The Passion of President McCain

If the election had gone the other way, Americans would have been spared all this doubt and deliberation about what to do in the Middle East.

Asked today whether adding 10 or 20,000 troops for Afghanistan would suffice, John McCain tells CNN it would be "an error of historic proportions" not to meet Gen. McChrystal's request for 40,000 or more.

If Barack Obama were as sure of anything as McCain is of everything, there would be no need for agonizing over what conservative Peggy Noonan calls "a choice between two hells":

"The hell of withdrawal is what kind of drama would fill the vacuum, who would re-emerge, who would be empowered, what Pakistan would look like with a newly redrawn reality in the neighborhood, what tremors would shake the ground there as the U.S. troops march out...a great nation that had made a commitment in retreat...

"The hell of staying is equally clear, and vivid: more loss of American and allied troops, more damage to men and resources, an American national debate that would be a continuing wound and possibly a debilitating one, an overstretched military given no relief and in fact stretched thinner, a huge and continuing financial cost in a time when our economy is low," with no guarantee or even definition of success.

A resolute President McCain would have little patience for this kind of hemming and hawing even though, as Frank Rich points out, "He made every wrong judgment call that could be made after 9/11. It’s not just that he echoed the Bush administration’s constant innuendos that Iraq collaborated with Al Qaeda’s attack on America. Or that he hyped the faulty W.M.D. evidence to the hysterical extreme of fingering Iraq for the anthrax attacks in Washington. Or that he promised we would win the war 'easily.' Or that he predicted that the Sunnis and the Shiites would 'probably get along' in post-Saddam Iraq because there was 'not a history of clashes' between them.

"What’s more mortifying still is that McCain was just as wrong about Afghanistan and Pakistan. He routinely minimized or dismissed the growing threats in both countries over the past six years, lest they draw American resources away from his pet crusade in Iraq."

But the Might-Have-Been Republican President is content to keep shooting from the hip even as Defense Secretary Robert Gates, another Republican, joins Hillary Clinton in emphasizing a more considered approach:

"(T)he new commander has done an assessment and found a situation in Afghanistan that is more serious than we anticipated when the decisions were made in March. So that's one thing to take into account.

"The other is, clearly, a flawed election in Afghanistan that has complicated the picture for us...

"The president is being asked to make a very significant decision. And the notion of being willing to pause, reassess basic assumptions, reassess the analysis, and then make those decisions seems to me, given the importance of these decisions...among the most important he will make in his entire presidency--seems entirely appropriate."

With McCain in the White House, Gates would be in deep trouble for waffling like that.

Fear Factor: Pearl Harbor to 9/11

Today is a reminder for those who live in one of the few places in the world where feeling safe is commonplace of what it's like suddenly to live with fear, to have the ground stop feeling solid under your feet.

Older generations experienced this epiphany in 1941 with Pearl Harbor. Their children were baptized by the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now a new generation tells Peggy Noonan how they were transformed by the "life-splitting event" of eight years ago:

"Before it they were carefree, after they were careful. A 20-year-old junior told me that after 9/11, 'a backpack on a subway was no longer a backpack,' and a crowded theater was 'a source for concern.' Every one of them used the word 'bubble': the protected bubble of their childhood 'popped'...The video of 9/11 has firmly and ineradicably entered their brains. Which is to say their first visual memory of America, or their first media memory, was of its towers falling down."

Each generation takes a different lesson from its trauma. The Greatest had to grow up overnight and go off to fight in foreign places or stay behind to work in war plants and live with meat and gas rationing.

The Baby Boomers took the shock of nuclear reality in the 1960s to start a "youthquake" against their parents' values about gender, race, sexuality and fighting an ideological war in Vietnam.

What will this generation make out of its loss of innocence? The memorials at Ground Zero are still unfinished, but by presidential decree, today will be the first 9/11 anniversary to be commemorated as a National Day of Service and Remembrance, encouraging a tribute of sacrificing for the common good through volunteer work.

Such efforts won't get any headlines, but they are a much more traditional American way of responding to shock and awe than retreating into rancor, mistrust and selfish squabbling.

No "Care" in Health Care

The political debate about healing is looking more and more like the last scene of "The Bridge on the River Kwai," a dazed doctor amid carnage mumbling "Madness, madness."

Not long after that 1950s movie about savagery arising from noble intentions, the psychoanalyst-philosopher Erich Fromm was obsessed with what he called "The Myth of Care." Stunned by social upheaval in the Sixties and rage over Vietnam, the author of "The Art of Loving" and "The Sane Society" kept searching newspapers and TV screens for images of people reaching out to help and comfort one another.

If he were alive today, Fromm would have an even harder time than he did back then finding evidence that, as they argue about health care, Americans haven't turned brutal and uncaring.

Barack Obama, who came to power as a healing figure, is being swamped by public anxieties and, the harder he works at being rational in an overheated atmosphere of fear and distrust, the more the President is judged as having passed the "point at which realism shades over into weakness" (Paul Krugman) and failing to take advantage of "the teachable moment" on health care (Peggy Noonan).

But whatever the potential damage to his party in next year's voting and his own prospects for reelection in 2012, the sight of Obama wandering the ruins of the health reform landscape, still trying to reason with unreasonable opposition, is less an indictment of the most gifted political figure of our time than a reminder that the best-educated, best-informed generations have not evolved much from the benighted days of half a century ago.

If anything, someone eligible for being hailed before a death panel might say that they have slid a long way back.

"Honey, We Shrunk the President"

After months of a bigger-than-life presidency, Barack Obama is being cut down to size--by the enormity of an economic crisis, by orchestrated fear of Change as a reality rather than an idea and by exhaustion of the hope and idealism he stirred up during two years of campaigning. But behind the falling poll numbers and raucous town halls, something else may be going on.

"Health Debate Fails to Ignite Obama’s Web," says a New York Times headline for a report from Iowa: "As the health care debate intensifies, the president is turning to his grass-roots network--the 13 million members of Organizing for America--for support.

"Mr. Obama engendered such passion last year that his allies believed they were on the verge of creating a movement that could be mobilized again. But if a week’s worth of events are any measure here in Iowa, it may not be so easy to reignite the machine that overwhelmed Republicans a year ago."

Sensing a potential Obama Waterloo, the previously overwhelmed are suddenly energized. "The Obama White House has done the near impossible," Peggy Noonan claims. "It has united the Republican Party. Social conservatives, economic conservatives, libertarians—they're all against the health-care schemes as presented so far. They're shoulder-to-shoulder at the barricade again."

Maybe so, but there are also signs that Obama is morphing, not into Jimmy Carter as Noonan suggests, but more of an embattled Harry Truman who found his presidential voice by taking on a "good-for-nothing" Congress in 1948.

In his less combative way, Obama is now directly confronting the proprietors of America's failed " health care system that works better for the insurance industry than it does for the American people."

In today's weekly address, he says: "If you’re worried about rationed care, higher costs, denied coverage, or bureaucrats getting between you and your doctor, then you should know that’s what’s happening right now. In the past three years, over 12 million Americans were discriminated against by insurance companies due to a preexisting condition, or saw their coverage denied or dropped just when they got sick and needed it most.

"Americans whose jobs and health care are secure today just don’t know if they’ll be next to join the 14,000 who lose their health insurance every single day. And if we don’t act, average family premiums will keep rising to more than $22,000 within a decade."

In Montana yesterday, the President was confronted by an insurance salesman who asked him to explain why he was "vilifying" insurance companies. Obama told him and, in the coming weeks, will undoubtedly be telling Americans everywhere who the enemy is.

In what looks like the wreckage of his hopes for health care reform, Barack Obama, like John Paul Jones when asked to surrender, may be saying, "I have not yet begun to fight."

Unhealthy Debate About Health Care

Left and right, anxiety over the ugly turn of American politics this month is provoking conflict about the conflict.

Paul Krugman decries "recent town halls, where angry protesters--some of them, with no apparent sense of irony, shouting “This is America!”--have been drowning out, and in some cases threatening, members of Congress trying to talk about health reform."

Across the ideological divide, Peggy Noonan finds, "What the protesters are saying is, 'You are terrifying us,'" expressing "a feeling of rebellion, an uprising against change they do not believe in."

Both sides agree that some of the outrage is trumped up--by "well-heeled interest groups...crass as they come" (Krugman) or the White House itself (Noonan), compiling an "enemies list" with an "email address to which citizens are asked to report instances of 'disinformation' in the health-care debate."

According to The Hill, "The showdowns between lawmakers and constituents have not only fueled the high-stakes battle over healthcare reform but also started a debate over the authenticity of the interruptions.

"With websites like EmbarrassYourCongressman.com encouraging activists to upload video and pictures from the heated meetings, Democratic members are asking Speaker Nancy Pelosi whether they should continue holding town hall meetings with large numbers of people...

"The Speaker has advised her rank and file to do what they deem appropriate. She said scheduled town hall meetings should go ahead as planned. There are other ways to get the message out, including tele-town halls, interviews, one-on-one meetings with constituents and news conferences, leadership aides said."

We are a long way, as Krugman notes, from the Norman Rockwell painting illustrating FDR’s "Four Freedoms" that "shows an ordinary citizen expressing an unpopular opinion. His neighbors obviously don’t like what he’s saying, but they’re letting him speak his mind."

For an historical parallel, we have to go back even more to William Butler Yeat's post-World War I poem, "The Second Coming":

"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.../The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity."

Taking Obama's Measure

With ten percent of his term in office gone, Barack Obama is being graded from the left and right and, not surprisingly, found to be doing (1) not enough and (2) too much.

(1) Paul Krugman faults him for "Not Enough Audacity," praising "Barack the Policy Wonk, whose command of the issues--and ability to explain those issues in plain English--is a joy to behold" but faulting "Barack the Post-Partisan, who searches for common ground where none exists, and whose negotiations with himself lead to policies that are far too weak."

(2) Peggy Noonan sees "a persistent sense of extraneous effort, of ambitions too big and yet too small, too off point, too base-pleading, too ideological, too unaware of the imperatives. And there is the depressing psychological effect of seeing government grow so much, so big, so fast. This encourages a sense that things are out of control and cannot be made better."

Somewhere between these polar views may be many who are less outspoken but trust Obama's instincts and judgment and, given the challenges he has to face, are willing to cut him some slack when he seems to be moving too fast or too slowly or trying to do too little or too much but won't hesitate to criticize him when we think he's going off course.

The opinion polls are getting iffy, but we still seem to be in a majority (pace Rush Limbaugh) who understand that, if Obama fails, we all do.

Sound-Bite Coming of Age

Grownups are just children who owe money, said a character in the 1992 movie "Peter's Friends" and now, with the economic crisis, they owe even more and, thanks to 24/7 cable TV, seem less mature than ever.

"Republicans, Let's Play Grown-Up," Peggy Noonan urges in the Wall Street Journal, suggesting that "idiots" in her party rise above temper tantrums in opposing Sonia Sotomayor:

"Don't grill and grandstand, summon and inform. Show the respect that expresses equality and the equality that is an expression of respect. Ask and listen, get the logic, explain where you think it wrong. Fill the airwaves with thoughtful exchanges."

As a grown-up White House tries to deal with overheated attacks on Obama's nominee as "racist," thoughtful exchanges are in short supply.

In his weekly address, the President observes, "There are, of course, some in Washington who are attempting to draw old battle lines and playing the usual political games, pulling a few comments out of context to paint a distorted picture of Judge Sotomayor’s record. But I am confident that these efforts will fail; because Judge Sotomayor’s seventeen-year record on the bench--hundreds of judicial decisions that every American can read for him or herself--speak far louder than any attack; her record makes clear that she is fair, unbiased, and dedicated to the rule of law."

But how many Americans will read any of those hundreds of decisions? How many more will make up their minds based on Keith Olbermann's rage about G. Gordon Liddy's radio rant comparing La Raza to the KKK and hoping that "key conferences" of the Supreme Court don't take place "when she's menstruating or something"?

Noonan says, "Comment-thread conservatives, like their mirror-image warriors on the left ("Worst person in the woooorrrlllddd!") are perpetually agitated, permanently enraged. They don't need to be revved, they're already revved. Newt Gingrich twitters that Judge Sotomayor is a racist. Does anyone believe that? He should rest his dancing thumbs, stop trying to position himself as the choice and voice of the base in 2012, and think."

Sounds good, but don't hold your breath from now until 2012 waiting for them all to grow up.

Obama-Bush Word War

The Administration's verbosity is under bi-coastal attack today from two former Bush factotums.

Bush I speechwriter Peggy Noonan complains in the Wall Street Journal: "As the federal government claims ever greater powers, its language has become vague to the point of meaningless and meaningless to the point of menacing."

On his Los Angeles Times blog, Andrew Malcolm, who was once Laura Bush's press secretary, offers an "Obama Era Language Update," explaining how "terror" and "drug war" have been euphemized into "man-caused disasters" and "a public health issue requiring treatment more than enforcement."

Of the latter, Malcolm predicts "vaccinations against drive-by shootings and muggings."

Noonan meanwhile under the title, "What's Elevated, Health-Care Provider?" drubs Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius for using expressions like "accessing affordable quality health care" instead of "going to the doctor."

After eight years of W's mangled simplifications like "axis of evil," the Obama crew's wonkery may indeed be fair game (Treasury Secretary Geithner recently took on a tutor in plain speaking), but "menacing" is more than bit much.

It was Ms. Noonan, after all, who had the first Bush saying, "Read my lips--no new taxes," and we all know how well that bit of straight talk worked out.

Authenticity Chic

Trend watchers are celebrating what Peggy Noonan describes as the end of "bland affluence" in the economic downturn, the forced return to good old-fashioned down-home American values.

"The cities and suburbs of America are about to get rougher-looking," she writes. "This will not be all bad. There will be a certain authenticity chic. Storefronts, pristine buildings—all will spend less on upkeep, and gleam less.

"So will humans. People will be allowed to grow old again...There will be fewer facelifts and browlifts, less Botox, less dyed hair among both men and women. They will look more like people used to look, before perfection came in. Middle-aged bodies will be thicker and softer, with more maternal and paternal give. There will be fewer gyms and fewer trainers, but more walking."

As an octogenarian, I've heard this song before--more than once. In the 1960s, many retreated from city life and spent up to four hours a day commuting to the country where they could chop wood, grow vegetables and rear children with small-town values.

In the following decades, as a magazine editor, I saw the rising popularity of periodicals like Country Living, Real Simple, Vermont Life et al.

Below the radar of Baby Boomer striving, there has always been a strain of longing for a better life, for authenticity--not the chic of dressing up in it.

As a lifelong walker who has never had a personal trainer or spent time in a gym, I can reassure the newly poor that they won't be giving up much.

"The new home fashion will be spare," Noonan predicts. "This will be the return of an old WASP style: the good, frayed carpet; dogs that look like dogs and not a hairdo in a teacup, as miniature dogs back from the canine boutique do now."

Man (and Woman) need not live by Botox alone.

Deck Chairs on the Titanic

The shipboard news today is that the new president is tightening his grip on the helm as Republicans reach for the wheel, but only a few dour souls are up on deck scouring the horizon for icebergs.

Obama rallies Congressional Democrats at their retreat: "We're not going to get relief by turning back to the very same policies that, for the last eight years, doubled the national debt and threw our economy into a tailspin. We can't embrace the losing formula that says only tax cuts will work for every problem we face, that ignores critical challenges like our addiction to foreign oil, or the soaring cost of health care, or failing schools and crumbling bridges and roads and levees.

"I don't care whether you're driving a hybrid or an SUV-- if you're headed for a cliff, you've got to change direction."

In the first-class lounge, Peggy Noonan sees passengers "braced" for impact while she points out that Obama's "serious and consequential policy mistake is that he put his prestige behind not a new way of breaking through but an old way of staying put. This marked a dreadful misreading of the moment. And now he's digging in. His political mistake, which in retrospect we will see as huge, is that he remoralized the Republicans. He let them back in the game."

Scanning the horizon, Paul Krugman points out that "most economic forecasts warn that in the absence of government action we’re headed for a deep, prolonged slump" and agrees that "the president made a big mistake in his initial approach, that his attempts to transcend partisanship ended up empowering politicians who take their marching orders from Rush Limbaugh."

Krugman and the Times editorial page call for full steam ahead, Republicans want to stop stoking the boilers and the rest of us keep trying to remember how we got shanghaied onto this luxury cruise in the first place.

Vacuous Valedictory

"All good things must come to an end" is the start of his New York Times essay today, which concludes with an editor's note: This is William Kristol’s last column.

The subject of the piece is not the writer's tenure:

"Since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, conservatives of various sorts, and conservatisms of various stripes, have generally been in the ascendancy. And a good thing, too! Conservatives have been right more often than not--and more often than liberals--about most of the important issues of the day: about Communism and jihadism, crime and welfare, education and the family. Conservative policies have on the whole worked--insofar as any set of policies can be said to 'work' in the real world. Conservatives of the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush years have a fair amount to be proud of."

It's fitting for Kristol to go out on a high note of error. klutzy writing and self-delusion, but apparently the market for his kind of babbling is not entirely dead. He came to the Times after a stint with Time, and now there are reports that the Washington Post, apparently suffering from a lack of wrong-headedness not completely satisfied by Charles Krauthammer and Michael Gerson, will avail themselves of Kristol's wisdom occasionally.

Whatever. The Times' next move should be to go after an elegant conservative like Peggy Noonan to go with their other literate columnists.

The Cabdriver's Inaugural Address

The moment in history is little more than a weekend away and, as Peggy Noonan writes today from Washington, "Everyone wants to be part of it."

She tells of Obama's speechwriter Jon Favreau in a taxi mentioning that he knows someone in the new administration:

"The cabdriver handed him a fully written inaugural address, and asked him to pass it on. Later, thinking of this, unbidden and for no clear reason, the words of the theme of the 1956 movie 'Friendly Persuasion' came to mind: 'Thee is mine, though I don't know many words of praise / Thee pleasures me in a hundred ways.' Jessamyn West's celebration of the Quakers of Indiana during the Civil War is a tale of a community living apart from a great drama and yet within that drama.

"And so the cabdriver, who works a shift, is up at night writing his inaugural address for Mr. Obama, knowing, this being America, the most fluid country in history, a place of unforeseen magic, that he would meet someone who knows someone. We all want to be together, to work together, we all want to be part of the history, of the time. And why not? Join in. Lightning strikes."

That feeling will swell up everywhere over the next few days, an unreasonable tide of hope and pride in the darkest of days, overwhelming everything we know and fear to move us to tears.

We are all living in a Frank Capra movie now--"Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," "Meet John Doe," "It's a Wonderful Life"--and we don't want to hear that it's all fantasy, that the houselights will come up and send us out into a cold, dark night of reality.

I can't wait to learn what Barack Obama and Jon Favreau have written for Tuesday, but I wish I could hear the cabdriver's inaugural address, too.

Advice to the Times: Get Noonan

As William Kristol's year-long gig (Why does it seem so much longer?) runs out, the Gray Lady should go after the stylish Peggy Noonan to replace him.

Those of us who have been gagging over Kristol's dopey, fact-free New York Times columns would welcome Noonan as a reminder of the days when conservatives had a way with words as well as ideas (see Will, George and Sullivan, Andrew). In the coming era of Sarah Palin, they will be needed more than ever in the national political discussion.

Today's Noonan effort in the Wall Street Journal is a sweet sample of her talents, parsing yesterday's Obama speech about the economy:

"He spoke of 'our capacity for future greatness' and argued 'the very fact that this crisis is largely of our own making means that it is not beyond our ability to solve.' This was a relief. It's time someone began to speak of the current crisis with optimism, as if it can be handled and got through. This is not a nation of 300 million people in extremis and on a morphine drip; it's a nation of 300 million people who are alive, alert and ready to go."

Looking at the mug shot of five presidents in the Oval Office, Noonan observes:

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

If the Times needs any further incentive to go after Noonan, it would bring the added satisfaction of taking something valuable away from the media's mad acquirer Rupert Murdoch.

The Conservative Case for Obama

As polls show pushy Palinism hurting McCain's chances, the struggle for the Republican future is reflected by two traditional conservatives, Peggy Noonan and George Will.

In the Wall Street Journal today, Noonan, who wrote speeches for Reagan and Bush I, makes "the case for Obama" this way:

"He has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need changing; his rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief. He climbed steep stairs, born off the continent with no father to guide, a dreamy, abandoning mother, mixed race, no connections. He rose with guts and gifts. He is steady, calm, and, in terms of the execution of his political ascent, still the primary and almost only area in which his executive abilities can be discerned, he shows good judgment in terms of whom to hire and consult, what steps to take and moves to make. We witnessed from him this year something unique in American politics: He took down a political machine without raising his voice.

"A great moment: When the press was hitting hard on the pregnancy of Sarah Palin's 17-year-old daughter, he did not respond with a politically shrewd 'I have no comment,' or 'We shouldn't judge.' Instead he said, 'My mother had me when she was 18," which shamed the press and others into silence. He showed grace when he didn't have to."

In the Washington Post, Pultizer-Prize columnist George Will, under a heading of "Call Him John the Careless," makes the conservative case against McCain:

"From the invasion of Iraq to the selection of Sarah Palin, carelessness has characterized recent episodes of faux conservatism. Tuesday's probable repudiation of the Republican Party will punish characteristics displayed in the campaign's closing days...

"Palin may be an inveterate simplifier; McCain has a history of reducing controversies to cartoons. A Republican financial expert recalls attending a dinner with McCain for the purpose of discussing with him domestic and international financial complexities that clearly did not fascinate the senator. As the dinner ended, McCain's question for his briefer was: 'So, who is the villain?'"

No liberal could make the case for Obama and against McCain any better than that.

Out of the Mouths of Boobs

Two leaders of the get-paid-to-be-stupid-in-public punditry give us gems today, Pat Buchanan with his pronouncement that Colin Powell is backing Barack Obama because he's black and William Kristol scolding Peggy Noonan for saying that Sarah Palin is symptomatic of "a new vulgarization in American politics.”

Buchanan can't help belaboring the obnoxious obvious, but Kristol reaches new heights of sappiness in attacking Noonan:

"Why do elites like to proclaim premature closure--not just in elections, but also in wars and in social struggles? Because it makes them the imperial arbiters, or at least the perspicacious announcers, of what history is going to bring. This puts the elite prognosticators ahead of the curve, ahead of the simple-minded people who might entertain the delusion that they still have a choice."

Aside from attacking what he does for a living in prose that shows an urgent need for instruction in remedial invective, Kristol is making the case that Joe the Plumber is "the latest ordinary American to do a star turn in our vulgar democratic circus. He seems like a sensible man to me...

"McCain and Palin have had the good sense to embrace him. I join them in taking my stand with Joe the Plumber--in defiance of Horace the Poet."

When Kristol's New York Times gig expires, the editors should seriously consider Joe as his replacement.

Cracked Republican Coalition

As the McCain-Palin campaign veers Wild Westward, the GOP Eastern elite is dropping off the wagon train.

CNN reports a "conservative backlash" to McCain's mortgage proposal with the National Review deriding the plan as "creating a level of moral hazard that is unacceptable."

George Will says "the McCain-Palin campaign's attempt to get Americans to focus on Obama's Chicago associations seems surreal--or, as a British politician once said about criticism he was receiving, 'like being savaged by a dead sheep.'"

Peggy Noonan issues "a warning" to Republicans: "When your crowds go from 'I love you' to 'I hate the other guy,' you are in trouble, you are on a losing strain. Winning campaigns are built on love."

David Brooks observes that "no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the 'normal Joe Sixpack American' and the coastal elite. She is another step in the Republican change of personality."

David Gergen goes from his CNN gig to the Colbert Report to repeat his warnings about Palin's stirring of racial hatred.

As the best Republican brains desert the McCain cause, he is in danger of being isolated among the yahoos and crackpots.

Forces of Nature

With a Katrina-sized hurricane bearing down on Texas amid whirlwind parsing of Sarah Palin's interview by Charlie Gibson, this looks like a weekend of hunkering down and hoping--a time for looking inward and wishing for the best.

As rational creatures, we want an explanation for everything so we can figure out how to cope. But especially on the day after 9/11, we know that some events are unforeseeable and leave us feeling helpless.

Weather forecasters predict "certain death" for those who stay in the Galveston area, and Peggy Noonan tells Obama supporters about Palin, "You can never kill her now. Forget it. She can hurt herself, but in terms of Democratic attacks she is bulletproof."

The hurricane is an immediate threat to life and limb, so it may be insensitive and unfair to compare its force to the potential destructiveness of a political figure who may or may not devastate our national life in the future.

But both are reminders that, much as we think of ourselves as knowledgeable, competent and evolved human beings, there are things in life we can't control. We just have to wait them out until things get back to normal.

A President From Nowhere

After Barack Obama or John McCain leaves the White House, where will future generations go to tour the boyhood home that shaped a president? Hawaii? Indonesia? The Panama Canal Zone?

For a long time, I lived near Hyde Park, where FDR was born and spent his years before moving into the White House. "All that is within me cries out to go back to my home on the Hudson River," he said as he was making history, and American generations can still visit, see and touch the reality that formed him and told him who he was and could be.

For the candidates in this election there is, as Gertrude Stein said, no there there. "Obama and McCain," Peggy Noonan writes, "are not from a place, but from an experience" and the "lack of placeness with both candidates contributes to a sense of their disjointedness, their floatingness."

This 21st century identity gap started with George W. Bush, who was born in Connecticut, grew up in Texas and spent most of his life before politics trying to figure out who he was and where he belonged. No matter how often we see him cutting brush, our sense of who he is and where he came from remains hazy.

For Obama, lack of a geographical label may even be an advantage, George Packer claims in the New Yorker, asserting that "a black man who, unlike Obama, is deeply rooted in America is probably unelectable today. His rootedness would be inseparable from his blackness, an identity that has to recede far into the background for a black candidate to have a chance."

And yet, anxiety about both candidates today may have much to do with the voters' sense that, as Noonan says, one of them is "from Young. He's from the town of Smooth in the state of Well Educated. He's from TV" and the other "from Military. He's from Vietnam Township in the Sunbelt state."

In the past century, Warren G. Harding campaigned from the front porch of his Victorian house in Marion, Ohio, which is still there for anyone who pays $6 to look at and wander through as is the boyhood home of Ronald Reagan in Dixon, Illinois, complete with a bowl of the popcorn he liked to munch before he went to California and invented himself first as an actor and then as a politician.

Our next president's defining home will not be geographical but a set of images on the Internet from all over the world, and we can only hope that that lack of a specific locale won't keep him from being grounded in reality.

The Russert Connection

In the week since he died, after all the millions of words about his life, there is the question of, beyond the self-love of media people celebrating themselves, why do so many care so much about Tim Russert's death?

Peggy Noonan today has the start of an answer: "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 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.'"

In the week's outpouring of sentiment, there was a striking emphasis on Russert's random acts of kindness-concern for people and their families far beyond the token gestures of a political life. After all the talk about his work, we are left with the residue of a sweet man who lived out E. M. Forster's injunction, "Only connect!"

What we long for in our hyperactive, overcrowded and wised-up lives is some joining of what Forster called "the prose and the passion"--some sense of a feeling heart behind all the cunning and the calculation of it all.

Tim Russert of Buffalo knew just what E M. Forster of Cambridge meant.

Hillary Clinton's Nixon Moment

Who will tell her it's time to go? Certainly not her husband, whose dynastic hopes will die hardest. Nor the limp leaders of Congressional Democrats, although Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein have been clearing their throats. Al Gore is too busy saving the planet and Howard Dean is just trying to hang onto his job as party chairman.

As Barack Obama now takes the lead in the slow dribble of superdelegates into his pledge pool, there is no one to do for Hillary Clinton what Republican leaders did for Richard Nixon in August 1974, when the Senate Minority Leader, House Minority Leader and Barry Goldwater, the former presidential candidate, went to the White House and told him that hanging on was hopeless. Nixon stepped down the next day.

But the Clintons are not good listeners and, as their desperation grows, she is openly relying on race, telling USA Today that "Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again...There's a pattern emerging here."

One of her non-fans, Peggy Noonan, writes in today's Wall Street Journal: "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."

But with friends like its weak-kneed nabobs, the Democratic Party doesn't need enemies. When will its leaders do for Hillary Clinton what Republicans did for Richard Nixon before he took his own party down in flames?