You have forty-five seconds to tell the voters why they should write your name down in the Iowa caucus. Whistle! … Whistle! Thank you very much. We will now hear from …

The awful smell in the room is human vanity. It is always a factor. The most self-sacrificing monk has vanity. He is asking the Lord to note the special privations he is undertaking in His name. The young woman who leaves the practice of the violin only to eat and sleep has vanity. She hopes that her skills will attract attention, and she may even believe that no other artist has registered her understanding of Bach’s Chaconne. Where banality reigns, you have the field marshal who wants to kill three times as many of the enemy as they succeed in killing of our own men, and the parliamentarian who wonders a little bit, before dozing off, whether history will note his unique skills in contriving a majority vote for that bill. And of course this gets into very big time when it is a man given 45 seconds to tell the audience why he should win the Iowa caucus. The benumbing challenge is to contrive a spiel in which the satisfaction of your own vanity plays a subordinate role.

The reason this is so difficult in 2004 is that we voters are being asked to identify ourselves with a national cause which is not easy to decipher. All the candidates agree that things are not going, in Iraq, as well as they should go. Dr. Dean says it is as simple as that we should never have gone to Iraq in the first place. Well, you might say, er yes, maybe we shouldn’t have gone to Iraq. But voting for Dr. Dean doesn’t transport you back to February, 2003, with the option of telling the planes to turn off their engines, and the ships to go back out to sea. So what do you actually accomplish?

Congressman Gephardt is determined to protect American jobs, many of them eliminated by the movement of capital to other parts of the world where labor is cheaper. He has a point. Something ought to be done to prevent an erosion of U.S. jobs. Oh, and he also wants health insurance — no wrinkles, no fine print deductions — health insurance for young Americans, which is a very good idea.

Senator Edwards from North Carolina is telling us — he can’t fool me, I’ve been around a bit — that he is a good looking guy who made his own way up the ladder; he’s obviously bright and persuasive, and he’s in favor of . . . a bunch of things. And he’d look good, that cold day next January, bringing back memories of the Golden Boy. Why not? Why not have a handsome president? There’s no civil rights act against that, is there?

And so it goes, in a season in which vanity simply cannot be given the subordinate attention vanity deserves. The candidates’ problem is the absence of a true cause. The people who are running for president of the United States are doing so because they want to be president of the United States. No candidate embodies a national objective. We don’t have a federalist arguing the need for cohesion against the democrat, the visionary leader who sees a nascent country reaching all the way to the Pacific Ocean up against a provincial, the petitioner who argues that Negroes are human, or that the Communist challenge must be resisted at all costs.

What the candidates are having to do is to mutate opposition to George W. Bush into a national cause. Everything else is — vanity. The problem is that George Bush doesn’t really lend himself to that treatment. Oh, there are habits of his that maybe grate, and he is spending a lot of money, and he is losing American lives in Iraq. But that does not constitute a cause. And the candidates who are given 45 seconds to declaim their willingness to serve as president aren’t having great success in transforming their vanity into a cause in which legions should march.

If you ponder Senator Kerry after 45 seconds, what have you got? Somebody in favor of good education, good health, reasonable international commitments, cooperative enterprises, and, well, perhaps some appreciation given to the 21-year old who fought in

Vietnam. So? Make him president?

But Bush is serving as president, and he’s going to run for a second term, and what are the arguments against letting him do that?