along the way, he never seems to mean it. His stands seem like positions. He bebops from issue to issue and never seems fully engaged in the real meat of policy, the content of it.

Also, we all know him. This, in time, will become a benefit to him—a big one. At the moment, early on, it’s not. Mr. Obama has the lightning, he’s new, he’s still just being discovered. Or, as a person who runs a news site that traditionally treats Republicans fairly told me, “He’s fun.” McCain supporters have ginned up email campaigns aimed at people who run sites saying, to paraphrase, We notice your coverage is heavily Obama. We hope this is not a financial or opportunistic decision. We hope you’re not tired of being brave. I should say it looks like it’s ginned up by McCain supporters, or rather D.C. Republicans.

What a hotbed of incompetent manipulation they have become.

Mr. Obama’s coverage is not all press bias. He sells papers and moves traffic. So right now it’s all about him, or rather will be when Big Bertha gets out of the way. People are going to keep looking at him because they’ve heard the polls that say he’s 5 or 12 or 15 points ahead. They can stop him or ease his way. They’re looking to figure out which.

What can Mr. McCain do? It’s still early, a lot of history has yet to unspool, we’ve entered summer and the shallow part of the campaign, the doldrums, there’s a little space. He should take advantage of it and have some fun.

This would be a good time for him to get interesting again. And he’ll find it easy because he is interesting. That’s why the boys on the bus loved him in 2000. That’s why the Republican base rejected him in 2000. He was hot and George W. Bush was—well, let’s call it mellow. Mr. McCain attacked Christian conservative leaders while Mr. Bush played them. Republicans were trying to recover from eight years of interesting. They didn’t want more.

I used to think what Mr. McCain’s aides thought after he started winning: He has to change now, be more formal, more constrained. That was exactly wrong.

Let McCain be McCain. Get him in the papers being who he is, get people looking at his real nature. Maybe then they’ll start taking him seriously when he talks policy. Maybe he’ll start taking himself seriously when he talks policy.

The most interesting thing about Mr. McCain has always been the delight he takes in a certain unblinkered candor. There is also the antic part of his nature, his natural wit, his tropism toward comedy. All this was captured wonderfully by Mark Leibovich last February in the New York Times. Mr. McCain had taken the lead in the primaries and had gone from being “one of the most disruptive forces in his party” to someone playing it safe. In an airplane interview he said things like, “There is a process in place that will formalize the methodology.” Then he couldn’t help it, he became McCain:

“[He] volunteered that Brooke Buchanan, his spokeswoman who was seated nearby and rolling her eyes, ‘has a lot of her money hidden in the Cayman Islands’ and that she earned it by ‘dealing drugs.’ Previously, Mr. McCain had identified Ms. Buchanan as ‘Pat Buchanan’s illegitimate daughter,’ ‘bipolar,’ ‘a drunk,’ ‘someone with a lot of boyfriends,’ and ‘just out of Betty Ford.’”

That’s my boy. That’s the McCain his friends love, McCain unplugged. The fall will be dead serious. At this point why not be himself, be human? Let him refind his inner rebel, the famous irreverent maverick, let the tiger out of the cage. It won’t solve everything but it will help obscure some other problems. His campaign is still not in great shape, his advance operation is not sharp—the one thing Republicans always used to know how to do!—he has many aides and few peers, and aides so doofuslike they blithely talk about the partisan impact of terror attacks.

And there is another problem that is bigger than all of that, and he is going to have to think himself through it. And that is that there is a sense about his campaign that . . . John McCain has already got what he wanted, he got what he needed, which was to be top dog in the Republican Party, the party that had abused him in 2000 and cast him aside. They all bow to him now, and he doesn’t need anything else. He doesn’t need the presidency. He got what he wanted. So now he can coast. This is, in the deepest way, unserious. JFK had to have the presidency—he wanted that thing. Nixon had to have it too, and Reagan had to have it to institute his new way. Clinton had to have it—it was his destiny, the thing he’d wanted since he was a teenager.

The last person I can think of who gave off the vibe that he didn’t have to have it was Bob Dole. Who didn’t get it. And who had a similar lack of engagement in terms of policy, and philosophy, and meaning.

Everyone in New York is saying, “What will happen?” “How do you see it?” “Who will win?” In this year of all years, who knows? My sense of it:

The campaign will grind along until a series of sharp moments. Maybe they will come in the debates. Things will move along, Mr. Obama in the lead. And then, just a few weeks out from the election, something will happen: America will look up and see the inevitability of Mr. Obama, that Mr. Obama has already been “elected,” in a way, and America will say, Hey, wait a second, are we sure we want that? And it will tighten indeed.

The race has a subtext, a historic encounter between the Old America and the New, and suddenly the Old America—those who are literally old, who married a guy who fought at the Chosin Reservoir, and those not so old who yet remember, and cherish, the special glories of the Old—will rise, and join in, and make themselves heard. They will not leave without a fight.

And on that day John McCain will suddenly make it a race, as if moved by them and wanting to come through for them one last time. And then on down to the wire. And then . . .

And then. What a year, what an election. It continues to confound and to bedazzle.

When somebody dies, we tell his story and try to define and isolate what was special about it—what it was he brought to the party, how he enhanced life by showing up. In this way we educate ourselves about what really matters. Or, often, re-educate ourselves, for “man needs more to be reminded than instructed.”

I understand why some think that the media coverage surrounding Tim Russert’s death was excessive—truly, it was unprecedented—but it doesn’t seem to me a persuasive indictment, if only because what was said was so valuable.

The beautiful thing about the coverage was that it offered extremely important information to those age 15 or 25 or 30 who may not have been told how to operate in the world beyond “Go succeed.” I’m not sure we tell the young as much as we ought, as clearly as we ought, what it is the world admires, and what it is they want to emulate.

In a way, the world is a great liar. It shows you it worships and admires money, but at the end of the day it doesn’t. It says it adores fame and celebrity, but it doesn’t, not really. The world admires, and wants to hold on to, and not lose, goodness. It admires virtue. At the end it gives its greatest tributes to generosity, honesty, courage, mercy, talents well used, talents that, brought into the world, make it better. That’s what it really admires. That’s what we talk about in eulogies, because that’s what’s important. We don’t say, “The thing about Joe was he was rich.” We say, if we can, “The thing about Joe was he took care of people.”

The young are told, “Be true to yourself.” But so many of them have no idea, really, what that means. If they don’t know who they are, what are they being true to? They’re told, “The key is to hold firm to your ideals.” But what if no one bothered, really, to teach them ideals?

After Tim’s death, the entire television media for four days told you the keys to a life well lived, the things you actually need to live life well, and without which it won’t be good. Among them: taking care of those you love and letting them know they’re loved, which involves self-sacrifice; holding firm to God, to your religious faith, no matter how high you rise or low you fall. This involves guts, and self-discipline, and active attention to developing and refining a conscience to whose promptings you can respond. Honoring your calling or profession by trying to do within it honorable work, which takes hard effort, and a willingness to master the ethics of your field. And enjoying life. This can be hard in America, where sometimes people are rather grim in their determination to get and to have. “Enjoy life, it’s ungrateful not to,” said Ronald Reagan.

Tim had these virtues. They were great to see. By defining them and celebrating them the past few days, the media encouraged them. This was a public service, and also what you might call Tim’s parting gift.

I’d add it’s not only the young, but the older and the old, who were given a few things to think about. When Tim’s friends started to come forward last Friday to speak on the air of his excellence, they were honestly grieving. They felt loss. So did people who’d never met him. Question: When you die, are people in your profession going to feel like this? Why not? What can you do better? When you leave, are your customers—in Tim’s case it was five million every Sunday morning, in your case it may be the people who come into the shop, or into your office—going to react like this? Why not?

*   *   *

One of the greatest statements, the most piercing, was something Chuck Todd said when he talked on a panel on MSNBC. He was asked more or less why Tim stuck out from the pack, and he said, “He was normal!” In a city, Washington, in which many powerful people are deep down weird, or don’t have a deep down, only a surface, Tim was normal. Like a normal man he cared about his family and his profession and his faith. Pat Buchanan later said they’re not making them now like they used to, Tim’s normality is becoming the exception. The world of Russert—stability, Catholic school, loving parents, TV shows that attempted only to entertain you and not to create a new moral universe in your head—that’s over, that world is gone. He had a point, though it’s not gone entirely of course, just not as big, or present, as it used to be.

Which got me thinking about one way in which Tim was lauded that, after a few days, was grating. And what’s a column without a gripe? Tim, as all now know, was a working-class boy from upstate New York. But the amazement with which some of his colleagues talked of his background made them sound like Margaret Mead among the indigenous people of Borneo. An amazing rags-to-riches story—he was found among an amazing Celtic tribe that dragged its clubs across the tangled jungle floors of a land called “Buffalo,” where they eat “wings” and worship a warrior caste known as “the Bills.” Here he is, years later, in a suit. This reflected a certain cultural insularity in our media, did it not? Tim came from a loving home, grew up in a house, in a suburb. He went to private Catholic schools. His father was a garbageman, which when I was growing up was known as a good municipal union job. Tim’s life was as good as or better than 90% of his countrymen in his time. His background wasn’t strange or surprising—it was normal.

Something not fully appreciated is the sense of particular sadness among conservatives, who felt Russert gave their views and philosophy equal time, an equality of approach. When Kate O’Beirne had a book out on the excesses of feminism a few years ago the only network show on which she was asked to give the antiabortion argument was “Meet the Press.” When I was on the book tour in 2000 for “The Case Against Hillary Clinton,” Tim’s was the only show that asked me to state my case at length, balancing it with an appearance of the same length by a Hillary supporter. I’m not sure network producers understand how grateful—embarrassing word, but true—conservatives are to be given time to say not only what they think but why they think it. Russert was big on why. He knew it was the heart of any political debate.

*   *   *

On the train coming back from his memorial on Wednesday, I talked to Tom Kean, a former governor of New Jersey and chairman of the 9/11 Commission. He told me of how a few years ago Tim, concerned about nuclear proliferation, invited Mr. Kean and Sam Nunn on “Meet the Press” to talk about it at length. No particular hook, he just wanted to gin up concern in Washington on an issue he knew was crucial. Mr. Kean said he had listened closely to all the journalists the past few days talking about how Tim prepared rigorously, was open-minded, civic minded, serious. He hoped they were listening to themselves, hoped they were reflecting on what they said. Emulation would be good there, too.

And so it begins, the campaign proper. You probably guessed that there would be no letup in this relentless year, no break between the primaries and the general election, that both candidates would stay on the screen. You were right. They will not leave, and go, and rest. They feel they can’t, it’s inch by inch, slow and steady wins the race. This robs them of the power of disappearance. You disappear and then come back and people say, “Hey, look at that guy.” They listen anew after a break in the drone.

Not this time. And maybe never again.

For Barack Obama this week, a Beltway setback. He chose for a key position a D.C. insider who got fat working the system. This was a poor decision by the candidate of change. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” But Jim Johnson was removed with dispatch, and the country didn’t notice. Beltway bottom line: Mr. Obama the cool customer had a problem, removed the problem, has no problem.

John McCain had a worse time, with the famously awkward speech in front of the background whose color was variously compared to snot, puke and lime Jell-O. He was scored for not being adept with a teleprompter. The press knocked him, essentially, for not being smooth and manipulative enough. But if he were good at the teleprompter, they’d complain that he’s too smooth and scripted.

The press will be nice to him again. When he’s 17 points down.

It should not count against a man that he has not fully mastered the artifice of his profession. Then again, he should have nailed the prompter by now. Such things show a certain competence. Voters are slower to trust you with big things if they see a lack of skill in small things. In this vein, a suggestion. Podiums always seem to swallow Mr. McCain. He has limited mobility with his arms because of his torture in Vietnam. It restricts his ability to gesture. And he is not a big man. He often looks like he’s flailing up there: I’m not waving, I’m drowning! His staff should build a podium for him, one that fits, and take it wherever he goes. For a seal, the great state of Arizona, which he has represented in the U.S. Senate for 22 years. Let him master the podium five months out. Other masteries will follow.

The lay of the land? Mr. Obama is ahead 47% to 41% in this week’s Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, and no one is surprised. Everyone knows he’s ahead. Everyone knows this is a Democratic year. But I think there are two particular subtexts this year, or perhaps I should say texts. One, obviously, is youth versus age. This theme is the clearest it’s been since 1960, when the old general who’d planned the Normandy invasion found himself replaced by a young man who had commanded a rickety patrol torpedo boat in World War II. You know that on some level, at some moment, Dwight D. Eisenhower looked at John F. Kennedy and thought: Punk.

But 2008 will also prove in part to be a decisive political contest between the Old America and the New America. Between the thing we were, and the thing we have been becoming for 40 years or so. (I’m not referring here to age. Some young Americans have Old America heads and souls; some old people are all for the New.)

Mr. McCain is the Old America, of course; Mr. Obama the New.

*   *   *

Roughly, broadly:

In the Old America, love of country was natural. You breathed it in. You either loved it or knew you should.

In the New America, love of country is a decision. It’s one you make after weighing the pros and cons. What you breathe in is skepticism and a heightened appreciation of the global view.

Old America: Tradition is a guide in human affairs. New America: Tradition is a challenge, a barrier, or a lovely antique.

The Old America had big families. You married and had children. Life happened to you. You didn’t decide, it decided. Now it’s all on you. Old America, when life didn’t work out: “Luck of the draw!” New America when life doesn’t work: “I made bad choices!” Old America: “I had faith, and trust.” New America: “You had limited autonomy!”

Old America: “We’ve been here three generations.” New America: “You’re still here?”

Old America: We have to have a government, but that doesn’t mean I have to love it. New America: We have to have a government and I am desperate to love it. Old America: Politics is a duty. New America: Politics is life.

The Old America: Religion is good. The New America: Religion is problematic. The Old: Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. The New: I’ll sue.

Mr. McCain is the old world of concepts like “personal honor,” of a manliness that was a style of being, of an attachment to the fact of higher principles.

Mr. Obama is the new world, which is marked in part by doubt as to the excellence of the old. It prizes ambivalence as proof of thoughtfulness, as evidence of a textured seriousness.

Both Old and New America honor sacrifice, but in the Old America it was more essential, more needed for survival both personally (don’t buy today, save for tomorrow) and in larger ways.

The Old and New define sacrifice differently. An Old America opinion: Abjuring a life as a corporate lawyer and choosing instead community organizing, a job that does not pay you in money but will, if you have political ambitions, provide a base and help you win office, is not precisely a sacrifice. Political office will pay you in power and fame, which will be followed in time by money (see Clinton, Bill). This has more to do with timing than sacrifice. In fact, it’s less a sacrifice than a strategy.

A New America answer: He didn’t become a rich lawyer like everyone else—and that was a sacrifice! Old America: Five years in a cage—that’s a sacrifice!

In the Old America, high value was put on education, but character trumped it. That’s how Lincoln got elected: Honest Abe had no formal schooling. In Mr. McCain’s world, a Harvard Ph.D. is a very good thing, but it won’t help you endure five years in Vietnam. It may be a comfort or an inspiration, but it won’t see you through. Only character, and faith, can do that. And they are very Old America.

Old America: candidates for office wear ties. New America: Not if they’re women. Old America: There’s a place for formality, even the Beatles wore jackets!

*   *   *

I weigh this in favor of the Old America. Hard not to, for I remember it, and its sterling virtues. Maybe if you are 25 years old, your sense of the Old and New is different. In the Old America they were not enlightened about race and sex; they accepted grim factory lines and couldn’t even begin to imagine the Internet. Fair enough. But I suspect the political playing out of a long-ongoing cultural and societal shift is part of the dynamic this year.

As to its implications for the race, we’ll see. America is always looking forward, not back, it is always in search of the fresh and leaving the tried. That’s how we started: We left tired old Europe and came to the new place, we settled the east and pushed West to the new place. We like new. It’s in our genes. Hope we know where we’re going, though.

It is the most amazing thing that a young black man who was just a few short years ago unknown to most of his countrymen—really, unknown—could, this week, win the presidential nomination of one of our two great political parties. It is even more amazing that this historic news could be overshadowed by the personal drama and spite of the woman who lost to him.

I like it that she spent the campaign accusing America of being sexist, of treating her differently because she is a woman, and then, when she lacked the grace to congratulate the victor, she sent her stewards out to tell the press she just needs time, it’s so emotional. In other words, she needs space because she’s a woman.

A friend sent, by instant message, the AP flash that ran at 16:56 ET on 06-03-2008. There it was suddenly on my screen:

“

*   *   *

WASHINGTON (AP)—Obama clinches Democratic nomination, making him first black candidate to lead his party.”

A great old-school bulletin, and of course it carried a huge and moving message. It is good when barriers fall; it’s good when possibilities seem to open up to more people, especially the young, who are always watching. (That’s what’s wrong with them, they’re always watching, and we’re always doing terrible things, like, say, not congratulating the winner on the night he won.)

But what I thought of when the friend sent the flash was something another friend told me months ago. It was the night Mr. Obama won Alabama. My friend was watching on TV, in his suburban den. His 10-year-old daughter walked in, looked, saw “Obama Wins” and “Alabama.” She said, “Daddy, we saw a documentary on Martin Luther King Day in school.” She said, “That’s where they used the hoses.” Suddenly my friend saw it new. That’s the place they used the water hoses on the civil rights marchers crossing the bridge. And now look. The black man thanking Alabama for his victory.

What kind of place makes a change like this? Only a great nation. We should love it tenderly every day of our lives.

*   *   *

We will hear a lot of tasteful tributes this weekend to Hillary Clinton’s grit and fortitude. The Washington-based media may go a little over the top, but only out of relief. They know her well and recoil at what she stands for. They also know they don’t like her, so to balance it out they’ll gush.

But this I believe is the truth: America dodged a bullet. That was the other meaning of the culminating events of this week.

Mrs. Clinton would have been a disaster as president. Mr. Obama may prove a disaster, and John McCain may, but she would be. Mr. Obama may lie, and Mr. McCain may lie, but she would lie. And she would have brought the whole rattling caravan of Clintonism with her—the scandal-making that is compulsive, the drama that is unending, the sheer, daily madness that is her, and him.

We have been spared this. Those who did it deserve to be thanked. May I rise in a toast to the Democratic Party.

They had a great and roaring fight, a state-by-state struggle unprecedented in the history of presidential primaries. They created the truly national primary. They brought 36 million people to the polls, including the young, minorities and first-time voters. They brought a kind of dogged brio to the year.

All of this is impressive, but more than that, they threw off Clintonism. They threw off the idea that corruption is part of the game, an acceptable fact. They threw off the idea that dynasticism was an unstoppable dynamic in modern politics, that Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton could, would, go on forever. They said: “No, that is not the way we do it.”

They threw off the idea of inevitability. Mrs. Clinton didn’t lose because she had no money or organization, she didn’t lose because she had no fame or name, she didn’t lose because her policies were unusual or dramatically unpopular within her party. She lost because enough Democrats looked at her and thought: I don’t like that, I don’t like the way she does it, I’m not going there. Most candidates lose over things, not over their essential nature. But that is what happened here. For all her accomplishments and success, it was her sketchy character that in the end did her in.

But the voters had to make the decision. So, to the Democrats: A nod. A bow. Well done.

May this mark the beginning of the remoralization of a great party.

*   *   *

Should he make her his vice president? He shouldn’t, and he won’t.

The reasons:

The only ones who could force him to do it are party elders, and they don’t like Mrs. Clinton. They’re the ones who finally forced her from the race. Their antipathy was not apparent when she was inevitable. It is obvious now.

She would never be content to be vice president. She’d be plotting against him from day one. She’d put poison in his tea.

She brings Bill.

She undercuts the cleanness of Obama’s message. She doesn’t turn the page, she is the page.

She would give Republicans something to get excited about. She will revivify them. They’re not excited about Mr. McCain, but they could become excited about opposing her.

Her presence on the ticket would force the party to have two breakthrough moments when a rule of political life, and life in general, is: one breakthrough at a time.

He doesn’t need her. He needs a boring white man. Because he’s an interesting black man. He needs a sober, experienced, older establishment player who will be respected by the press, the first responders of the political game. They’ll set the tone in which the choice is celebrated, or not. He needs someone like Sam Nunn. Or, actually, Sam Nunn. He could throw a wild pass at Jim Webb because he has a real-guy, Southern, semi-working-class persona, and a Scots-Irish grit and chippiness. He is from important Virginia, has Vietnam boots and is moderate.

Choosing Mrs. Clinton would make Mr. Obama look weak. No one would believe he picked her because he respected or liked her. They’d think he was appeasing her. This is not something he can afford! And in any case some people cannot be appeased. Voters would assume she and her people did their voodoo—I have 18 million voters!—and he fell for it. She doesn’t have 18 million voters, she got 18 million votes. It is telling the way she thinks of them, as if they are working-class automatons awaiting her command.

As for reports of their rage, there are always dead-enders, and frantic lovers of this candidate or that. This goes under the larger heading “lonely people.” But there’s reason to think, and some Democratic insiders do think it, that a lot of the supposed pro-Clinton furor is ginned up on Web sites by the Clinton campaign, and even manufactured by the Clinton campaign, to prove Clinton loyalists are real and their demands must be met. In any case, you can see how Mrs. Clinton views her supposed working-class heroes by what she is doing with them now: using them as a bargaining chip to get whatever she wants.

Democrats this year have the winning fever, and Democrats will come out. By November they will be united.

Also, he doesn’t like her. He recoils. Just like his party.

Leave him alone. He wrote a book. It is true or untrue, accurately reported or not. If not, this will no doubt be revealed. It is honestly meant and presented, or not. Look to the assertions, argue them, weigh and ponder.

That’s my first thought. My second goes back to something William Safire, himself a memoirist of the Nixon years, said to me, a future memoirist of the Reagan years: “The one thing history needs more of is first-person testimony.” History needs data, detail, portraits, information; it needs eyewitness. “I was there, this is what I saw.” History will sift through, consider and try in its own way to produce something approximating truth.

In that sense one should always say of memoirs of those who hold or have held power: More, please.

Scott McClellan’s book is the focus of such heat, the target of denunciation, because it is a big story when a press secretary breaks with a president. This is like Jody Powell turning on Jimmy Carter, or Marlin Fitzwater turning on Reagan. That is, it’s pretty much unthinkable. And it’s a bigger story still when such a person breaks with his administration not over many small things but one big thing, in this case its central and defining endeavor, the Iraq war. The book can be seen as a grenade lobbed over the wall. Thus the explosive response. He is a traitor, turncoat, betrayer, sellout. If he’d had any guts he would have spoken up when he was in power.

I want to quote his defenders, but he doesn’t have any.

Those in the mainstream media who want to see the president unmasked, who want to see the administration revealed as something dark, do not want to be caught cheering on the unmasker.

The left, while embracing the book’s central assertions, will paint him as a weasel who belatedly ’fessed up. They’re big on omertà on the left. It’s part of how they survive.

The right will—already has—pummel him for disloyalty. But those damning him today would have damned him even more if he’d resigned on principle three years ago. They—and the administration—would have beaten him to a pulp, the former from rage, the latter as a lesson: This is what happens when you leave and talk.

And Americans in general have a visceral and instinctive dislike for what Drudge called a snitch. This is our tradition, and also human nature.

So Mr. McClellan defends himself in the same way he defended the administration, awkwardly. He could not speak earlier because he did not oppose earlier; he came to oppose with time and on reflection. He is trying, now, to tell the truth.

He is a man alone, “a pariah,” as Matt Lauer put it.

He does not appear to have written his book to bolster his reputation. He paints himself as a loser. “I didn’t stay true to myself”; he loved “the theatre of political power” and “found being part of the play exciting”; he tried to play “the Washington game” and “didn’t play it very well.” But soon the mea culpa becomes a you-a culpa.

He has nothing to say, really, about the world he entered, about what it was to be there. His thoughts present themselves as clichés. Working in the White House is “a wow.” Seeing it lit up at night “never got old.” He’ll never forget where he was on 9/11. He claims he was taught to “communicate” by Karen Hughes. This is all too believable. I did learn that the word visit—“Got a moment to visit?”—is apparently Texan for “I’m about to kill you” or “Let’s conspire.”

The book is not quite a kiss-and-tell, smooch-and-blab or buss-and-bitch. It is not gossipy, or fun, or lively. It is lumpy, uneven and, when he attempts to share his historical insights—the Constitution, he informs us, doesn’t mention the word “party”—embarrassing.

And yet the purpose of the book is a serious one. Mr. McClellan attempts to reveal and expose what he believes, what he came to see as, an inherent dishonesty and hypocrisy within a hardened administration. It is a real denunciation.

He believes the invasion of Iraq was “a serious strategic blunder,” that the decision to invade Iraq was “a fateful misstep” born in part of the shock of 9/11 but also of “an air of invincibility” sharpened by the surprisingly and “deceptively” quick initial military success in Afghanistan. He scores President Bush’s “certitude” and “self-deceit” and asserts the decision to invade Iraq was tied to the president’s lust for legacy, need for boldness, and grandiose notions as to what is possible in the Mideast. He argues that Mr. Bush did not try to change the culture of the capital, that he “chose to play the Washington game the way he found it” and turned “away from candor and honesty.”

Mr. McClellan dwells on a point that all in government know, that day-to-day governance now is focused on media manipulation, with a particular eye to “political blogs, popular web sites, paid advertising, talk radio” and news media in general. In the age of the permanent campaign, government has become merely an offshoot of campaigning. All is perception and spin. This mentality can “cripple” an administration as, he says, it crippled the Clinton administration, with which he draws constant parallels. “Like the Clinton administration, we had an elaborate campaign structure within the White House that drove much of what we did.”

His primary target is Karl Rove, whose role he says was “political manipulation, plain and simple.” He criticizes as destructive the 50-plus-1 strategy that focused on retaining power through appeals to the base at the expense of a larger approach to the nation. He blames Mr. Rove for sundering the brief post-9/11 bipartisan entente when he went before an open Republican National Committee meeting in Austin, four months after 9/11, and said the GOP would make the war on terror the top issue to win the Senate and keep the House in the 2002 campaign. By the spring the Democratic Party and the media were slamming back with charges the administration had been warned before 9/11 of terrorist plans and done nothing. That war has continued ever since.

Mr. McClellan’s portrait of Mr. Bush is weird and conflicted, though he does not seem to notice. The president is “charming” and “disarming,” humorous and politically gifted. He weeps when Mr. McClellan leaves. Mr. McClellan always puts quotes on his praise. But the implication of his assertions and anecdotes is that Mr. Bush is vain, narrow, out of his depth and coldly dismissive of doubt, of criticism and of critics.

If that’s what you think, say it. If it’s not, don’t suggest it.

When I finished the book I came out not admiring Mr. McClellan or liking him but, in terms of the larger arguments, believing him. One hopes more people who work or worked within the Bush White House will address the book’s themes and interpretations. What he says may be inconvenient, and it may be painful, but that’s not what matters. What matters is if it’s true. Let the debate on the issues commence.

What’s needed now? More memoirs, more data, more information, more testimony. More serious books, like Doug Feith’s. More “this is what I saw” and “this is what is true.” Feed history.

She was born in Russia, fled the pogroms with her family, was raised in Milwaukee, and worked the counter at her father’s general store when she was 8. In early adulthood she made aliyah to Palestine, where she worked on a kibbutz, picking almonds and chasing chickens. She rose in politics, was the first woman in the first Israeli cabinet, soldiered on through war and rumors of war, became the first and so far only woman to be prime minister of Israel. And she knew what it is to be a woman in the world. “At work, you think of the children you’ve left at home. At home you think of the work you’ve left unfinished. . . . Your heart is rent.” This of course was Golda Meir.

Another: She was born in a family at war with itself and the reigning power outside. As a child she carried word from her important father to his fellow revolutionaries, smuggling the papers in her school bag. War and rumors of war, arrests, eight months in jail. A rise in politics—administering refugee camps, government minister. When war came, she refused to flee an insecure border area; her stubbornness helped rally a nation. Her rivals sometimes called her “Dumb Doll,” and an American president is said to have referred to her in private as “the old witch.” But the prime minister of India preferred grounding her foes to dust to complaining about gender bias. In the end, and in the way of things, she was ground up too. Proud woman, Indira Gandhi.

And there is Margaret Hilda Roberts. A childhood in the besieged Britain of World War II—she told me once of listening to the wireless and being roused by Churchill. “Westward look, the land is bright,” she quoted him; she knew every stanza of the old poem. Her father, too, was a shopkeeper, and she grew up in the apartment above the store near the tracks. She went to Oxford on scholarship, worked as a chemist, entered politics, rose, became another first and only, succeeding not only in a man’s world but in a class system in which they knew how to take care of ambitious little grocer’s daughters from Grantham. She was to a degree an outsider within her own party, so she remade it. She lived for ideas as her colleagues lived for comfort and complaint. The Tories those days managed loss. She wanted to stop it; she wanted gain. Just before she became prime minister, the Soviets, thinking they were deftly stigmatizing an upstart, labeled her the Iron Lady. She seized the insult and wore it like a hat. This was Thatcher, stupendous Thatcher, now the baroness.

Great women, all different, but great in terms of size, of impact on the world and of struggles overcome. Struggle was not something they read about in a book. They did not use guilt to win election—it comes up zero if you Google “Thatcher” and “You’re just picking on me because I’m a woman.” Instead they used the appeals men used: stronger leadership, better ideas, a superior philosophy.

*   *   *

You know where I’m going, for you know where she went. Hillary Clinton complained again this week that sexism has been a major dynamic in her unsuccessful bid for political dominance. She is quoted by the Washington Post’s Lois Romano decrying the “sexist” treatment she received during the campaign, and the “incredible vitriol that has been engendered” by those who are “nothing but misogynists.” The New York Times reported she told sympathetic bloggers in a conference call that she is saddened by the “mean-spiritedness and terrible insults” that have been thrown “at you, for supporting me, and at women in general.”

Where to begin? One wants to be sympathetic to Mrs. Clinton at this point, if for no other reason than to show one’s range. But her last weeks have been, and her next weeks will likely be, one long exercise in summoning further denunciations. It is something new in politics, the How Else Can I Offend You Tour. And I suppose it is aimed not at voters—you don’t persuade anyone by complaining in this way, you only reinforce what your supporters already think—but at history, at the way history will tell the story of the reasons for her loss.

So, to address the charge that sexism did her in:

It is insulting, because it asserts that those who supported someone else this year were driven by low prejudice and mindless bias.

It is manipulative, because it asserts that if you want to be understood, both within the community and in the larger brotherhood of man, to be wholly without bias and prejudice, you must support Mrs. Clinton.

It is not true. Tough hill-country men voted for her, men so backward they’d give the lady a chair in the union hall. Tough Catholic men in the outer suburbs voted for her, men so backward they’d call a woman a lady. And all of them so naturally courteous that they’d realize, in offering the chair or addressing the lady, that they might have given offense, and awkwardly joke at themselves to take away the sting. These are great men. And Hillary got her share, more than her share, of their votes. She should be a guy and say thanks.

It is prissy. Mrs. Clinton’s supporters are now complaining about the Hillary nutcrackers sold at every airport shop. Boo hoo. If Golda Meir, a woman of not only proclaimed but actual toughness, heard about Golda nutcrackers, she would have bought them by the case and given them away as party favors.

It is sissy. It is blame-gaming, whining, a way of not taking responsibility, of not seeing your flaws and addressing them. You want to say “Girl, butch up, you are playing in the leagues, they get bruised in the leagues, they break each other’s bones, they like to hit you low and hear the crack, it’s like that for the boys and for the girls.”

And because the charge of sexism is all of the above, it is, ultimately, undermining of the position of women. Or rather it would be if its source were not someone broadly understood by friend and foe alike to be willing to say anything to gain advantage.

*   *   *

It is probably truer that being a woman helped Mrs. Clinton. She was the front-runner anyway and had all the money, power, Beltway backers. But the fact that she was a woman helped give her supporters the special oomph to be gotten from making history. They were by definition involved in something historic. And they were on the right side, connected to the one making the breakthrough, shattering the glass. They were going to be part of breaking it into a million little pieces that could rain down softly during the balloon drop at the historic convention, each of them catching the glow of the lights. Some network reporter was going to say, “They look like pieces of the glass ceiling that has finally been shattered.”

I know: Barf. But also: Fine. Politics should be fun.

Meir and Gandhi and Mrs. Thatcher suffered through the political downside of their sex and made the most of the upside. Fair enough. As for this week’s Clinton complaints, I imagine Mrs. Thatcher would bop her on the head with her purse. Mrs. Gandhi would say “That is no way to play it.” Mrs. Meir? “They said I was the only woman in the cabinet and the only one with—well, you know. I loved it.”

Big picture, May 2008:

The Democrats aren’t the ones falling apart, the Republicans are. The Democrats can see daylight ahead. For all their fractious fighting, they’re finally resolving their central drama. Hillary Clinton will leave, and Barack Obama will deliver a stirring acceptance speech. Then hand-to-hand in the general, where they see their guy triumphing. You see it when you talk to them: They’re busy being born.

The Republicans? Busy dying. The brightest of them see no immediate light. They’re frozen, not like a deer in the headlights but a deer in the darkness, his ears stiff at the sound. Crunch. Twig. Hunting party.

The headline Wednesday on Drudge, from Politico, said, “Republicans Stunned by Loss in Mississippi.” It was about the eight-point drubbing the Democrat gave the Republican in the special House election. My first thought was: You have to be stupid to be stunned by that. Second thought: Most party leaders in Washington are stupid—detached, played out, stuck in the wisdom they learned when they were coming up, in ‘78 or ‘82 or ‘94. Whatever they learned then, they think pertains now. In politics especially, the first lesson sticks. For Richard Nixon, everything came back to Alger Hiss.

They are also—Hill leaders, lobbyists, party speakers—successful, well-connected, busy and rich. They never guessed, back in ‘86, how government would pay off! They didn’t know they’d stay! They came to make a difference and wound up with their butts in the butter. But affluence detaches, and in time skews thinking. It gives you the illusion you’re safe, and that everyone else is. A party can lose its gut this way.

Many are ambivalent, deep inside, about the decisions made the past seven years in the White House. But they’ve publicly supported it so long they think they . . . support it. They get confused. Late at night they toss and turn in the antique mahogany sleigh bed in the carpeted house in McLean and try to remember what it is they really do think, and what those thoughts imply.

And those are the bright ones. The rest are in Perpetual 1980: We have the country, the troops will rally in the fall.

“This was a real wakeup call for us,” someone named Robert M. Duncan, who is chairman of the Republican National Committee, told the New York Times. This was after Mississippi. “We can’t let the Democrats take our issues.” And those issues would be? “We can’t let them pretend to be conservatives,” he continued. Why not? Republicans pretend to be conservative every day.

The Bush White House, faced with the series of losses from 2005 through ‘08, has long claimed the problem is Republicans on the Hill and running for office. They have scandals, bad personalities, don’t stand for anything. That’s why Republicans are losing: because they’re losers.

All true enough!

But this week a House Republican said publicly what many say privately, that there is another truth. “Members and pundits . . . fail to understand the deep seated antipathy toward the president, the war, gas prices, the economy, foreclosures,” said Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia in a 20-page memo to House GOP leaders.

The party, Mr. Davis told me, is “an airplane flying right into a mountain.” Analyses of its predicament reflect an “investment in the Bush presidency,” but “the public has just moved so far past that.” “Our leaders go up to the second floor of the White House and they get a case of White House-itis.” Mr. Bush has left the party at a disadvantage in terms of communications: “He can’t articulate. The only asset we have now is the big microphone, and he swallowed it.” The party, said Mr. Davis, must admit its predicament, act independently of the White House, and force Democrats to define themselves. “They should have some ownership for what’s going on. They control the budget. They pay no price. . . . Obama has all happy talk, but it’s from 30,000 feet. Energy, immigration, what is he gonna do?”

*   *   *

Could the party pivot from the president? I spoke this week to Clarke Reed of Mississippi, one of the great architects of resurgent Republicanism in the South. When he started out, in the 1950s, there were no Republicans in his state. The solid south was solidly Democratic, and Sen. James O. Eastland was thumping the breast pocket of his suit, vowing that civil rights legislation would never leave it. “We’re going to build a two-party system in the south,” Mr. Reed said. He helped create “the illusion of Southern power” as a friend put it, with the creation of the Southern Republican Chairman’s Association. “If you build it they will come.” They did.

There are always “lots of excuses,” Mr. Reed said of the special-election loss. Poor candidate, local factors. “Having said all that,” he continued, “let’s just face it: It’s not a good time.” He meant to be a Republican. “They brought Cheney in, and that was a mistake.” He cited “a disenchantment with the generic Republican label, which we always thought was the Good Housekeeping seal.”

What’s behind it? “American people just won’t take a long war. Just—name me a war, even in a pro-military state like this. It’s overall disappointment. It’s national. No leadership, adrift. Things haven’t worked.” The future lies in rebuilding locally, not being “distracted” by Washington.

Is the Republican solid South over?

“Yeah. Oh yeah.” He said, “I eat lunch every day at Buck’s Cafe. Obama’s picture is all over the wall.”

How to come back? “The basic old conservative principles haven’t changed. We got distracted by Washington, we got distracted from having good county organizations.”

Should the party attempt to break with Mr. Bush? Mr. Reed said he supports the president. And then he said, simply, “We’re past that.”

We’re past that time.

Mr. Reed said he was “short-term pessimistic, long-term optimistic.” He has seen a lot of history. “After Goldwater in ‘64 we said, ‘Let’s get practical.’ So we got ol’ Dick. We got through Watergate. Been through a lot. We’ve had success a long time.”

Throughout the interview this was a Reed refrain: “We got through that.” We got through Watergate and Vietnam and changes large and small.

He was holding high the flag, but his refrain implicitly compared the current moment to disaster.

What happens to the Republicans in 2008 will likely be dictated by what didn’t happen in 2005, and ‘06, and ‘07. The moment when the party could have broken, on principle, with the administration—over the thinking behind and the carrying out of the war, over immigration, spending and the size of government—has passed. What two years ago would have been honorable and wise will now look craven. They’re stuck.

Mr. Bush has squandered the hard-built paternity of 40 years. But so has the party, and so have its leaders. If they had pushed away for serious reasons, they could have separated the party’s fortunes from the president’s. This would have left a painfully broken party, but they wouldn’t be left with a ruined “brand,” as they all say, speaking the language of marketing. And they speak that language because they are marketers, not thinkers. Not serious about policy. Not serious about ideas. And not serious about leadership, only followership.

This is and will be the great challenge for John McCain: The Democratic argument, now being market tested by Obama Inc., that a McCain victory will yield nothing more or less than George Bush’s third term.

That is going to be powerful, and it is going to get out the vote. And not for Republicans.

This is an amazing story. The Democratic Party has a winner. It has a nominee. You know this because he has the most votes and the most elected delegates, and there’s no way, mathematically, his opponent can get past him. Even after the worst two weeks of his campaign, he blew past her by 14 in North Carolina and came within two in Indiana.

He’s got this thing. And the Democratic Party, after this long and brutal slog, should be dancing in the streets. Party elders should be coming out on the balcony in full array, in full regalia, and telling the crowd, “Habemus nominatum”: “We have a nominee.” And the crowd below should be cheering, “Viva Obamus! Viva nominatum!”

Instead, you know where they are, the party elders. They are in a Democratic club on Capitol Hill, slump-shouldered at the bar, having a drink and then two, in a state of what might be called depressed horror. “What are they doing to the party?” they wail. “Why are they doing this?”

You know who they are talking about.

The Democratic Party can’t celebrate the triumph of Barack Obama because the Democratic Party is busy having a breakdown. You could call it a breakdown over the issues of race and gender, but its real source is simply Hillary Clinton. Whose entire campaign at this point is about exploiting race and gender.

Here’s the first place an outsider could see the tensions that have taken hold: on CNN Tuesday night, in the famous Brazile-Begala smackdown. Paul Begala wore the smile of the 1990s, the one in which there is no connection between the shape of the mouth and what the mouth says. All is mask. Donna Brazile was having none of it.

Mr. Begala more or less accused the Obama people of not caring about white voters: “[If] there’s a new Democratic Party that somehow doesn’t need or want white working-class people and Latinos, well, count me out.” And: “We cannot win with eggheads and African Americans.” That, he said, was the old, losing, Dukakis coalition.

“Paul, baby,” Ms. Brazile, who is undeclared, began her response, “we need to not divide and polarize the Democratic Party. . . . So stop the divisions. Stop trying to split us into these groups, Paul, because you and I know . . . how Democrats win, and to simply suggest that Hillary’s coalition is better than Obama’s, Obama’s is better than Hillary’s — no. We have a big party, Paul.” And: “Just don’t divide me and tell me I cannot stand in Hillary’s camp because I’m black, and I can’t stand in Obama’s camp because I’m female. Because I’m both. . . . Don’t start with me, baby.” Finally: “It’s our party, Paul. Don’t say my party. It’s our party. Because it’s time that we bring the party back together, Paul.”

In case you didn’t get what was behind that exchange, Mrs. Clinton spent this week making it clear. In a jaw-dropping interview in USA Today on Thursday, she said, “I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on.” As evidence she cited an Associated Press report that, she said, “found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

White Americans? Hard-working white Americans? “Even Richard Nixon didn’t say white,” an Obama supporter said, “even with the Southern strategy.”

If John McCain said, “I got the white vote, baby!” his candidacy would be over. And rising in highest indignation against him would be the old Democratic Party.

To play the race card as Mrs. Clinton has, to highlight and encourage a sense that we are crudely divided as a nation, to make your argument a brute and cynical “the black guy can’t win but the white girl can” is — well, so vulgar, so cynical, so cold, that once again a Clinton is making us turn off the television in case the children walk by.

“She has unleashed the gates of hell,” a longtime party leader told me. “She’s saying, ‘He’s not one of us.’”

She is trying to take Obama down in a new way, but also within a new context. In the past he was just the competitor. She could say, “All’s fair.” But now he’s the competitor who is going to be the nominee of his party. And she is still trying to do him in. And the party is watching.

Again: amazing.

Who can save the situation? The superdelegates.

You know them. They’re the ones hiding under the rock, behind the boulder, and at the bar.

They are terrified, most of them. They want the problem to go away. They want it handled, but they don’t want to do it. They don’t want to tell Hillary to stop, because they would likely pay a price for it, and not just with her.

They are afraid of looking as if they’re jumping on a train that’s speeding down the tracks and is about to roll over the damsel in distress.

Which is how Hillary — and her supporters — will paint it. Even though she’s no damsel, and she causes distress.

Some insight from a superdelegate I spoke to Thursday:

It’s not math anymore, it’s psychodrama. If she can’t have it, no one can have it. If she has to tear the party apart, she will.

Nancy Pelosi can’t make her drop out. The Clintons think the speaker is for Obama anyway, her San Francisco district went for him 70% to 30%; they’ll dismiss her. Chuck Schumer can’t do it, he’d offend women in New York. Harry Reid can’t do it, he’ll offend women, period. If black political figures go to the Clintons and make a plea, they’ll be dismissed as Obama partisans.

So who, I asked, can do it?

White women have been Mrs. Clinton’s most reliable base of support and readiest crutch, the superdelegate said. And maybe they’re the only ones who can break through, both to Mrs. Clinton and to the country, and tell her to stop. “If it’s a man, she goes back to gender: Men are always picking on me, you just don’t want women in power. If it’s a black, it’s You betrayed us, how can you call on me to get out after what I’ve done for you? ”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein made a feint in the direction of stopping Hillary this week. Mrs. Clinton should offer a rationale for her continuing the campaign at this point, Ms. Feinstein said.

The superdelegate mentioned Maryland’s Barbara Mikulski. “I can assure you that Sen. Mikulski is 100% behind Clinton,” her office told me. The superdelegate mentioned Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and Ellen Malcolm of Emily’s List, the No. 1 political action committee in the country. “They can say, ‘We’ve stood with you, you’ve got true grit, but now you have to go.’”

The question “Who will tell her, who can make her go?” is really the question “Who will save the Democratic Party in 2008?” It cannot be doubted at this point that real damage is being done to its standard-bearer and to all those who will be on the ticket with him.

Maybe the superdelegate is right, and maybe saving the party this year will be women’s work. Maybe the Democratic Party establishment, such as it is, men and women, black and white and all other colors, will rise up together. Maybe that would be a perfect rebuke to race-baiting and gender-gaming.

It will be amazing if someone doesn’t start up that train, someone doesn’t get in the cab, someone doesn’t shout, “All aboard!” But then it’s been an amazing year.