Peggy Noonan

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.

I was talking with an old friend, a longtime Democrat, and she asked if I knew what religion a certain presidential candidate was. I replied that I didn’t know and hoped I’d never find out. We started to laugh, and she nodded.

I didn’t mean it and yet I meant it, for we have come to an odd pass regarding candidates and their faith. It’s not as if faith is unimportant, it’s always important. But we are asking our political figures—mere flawed politicians—to put forward and talk about their faith to a degree that has become odd. We push them against the wall and do a kind of theological frisk on them. We didn’t use to.

Forty years ago, a firm-jawed, silver-haired Michigan governor made a serious bid for the presidency. He was well-funded, well-credentialed, and was done in by one of those campaign gaffes in which a throwaway line becomes a death knell. He had changed his position on Vietnam, and in explaining his previous support said he’d been “brainwashed” on the issue. Americans don’t like their presidents to be people who’d allow their brains to be sent to the dry cleaners. Republicans in particular were not amused. So he was over.

His name was George Romney. He was Mitt’s father. And no one back in those narrow-minded, benighted days seems to have cared that much that he was a Mormon.

Now it’s an issue. Now we debate the candidate’s faith.

This is change. Is it progress?

It doesn’t feel like it.

In 1968 we were, as now, a religious country. But when we walked to the polls, we thought we were about to hire a president, not a Bible study teacher.

No one cared, really, that Richard Nixon was a Quaker. They may have been confused by it, but they weren’t upset. His vice president, Spiro Agnew, was not Greek Orthodox but Episcopalian. Nobody much noticed. Nelson Rockefeller of New York was not an Episcopalian but a Baptist. Do you know what Lyndon Johnson’s religion was? He was a member of the Disciples of Christ, but in what appeared to be the same way he was a member of the American Legion: You’re in politics, you join things. Hubert Humphrey was born Lutheran, attended Methodist churches, and was rumored to be a Congregationalist. This didn’t quite reach the level of mystery because nobody quite cared.

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It is true that everyone knew Jimmy Carter was an evangelical Christian, but that was famous because they were a new and rising force in American politics in 1976, and after Watergate his immersion in faith seemed refreshing. He was a Southern Baptist who left the Southern Baptist Convention in 2000 after many arguments, including over whether Mormons were Christians. He said yes. No one knows what religion Jerry Ford was and, just to add some mystery, I’m not going to go to Ask.com about it, as I did with the others. Ford didn’t publicly share his heart on these matters. He was of a generation that knew some things are actually, we should brace ourselves here, private. Ronald Reagan was Presbyterian, but his faith was both ardent and lightly held. He prayed a lot, and when he did he knew who was listening. But he was so unused to the normal ways of Christian service that, Mike Deaver once told me, he once happily dipped the bread in the wine as communion was passed.

America cared that Jack Kennedy was Catholic, for a while. We’d never had a Catholic president, and only one Catholic major-party presidential nominee before him, Democrat Al Smith in 1928. But Smith was rather too exotic in a number of ways, with his New York accent and his ward-heeler air. He was a great man, but a city boy in a small-town nation.

Kennedy—urbane, sophisticated, taught by Harold Laski at the London School of Economics—made the most of his problem, giving a great speech that put his foes on the defensive.

But it is an odd thing that as a nation we seemed more liberal on these issues then than today. I think of JFK hearing that Martin Luther King Jr.’s father said he wouldn’t vote for Kennedy because he was Catholic. Kennedy is reported to have said, “Imagine Martin Luther King’s father being a bigot!” Then, being Jack Kennedy, he detached and said philosophically, “But then we all have our fathers.”

Bill Clinton was a Southern Baptist. No one gave much thought to what Bush One was, including, perhaps, Bush One, until he was older. But he’d been raised among “the frozen chosen,” which is how some denominations used to refer teasingly to Episcopalians.
His son, George W. Bush, became president a few years after an intense Christian conversion that was by all accounts transforming. In the way of many recent converts, in the great whoosh of feeling they often experience, his presidency came to take much of its shape from a certain emotionalism. Certainly there were around him a number of transported spirits, and pious connivers.

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There are some people who believe faith doesn’t belong in politics. But it does, and it is there inextricably. The antislavery movement, the temperance movement, the civil rights movement, the antiabortion movement, all were political movements animated in large part by religious feeling. It’s not that it doesn’t matter. You bring your whole self into the polling booth, including your faith and your sense of right and wrong, good and bad, just as presidents bring their whole selves into the Oval Office. I can’t imagine how a president could do his job without faith.

But faith is also personal. You can be touched by a candidate’s faith, or interested in his apparent lack of it. It’s never wholly unimportant, but you should never see a politician as a leader of faith, and we should not ask a man who made his rise in the grubby world of politics to act as if he is an exemplar of his faith, or an explainer or defender of it

We have the emphasis wrong. It’s out of kilter. And the result is a Mitt Romney being harassed on radio shows about the particulars of his faith, and Hillary Clinton—a new-class yuppie attorney and board member—announcing how important her Methodist faith is and how much she loves wearing her diamond cross. For all I know, for all you know, it is true. But there is about it an air of patronizing the rubes and boobs.

We should lighten up on demanding access to their hearts. It is impossible for us to know their hearts. It’s barely possible to know your own. Faith is important but it’s also personal. When we force political figures to tell us their deepest thoughts on it, they’ll be tempted to act, to pretend. Do politicians tend to give in to temptation? Most people do. Are politicians better than most people? Quick, a show of hands. I don’t think so either.

I thought I’d say a word for the Beaconists.

This election year we will, sooner or later, be asked to think about, and concentrate on, what American foreign policy should be in the future. We will have to consider, or reconsider, what challenges we face, what the world really is now after the Cold War and after 9/11, what is needed from America, and for her.

In some rough and perhaps tentative way we will have to decide what philosophical understanding of our national purpose rightly guides us.

Part of the debate will be shaped by the tugging back and forth of two schools of thought. There are those whose impulses are essentially interventionist–we live in the world and must take part in the world, sometimes, perhaps even often, militarily. We are the great activist nation, the spreader of political liberty, the superpower whose meaning is made clear in action.

The other school holds profound reservations about all this. It is more modest in its ambitions, more cool-eyed about human nature. It feels more bound by the old advice attributed to one of the Founding Generation, that we be the friend of liberty everywhere but the guarantor only of our own.

Much has changed in the more than two centuries since he said that: many wars fought, treaties made, alliances forged. And yet as simple human wisdom, it packs a wallop still.

Those who feel tugged toward the old Founding wisdom often use the word “beacon.” It is our place in the scheme of things, it is our fate and duty, to be a beacon of liberty. To stand tall and hold high the light. To be an example, to be an inspiration, to encourage. We do not invent constitutions and impose them on other countries; instead they, in their restlessness, in their human desire to achieve a greater portion of freedom, will rise up in time and create their own constitution. And because they created it, and because it reflects their conception of justice, they will hold it more dearly.

So we are best, in the world as it is now, the beacon, not the bringer, of freedom. We are its friend, not its enforcer.

As a foreign policy this sounds, or has been made to sound, unduly passive. We’ll sit around being a good example and the rest of them can take a hike. But if you want to be a beacon, it’s actually a hard job. It involves activism. You can’t be a beacon unless as a nation you’re in pretty good shape. You can’t be a beacon unless you send forth real light. You can’t be a beacon unless you really do inspire.

Do we always? No. We’re not always a good example for the world. And so, for the coming holiday, a few baseline areas, some only stylistic, in which we could make our light glow brighter in–and for–the world.

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It would be good to have the most visible symbols of our country, the president and the Congress, be clean. So often they seem not to be. They are scandal-ridden, or an embarrassment, or seem in the eyes of the world to be bought and paid for by special interests or unions or industries or professions. Whether you are liberal or conservative, you agree it is important that the world be impressed by America’s leaders, by their high-mindedness and integrity. Leaders who are not dragged through the mud because they actually don’t bring much mud with them. There is room for improvement here.

To be a beacon is to speak softly to the world, with dignity, with elegance if you can manage it, or simple good-natured courtesy if you can’t. A superpower should never shout, never bray “We’re No. 1!” If you’re No. 1, you don’t have to.

To be a beacon is to have a democracy in which issues of actual import are regularly debated. Instead our political coverage consists of daily disquisitions on “targeted ads,” “narratives,” “positioning” and “talking points.” We really do make politicians crazy. If a politician cares only about his ads and his rehearsed answers, the pundits call him inauthentic. But if a politician ignores these things to speak of great issues we say he lacks “fire in the belly” and is incompetent. So many criticisms of politicians boil down to: He’s not manipulating us well enough! We need more actual adults who are actually serious about the business of the nation.

To be a beacon is to keep the economic dream alive. We’re still good at this. The downside is the rise in piggishness that tends to accompany prosperity. It is not good to embarrass your nation with your greed. It disheartens those who are doing their best but are limited, or unlucky, or just haven’t made it work yet. It is good when you have it not to keep it all but to help the limited, and unlucky, and those who just haven’t made it work yet. Keep it going, Porky.

To be a beacon is to continue another thing we’re good at, making the kind of citizens who go into the world and help it: the doctors, the scientists, the nurses. They choose to go and help. The world notices, and says, “These are some kind of people, these Americans.”

To be a beacon is to support the creation of a culture that is not dark, or sulfurous, or obviously unwell. We introduce our culture to our new immigrants each day through television. Just for a moment, imagine you are a young person from Africa or South America, a new American. You come here and put on the TV, for even the most innocent know that TV is America and America is TV, and you want to learn quickly. What you see is an obvious and embarrassing obsession with sex, with violence, with sexual dysfunction. You see the routine debasement of women parading as the liberation of women.

*   *   *

Conservatives have wrung their hands over this for a generation. But really, if you are a new immigrant to our country, full of hope, animated in part by some sense of mystery about this country that has lived in your imagination for 20 years, you have got to think: This is it? This ad for erectile dysfunction? Oh, I have joined something that is not healthy.

Sad to think this. They want to have joined a healthy and vibrant and well-balanced nation, not a sick circus.

I haven’t even touched upon poverty, the material kind and the spiritual kind. I haven’t touched on a lot. But if we were to try harder to be better, if we were to try harder to be and seem as great as we are, we wouldn’t have to bray so much about the superiority of our system. It would be obvious to all, as obvious as a big light in the darkness.

To be a brighter beacon is not to choose passivity, or follow a path of selfishness. It would take energy and commitment and thought. We’ve always had a lot of that.

A happy Thanksgiving to all who love the great and fabled nation that is still, this day, the hope of the world.

The story as I was told it is that in the early years of her prime ministership, Margaret Thatcher held a meeting with her aides and staff, all of whom were dominated by her, even awed. When it was over she invited her cabinet chiefs to join her at dinner in a nearby restaurant. They went, arrayed themselves around the table, jockeyed for her attention. A young waiter came and asked if they’d like to hear the specials. Mrs. Thatcher said, “I will have beef.”

Yes, said the waiter. “And the vegetables?”

“They will have beef too.”

Too good to check, as they say. It is certainly apocryphal, but I don’t want it to be. It captured her singular leadership style, which might be characterized as “unafraid.”

She was a leader.

Margaret Thatcher would no more have identified herself as a woman, or claimed special pleading that she was a mere frail girl, or asked you to sympathize with her because of her sex, than she would have called up the Kremlin and asked how quickly she could surrender.

She represented a movement. She was its head. She was great figure, a person in history, and she was a woman. She was in it for serious reasons, not to advance the claims of a gender but to reclaim for England its economic freedom, and return its political culture to common sense. Her rise wasn’t symbolic but actual.

In fact, she wasn’t so much a woman as a lady. I remember a gentleman who worked with her speaking of her allure, how she’d relax after a late-night meeting and you’d walk by and catch just the faintest whiff of perfume, smoke and scotch. She worked hard and was tough. One always imagined her lightly smacking some incompetent on the head with her purse, for she carried a purse, as a lady would. She is still tough. A Reagan aide told me that after she was incapacitated by a stroke she flew to Reagan’s funeral in Washington, went through the ceremony, flew with Mrs. Reagan to California for the burial, and never once on the plane removed her heels. That is tough.

The point is the big ones, the real ones, the Thatchers and Indira Gandhis and Golda Meirs and Angela Merkels, never play the boo-hoo game. They are what they are, but they don’t use what they are. They don’t hold up their sex as a feint: Why, he’s not criticizing me, he’s criticizing all women! Let us rise and fight the sexist cur.

When Hillary Clinton suggested that debate criticism of her came under the heading of men bullying a defenseless lass, an interesting thing happened. First Kate Michelman, the former head of NARAL and an Edwards supporter, hit her hard. “When unchallenged, in a comfortable, controlled situation, Sen. Clinton embraces her elevation into the ‘boys club.’ “ But when “legitimate questions” are asked, “she is quick to raise the white flag and look for a change in the rules.”

Then Mrs. Clinton changed tack a little and told a group of women in West Burlington, Iowa, that they were going to clean up Washington together: “Bring your vacuum cleaners, bring your brushes, bring your brooms, bring your mops.” It was all so incongruous—can anyone imagine the 20th century New Class professional Hillary Clinton picking up a vacuum cleaner? Isn’t that what downtrodden pink collar workers abused by the patriarchy are for?

*   *   *

But even better, and more startling, people began to giggle. At Mrs. Clinton, a woman who has never inspired much mirth. Suddenly they were remembering the different accents she has spoken with when in different parts of the country, and the weird laugh she has used on talk shows. A few days ago new poll numbers came out—neck and neck with Barack Obama in Iowa, her lead slipping in New Hampshire. There is a sense that Sen. Obama is rising, a sense for the first time in this election cycle that Mrs. Clinton just may be in a fight, a real one, one she could actually lose.

It’s all kind of wonderful, isn’t it? Someone indulged in special pleading and America didn’t buy it. It’s as if the country this week made it official: We now formally declare that the woman who uses the fact of her sex to manipulate circumstances is a jerk.

This is a victory for true feminism, in its old-fashioned sense of a simple assertion of the equality of men and women. We might not have so resoundingly reached this moment without Mrs. Clinton’s actions and statements. Thank you, Mrs. Clinton.

A word on toughness. Mrs. Clinton is certainly tough, to the point of hard. But toughness should have a purpose. In Mrs. Thatcher’s case, its purpose was to push through a program she thought would make life better in her country. Mrs. Clinton’s toughness seems to have no purpose beyond the personal accrual of power. What will she do with the power? Still unclear. It happens to be unclear in the case of several candidates, but with Mrs. Clinton there is a unique chasm between the ferocity and the purpose of the ferocity. There is something deeply unattractive in this, and it would be equally so if she were a man.

*   *   *

I wonder if Sen. Obama, as he makes his climb, understands the kind of quiet cheering he is beginning to garner from some Republicans, and from those not affiliated with either party. They see him as a Democrat who could cure the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton sickness.

I call it that because it seems to me now less like a dynastic tug of war than a symptom of deterioration, a lazy, unserious and faintly corrupt turn to be taken by the oldest and greatest democracy in the history of man. And I say sickness because on some level I think it is driven by a delusion: “We will be safe with these ruling families, whom we know so well.” But we won’t. They have no special magic. Dynasticism brings with it a sense of deterioration. It is dispiriting.

I am not sure of the salience of Mr. Obama’s new-generational approach. Mrs. Clinton’s generation, he suggests, is caught in the 1960s, fighting old battles, clinging to old divisions, frozen in time, and the way to get past it is to get past her. Maybe this will resonate. But I don’t think Mrs. Clinton is the exemplar of a generation, she is the exemplar of a quadrant within a generation, and it is the quadrant the rest of us of that generation do not like. They came from comfort and stability, visited poverty as part of a college program, fashionably disliked their country, and cultivated a bitterness that was wholly unearned. They went on to become investment bankers and politicians and enjoy wealth, power or both.

Mr. Obama should go after them, not a generation but a type, the smug and entitled. No one really likes them. They showed it this week.

The story isn’t that the Democrats finally took on Hillary Clinton. Nor is it that they were gentlemanly to the point of gingerly and tentative. There was an air of “Please, somebody kill her for me so I can jump in and show high minded compassion at her plight!”

Barack Obama, with his elegance and verbal fluency really did seem like that great and famous political figure from his home state of Illinois—Adlai Stevenson, who was not at all hungry, not at all mean, and operated at a step removed from the grubby game. Mr. Obama is like someone who would write in his diaries, “I shall point out Estes Kefauver’s manifold inconsistencies, then to luncheon with Arthur and Marietta.”

The odd thing is it’s easier to be a killer when you know exactly what you stand for, when you have a real philosophy. The philosophy becomes a platform from which you can strike without ambivalence. Mr. Obama seems born to be mild. But still, that’s not the story.

Nor is it that John Edwards seems like a furry animal on a wheel, trying so hard, to the point he’s getting a facial tic, and getting nowhere, failing to get his little furry paws on his prey, not knowing you have to get off the wheel to get to the prey. You have to stop the rounded, rote, bromidic phrases, and use a normal language that cannot be ignored.

The story is not that Mrs. Clinton signaled, in attitude and demeanor, who she believes is her most dangerous foe, the great impediment between her and an easy glide to the nomination. Yes, that would be Tim Russert.

The story is that she talked about policy. Not talking points, but policy. In talking about it she seemed, for the first time, to be revealing what’s inside.

It was startling. It’s 1993 in there. The year before her fall, and rise.

I spent a day going over the transcripts so I could quote at length, but her exchanges are all over, it’s a real Google-fest. Here, boiled down, is what she said.

Giving illegal immigrants drivers licenses makes sense because it makes sense, but she may not be for it, but undocumented workers should come out of the shadows, and it makes sense. Maybe she will increase the payroll tax on Social Security beyond its current $97,500 limit, to $200,000. Maybe not. Everybody knows what the possibilities are. She may or may not back a 4% federal surcharge on singles making $150,000 a year and couples making $200,000. She suggested she backed it, said she didn’t back it, she then called it a good start, or rather “I support and admire” the person proposing such a tax for his “willingness to take this on.”

She has been accused of doubletalk and she has denied it. And she is right. It was triple talk, quadruple talk, Olympic level nonresponsiveness. And it was, even for her, rather heavy and smug. Her husband would have had the sense to look embarrassed as he bobbed and weaved. It was part of his charm. But he was light on his feet. She turns every dance into the polka. And it is that amazing thing, a grim polka.

*   *   *

But the larger point is that her policy approach revealed all the impulses not of the New Centrism but the Old Leftism. Her statements were redolent of the 1990s phrase “command and control.” They reflect a bias toward the old tax-raising on people who aren’t rich, who aren’t protected, the old “my friends and I know best, and we’ll fill you dullards in on the details later.”

For a few years now I’ve thought the problem for the Democrats in general but for Mrs. Clinton in particular is not that America is against tax increases. They’ve seen eight years of big spending, of wars, of spiraling entitlements. They’ve driven by the mansions of the megarich and have no sympathy for hedge fund/movie producer/cosmetics empire heirs. They sense the system is rigged toward the heavily protected. They sense this because they’re not stupid.

The problem for Mrs. Clinton is not that people sense she will raise taxes. It’s that they don’t think she’ll raise them on the real and truly rich. The rich are her friends. They contribute to her, dine with her, have access to her. They have an army of accountants. They’re protected even from her.

But she can stick it to others, and in the way of modern liberalism for roughly half a century now one suspects she’ll define affluence down. That she would hike taxes on people who make $150,000 a year.

But those “rich”—people who make $200,000 and have two kids and a mortgage and pay local and state taxes in, say, New Jersey—they don’t see themselves as rich. Because they’re not. They’re already carrying too much of the freight.

What Mrs. Clinton revealed the other night was more than an unfortunate persona. What I think she revealed was that her baseline thinking has perhaps not changed that much since the 1990s, when she was a headband wearing, power suited, leftist-who-hadn’t-been-wounded-yet. It seemed to me she made it quite possible to assume you know who she’ll be making war on. And this—much more than the latest scandal, the Chinatown funny money and the bundling—could, and I think would, engender real opposition down the road. The big chink in her armor is not stylistic, it is about policy. It is about the great baseline question in all political life: Whose ox is being gored?

*   *   *

A quick word here on why the scandals I refer to above do not deter Mrs. Clinton’s rise. There are people who’ve made quite a study of her life and times, and buy every book, from the awful ones such as Ed Klein’s to the excellent ones, such as Sally Bedell Smith’s recent “For Love of Politics,” a carefully researched, data-rich compendium on the Clintons’ time in the White House.

People who’ve studied Mrs. Clinton often ask why her ethical corner cutting and scandals have not caught up with her, why the whole history of financial and fund-raising scandals doesn’t slow her rise.

In a funny way she’s protected by her reputation. It’s so well known it’s not news. It doesn’t make an impression anymore. People have pointed out her ethical lapses for so long that they seem boring, or impossible to believe. “That couldn’t be true or she wouldn’t be running for president.” This thought collides with “And we already know all this anyway.” Her campaign uses the latter to squash the latest: “old news,” “cash for rehash.”

I’ve never seen anything quite like this dynamic work in modern politics. But the other night, for the first time, I had the feeling maybe it isn’t going to work anymore, or with such deadening consistency.

“I love chicks that have been intimate with IED’s,” he announced to his fellow soldiers sitting in the chow tent in Camp Falcon in Baghdad. “It really turns me on—melted skin, missing limbs, plastic noses.” The soldiers laughed so hard they almost fell from their chairs. They enjoy running over dogs in Bradley Fighting Vehicles, luring them in and then crushing their bones as they whelp. When a soldier comes upon a mass grave, he picks up a human skull, places it merrily on his head, and marches around.

This is from the now-famous “Baghdad Diaries,” in The New Republic, carrying the byline of soldier-writer Scott Thomas. They are an attempt to capture the tragedy and dehumanization of war, how it coarsens men in ways that you, safe in your bed, cannot fathom. They are a lost generation, battered by war, and struggling, with the real weapons of war’s survivors—mordant wit, pitiless humor, the final surrender to nihilism—to survive in a world they never made. Do I overwrite? Do I sound like an idiot? I’m just trying to fit in.

To read the Thomas pieces was, simply, to doubt them. And to wonder if its editors had ever actually met a soldier on his way to or from Iraq, or talked to any human being involved in the modern military.

The diaries appear to be another case of journalistic fabulism. This week came word, via the published transcript of a telephone conversation between “Thomas,” who is actually Scott Thomas Beauchamp, and his editors. It is actually painful to read. The editors almost plead with him to stand by his work, after months of critics’ picking them factually apart. He won’t do it. He doesn’t want to talk to “the media.” He’s said enough.

*   *   *

Everyone in journalism thought first of Stephen Glass. I actually remember the day I read his New Republic piece on the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington in 1997, a profile of young Republicans as crude and ignorant pot-smoking alcoholics in search of an orgy. It, um, startled me. After years of observation, I was inclined toward the view that there’s no such thing as a young Republican. More to the point, I’d been to the kind of convention Mr. Glass wrote about, and I thought it not remotely possible that the people he painted were real. I also thought: Man, this is way too convenient. The New Republic tends to think Republicans are hateful, and this reporter just happened to be welcomed into the private world of the most hateful Republicans in history.

On the Thomas stories, which I read not when they came out but when they began to come under scrutiny, I had a similar thought, or a variation of it. I thought: That’s not Iraq, that’s a Vietnam War movie. That’s not life as it’s being lived on the ground right now, that’s life as an editor absorbed it through media. That’s the dark world of Kubrick and Coppola and Oliver Stone, of the great Vietnam movies of the ’70s and ’80s.

If that’s what you absorbed during the past 20 or 30 years, it just might make sense to you, it would actually seem believable, if a fellow in Iraq wrote for you about taunting scarred women, shooting dogs, and wearing skulls as helmets. This is the offhand brutality of war. You know. You saw it in a movie.

If you’d had a broader array of references, and were less preoccupied by the media that is the great occupying force in our own country, and you were the editor of the Thomas pieces, you might have said, “Whoa.” Just whoa.

*   *   *

I’ll jump here, or lurch I suppose, to something I am concerned about that I think I am observing accurately. It has to do with what sometimes seems to me to be the limited lives that have been or are being lived by the rising generation of American professionals in the arts, journalism, academia and business. They have had good lives, happy lives, but there is a sense with some of them that they didn’t so much live it as view it. That they learned too much from media and not enough from life’s difficulties. That they saw much of what they know in a film or play and picked up all the memes and themes.

In terms of personal difficulties, they seem to have had less real-life experience, or rather different experiences, than their rougher predecessors. They grew up affluent in a city or suburb, cosseted in material terms, and generally directed toward academic and material success. Their lives seem to have been not crowded or fearful, but relatively peaceful, at least until September 2001, which was very hard.

But this new leadership class, those roughly 35 to 40, grew up in a time when media dominated all. They studied, they entered a top-tier college, and then on to Washington or New York or Los Angeles. But their knowledge, their experience, is necessarily circumscribed. Too much is abstract to them, or symbolic. The education establishment did them few favors. They didn’t have to read Dostoevsky, they had to read critiques and deconstruction of Dostoevsky.

I’m not sure it’s always good to grow up surrounded by stability, immersed in affluence, and having had it drummed into you that you are entitled to be a member of the next leadership class. To have this background in the modern era is to come from a ghetto, the luckiest ghetto in the world, a golden ghetto beyond whose walls it can be hard to see. There’s much to be said for suffering, for being on the outside or the bottom, for having to have fought yourself up and through. It can leave you grounded. It can give you real knowledge not only of the world and of other men but of yourself. In some ways it can leave you less cynical. (Not everything comes down to money.) And in some ways it leaves you just cynical enough.

*   *   *

Journalistically, I was lucky enough to work at CBS News when it was still shaped by the influence of the Murrow boys. They knew and taught that “everyone is entitled to his own opinions”—and they had them—”but not his own facts.” And I miss the rough old boys and girls of the front page, who’d greet FDR with “Snappy suit, Mr. President,” who’d bribe the guard to tell them what the prisoner said on the way to the chair, and who were not rich and important but performed an extremely important social function.

They found out who, what, where, when, why. And they would have looked at the half-baked, overcooked junior Hemingway of Scott Thomas Beauchamp and said, “That sounds like a buncha hooey.”

Where do things stand now with Hillary Clinton? What is her trajectory almost a year since it became clear she was running for the presidency?

Some time back I said she doesn’t have to prove she is a man, she has to prove she is a woman. Her problem is not her sex, as she and her campaign pretend. That she is a woman is a boon to her, a source of latent power. But to make it work, she has to seem like a woman.

No one doubts Mrs. Clinton’s ability to make war. No close or longtime observer has ever been quoted as saying that she may be too soft for the job. Instead one worries about what has always seemed her characterological bellicosity. She invented the War Room, listened in on the wiretaps, brought into the White House the man who got the private FBI files of the Clintons’ perceived enemies.

This is not a woman who has to prove she’s tough enough and mean enough; she is more like a bulldozer who has to prove she won’t always be in high gear and ready to flatten you. In private, her friends say—and I have seen it to be true—that she is humorous, bright, interested in the lives of others. But as a matter of political temperament and habit of mind, she is neither patient, high minded nor forbearing. Those who know Mrs. Clinton well, and my world is thick with them, have qualms about her toughness, not doubts.

But she is making progress. She is trying every day to change her image, and I suspect it’s working. One senses not that she has become more authentic, but that she has gone beyond her own discomfort at her lack of authenticity. I am not saying she has learned to be herself. I think after a year on the trail she’s learned how to not be herself, how to comfortably adopt a skin and play a part.

Her real self is a person who wants to run things, to assert authority, to create systems and have people conform to them. She is not a natural at the outsized warmth politics demands. But she is moving beyond—forgive me—the vacant eyes of the power zombie, like the Tilda Swinton character in ‘‘Michael Clayton.’’ The Boston Globe, dateline Manchester, N.H.: ‘‘Clinton is increasingly portraying herself more as motherly and traditional than as trailblazing and feminist.’’ In a week of ‘‘Women Changing America’’ events Mrs. Clinton has shared tales of Chelsea’s childhood and made teasing references to those who are preoccupied by her hairstyles and fashion choices. On ‘‘The View’’ she joked of her male rivals, ‘‘Well, look how much longer it takes me to get ready.’’ This was a steal from JFK’s joke about Jackie when she was late for an appearance: ‘‘It takes her longer to get ready, but then she looks so much better.’’

Her fund-raising emails have subject lines like, ‘‘Wow!’’ and ‘‘Let’s make some popcorn!’’ Her grin is broad and fixed. She is the smile on the Halloween pumpkin that knows the harvest is coming. She’s even putting a light inside.

In New York this week she told a women’s lunch that ‘‘we face a new question—a lot of people are asking whether America is ready to elect a woman to the highest office in our land.’’ She suggested her campaign will ‘‘prove that America is indeed ready.’’ She also quoted Eleanor Roosevelt: ‘‘Women are like tea bags—you never know how strong they are until they get in hot water.’’

*   *   *

Mrs. Clinton is the tea bag that brings the boiling water with her. It’s always high drama with her, always a cauldron—secret Web sites put up by unnamed operatives smearing Barack Obama in the tones of Tokyo Rose, Chinese businessmen having breakdowns on trains after the campaign cash is traced back, secret deals. It’s always flying monkeys. One always wants to ask: Why? What is this?

The question, actually, is not whether America is ‘‘ready’’ for a woman. It’s whether it’s ready for Hillary. And surely as savvy a campaign vet as Mrs. Clinton knows this.

Who, of all the powerful women in American politics right now, has inspired the unease, dismay and frank dislike that she has? Condi Rice, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein? These are serious women who are making crucial decisions about our national life every day. They inspire agreement and disagreement; they fight and are fought with. But they do not inspire repugnance. Nobody hates Barbara Mikulski, Elizabeth Dole or Kay Bailey Hutchison; everyone respects Ms. Rice and Ms. Feinstein.

Hillary’s problem is not that she’s a woman; it’s that unlike these women—all of whom have come under intense scrutiny, each of whom has real partisan foes—she has a history that lends itself to the kind of doubts that end in fearfulness. It is an unease and dismay based not on gender stereotypes but on personal history.

*   *   *

But here’s why I mentioned earlier the latent power inherent in the fact that Hillary is a woman.

It is true that 54% of the electorate is composed of women, and that what feminist sympathies they have may be especially enlivened this year by a strong appeal. It is not true that women in general vote in anything like a bloc, but it is probably true—I think it is true—that they share in a general way some rough and broad sympathies.

One has to do with what it is to be a woman in the world. To be active on any level in the life of the nation is to be immersed in controversy. If you are a woman, the to and fro, the fights you’re in, will to some extent be sharpened or shaped by what used to called sexism. There isn’t a woman in America who hasn’t been patronized—or worse—for being a woman, at least to some degree, and I mean all women, from the nun patronized by the bullying bishop to the congresswoman not taken seriously by the policy intellectual to the school teacher browbeaten by the school board chairman to the fare collector corrected by the huffy businessman. It happens to every woman.

Conservative women tend not to talk about it except to each other, and those conversations are voluble and pointed. They don’t go public with their complaints because they’re afraid it will encourage liberals to pass a law, and if you wanted more laws, or thought laws could reform human nature and make us all nice, you wouldn’t be a conservative. Their problem is sharpened by the fact that some conservative men are boorish and ungentlemanly to show how liberated they are. But I digress.

Or rather I don’t. The point is there are many women who will on some level be inclined to view Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy through the lens of their experience as women, and there is real latent sympathy there if she could tap it, which is what she’s trying to do.

But first, or more important, she will have to credibly and persuasively address what it is in her history—in her—that inspires such visceral opposition. That would be quite something if she did, or even tried.

Fred Thompson gives “a very incoherent and not very concise stump speech,” peaked months ago, and is the campaign’s “biggest dud.” Mitt Romney has “an authenticity problem”; he is “almost too mechanical about the issues.” John McCain faces “enormous hurdles,” and the “irony” of his quest is that he may just be repeating 2000. Mike Huckabee has “the obvious problems—being from Hope, Ark., and quite frankly having the last name Huckabee.” The craven Republicans are “terrified about losing the presidency after losing Congress.” All this comes from Terry McAuliffe, longtime Democratic Party mover, maven and moneyman, who’s obviously hoping for a Democratic win.

Only kidding. It comes from Mr. McAuliffe’s new podium partner on the Washington speech circuit, longtime Bush operative Dan Bartlett, recently departed after years as White House communications director. Mr. Bartlett has taken the old place of Ed Gillespie, the lobbyist, who used to appear with Mr. McAuliffe and is now back at the White House in Mr. Bartlett’s old job. This is why the late Drew Pearson called his column “Washington Merry-Go-Round.”

They serve and rarely leave. So often people work in government and make it more of a swamp; then they leave and become mosquitoes living off the pond scum, buzzing off the surface, eating well, issuing their little stings.

I am harsh. But it’s something I often wonder: Why don’t people in Washington go home anymore? I’m reading Michael Korda’s serene and gracious tribute to Dwight Eisenhower, “Ike: An American Hero,” and stopped dead at this part. The day his White House successor, JFK, was inaugurated, “in the middle of a heavy snowstorm, [Ike] and Mamie left quietly and unobtrusively . . . grateful that they were no longer the focus of attention, and drove the eighty miles to Gettysburg.” Oh for those days. And that sort.

*   *   *

Now, you wouldn’t think an adviser who helped steer a president to a sundered base, a flattened party and some of the lowest approval ratings since such polling began, would feel free to be so critical of others in politics. Profound modesty as to the depth of one’s own savvy might be in order.

But maybe Mr. Bartlett’s attitude illustrates a larger reality. The Bush people don’t seem to spend much time on loyalty to the party per se, only to their guy. Who after all is looking out for the Republican nominees, for the group of them? They are the future of the party. The Washington GOP apparatus is focused on the president, on asserting the brilliance of his legacy and, at this point, I’m sure, as in the Clinton days, on making sure he has a nice and well-funded presidential library. But who is looking out for his presumptive heirs? Why, for example, are they forced into debates that seem almost designed to diminish them? Having as moderator a preening cable jockey does nothing to enhance their stature. It is a recipe for sadness. Why don’t the Republican campaigns—the Republican establishment—try to get moderators of calm stature? Ted Koppel, for one, is an old-school broadcaster; he makes you look classy because he’s classy; he lends it to you as he asks you questions. What does Chris Matthews lend? Why not Keith Olbermann? Or Al Franken?

I am wondering if the Washington GOP establishment fails to look after these things because they don’t really think there’s life after Bush, or even care all that much. They think the next president is a Democrat. A lot of them will do lobbying for a living. Better learn to get along! And so the candidates swim with an anvil around their necks.

One of the few candidates Mr. Bartlett had nothing bad to say about was Rudy Giuliani, which suggests to me what I hear from those who visit the White House may be true: The president has decided it’s Rudy. He also told a friend that when the primary is over, he’ll campaign hard for the nominee. Here I imagine the candidates for once speaking in unison: Oh, please don’t!

Something I’d call the Twenty Percent Rule seems to exist in presidential polling. No matter what a president does, he gets to keep 20% approval. You could break into the Watergate hotel while having sex with an intern and keep them. The 20% is made up of the immovable, intractable base—those who fell for you early and hard and won’t quit, who hate the media so much that if they hate you they’ll love you, who are certain the incumbent is abused by history and its recent minor players, who stick because of this issue or that. And that 20%, by definition highly engaged in politics, always votes in the primaries.

Every candidate needs them. At the very least, no one wants to inspire their enmity. I asked a veteran conservative political professional what the candidates can do. He said, “No need to trash Bush by name. Run as Sarkozy focusing on the future. Those tired of Bush will see the distancing. Those enamored will assume the candidates love Bush. Say something nice about the Bush tax cuts or Supreme Court appointments. Bushies just need to hear something nice.”

The GOP challengers, no matter how they feel about Mr. Bush, can’t knock him, because that would infuriate the president’s 20% in Iowa, New Hampshire and elsewhere.

The exception is Ron Paul, who seems to have no fear of criticizing anybody, and, this week, John McCain, who in the debate had some sharp words for the current reality: “The American people no longer have trust or confidence in our government. Our failure at Katrina, our failures in Iraq, our failures to get spending under control. And we’ve got to restore that trust and confidence.” That sounded like the beginning of a little rebellion.

*   *   *

I suspect the Republican establishment knows all this, but I am not sure it concerns them overmuch. Why should it? If you are an absolute Bush partisan, you probably don’t really want a Republican to follow him and potentially, in decisions if not in words, rebuke him. That would be the worst thing, not being followed by Hillary or Obama. If the latter happens, the outgoing administration can—and will—blame the loss on lax candidates, on a party that wasn’t sufficiently inclusive, on congressional scandals, on immigration. “If only they’d followed our lead!”

They’ll be fine. The party may be defeated, the conservative coalition that raised them high sundered, but they’ll be all right. Which is important, because more than the president’s legacy is involved. Their very personal legacy is involved. No one wants to have worked for the biggest embarrassment in modern American political history. You won’t be burning up the public speaking trail with Terry McAuliffe that way.

Barack Obama has a great thinking look. I mean the look he gets on his face when he’s thinking, not the look he presents in debate, where they all control their faces knowing they may be in the reaction shot and fearing they’ll look shrewd and clever, as opposed to open and strong. I mean the look he gets in an interview or conversation when he’s listening and not conscious of his expression. It’s a very present look. He seems more in the moment than handling the moment. I’ve noticed this the past few months, since he entered the national stage. I wonder if I’m watching him more closely than his fellow Democrats are.

Mr. Obama often seems to be thinking when he speaks, too, and this comes somehow as a relief, in comparison, say, to Hillary Clinton and President Bush, both of whom often seem to be trying to remember the answer they’d agreed upon with staff. What’s the phrase we use about education? Hit Search Function. Hit Open. Right-click. “Equity in education is essential, Tim . . .”

You get the impression Mr. Obama trusts himself to think, as if something good might happen if he does. What a concept. Anyway, I’ve started to lean forward a little when he talks.

But he doesn’t stand a chance, right? His main competitor, Mrs. Clinton, is this week’s invincible. She broke through 50% for the first time in a big national poll—53% saying they would support her, a full 33 points more than Obama. Her third quarter fund raising beat everyone else’s. “It’s all over but the voting,” said Rep. Tom Petri, who will probably get pummeled a bit by the campaign for premature triumphalism. But he only said what a lot of people are starting to think.

*   *   *

Some Democrats seem proud they already know who their candidate is, unlike those messy Republicans who haven’t been able to resolve the issue. But should it be resolved before people vote?

Has the Democratic Party noticed it actually has some impressive candidates? They should not be written off, and when you think about it, it’s weird that they’re being written off. Joe Biden used to seem mildly giddy, vain but in a small way, not a big and interesting way. (Big is LBJ: Ah will impose mah will. Small: Where’s my hair-sculpting gel?) But it has been 35 years since he became a figure in Washington, and in the past few years in particular he has been ahead of his peers on Iraq—ahead with warnings, ahead with tripartite thinking, ahead with a seriousness and sobriety about the fix we’re in. He is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and he’s been reading daily threat reports for a long time. He is impressive. Why don’t the Democrats notice?

Chris Dodd is the head of the Senate Banking Committee, and nothing if not sophisticated. In the post-9/11 world, sophisticated is not so bad. He’s been in the Senate 27 years. In earlier years his thinking on government, his assumptions about what can and should be expected of it, veered from the utopian to the world-weary, and were sometimes both at once. But if you listen to him and watch him in debate, you might legitimately conclude this is a candidate who understands how it all works and what time it is. He’s one of the grown-ups.

Anybody notice?

*   *   *

Mr. Obama’s experience, as we all know, is as limited as Mrs. Clinton’s, which is to say limited indeed. She has held elective office for only 6 1/2 years. Before that she was first lady of Arkansas and then first lady of the United States. He has held national office for only 3 1/2 years, and before that was a state legislator for eight years. But he has impressed people, and not with money, résumé or clout but something rarer, natural gifts. That’s not nothing. Big talent is rare, and deserves consideration.

And yet the Democrats remain in their Hillary trance.

Not all, of course. Each candidate has his band of supporters, his little base. Mr. Obama is fortunate to have one with the grace and vigor of Ted Sorensen, John F. Kennedy’s great staffer and speechwriter, who told me this week, “I am supporting Obama.” He has known and liked the other main candidates, has “no objection to a female commander-in-chief and no ill feelings stemming from the Clinton stains on the escutcheon of the White House.” But Mr. Obama is “the one serious potential nominee of the Democratic Party who is most likely to win” and most likely “to end the tragic occupation of Iraq on terms compatible with our country’s best interests and traditional values.”

When I asked if his support was connected in any way to the idea of breaking away from the Bush-Clinton-Bush rotation, he said, “Above all, I believe this country needs change, and continuing the 20-year hold on the White House of the same two families is not my idea of change.”

*   *   *

That to me gets to the heart of the problem and the heart of The Trance. Mrs. Clinton is so far ahead so early on for the same reason Mr. Bush was so far ahead so early on in 2000, and after only six years as governor, with no previous offices behind him.
It is the nature of modern politics. A political family gains allies—retainers, supporters, hangers-on, admirers, associates, in-house Machiavellis. The bigger the government, the more ways allies can be awarded, which binds them more closely. Your destiny is theirs. Members of the court recruit others. Money lines spread person to person, company to company, board to board, mover to mover.

The most important part is the money lines. Power is expensive. The second most important part is the word “winner.” The Bushes are winners; the Clintons are winners. We know this, they’ve won. The Bushes are wired into the Republican money-line system; the Clintons are wired into the Democratic money-line system. For a generation, two generations now, they have had the same dynamics in play, only their friends are on the blue team, not the red, or the red, not the blue.

They are, both groups, up and ready and good to go every election cycle. They are machines. There are good people on each side, idealists, the hopeful, those convinced the triumph of their views will make our country better. And there are those on each side who are not so wonderful, not so well-meaning, not well-meaning at all. And some are idiots, but very comfortable ones.

Is this good for our democracy, this air of inevitability? Is it good in terms of how the world sees us, and how we see ourselves? Or is it something we want to break out of, like a trance?

It would be understandable if they were families of a most extraordinary natural distinction and self-sacrifice. But these are not the Adamses of Massachusetts we’re talking about. You’ve noticed, right?

You don’t want to judge Christ by Christians, someone once said. He is perfect, they are not.

In a similar way you don’t want to judge capitalism by capitalists, or the legitimacy of democracy by the Democrats, or the vitality of our republic by the Republicans. You have to take the thing pure and in itself, while allowing for the flaws and waywardness of its practitioners.

I say this because here in America we have reached a funny pass. People are doing and saying odd things as if they don’t know the meaning of the thing they say they stand for. In particular I mean we used to be proud of whom we allowed to speak, and now are leaning toward defining ourselves by whom we don’t speak to and will not allow to speak. This is not progress.

Conservatives on campus are shouted down. A crusader against illegal immigration is rushed off the stage at Columbia University. Great newspapers give ad breaks to groups with which they feel an ideological affinity, but turn away ads from those they do not, such as antiabortion groups. And they call this a business.

So much silencing. It seems so weak, so out of keeping with who we are. We love the tradition of free speech in America, but you don’t want to judge its health by what we’ve done with it lately, or to it.

*   *   *

In 1960 the premier of the Soviet Union came and spoke in the United States. Nikita Khrushchev was our sworn enemy, and a vulgarian—sweaty faced, ill educated, dressed in a suit just off the racks from the Gulag Kresge’s. I was a child, but I remember the impression he made. He took off his shoe and banged it, literally, on the soft beige wood of a desk at the U.N., as he fulminated. His nation had nuclear weapons. They were aimed at us.

The new Cuban dictator, Fidel Castro, was there too. He was young and bearded and dressed in camouflage; he too, soon, would have missiles pointed at us. He not only went to the U.N. and spoke to the world, he refused to stay at the Waldorf and sweetly chose instead a hotel in Harlem to show his solidarity with America’s oppressed. The Americans there seemed to get the joke, and welcomed him with laughter. They knew he was playing them. But then they’d been played before.

Khrushchev’s trip and Castro’s were all about propaganda, all about sticking it to Uncle Sam. And here’s what happened: Nothing. Their presence hurt our country exactly zero percent. In fact it raised us high, reminding the world we are the confident nation that lets its foes speak uncensored. As an adult nation would.

*   *   *

You know where I’m going. Is it necessary to say when one speaks of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that you disapprove of him, disagree with him, believe him a wicked fellow and are not amused that he means to have missiles aimed at us and our friends? If it is, I am happy to say it. Who, really, isn’t?

But this has been our history: to let all speak and to fear no one. That’s a good history to continue. The Council on Foreign Relations was right to invite him to speak last year—that is the council’s job, to hear, listen and parse—and Columbia University was well within its rights to let him speak this year. Though, in what is now apparently Columbia tradition, the stage was once again stormed, but this time verbally, and by a university president whose aggression seemed sharpened by fear.

There were two revealing moments in Ahmadinejad’s appearance. The first is that in his litany of complaint against the United States he seemed not to remember the taking and abuse of American diplomatic hostages in 1979. An odd thing to forget since he is said to have been part of that operation. The second was the moment when he seemed to assert that his nation does not have homosexuals. This won derisive laughter, and might have been a learning moment for him; dictators don’t face derisive from crowds back home.

It was like the moment in 1960 when Khrushchev’s motorcade stalled on Third Avenue and a commuter walked by and gave him the finger. Actually I don’t know there was such a moment, but knowing Americans I’m sure there was. Talking and listening to the wicked is the way we always operated in the long freak show that was 20th-century world leadership. And I’m sure before.

If Jefferson had dined only with those who’d been a force for good in the world, Jefferson would often have dined alone. If we insist only good and moral leaders talk to us, we’ll wind up surrounded by silence. In fact, if we insist we talk only to those whose good deeds have matched their high aspirations, we won’t always be on speaking terms with ourselves.

*   *   *

Domestically, the Democratic presidential candidates appear only before supportive groups. They don’t speak to antitax groups and talk about their own assumptions regarding tax policy. They don’t go to traditional values groups.

It’s all very controlled. And it’s unworthy of a great nation. When people say the campaign feels artificial, that’s what they mean. It’s not John Edwards’s hairspray or Hillary Clinton’s makeup. It’s that they give every sign of being afraid to speak and listen to those who haven’t been patted down by thought-cops for unacceptable views.

The Republicans are the same. An invitation to debate on Univision, the Spanish-language network? They have scheduling conflicts. What about the Log Cabin Republicans? No time right now.

How unserious.

If you, candidate A, have clear and serious reasons for desiring the wave of millions a year illegally over the border to stop, you should be able to talk to Hispanic groups and audiences about it. You go straight to them and appeal to their patriotism, fairness and common sense. Why? Because they’re patriotic and fair and have common sense. It is a compliment to show you know this.

Will some of them boo? Yes, of course. So what? Too bad. That’s the price you pay for being truthful at a tough time. And in America it’s always a tough time.

The staffs, gurus and handlers of all the candidates are always afraid their guy will get booed. But do they realize how tired we are of hearing the tepid applause that follows the predictable pander?

I know they’re all always eager to laud Ronald Reagan. But Reagan began his fall 1980 campaign in the South Bronx, and argued his case with people on the street. After he was elected, he pleaded for peace in letters to Leonid Brezhnev. Too bad he wasn’t tough enough. Oh wait.

I think the problem is not coming from normal Americans but from our leadership class, our academics and political leaders. The new fearfulness has resulted in new foreign policy: “Let’s not speak to Buffy.” Great. How’s that working for ya?