The Week

■ NOT A JOKE: What follows is the opening paragraph of a review by Marc Fisher of Ron Hansen’s book Hitler’s Niece in the Washington Post Book World: “Hitler and Nixon, our two great obsessions of the latter half of this century, have won places in the pantheon of darkness, great evil figures, moody and mysterious yet ordinary and pathetic. Nixon, at least, is ours—an American crook, roiling with petty jealousies and hates.”

■ One of the local references in Bill Bradley’s campaign kickoff in Crystal City, Mo., was to the Mississippi. “With its numberless streams and tributaries coming together, the Mississippi River is like democracy itself.” With its numberless paragraphs not quite coming together, Bradley’s speech was like the Mississippi itself—-long, lazy, and without any clear sense of where it was going, through its many bends. A good announcement speech can hit specific issues; more important, it articulates the themes from which a candidate’s issues arise. Bradley’s did neither. He called for “a new kind of leadership,” without saying where he would go; he urged Americans to “renew our faith in each other,” without explaining what justifies our fidelity. Lost in the slow solemn flow of bromides was any precise picture of him—the intense evangelical he was in college, the semi-supply-sider he became in the early ’80s, or the race-baiting left-winger he is today.

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■ NOT A JOKE: What follows is the opening paragraph of a review by Marc Fisher of Ron Hansen’s book Hitler’s Niece in the Washington Post Book World: “Hitler and Nixon, our two great obsessions of the latter half of this century, have won places in the pantheon of darkness, great evil figures, moody and mysterious yet ordinary and pathetic. Nixon, at least, is ours—an American crook, roiling with petty jealousies and hates.”

■ One of the local references in Bill Bradley’s campaign kickoff in Crystal City, Mo., was to the Mississippi. “With its numberless streams and tributaries coming together, the Mississippi River is like democracy itself.” With its numberless paragraphs not quite coming together, Bradley’s speech was like the Mississippi itself—-long, lazy, and without any clear sense of where it was going, through its many bends. A good announcement speech can hit specific issues; more important, it articulates the themes from which a candidate’s issues arise. Bradley’s did neither. He called for “a new kind of leadership,” without saying where he would go; he urged Americans to “renew our faith in each other,” without explaining what justifies our fidelity. Lost in the slow solemn flow of bromides was any precise picture of him—the intense evangelical he was in college, the semi-supply-sider he became in the early ’80s, or the race-baiting left-winger he is today.