May 21, 2004, 8:14 a.m.
“The Beat Meet the Elite”
NRO is where people want to be.

National Review Online is indispensable.

It's the glue that holds together the Washington policy community — think tankers, journalists, activists, anonymous speech writers, celebrity politicos, and those laboring in the bowels of the great bureaucracies as well. And it is NRO that connects this community with "America Beyond The Beltway."

Actually, NRO is more than that. It's the 21st-century version of the sidewalk café in Paris, the posh men's club in London, that out-of-the-way bar in Budapest where the most-intriguing people gather to drink and whisper, the Greenwich Village hideaway where, it was once said, "the beat meet the elite."

It is on NRO's virtual pages that the freshest ideas are introduced and the cutting-edge debates take place. This is understood across the political spectrum. I'm always amazed by how many people on the Left read articles I write for NRO. I know because they send e-mails — often less-than-flattering e-mails but even so, they're reading and they're responding, and that matters.

Visitors to NRO meet the eloquent Victor Davis Hanson and the witty John O'Sullivan; the insightful Rich Lowry and the learned Richard Brookhiser; the perceptive Kate O'Beirne and the trenchant Ramesh Ponnuru. There are so many others I could mention — all of them edited by the unflappable and incomparable Kathryn Lopez.

One might say that if NRO didn't exist someone would have to invent it. But, thankfully, it does exist. All it needs is a little care and support.