The Week

• You just knew His right-hand man would be called “Emanuel.”

• It’s said that Barack Obama has chosen to go the good cop/bad cop route in running his White House. Under this scenario, Obama is the good cop. (We’re skeptical, but will wait to see.) The bad cop is his new chief of staff, Illinois Democratic Rep. Rahm Emanuel, once famously described in the Washington Post as “a wiry-thin, foul-mouthed ballet dancer from Chicago.” There’s no doubt the tough-talking Emanuel will push hard to get things done. The question is whom he will push. There are reasons to feel — well, “hope” seems too strong a word, but perhaps we should indulge a little optimism — that some of Emanuel’s much-discussed toughness will be directed at members of his own party, because in addition to being a to-the-wall partisan, Emanuel is also a bit of a political realist. When he was placed in charge of the Democrats’ effort to win back the House in 2006, he did not insist on leftist ideological purity in every candidate, regardless of region. So the question is, now that Emanuel will be doing Obama’s work in the White House, will he push the left wing of the Democratic party to conform to a moderate agenda, or will he direct all of his attacks at Republicans and the few remaining moderate Democrats?

• Obama has signaled that one of his first items of business will be to ask Congress to pass a massive economic-stimulus package. With Obama in the White House, congressional Democrats can pass their dream bill — extensions of unemployment benefits and food stamps, a bailout for fiscally irresponsible states, and new roads and bridges for the constituents back home. We’re hearing that the price tag could reach $300 billion. Whatever individual merits these policies might have, they are unlikely to stimulate the economy, for the simple reason that the government cannot inject money into the economy without first taking money out of the private sector through taxing or borrowing. Who knew that when Obama said “change” he meant a return to the threadbare fiscal policies of LBJ?

• During the campaign, Obama said he would raise taxes on capital gains, dividends, and high earners. People with high incomes would see their income-tax rates go from 35 to 39.6 percent, with an additional 2 to 4 percent tax imposed to finance Social Security. If we are lucky, the weakness of the economy will have the one good effect of staying Obama’s hand. If you were designing tax increases to exact the most economic damage in return for the least revenue, you might well come up with Obama’s plan. A recession is a particularly bad time to act on these liberal impulses; the correct time is never.

• That $700 billion rescue package for banks is in danger of turning from a safety net into a slush fund. The scent of money has attracted lobbyists for every interest group in Washington. Now comes word that Treasury secretary Henry Paulson might dip into the fund to bail out struggling automakers GM and Chrysler. Auto sales are falling and both companies are in deep financial trouble. They blame the financial crisis and are asking Paulson to include them in the bank rescue. In order to qualify for the rescue money, GM’s financing arm, GMAC, is seeking to transform itself into a conventional bank. This desperation borders on the comical. What’s next, a free Chevy Cobalt when you open a new account? The contortions are a ruse to mask the inappropriateness of the automakers’ request. The current economic contraction did not cause their problems, and a quick injection of cash won’t solve them.

• Two odious items top the Democrats’ wish list as the coronation approaches. The first is reinstatement of the so-called Fairness Doctrine. The second is the abolition of secret-ballot elections in union-organizing votes. Both measures are illiberal and anti-democratic. Both appeal to the worst of the Left’s vindictive passions, and therefore are popular among Democrats. And both use the government to create institutional advantages for the Left that it could not obtain through legitimate means. The Fairness Doctrine would require radio stations to broadcast a money-losing product: three hours of whiny liberal rejoinders to Rush Limbaugh every weekday. The doctrine has nothing to do with fairness — its resurrection is sought for the sole purpose of bankrupting stations that carry Limbaugh, Hannity, Levin, Ingraham and the rest of the pack. Equally misnamed is the Employee Free Choice Act, which replaces secret-ballot elections with the “card check” system, meaning that a union thug who may also be your supervisor asks you to sign a form saying you want to be represented by his union — all of your own free will, of course. Labor unions routinely use violence as a tool of persuasion; workers facing their wrath deserve the protection of a secret ballot. How Obama greets these specimens of malfeasance will tell us much about what to expect from his administration.

• Washington is abuzz with speculation that Obama might nominate Jamie Gorelick to be the next attorney general. It is difficult to imagine a worse choice. As Clinton’s deputy AG, Gorelick — over the objections of seasoned prosecutors — heightened the infamous “wall” that prevented intelligence officers from sharing information with criminal investigators, a reckless and unnecessary hamstring that contributed mightily to the FBI’s failure to foil the 9/11 plot. And then there’s her post-Clinton career. Like many well-connected Democrats, she moved seamlessly from public service to a cozy executive post at Fannie Mae, where she raked in millions while the company cooked the books and helped trigger the credit crisis. In the process, she benefited from a sweetheart mortgage loan from Countrywide, the giant lender whose shenanigans are currently the subject of a major federal investigation. Even assuming she is free of wrongdoing, she is not the right person to lead the Justice Department as it probes her former benefactors. Obama should look elsewhere.

• The campaign continued for Sarah Palin, as blame-shifting McCain aides accused her, anonymously, of not knowing that Africa is a continent rather than a country. Nonsense, says Steve Biegun, a former NSC aide and Palin briefer, on the record: She knew Darfur and Clinton’s AIDS initiative from the get-go; her enemies are twisting overheard, let’s-get-this-straight queries in the confusion of debate prep. The governor should spend the next four years in Alaska, solidifying her credentials as an executive. Going to Washington as a senator would take some of her bloom off; she can get more media exposure than any solon. She needs to keep learning. And please, may she drop the notion that “core values” are all a politician needs. President Bush and his supporters seemed to believe the same thing, in part to excuse his tongue-tied ways — the reaction to which helped give us our new memoirist-in-chief. It’s no shame to know things, and to say them well.

• One of John McCain’s most potent enemies was time. On the eve of the Republican convention, he turned 72. He was 25 years older than his opponent, 28 years older than his running mate. Elements of his biography — his time in the club of the Senate; his very different time in a North Vietnamese prison — made him seem older yet. Obama, slim and athletic, is by contrast a young 47. Of course, McCain was still a dozen years younger than Deng Xiaoping when he masterminded the Tiananmen Square massacre. But the job of Communist despot, while taxing, does not require living in the political spotlight in the same way as American presidential candidates must. If the electorate wanted change — and both candidates promised it — then Obama seemed more suited to the task. There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the ebb — leads nowhere.

• Every election ends in unifying rhetoric, and this one was no different. McCain pledged “to find ways to come together to find the necessary compromises to bridge our differences,” and Obama answered his four infinitives with four alliterations, rejecting the “partisanship and pettiness . . . that has poisoned our politics for so long.” Partisan politics was the stepchild of the founders. They created a two-party system, Federalists and Republicans (today’s Democrats), but they were uncomfortable with what they had done. Each party believed it spoke for the nation — which implied that the other party was illegitimate. Thomas Jefferson put it best, as he often did, saying in his first inaugural, “We are all republicans — we are all federalists,” but writing, in a private letter, “I shall . . . sink federalism into an abyss from which there shall be no resurrection.” Time has shown that parties are a check and balance as important as any in the Constitution. Competition exposes shortcomings and develops solutions. Let the game begin — again.

Exit Stage Right

Assuming there’s still time for some good, old-fashioned recriminations about the recent unpleasantness at the polls, I’d like to vent my most enduring complaint about the Republican party and Homo republicanus generally: Republicans have an infuriating tendency to read their stage directions instead of their lines. They tell the audience about their characters’ motivation, their blocking, staging, lighting, whatever. But they never just play their part.

I first noticed this way back in 1991. KKK nutter David Duke had won a seat in Louisiana’s house of representatives in 1989 and was letting the national press use him against the GOP generally. Pres. George H. W. Bush needed to denounce Duke in the strongest possible terms. Instead, what he said was: “We have — I have — want to be positioned in that I could not possibly support David Duke because of the racism and because of the very recent statements that are very troubling in terms of bigotry and all of this.”Positioned?

Then there was Bob Dole, the conviction politician who told a Republican audience: “If that’s what you want, I’ll be another Ronald Reagan.” He somehow turned the 1996 campaign into a referendum on that burning national question, “Should I go negative?” According to his own campaign, Dole’s overarching strategy was to “act presidential.” Not to “be presidential” — just to act that way.

I could go on, but let’s fast-forward to the McCain campaign, which seemed more interested in talking about the process of running for president with a press corps determined to eat it alive than in actually running for president. Campaign adviser Charlie Black told the press that it “would be a big advantage” for McCain if we had a terrorist attack on American soil. True enough. But saying so wins you no points whatsoever.

Another unnamed “Republican operative” told the Washington Post: “There’s no question that we have to change the subject” from the economy. A “senior campaign official” added that the campaign would change the tone and go much more “aggressive.”

Now, again, I have no problem with the stage direction. By all means, the McCain campaign should have been more aggressive. Much, much more aggressive. Bob Dole should have gone negative. He should have acted presidential. Poppa Bush absolutely should have positioned himself as far as possible from David Duke.

But in politics — as in life! — there’s a huge difference between showing and telling. One of the key ingredients of “acting presidential” is not to wave your arms around shouting, “Hey, look at me, I’m acting presidential!” Positioning yourself in opposition to some racist kook is best achieved by denouncing the racist kook, not telling the world how you want to be positioned.

And of course the economy hurt John McCain in this election. Of course he should have changed the subject (if, as it seems, he was incapable of discussing the economy competently). But why on earth would you tell people that?

Part of the answer for the McCain campaign is that these guys are notoriously concerned about being on good terms with the press. That’s why they seemed so obsessed with the press’s treating them unfairly. They were like jilted lovers.

But I think there’s a larger lesson here. Republicans, moderates and conservatives alike, generally see politics as an unnatural vocation. The forced outrage, the mock piety, the pursuit of consensus, and the outsized need to take account of people’s feelings: It’s all a bit too fake for people from the world of business, finance, or the military. But for many liberals, politics (like the fields of education, journalism, and, most of all, acting) is an authentic calling. They don’t see acting as dishonest; they see it as inspiring. They don’t feel quite so dirty pretending to be outraged. They know their lines — and want to read them. I think this shortcoming generally speaks well of Republicans as people, but in politicians it can be infuriating.

Maybe that’s why the best conservative politician of the 20th century was an actor.

— Jonah Goldberg

• On Election Day, three states passed referenda against same-sex marriage, including notoriously liberal California, which undid a state-supreme-court decision in the process. Same-sex marriage has now been up for a vote in 30 states and lost in all of them. Moreover, the polls show no lessening of public opposition over the last five years. We know that same-sex marriage is supposed to be inevitable and opposition to it futile, but somebody forgot to tell the voters.

• “Hi. We’re from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” says an actor playing a Mormon missionary. “We’re here to take away your rights,” adds his colleague. Next, they enter the home of a lesbian couple, pry off their wedding rings, and tear up their marriage certificate. This commercial aired in California before the election, and it targeted the Mormon church for encouraging its members to donate time and resources to the passage of Proposition 8, the aforementioned ballot measure. California’s Catholic bishops and a number of evangelical churches, including the megachurch of Rick Warren, also supported Proposition 8, but anger over its passage has focused disproportionately on Mormons. Gay-rights activists have organized protests at their temples both in and out of California, accused them of bigotry and hatred, and called for their church to lose its tax-exempt status (for which punishment, no convincing legal case can be made). A few points to keep in mind: First, the millions of dollars that Mormons donated in support of Proposition 8 were private, individual contributions, not money from the church. Second, there are reasons to oppose same-sex marriage other than anti-gay bigotry, and gay-rights activists discredit themselves by attributing the worst possible motives to those who disagree with them. Third, trying to change the church’s tax status is a double-edged sword that might be used equally well against religious organizations (not to mention nonprofits) that endorse liberal causes. What this comes down to is that like-minded people exercised their political rights and are being vilified for it.

• Since 1996, Ward Connerly has pushed ballot initiatives to ban racial preferences in California, Washington, and Michigan, where they were approved. This year, he set an ambitious goal for himself: five initiatives in five states. In the end, just two qualified for the ballot, and only the one in Nebraska passed. The vote in Colorado was close, and the opposition dramatically outspent Connerly and his local allies. It also ran a demagogic campaign — its website, for instance, equated opposition to affirmative action with support for the KKK. Over the years, the effort to establish truly equal opportunity has endured many legal and political setbacks. At some point, however, the bean-counting simply must stop. A nation that is capable of electing a black president has no further need of policies that judge people by the color of their skin (if ever it did). We hope Connerly is not done.

• Hispanics favored Obama over McCain by 67 to 31 percent. As a disproportionately low-income group that values social services, they start out leaning toward the Democrats. They favored them more in this election for the same reasons that most groups did. The perception that Republicans are hostile to immigrants doubtless increased these tendencies still further, but must have played a relatively minor role. In any case, if Senator McCain, a co-sponsor of legislation granting amnesty to illegal immigrants, cannot overcome this perception, then no Republican can. Going forward, Republicans should encourage the economic and cultural assimilation of Hispanics. They should explain how conservative policies can advance the aspirations of low-income workers of all races. Those policies include limits on unskilled immigration. But Republicans must take care not to give the impression that these limits are motivated by dislike of the immigrants themselves. In these debates, tone matters as well as substance, and if Republicans get either wrong, they may find that their worst losses are ahead of them.

• The election added another kink to Joe Lieberman’s relationship with the Democratic party. Rejected by Democratic voters in the 2006 primary for his support of the Iraq War and the surge, he had to win reelection as an independent. This year he backed John McCain for president in a prime-time speech at the GOP convention. Yet Lieberman caucused with the Democrats for the last two years, giving them their Senate majority, and on every issue save the war he is a dependable liberal. He also gave money to Democratic Senate candidates. Majority leader Harry Reid must now decide whether to strip Lieberman of his chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. Giving Lieberman the boot would be an act of intellectual good housekeeping. Iraq was the salient national-security issue of the mid-’00s. It is a shame that Democrats made blindness a requirement of party loyalty, but it would be an equal shame for them to disguise the fact now by keeping Lieberman around. When a similar issue arises, will they want such a bumptious Americanist in their ranks?

• In Minnesota, Republican senator Norm Coleman is, at this writing, sweating out the results of a tight reelection contest with faded jokester Al Franken. Election-night returns showed Coleman ahead by about 700 votes, which dwindled to 200 after correction of arithmetical and transcription errors. So far there is no firm evidence of intentional misconduct, though an electronic vote record that was somehow date-stamped two days before the election raised a few eyebrows, as did a small county’s addition of 100 votes for Franken and an election official’s reportedly discovering 32 absentee ballots in the trunk of her car. Next up is a recount, in which election judges will tally every one of the nearly 3 million optical-scan ballots by hand. Since representatives of the two candidates can challenge any ballot they deem unclear, this procedure could easily degenerate into farce, which might lead to something even worse — investigation by a committee of the Democrat-controlled Senate (though, in a hopeful sign, an early hand recount of 7,700 ballots in Ramsey County changed exactly one vote). Minnesota’s officials must ensure that the “paper trail,” originally meant to serve as verification and backup for electronic voting machines, is not converted into a mulligan for the losing side.

• When Obama first visited Kenya, his father’s country, in 1988, he was greeted by his aunt Zeituni Onyango. “‘Welcome home,’ Zeituni said, kissing me on both cheeks,” wrote Obama in his autobiography. Our president-elect has been somewhat less effusive in welcoming Miss Onyango to the U.S. The lady came here eight years ago on a temporary visa and obtained a Social Security card in 2001. When her visa expired, she applied for political asylum, but the application was rejected in 2004 and a judge ordered her to leave the country. Onyango chose not to comply, and is now a fugitive alien. Since 2003 she has been living in public housing in Boston and receiving a stipend from that city’s Housing Authority for being a part-time “health advocate” — yet another one of those jobs, apparently, that Americans will not do. Her straitened circumstances notwithstanding, Onyango managed to donate $260 to her nephew’s presidential campaign — illegally, as she is not a citizen. The president-elect returned the donations (after they were publicized) and says that his aunt should obey the law. Wait a minute — you mean we have laws on immigration? For how much longer?

• The mainstream media’s left-wing bias is no secret to anyone who can read, but we’re always impressed when someone within the establishment has the temerity to admit it. Such was the case at the Washington Post recently, as its ombudsman, Deborah Howell, published some statistics about the paper’s campaign coverage. It’s no surprise that since November 11 of last year, Obama got more coverage (946 stories to McCain’s 786) — the Democratic primary went on longer. But there’s less of an excuse for the count since the end of the primaries, which Obama also won, 626 to 584. Perhaps most telling of all, though, was Howell’s impression of the coverage’s quality as opposed to quantity: The paper ran more than twice as many “horse race” stories as “issue” stories; also, Howell noted, “Obama deserved tougher scrutiny than he got, especially of his undergraduate years, his start in Chicago and his relationship with Antoin ‘Tony’ Rezko, who was convicted this year of influence-peddling in Chicago. The Postdid nothing on Obama’s acknowledged drug use as a teenager.” This admission comes a day late and a dollar short, but it’s more than we’ve come to expect from the mainstream press.

• In the waning days of the presidential campaign, Joe Biden said: “Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama.” In reality, it took only a day or two, as Russian president Dmitry Medvedev delivered a stern speech in which he demanded that the United States stop building a missile-defense system in the Czech Republic and Poland, and threatened to retaliate by deploying missiles near the Polish border. The Russian obsession with a small missile-defense system in Eastern Europe is strange: A handful of interceptors provide no deterrent to Russian weaponry and are in fact a NATO response to the emerging menace of Iran. So far, Obama has not indicated what he will do, though he has previously announced his hostility to missile defense. He can now either stand up to Russia’s fulminations or try to appease. That choice has significant implications for American national security, and it will reveal much about how he intends to govern.

• The election was hardly over before Obama received a letter of congratulation from Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — a sort of love letter, really, in the way it mentioned past quarrels only to rise above them. Prompting it was the political chaos in Tehran, where Ahmadinejad’s government is falling apart, and where he is unpopular enough to lose elections next year. More to the point, though, negotiations are under way between Washington and Baghdad on a status-of-forces agreement (SOFA), which would determine a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. The Sunnis and Kurds, and everyone else in the region except the Shiites, would like an American garrison to remain, with enough strength to act as peacekeepers if need be. Tehran, which has toned down the violence of its Iraqi Shiite clients, wants the Americans out completely in the expectation that it will be able to dominate the Shiite government that seems a certainty for the foreseeable future. Being nice to Obama is a move to influence the SOFA in its favor, which would be another step toward Iranian hegemony in the Gulf region. Obama continues to criticize Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon and its sponsorship of terror, and that’s answer enough to this love letter.

• An economic growth rate of 5.8 percent doesn’t sound too bad, does it? It does if you’re one of the technocrat-thugs who run China. The export- and investment-driven Chinese economy grew at an “official” rate (probably somewhat overstated) of 11.9 percent last year, but, thanks to the worldwide economic downturn, that number is falling fast, and projected to sink to 5.8 percent next quarter. The problem for the politburo is that, skyscrapers of Shanghai notwithstanding, much of the country remains poor and discontented. In a democracy, there is a pressure valve for such discontent — a little something called an election. Beijing has chosen instead to bribe the masses into complacency, and has long assumed that something like 10 percent growth is required to create enough jobs to keep them happy. China’s rulers have now announced a stimulus plan of close to $600 billion (much of it a Keynesian orgy, but never mind). It has been close to three decades since Deng Xiaoping began the high-wire act of combining market liberalism with political illiberalism; the position of his successors is no less precarious.

• The National party, Kiwi conservatives, will lead New Zealand’s new government. And there’s even better news from down under: The National government will be joined by five members from the ACT party, arguably the most free-market outfit to hold seats in any of the world’s parliaments. (The name originally stood for Association of Consumers and Taxpayers.) ACT’s platform includes Gingrich-style welfare reform, a flat tax, and closer relations with the U.S. and the rest of the Anglosphere. And so the world turns: With Merkel in Germany, Sarkozy in France, Berlusconi in Italy, Harper in Canada, and Cameron ascendant in the United Kingdom, America under the triumvirate of Obama-Reid-Pelosi stands to have one of the most left-wing governments among the world’s major powers. Suggestion to Republican strategists: Vacation in Wellington.

• Britain’s Queen Mother — which is to say, the mother of the present monarch — died in 2002 at the age of 101, having survived two world wars, the abdication of her brother-in-law, the disdain of Eleanor Roosevelt (who called her “a little self-consciously regal”), the death of her husband, the fiasco of her grandson’s marriage to Princess Diana, and several decades’ steady consumption of Gordon’s gin with Dubonnet. Now British radio journalist Edward Stourton has written a book in which he calls Her Majesty “a ghastly old bigot.” The Queen Mum, claims Stourton, on his telling her that he was just back from a European summit, said: “It will never work, you know. . . . It will never work with all those Huns, wops, and dagos.” Well, it is somewhat heartening to know that the fine old English contempt for all other nations — the conviction, as traditionally expressed, that “the wogs start at Calais” — survived into the 21st century. However, given the origins of the House of Windsor into which she married — the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha until an expedient name change in World War I — the lady seems to have been calling down fire on her own position.

• The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, standing on a site believed to be that of Christ’s Resurrection, is managed by six different Christian sects under a complex set of protocols dating from the Ottoman Empire. Each sect guards its rights very jealously, and there are frequent petty conflicts. The keys to the main entrance of the church have been held by a Muslim family since the 12th century because the Christians do not trust one another. In 2002 a Coptic monk placed his chair in a section of the church claimed by Ethiopians: The resulting fracas put some dozen monks in the hospital. On November 9 this year things got nasty yet again, when a rumble between Greek Orthodox and Armenian monks had to be broken up by Israeli police. One of the Greeks, having perhaps been too slow to turn the other cheek, had a nasty gash on his forehead. “This is my commandment,” said the Prince of Peace to His followers, “that ye love one another, as I have loved you.” It seems to be taking a while to sink in.

• School bake sales are tons of fun, and that worries California’s committees for the promotion of virtue and prevention of vice, whose blue-nosed busybodies fret that their young wards are packing too much tonnage. California has adopted strict dietary guidelines governing what sorts of comestibles may be sold in its schools — even at occasional bake sales — which has led to the banishment of that old standby, the cupcake. Reports the New York Times: “The Piedmont High water polo team falls woefully short of these standards, selling cupcakes, caramel apples and lemon bars off campus in a flagrant act of nutritional disobedience.” Savor those words: nutritional disobedience. As longtime advocates of the decriminalization of desserts and other controlled substances, the editors of this magazine pray that California will have the good sense to legalize cupcakes, and even harder substances such as lemon bars, thereby undermining the black market in confections and bringing sucrose-related commerce out of the shadows and into the open marketplace.

• Amid the generally dismal election news, there were occasional positive results, and several of these came from a most unlikely place: San Francisco. Its citizens resoundingly rejected a proposal to name a sewage-treatment plant after George W. Bush, and another to decriminalize prostitution; one-quarter of them even voted against same-sex marriage. Best of all, San Francisco voters reversed their city council’s decision to banish the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) from public high schools. This being San Francisco, a group called Friends of JROTC had to reassure voters beforehand that JROTC “does not abide by the ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ policy.” Still, it’s a pleasant surprise to see the City by the Bay encouraging young students to consider military careers. The next thing you know, National Review will be holding subscription drives there.

• One of President Bush’s unheralded achievements has been his success at keeping left-leaning creative types in obscurity. He so infuriated the nation’s liberal filmmakers that they spent enormous amounts of time and money on an endless series of unwatchable anti-Bush films whose cumulative receipts were just about matched by the first weekend of Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa. Even better, Bush gave the insufferable playwright/essayist Wallace Shawn a nasty case of writer’s block. As Shawn told the Times of London: “I grew up in a country where my parents [his father was New Yorker editor William Shawn] thought of Americans as benevolent people. . . . Bush has openly mocked law and proclaimed a certain pleasure in sadism and exulted in holding prisoners and mistreating and torturing them. . . . My emotional life has been very strongly affected by the fact that Bush was president and my writing life is affected by my emotional life.” Poor sensitive soul! Fortunately for cinéastes, however, Shawn was not too conflicted to continue his lucrative acting career. This means that future generations will have the opportunity to learn from his delicately shaded performances in such classics as Fat Actress, Tom and Jerry in Shiver Me Whiskers, and Scooby-Doo and the Goblin King.

• Pity Michael Bloomberg. For all his billions, and all his power as mayor of New York (for which office he recently bought himself the chance to seek a third term), there is one place in the city where he cannot indulge his greatest pleasure — running other people’s lives. That place is the headquarters of the United Nations, where New York’s anti-smoking laws hold no sway and transnational bureaucrats from Tajikistan and Lesotho can puff away to their hearts’ content (and their lungs’ peril). It’s not often that the U.N. does something right, though this laudable resistance to public-health puritanism may be more a case of the organization’s habitual sloth than a sign of any dedication to freedom: In 2003, Kofi Annan proposed a smoking ban in the headquarters, and, though nothing is official yet, the General Assembly recently endorsed that policy. Still, it is pleasantly ironic that the United Nations, so often a tool of dictators and terrorists, now stands as one of the last outposts of individual freedom in a city gone mad with nanny-statism.

• Here’s a crime-fighting advance not to be sniffed at. How to identify an individual for forensic purposes? Fingerprinting is the longest-established method. Retinal scans and voice prints have some limited application. Now scientists from the Monell Center in Philadelphia, in recently published research, have shown that an individual’s unique scent signature can still be detected even after a heroic diet of curry, garlic, or onions. Our odorprints are as individual as our fingerprints, apparently. The researchers look forward to the invention of sensor devices to detect odorprints, for example at crime scenes. An interesting new technology: but we predict the ACLU will make a stink about it.

• John Leonard was an omnivorous and omnicompetent reviewer, for the New York Times and a raft of other publications. He was also a dedicated man of the Left — except for a brief period at the dawn of his career, when the Harvard dropout sent an essay on beatniks to William F. Buckley Jr., who hired him. While working for National Review, Leonard met Whittaker Chambers and was sent to newly Communist Cuba — experiences that inoculated him against sheer fellow traveling, even when he came to be literary editor of The Nation. Leonard’s prose was gaudy, gushing, bursting at the seams; he, even more than Tom Wolfe, was the late-20th-century custodian of the tumbling sentence of H. L. Mencken. When he came, odd man out, to National Review functions, he impressed everyone with his sweetness and humor. Dead at 69. R.I.P.

• Michael Crichton was a wildly successful novelist because he told stories well. Yet he was more than an entertainer. His books grappled with a series of difficult questions — everything from genetic engineering (Jurassic Park) and nanotechnology (Prey) to airline safety (Airframe) and the media and sexual harassment (Disclosure). His 2004 novel State of Fear drove the Left batty: It depicted global-warming doomsayers as secular zealots motivated by anything but a sincere concern for environmental conservation. Crichton was no conservative, but his willingness to challenge the sacred covenants of liberalism often allowed him to join the Right in common cause. Dead of cancer at the age of 66. R.I.P.

The Election

Hope amid the Ruins

All Americans should hope that President-elect Barack Obama’s time in office will redound to the country’s long-term benefit. The odds are nonetheless against it. Liberals will soon be in the driver’s seat in Washington in a way they have not been since the days of the Great Society. The Democratic majority in Congress will be about the same size as the one that greeted President Clinton in 1993, but much more homogeneously liberal.

Yet the public has not embraced many of the central aspects of liberalism. This may explain why, while Obama’s record and positions put him well to the left of any president in the last four decades, he is, to judge from his campaign, a man who wants to cut taxes, defend an individual right to own guns, take a hard line on terrorists in Pakistan, reduce the abortion rate, allow people to stay in their health-care plans, and keep trade free. Polls suggest that he was wise to run in this fashion: The public remains as skeptical about federal activism and social liberalism as it has been for years.

The public has, however, clearly rejected the Republican party in its present configuration. It is always difficult for a party to maintain control of the White House after two terms in office. But both President Bush and Senator McCain made the task harder. Bush took too long to change course in Iraq and botched the response to Hurricane Katrina. McCain rarely stuck to one message or strategy. The financial crisis, for which we do not primarily blame either man, sealed the party’s fate.

But Republicans have been so unpopular for so long, and their failure has been so sweeping, that it is a mistake to dwell too long on the flaws of specific men or the consequences of particular events. Neither Bush nor McCain nor congressional Republicans gave much sign that they understood the frustrations that average Americans have felt over the last few years toward the economy and Washington, let alone that they had solutions. The exit polls demonstrate this failure again and again: in questions about which party and candidates voters consider the most sympathetic to regular people, in questions about who would do best for the economy, in the breakdown of the vote by income.

Senator McCain’s principal economic message concerned spending and, more narrowly still, earmarks. Any winning conservative candidate would have to mention those themes. But he would also have to do what McCain did not, which was to link those issues to a bigger story about how government can hurt or help people as they seek to achieve their aspirations. Had McCain done more of this work early, he would have had credibility with the middle class when the financial crisis hit — and his attacks on Obama’s radical associations would have had added punch because he would have established his solidarity with the great American middle.

Obituaries for conservatism are premature. Conservatives believe that American interests and values are threatened by familial instability, runaway government, and weakness and confusion in foreign policy. Those convictions will retain serious political strength for as long as they are rooted in reality. The contemporary conservative vocation is to breathe new life into them.

Conservatives should be willing to work with the Democrats in Washington when appropriate — assuming the Democrats are interested in having their help — but should be no more mealy-mouthed, apologetic, or timorous than the Democrats were after the 2004 election. In the months to come, when Democrats misread the election as a mandate for liberalism — and particularly when they betray the explicit and implicit commitments Obama made during this campaign — Republicans should do everything they can to drive the point home, less in hopes of changing legislative outcomes than of moving voters in advance of 2010 and 2012.

Recriminations have their place, and we look forward to a lively debate among conservatives about our future. But our most urgent task is not to second-guess decisions that were made in 2003, 2005, or 2008. It is to devise an agenda — on health care, on taxes, on transportation, on energy — that Americans in the middle of the income distribution believe will serve their interests. If we can do that, we will not be, as so many pundits have said, at the end of a conservative era, but at the midpoint between two such eras. Success will require a great deal of wit. We will, alas, have plenty of time.

The Election II

Watershed

To understand what a watershed Barack Obama’s election was, one need only compare him with his predecessors. George Washington owned slaves; so, for a time, did Ulysses Grant. Woodrow Wilson showed <i>Birth of a Nation</i>, pro-Klan propaganda, in the White House. Warren Harding’s enemies claimed that he was part black (Harding, to his credit, was unfazed by the rumor). Every World War II veteran who won the White House — from General Eisenhower to Lieutenant Bush — served in a segregated military. The belief in equal rights that lies at the heart of our nation’s founding extended to African Americans — Thomas Jefferson, who owned hundreds of them and (probably) slept with one of them, so understood it — but reality lagged for most of our history.

In our lifetime, individual blacks have risen to the top in numerous fields — arts, entertainment, business, government, the military. Winning the White House is a symbol of consolidated social progress. But symbols matter; there are no historical placemats of secretaries of state. Even Americans who did not support Obama can feel proud for their country in the wake of his election.

Obama’s victory means different things to different supporters. Black Americans — including those, like Obama himself, who have no family experience of American slavery, and hardly even personal experience of racism — feel justified solidarity. Obama’s white supporters are a bit harder to take. For them, he is an almost cultic healer of all ills, and their own psyches. The least irksome of these are the first-time voters who responded with the ardor of youth to a historical moment they can barely grasp.

A watershed fills one river. Obama’s victory stands out in the history of important American elections for having little ideological content. Other transformative presidents, from Jefferson to Ronald Reagan, came to office with new ideas they intended to put into practice. Obama’s litany of hope and change was notably vague; his parochial and radical past is a long way from his moderate campaign atmospherics. How he gets from one to the other will be one of the dramas of his administration.

There will be attempts, no doubt from Obama himself, to make the narrative of racial fulfillment cover all cases. Media censors, who have been in the tank for Obama since at least January, will continue their handiwork. All efforts to stifle the ordinary give and take of politics must be resisted. America is in two wars and a financial crisis; such ideas as Candidate Obama expressed were mostly mistaken. History has been made; now the work begins.