But though our historical memories are full of Commodore Perry and the opening of Japan, John Hay and the Open Door in China, and Lyndon Johnson and the open-ended war in Vietnam, it's important to remember that there always has been a strain of deference in American relations with the East.

Of course we Americans have been historically illiterate from the beginning. This has been (as the Chinese might say) both crisis and opportunity -- or,...]]> Sat, 14 Nov 2009 22:00:00 -0800 WASHINGTON -- Is it possible to hear the sound of hands wringing? Or of souls agonizing? Or of ironies clanging?

I think you can. I think that if you listen carefully you can hear all three this month in the capital -- and I'm not talking about Republicans worrying whether they might be endangered in the Obama era, or about conservatives wrestling with whether it is prudent for insurgents to challenge establishment Republicans, or about GOP leaders wondering if the party has anybody who might run a credible candidacy against an incumbent president whose aura of destiny has suddenly been transformed into a sense of vulnerability.

No, the wringing, the agonizing and the...]]> Sat, 07 Nov 2009 22:00:00 -0800 We thought it meant the end of international contention. We thought it meant the nuclear menace was no more. We thought it meant Russia and America, the two powers of the future envisioned by de Tocqueville, could be friends. We thought it meant the end of espionage. We thought it might even be the end of history.

We were wrong, dead wrong, tragically wrong, about all of it, because we did what great powers always do when they are engaged in great contests. We thought that if only we could get through the Cold War (or World War I, or World War II) we would enter the sunlit uplands, where serenity and prosperity reigned, purchased effortlessly by (and this was the phrase that was...]]> Fri, 30 Oct 2009 22:00:00 -0700 It may be that a swift resolution to the Afghanistan debate is essential. It may be that political pressures make delay unappealing or even impossible. It may be that President Barack Obama's growing reputation for leisurely consideration and for easy compromise requires him to make a brisk ruling on American policy in Afghanistan.

But this is incontrovertibly true: The Obama administration and the American people are not remotely prepared to make a thoughtful, intelligent choice about what to do in central Asia. To make a deeply considered decision, the administration and Americans need to have, and resolve, five debates:

A debate about the connection between the Taliban...]]> Sat, 24 Oct 2009 22:00:00 -0700 SWAMPSCOTT, Mass. -- Let me tell you about my fifth-grade classroom. It was upstairs in the 80-year-old wing of the Stanley School, right under a classic New England cupola. We young scholars sat at manila-yellow desks that squished our knees. Over on the left side a series of cages held all manner of wildlife. On the chalkboard, in Palmer-perfect script, were written the details of the life cycle of the butterfly, or maybe the distinction between herring gulls, black-backed gulls, Bonaparte's gulls and common terns, for in our beach town and especially in this classroom these distinctions took on great importance.

Presiding over this mess of litter and learning was Clara...]]> Sat, 17 Oct 2009 22:00:00 -0700 WASHINGTON -- Maybe it happened on an afternoon when no one was looking. Maybe it occurred when everyone was focused on something else, or preoccupied with other matters. Maybe it happened one night.

But this is no romantic comedy, and there is no Clark Gable or Claudette Colbert involved. Yet it definitely happened. The Iraq war, once owned by George W. Bush, suddenly became Barack Obama's. So, too, the war in Afghanistan. And the economy. Don't forget the threat from Iran. They're all Obama's now.

I'm calling it President Obama's Frank Capra moment, and it's playing on a video screen near you -- though, unlike the 1934 movie for which this phenomenon is named, no one...]]> Sat, 10 Oct 2009 22:00:00 -0700 Washington has turned into one big book club, and everybody seems to be reading the same two books. They are not Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows' wonderful "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society," which (justifiably) is the top book club selection in the rest of the country, nor Alan Bradley's affecting British mystery novel, "The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie," published this spring and already a book club classic.

Instead, all of Washington is reading an inch-thick tome by a West Point graduate with a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins and a 300-page meditation on the life of McGeorge Bundy by a young man who manages a Brookings Institution project on sovereign wealth...]]> Sat, 03 Oct 2009 22:00:00 -0700 WASHINGTON -- The president sits at ease in a blue suit, blue shirt and blue patterned tie. Over one shoulder is a bronze bust of Martin Luther King, the civil rights leader who was slain when the president was 6 years old. Over the other shoulder is a bronze bust of Abraham Lincoln by the Gilded Age sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, whom Obama no doubt knows as the artist behind the Shaw Memorial, the unforgettable tribute to the black infantry unit that fought for the Union in the Civil War.

This is Obama's moment, and it is Obama's White House.

He is settling in, growing comfortable with his office and in his office. He installed the great George Peter Alexander Healy...]]> Sat, 26 Sep 2009 22:00:00 -0700 PITTSBURGH -- Party's over. The visiting police and protesters are gone; the fences and barbed wire are coming down. Someone's making a fortune moving concrete barriers out of town. Regular cars are replacing limousines on the street. We can sell newspapers in metal boxes again. Downtown is no longer Brigadoon on the Monongahela.

But the end of the G-20 (and the end of a hectic week for Barack Obama, who also appeared at the United Nations) means the beginning of the next phase of the Obama presidency. The set-piece speeches and photo ops were nice while they lasted -- the diplomatic equivalent, in the words of the old song, of dancing and dreaming through the night -- and the...]]> Sat, 19 Sep 2009 22:00:00 -0700 PITTSBURGH -- In less than a week 20 world leaders will convene here for a global summit to take the measure of the international economy and examine what they can do to irrigate the green shoots and fertilize the fallow areas. In a month of big moments for President Barack Obama, this will be one of the most important.

So much is at stake -- for the president, for the economy, for the globe, even for Pittsburgh, which is set to strut its stuff at a summit meant to shine a light on technological innovation, economic revitalization and all things green. So as the politicians and correspondents pack their bags, it might be useful to have a look at the landscape before the world...]]> Sat, 12 Sep 2009 22:00:00 -0700 Most of the world goes to war about geography. Europe goes to war about history. And while the war that broke out late last week in Europe wasn't a shooting war, it was a classic European dispute about the past -- one that, like all of these European historical controversies, has implications for the future.

This latest war over history isn't, like some European controversies, about ancient and half-forgotten resentments. Its subject is thoroughly modern, within the memory of most of the readers of this column. And its contents are astonishing, given what we have learned in the past two decades.

The principals in this war are the usual combatants, the British, the French...]]> Sat, 05 Sep 2009 22:00:00 -0700 Across oceans and continents it raged, drawing 100 million people into combat, leaving tens of millions dead, transforming millions more into refugees, costing hundreds of billions of dollars, redrawing borders, rewriting alliances, creating scientific advances so frightening that the end of civilization could be contemplated. It moved the center of military power (and with it the center of scientific power) from Europe to the great Eurasian land mass and North America. It was the worst war ever fought, and it was fought by men and women we now call the Greatest Generation. It started 70 years ago this week.

Americans have fought many wars, but today when we speak of "the war" we...]]> Sat, 22 Aug 2009 22:00:00 -0700 President Obama will return from his island idyll to a political landscape completely remade. He still will be greeted by swooning crowds and enthusiastic cheers. But his signature domestic policy is weakened, the result of a resurgent Republican Party that only months ago was on life support.

The irony here is that the Republicans played little role in their recovery, and are instead the innocent and passive beneficiaries of a grassroots (and radio-inspired) insurgency that, if they examine it carefully, may yet bite them as fiercely as it has bitten the president and his congressional allies.

But the conservative backlash against Republicans who supported big-government...]]> Sat, 15 Aug 2009 22:00:00 -0700 In about a week the president will go to Martha's Vineyard for his summer vacation. There he'll have time to stroll the beach, maybe take a nap, almost surely look back on seven of the most exhilarating and difficult months of his life, and of the life of his country. As he reflects on those months, what questions is he likely to ask, and how is he likely to answer them? Here's a guess:

Did I translate the hope and optimism of the campaign into the presidency? There is nothing like a presidential campaign to set up a presidency for failure: all those adoring crowds, all those caucus and primary victory statements amid the cheering and the bunting, all that promise and, worse yet,...]]> Sat, 08 Aug 2009 22:00:00 -0700 The last time we looked -- wasn't it just about five minutes ago? -- the Democrats were in as commanding a position as they have been in a generation. A popular president. Huge majorities in the House and Senate. All the issues going their way. Plus an unusually low barrier for success -- produce an economy that isn't an utter catastrophe and don't look, sound or smell remotely like George W. Bush.

So why are the newspapers, Web sites and airwaves full of talk of Democratic strains, Democratic breakdowns, Democratic fissures, Democratic tensions?

At the heart of all these conversations -- at the center of the party handwringing -- is a species of political animal called the...]]> Sat, 01 Aug 2009 22:00:00 -0700 Here are some numbers that you need to remember as you watch President Barack Obama and Congress wrangle over a blizzard of figures at the heart of a proposed dramatic overhaul of the way Americans receive their health care: 372-33, 77-6, 307-116 and 70-24.

These numbers are vital to understanding the American political system, if not the American medical system, and anyone who overlooks them is forgetting an important quality of the way Americans have governed themselves and cared for themselves as they grow old and infirm.

So brace yourself for some sobering math. The original Social Security bill, as dramatic a departure from the American economic way as any in our...]]> Sat, 25 Jul 2009 22:00:00 -0700 FRANCONIA, N.H. -- We were going to climb Mount Pemigewasset, which juts out from the cliffs that form Indian Head and has a remarkable panorama of White Mountain summits at the top.

We were going to find the semi-secret Saco River swimming hole, down the embankment, over the railroad tracks, then up the far embankment near an ancient bridge known as Fourth Iron.

We were going to sink our toes into the sandy beach at Ellacoya State Park and, what is more, we were going to learn to pronounce the name of the Indian princess for which it was known.

We were going to do all these things, on vacation, but then it was time to go.

We were going to do all these things....]]> Sat, 18 Jul 2009 22:00:00 -0700 Archibald MacLeish called the mission "a wonder to us, unattainable, a longing past the reach of longing," saying that "(t)hree days and three nights we journeyed, steered by farthest stars."

Norman Mailer wrote of "this slim angelic mysterious ship of stages" that moved into the heavens, "slow as Melville's Leviathan might swim, slowly as we might swim upward in a dream looking for the air."

Eugene Ionesco said it "gives us vast perspectives."

Forty years ago this week, we landed on the moon.

Very little else that humankind has accomplished since then has spawned poetry and elegy, though much else has had the effect, as Ionesco put it, of "breaking down the...]]> Sat, 11 Jul 2009 22:00:00 -0700 NORTH CONWAY, N.H. -- There isn't a presidential yard sign in sight up here. Nobody at the gas station that sells maybe the best doughnuts in the world is talking about the next presidential primary. Lots of the politicos have gone fishing ... or hiking, or kayaking. That is quite literally true.

Sure, everyone noticed Sarah Palin's stunning announcement that she is relinquishing the governor's office with the grizzly bear rug two weeks from now. And no one quite knows what it means when a politician says she wants to engage in public issues by removing herself from public power.

As we approach the dog days of summer, it is important to remember two facts: New Hampshire is...]]> Sat, 04 Jul 2009 22:00:00 -0700 SENECA FALLS, N.Y. -- We mark this weekend the signing in Philadelphia of the Declaration of Independence, which was conceived in 1776 as a list of particulars but swiftly became a promissory note. The sobering fact for this early summer holiday is that we're still stretching to live up to the values we set out before we were even a country.

Look carefully at the Declaration of Independence and you'll realize that you recognize only a small fraction of the document and that the rest -- the list of sins against reason and liberty that the British king committed -- constitutes a rationale for revolution. We know, and each time this year pledge ourselves morally to achieve, the part...]]> Sat, 27 Jun 2009 22:00:00 -0700 Iraq and the economy are hard problems. President Barack Obama seems to be handling them gracefully. Iran and health care are hard problems. The president is having more difficulty with them.

Could it be more than a coincidence that this Democratic president seems more sure-footed with the problems he inherited from Republican President George W. Bush than he is with the problems he inherited from the failures of Democratic Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton?

Let's begin by acknowledging that none of these problems is remotely settled and that even when they are settled they may not be over. Iraq, Iran, the economy and health care are destined to be American...]]> Sat, 20 Jun 2009 22:00:00 -0700 PITTSBURGH -- This September the leaders of the 19 most influential nations and a representative of the European Union will gather on the banks of the Allegheny River to discuss global issues. Fifty Septembers earlier, another powerful leader traveled to Pittsburgh for conversations and speeches. The world was very different then.

This is a tale of two summits, one amid a Cold War, the other in an era of hot wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is a tale of two different worlds, one riven by ideological conflict, the other burdened by economic crisis.

In the contrast between these two visits -- one conducted in a bipolar world, the other in a multipolar world -- is the...]]> Sat, 13 Jun 2009 22:00:00 -0700 The auto industry is on life support, banks are almost nationalized, investment houses are gasping for breath, retailers are struggling. So it may not surprise you to learn that another hardy perennial of society is teetering. Bid farewell to the textbook.

The textbook? That huge bound volume with the diagrams of the innards of a frog and, as every schoolboy knows, plastic overlays of the reproductive system of the homo sapiens? The book that has pictures of all the presidents and a chart of all the vice presidents? The go-to place when you want to know all the verbs conjugated with etre rather than avoir? Say it ain't so, Paul Samuelson.

This is bad news for publishers...]]> Sat, 06 Jun 2009 22:00:00 -0700 Seventy years ago there raged in Washington one of the most portentous, and least known, debates in Western history. World War II had not yet begun. The full extent of Hitler's maniacal plan to wipe Europe free of Jews was not yet known. The United States hadn't taken even the first steps toward the informal alliance against Nazi Germany that the Lend-Lease Act symbolized.

For decades historians have suggested that Franklin Roosevelt was aware but not much moved by the danger that Jews faced in a Europe that eventually would be overrun by the Nazis and their ideology of anti-Semitism. The president has been celebrated for his masterly prosecution of the war, but in the verdict of...]]> Sat, 30 May 2009 22:00:00 -0700 The Webster School on Holly Avenue in St. Paul, Minn., has a tradition going back almost 130 years. It has a rousing song ("Webster School is great as can be / Teachers, parents, friends and family ..."). It boasts a commitment to creativity, opportunity and diversity, three qualities that qualify it as an emblem of the nation's greatest and most enduring values. And it was named for one of the greatest exemplars of the American idea, Daniel Webster.

All of which makes it all the more remarkable, all the more startling, all the more troubling, that the Webster School will soon abandon its proud name and heritage and call itself Barack and Michelle Obama Service Learning...]]> Sat, 23 May 2009 22:00:00 -0700 The call came late at night and the tone of the voice was ominous. We had to meet. Immediately. It could not wait. It had to be the next day.

So I flew to Boston and met Edward Connery Lathem in the US Airways Club. For years we had been working together on a book that in our hearts we knew almost no one would read. That didn't matter. What mattered that morning was whether the pages of our book would have 38 lines of type or 39.

We talked about it, thought about it, looked over galley proofs, and then made the fateful decision. We went for 39. And, as Edward's friend Robert Frost put it in a different context, that has made all the difference, and not only because the...]]> Sat, 16 May 2009 22:00:00 -0700 It was built in darkness -- and destroyed in sunlight. It separated Berlin -- and united much of Europe. It provided the backdrop for perhaps the most stirring speech ever given by a young Democratic president -- and by an old Republican president. It was constructed of concrete and metal -- but above all it was emblem and metaphor.

Through the reign of seven American presidents and five Soviet leaders -- from John F. Kennedy and Nikita S. Khrushchev to George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev -- the Berlin Wall was a symbol of all that divided East and West. It seemed impregnable and permanent. And then it fell.

The world already had a rich folklore of walls tumbling down,...]]> Sat, 09 May 2009 22:00:00 -0700 He was always in motion. As a quarterback wearing No. 15 for the Buffalo Bills, as a young congressman afire with passion about supply-side economics, as a presidential candidate plowing the back roads of New Hampshire, as a Cabinet member making the Department of Housing and Urban Development an unlikely Washington power center, as a vice-presidential nominee traveling in a plane called "Partner's Ship," Jack F. Kemp was never still.

Which is why, when his voice was stilled with his death Saturday, there was such a vacuum. Kemp always had something to say, someplace to go, a wide receiver to find, a dragon to slay, a tax to cut, a kind word to share. He was the bright, smiling...]]> Sat, 02 May 2009 22:00:00 -0700 When Thomas Jefferson succeeded John Adams, a contest that put America on such a different footing that it is remembered today as the Revolution of 1800, he did not seek to put members of the Adams administration on trial. When Warren G. Harding followed Woodrow Wilson in the White House in 1921, he did not put Edith Galt Wilson on trial for usurping the office of the presidency after Wilson's stroke. When Bill Clinton ended a dozen years of Republican rule in 1993, he did not try to prosecute Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush for deceiving the Congress over the Iran-Contra affair.

In the span of 220 years there have been 43 changes of presidents, and always this rule, never...]]> Mon, 27 Apr 2009 22:00:00 -0700 There are scores of ways to evaluate the beginning of a presidency. One of the most facile is to look at a president's first 100 days, which in the case of President Barack Obama ends Wednesday, and compare the achievements (or failures) with the first hundred days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. With an economic crisis raging -- though not one as severe as 1933 -- that temptation is going to be irresistible.

Let's let others do that, remembering of course that the phrase "hundred days" comes not from FDR but from Napoleon, and from a far less noble moment in history -- the French emperor's return from his Elba exile and the threat he posed to order in Europe.

For our...]]> Sat, 18 Apr 2009 22:00:00 -0700 ST. AUGUSTINE BEACH, Fla. -- There's no pretense here at the Beachcomber restaurant -- heck, there are hardly any windows here at the Beachcomber -- and that befits a place where you have to take a left at the washer and dryer to reach the men's room. So when the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee walks in for a grilled fish sandwich and an order of fries, the skinny guy with the Panama hat in the overalls with no shirt and the stout guy in the golf shirt and boat shoes give him a bright hello and then pay him no mind.

George S. McGovern is wearing a pair of shorts and a light brown Polo shirt, and at 86 years old he doesn't seem like a mortal threat to American values,...]]> Sat, 11 Apr 2009 22:00:00 -0700 It may take years for the cost of this recession to be paid back -- and if you are young, the scars from this recession will be with you always. You'll be leery of the stock market, careful about buying a house, afraid to spend -- all good things, I hasten to add, as long as they are adopted in moderation. (A little moderation a few years ago might have prevented this whole mess. But this morning we're looking forward, not backward.)

Yet for all the gloom, there are some bright spots -- not enough to think that 2009 will be a bright harvest of prosperity, to be sure, but enough to think that this downturn, in our economy and in our outlook, won't last forever. Just as the...]]> Sat, 04 Apr 2009 22:00:00 -0700 "What has transpired in the last six months in the U.S. and elsewhere is that the forces of the universe overwhelmed everybody in ways that have forced change, and at a circumstance not of our choosing," says Michael Useem, who directs the Center for Leadership and Change Management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business. "We're making change in a reactive way and not a proactive way. We can wish we had driven the change a few years ago."

But that's a wish, and it's too late for that. For in truth this is a period of historic change. It is a period almost without precedent in terms of the speed, breadth and depth of change. When your grandchildren read...]]> Sat, 28 Mar 2009 22:00:00 -0700 "I can't stand the sight of the things anymore," Machita said to me that afternoon.

I called her up the other day and together we relived the frightening time we shared so long ago. Machita is now 67, a retired secretary, and what she said was eerily similar to her remarks three decades earlier: "I couldn't stand the sight of the towers."

As news of the accident circulated, Machita and her family packed their suitcases in their home by the Susquehanna and fled -- her neighbor told me she was more afraid of the panic than the radiation -- and a year later they sold the place, just to get away, moving about 15 miles north. But the story of Three Mile Island, and the spring...]]> Sat, 21 Mar 2009 22:00:00 -0700 At the center of the battle was a great hulking monastery, which, founded by St. Benedict in A.D. 529 and used as the model for abbeys throughout Western Europe, was one of the most sacred sites of Christianity. With five courtyards, with the echoes of centuries of pilgrims' footfalls and with one of the greatest repositories of Christian writing dating to antiquity, Monte Cassino was by any measure one of the cultural gems of what still might have been the world's most powerful continent and what indisputably is one of the world's great faiths.

Everyone recognized the monastery for what it was: a cultural icon situated on what inevitably was described as one of the greatest...]]> Sat, 14 Mar 2009 22:00:00 -0700 But from the start that was an unfair comparison or, if you are one of the many readers who think the press is rooting too hard for President Obama, you may prefer calling it an inappropriate comparison. FDR faced the worst economic conditions in the history of the modern world. Obama faces the worst economic conditions in about three decades.

More than 4,000 banks had failed in the two months leading to the Roosevelt inauguration and a quarter of American workers had no job. Things are bad now -- no, they are terrible -- but they are not as bad as they were in Roosevelt's first few months. Not even close.

So far we have nothing to compare with the creation of FDR's Civilian...]]> Sat, 07 Mar 2009 22:00:00 -0800 Now that the Dow has given up half its value, the government has thrown trillions of dollars into banks and investment houses, and unemployment is doing a high step toward alarming levels, Obama is calculating that hope is not enough. He's using as his playbook the promises of the Obama campaign.

Already the Obama opposition is developing, engaging one terrifying word (socialism) and two scary ones (too much). The question of this troubled hour is whether the president is trying to do too much, spend too much, risk too much.

Many years ago former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo used to say that a governor could do anything he wanted, but he couldn't do everything he wanted. Obama,...]]> Sat, 28 Feb 2009 22:00:00 -0800 The president is a luminous figure, a symbol of American possibility, the personification of decades of dreams, particularly for black Americans. (So was John F. Kennedy to Catholics, and Ronald Reagan to conservatives.) But for almost a month's time the world's most hopeful character had become one of the world's biggest downers.

Let's leave aside this morning any qualms we might have about a man who can pick up and then put down the hope handle with such apparent ease. Instead let's examine the tension between optimism and pragmatism, and the difficult equilibrium between rallying the country for a challenge and providing it with a sobering view of that challenge.

The...]]> Sat, 21 Feb 2009 22:00:00 -0800 It is true, too, that America doesn't really need the Lincoln Memorial. Lincoln's memory lives in the nation's splendid diversity, in its ennobling spirit and in its resilient hopes even in the face of economic adversity and foreign threats.

But if Lincoln saved the country, Washington created the country. As a citizen, he won the war that set it free. As a general, he established the tradition of civilian rule. As a ruler, he assured that the United States would be a democracy, not a monarchy. Born an English subject, he died an American patriot.

The two men had one important thing in common. Lincoln and Washington looked at the great suffering of war and knew that to...]]> Sun, 15 Feb 2009 22:00:00 -0800 So what are we to make of Thursday's 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, coming as it does in the first month of the administration of Barack Obama, the first black president? Mere coincidence? Or some celestial mystery whose message we dare not ignore?

These questions perhaps are better suited to the Swiss psychologist C.G. Jung than to the newspaper columnist. (Tantalizing fact: Jung was born during Reconstruction only to die during the civil rights movement.) But this remarkable moment surely offers lessons for Barack Obama. Here are some that Lincoln might endorse for his spiritual successor:

Be the friend of the soldier, the scourge of the generals....]]> Sat, 07 Feb 2009 22:00:00 -0800 But he is, or soon will be, the secretary of commerce. President Barack Obama selected him last week -- the third Republican in his Cabinet -- and in choosing the senior senator from New Hampshire he inadvertently brought to a close more than a century of an important, though quiet, cultural and electoral phenomenon.

Flinty New England conservative, R.I.P.

When commentators bemoan the eclipse of a potent strain of New England Republicanism, they're usually talking about left-leaning moderates or liberals, men in the mold of Lowell P. Weicker Jr. of Connecticut and Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts (both still alive), women in the mold of Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of...]]> Sat, 31 Jan 2009 22:00:00 -0800 But before long Obama is likely going to want to make some changes in the most famous office in the world. Indeed, a top White House official said in an e-mail exchange last week that the president isn't going to stick with the portraits Bush selected.

Nobody much cared whose picture was on the White House walls until Ronald Reagan hung a portrait of Calvin Coolidge in the Cabinet Room in 1981. The 30th president hadn't been a model for anyone outside New England since he left office in 1929, though his virtues of thrift (in spending and speaking) and integrity (personal and political) have become more prized in an era of verbosity and vulgarity. Plus, no other president had been...]]> Tue, 20 Jan 2009 22:00:00 -0800 For yesterday the nation paused -- not in grief but in remembrance, not in celebration but in solemnity, not in raucous joy but in quiet fulfillment -- a fulfillment not only of a man's dream but also of a nation's promise.

Seldom in more than two centuries of American history has there been a moment of such profound symbolism. And if Barack Obama's Inaugural Address lacked a quotation for the ages, it was because what the nation saw was so much more important than what the president said.

The nation saw millions of its people filling the Washington Mall, their eyes focused on a black man taking the oath of office at the West Front of the Capitol, two miles and 46 years away...]]> Fri, 16 Jan 2009 22:00:00 -0800 This slogan from one of the nation's most storied military units, the Seabees, has a special meaning for this season of hope and renewal in American civic life. The new president will be expected to do everything, and to do it well. He can't, and he won't. No one could.

This isn't merely a matter of high expectations, which in this year of deficits we have in surplus, nor merely a matter of managing expectations, which must be one of Obama's premier priorities. It is also a matter of presidential pacing.

New American presidents labor under the tyranny of many historical factors, none more oppressive, more distorting or more distracting than the precedent of "the hundred...]]> Mon, 12 Jan 2009 22:00:00 -0800 Which is why the boasts of the trumpet's call to arms in American inaugurations are almost always accompanied with the whisper of humility, a word that actually appears in six presidents' inaugural addresses.

"I assume this trust in the humility of knowledge that only through the guidance of Almighty Providence can I hope to discharge its ever-increasing burdens," Herbert Hoover said in 1929.

Harry Truman's remarks 20 years later hit the same note: "I accept with humility the honor which the American people have conferred upon me."

Barack Obama, accomplished autobiographer and welder of a historic political accomplishment, comes to his particular intersection of...]]>