It had to be, for this year, a Democrat who broke the silence before a civil service commission meeting last month. "So, who's caught up in Obamamania?" The grin on the official's face divulged that he wasn't, exactly. Chatter went back and forth, laughter and smiles more knowing than tight-lipped — when these people enter city hall they walk into politics. Another appointee, a Republican, said he had only been watching closely enough to know "that there are three leading candidates, and I'm not terribly excited by any of them."

A couple of weeks ago, one colleague confessed he favored neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton nor John McCain. He was open to considering each one of them. The forum in which the open question was posed wasn't the right place for my opinion. And anyway, I have needed only one general election year, 2004, to know enough to stay out of the amicable political persuasion business. Friends vote however they want. But I did offer simple advice — if uninitiated, focus on policies — and, noting widespread ambivalence, considered the thought experiment. Political convictions intact, what if I were undecided?

Barack Obama's campaign courted me during February — tracts and phone calls, an automated invitation to cross party lines in the Ohio primary. Reasons why I might vote for Obama are scarce to start out. The Illinois senator opposes the Bush doctrine; I solemnly espouse it. He welcomes judicial activism; I don't oppose social legislation so much as I demand the impeachment of judges who try to promulgate it themselves. In one pamphlet, the campaign asked me to support Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton because the latter claims to impugn NAFTA — blamed by each candidate for Ohio's sallow economy — as immemorially as the former has.

Now, there is a double irony: Ohio was driven into these circumstances by Republican eminence in the state capital, and by the same majority flouting every rule of the free market. I would see tariffs abolished and countries made to specialize and compete; but the senator aggregated a promise to increase taxation and subsidies after a protectionist decree. OK, what else to vote for? Another colleague volunteered sheer character, as he saw parallels between Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy. Both men, he said, give people hope.

A narrow but limning reduction is to assume most of Kennedy's prepared text came from the hand and heart staff. Richard Reeves, validated by his syndicated columns from the far, mystical left, wrote Profile of Power, an incontestable and sober biography of thirty-fifth president. Hope felt in the telecast presence of Kennedy? It inheres in the hopeful: the New Englander was cool-headed, astute; until the day of his assassination, baffled with the supernatural investitures, in him, by others. If self-centered, dilatory and indulgent, JFK was faultlessly dispassionate for an executive station. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s hagiography convinces people of John F. Kennedy's glory in the same way that Clement Clarke Moore inspirits belief in Santa Claus.

The Kennedy whom Barack Obama resembles is Bobby. Reeves was ruthlessly plain about the attorney general's performance during the Cuban Missile Crisis: Robert Kennedy was inexperienced and impractical, but he was also magniloquent, vain and capricious.

There is no malice in Obama. He appears likable; modest, for a pol; and indelibly candid about his foibles. But he also appears to be somebody's speechwriter who accidentally got elected instead. His rhetoric — classical rhetoric — is sing-songy, and substitutes pomposity for wit even as it exchanges verity for style. Can Obama demonstrate the political power of his language? Well, no: he hasn't had time for it. Then, the nonchalance greeting accusations of Obama's staff telling NAFTA members other than what the candidate told voters. Leeway to which Obama is entitled, it was said. Really? That, what — the senator is vitally insubstantial? And thereby an ensuing smallness of the man.

Hillary Clinton: less to say about her. Her domestic positions are similar enough to Obama's for rejection; her foreign policy statements mutable enough to distrust. Even if she were to be nominated, even if she were inaugurated as president in ten months' time, that a debutant Illinoisan currently leads the primary race means that while inevitable, Clinton wouldn't be irresistible.

A rejoinder to the Obama campaign's retorts on NAFTA woke me up on a Sunday morning. I took notes. Hillary Clinton, in a recording, regretted this one steel mill having closed. She vowed to "end corporate giveaways," and "create jobs" to "help build the middle class." Only in a daydream from a mind of central planning can millions be placed into an abstractive construction set.

That returns me to last year's bizarre holiday tableau starring Clinton. To Carol of the Bells, symphonic but also the gravest Christmas chant selectable, Clinton wrapped boxes — not gifts, since each was figuratively identified as a federal program envisioned under a Clinton presidency.

I didn't comment on the advertisement but was struck by it. For the first time, I saw an earnest former first lady. Hillary Clinton sees herself the American matron of twentieth century socialism. Citizens are her guests: welcome to all the stuff set out by laborers, and free to come and go, but to do little more than say Please and Thank You. They can't be head of the household. She is. Her excitement, as she bundled those presents, was real. But Mrs. Clinton looks haggard from the wrong angle, these days, and her message of old-time statism — without the gilt Obama lays on his — is just as worn. Inherited popularity aside, Clintonism is old, so old. The voter is left with the appeal of a rotting feast.

Even though I conjectured a "President McCain" for the sake of an argument last April, I told a friend in December that the Arizona senator, nearly the Republican nominee in 2000, stood in this election as "an also-ran." In a party primary, John McCain would not have been — before Super Tuesday — my first choice, nor necessarily my second, while probably my third. He speaks silly things about "global warming" and the makers of pharmaceuticals — ah, but the other two senators do, too, and they are a lot sillier. He is stentorian on subjects that are none of his business, like free speech and its monetary form.

McCain is less silly on federal excess; he dislikes it. Whatever complaisance he showed on Capitol Hill over the president's judicial nominees, he has no love for judges looking into the Constitution and finding the Almighty, but seeing themselves. Cardinally, John McCain exhorts American power to expand the democratic world as a defense against what remains of the mephitic, totalitarian one. And partisan Republicans resent him for acting contra to the party now and then; but for the average citizen, if there's anything to be said of a mugwump, it's that he doesn't play favorites.

He would be no gentle, endearing president. Still, that can be plus, maybe sending David Gregory, that disrespectful bore from NBC, away from press conferences in tears. A leader for these times? As another colleague noted, he "fits the bill." I have seen sons of bitches in office, but never a real sonuvabitch. By process of elimination I vote for John McCain.

Unless the Democratic presidential contenders suddenly appeal, or voting for dead men or withdrawn candidates or imaginary parties convinces as indirect means to political satisfaction, the Republican voter will soon choose between John McCain and Mitt Romney. The race hasn't descended to acrimony, exactly, but it is still as cheerless as it was last week, right before Rudy Giuliani discovered that his grin was Cheshire.

John McCain is the curmudgeon whose primary wins at first mystify. He grumbled about deficits and twice voted against George W. Bush's tax cuts. In spite of, or because of, proximity to the white-collar obloquy of the Keating Five, the senator sees corruption where there is instead a First Amendment. McCain is not only openly accepting of illegal immigration, but fervent. Why have Republican voters elevated him? One supposition rests on tenure — it is simply John McCain's turn, voters resign themselves to that. For a corollary, one compares McCain to former senator and presidential loser Bob Dole.

Both men have been senators, were veterans, and endure limiting injuries from war. Neither, if called "moderate," will motivate very many to shake their heads. To conflate them politically, however, misses their divergent natures. The irascible McCain has chosen positions with far more assertiveness than the complaisant Dole — to say McCain is "moderate" means that he holds several statist beliefs, while for Dole it means that he is lukewarm and may simply give in. That may convey authority and consistency for the former but it certainly implies an absence thereof for the latter, and dispatches the analogy. We have the footage from 1996: Senator McCain has not mistaken San Diego for San Francisco, or dived off any dais.

Mitt Romney, the executive, occupies a political space that once belonged to Ronald Reagan. From where does the robust American come? Family and enterprise, the former governor celebrating the first; and advocating, via tax relief, the second. How to stand in wartime? Hold fast, says Romney, turning on the phrase "strong military." What about rightist cultural standards? Yes, yes and yes.

What Romney promises is not necessarily what he has enacted. National Review contributor Deroy Murdock has, for months, compared the candidates. He especially impugned the former governor's contemporary statements and, though with an evident vindictive spirit, significantly so. Corporate taxes, use taxes, identification card fees: all increased. Whence abortion, immigration and marriage laws? Westerly. Romney continues to define himself with negative space. Thus he runs as the conservative, but declaratively, and thus putatively; and perhaps ostensibly. As I said to a friend, over breakfast last Friday, voters face a choice between a reformed conservative and a moderate — but could very well elect the reformed conservative and have a moderate.

Complicating this is the perception of the presidency becoming a tight cynosure of Washington, D.C. — not because it is or could be, but because the men who would inhabit the White House are foremost on the public mind. Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, though not a Radical. Jack Kennedy's first two years in executive office were a profile in legislative washouts, thanks to an adverse congressional wing of JFK's own party. And: Hillary Clinton would have seen socialized medicine promulgated in 1994 if Democrats had wanted it. Between the balance of power is the potential for a beneficial difference in ideology, but recalcitrant caucuses of the GOP are evaluating the party as if they were electing a parliament.

On the other hand, Congress can declare but never administer war. It may be that transnational fascism rising in the Near East — the hostilities already engaged and promising a decade of trials — has decided the ballots in McCain's favor. The senator has called for less, not more, extricable deployments overseas. Almost a year ago, John McCain said unpopular things about unpopular campaigns. At the same time, Mitt Romney said something else. Those statements have been disfigured by McCain, though not wholly. Romney was asked about "timetables" in Iraq, in this case the watchword for check marks for a retreat. He assumed, rightly, that President Bush had a political covenant with Baghdad, and spoke to that end. The question was loaded: did Romney asseverate? Maybe. What he clearly showed was caution, great caution, and not necessarily — judging by his language — out of military deliberation.

John McCain's capture and torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese countervails the left's animation of Oliver Stone's pitiable, disenchanted military stereotype. No more accusations of civilian cowardice, at least. Were a President McCain to send the armed forces into justified peril, with near-certainty could one assume that none would suffer quite like he did. Yet McCain has his own thane's mindset, insulting Romney and begging, for observers, whether his service supplies the cause of derogating those civilians whom he swore to protect — but now obstruct him politically.

Where are the other candidates, the better ones? Popularly defeated by John McCain and Mitt Romney, two men of the imperfection that tends to stifle the ideologues and dreamers. Can the victor be flattered by the could-be vice president? God forbid these two end up as one another's running mate, haughty partners in electoral enterprise.

Events, since just this Saturday, can be arranged as a crest for the last two weeks of Republican presidential campaigning. John McCain struck Mitt Romney with an imputation of words on Iraq policy to Romney's tendency to equivocate, not too far off the mark. Mitt Romney retorted with a defense of topical statements — and a note of McCain's better standing with members of the other party, also not too far off the mark. In the three-day exchange of stilted indignation for like, journalists in support of each have contributed to a group conclusion that both men are sour and half again too shrewd.

But then, mercury is a toxin signifying radiance, yes? John McCain is polling on top, Mitt Romney close enough in second. It is, though performing from within the offices of glass. Those in whose mouths a thermometer has accidentally snapped can describe, in grimaces, the misfortune of a simple means for telling temperature happening to be that awful, argent liquid. Messrs. former governor and senator may face the other directly for Republican presidential nomination, but for now each competes to be the least dislikeable.

Rudy Giuliani, who trails in the race he once led, only smiled. "Some of my opponents are engaging in negative campaigning, using words like dishonesty," he said on Saturday. Save strength for the Democratic nominee, remember? "So I'm gonna try and remain positive, we're gonna talk about the things we can do for America, the things we can do for Florida. And I think that is going to be the winning strategy in Florida." National Review's Jim Geraghty demurred. "I realize Republicans are not Democrats and Florida is not South Carolina, but that is more or less the argument that John Edwards was deploying in the final days before yesterday's primary," after which the former senator from North Carolina took the spot reserved for Giuliani.

Can we take Jim up on the qualification? John Edwards, after bumptious entrances in two presidential primary seasons, has won a single state, showed a few times four years ago but otherwise stays back in place. He airs policy in the future subjunctive, because as a junior senator he legislated as a co-sponsor; or else introduced bills that were either commemorative or a little more than that, and if so checked in committee. Rudy Giuliani's mayorship, in its brasher moments — shattering welfare and elevating its dependent class, arming a police force to grapple with and pull down the streets' criminal establishment, knocking out whole sections of New York's affirmative action offices — was executive grace under fire, on the order of the Cato Institute managing from Berkeley's city hall. What most talk of, Rudy has done.

Hardly anybody in the press believes Rudy Giuliani's strategy will be effective, let alone triumphant, but the former mayor must be very pleased by how terribly his opponents have cloyed over the last ten days. If but consigned to the imaginative details of string theory, there is a Tuesday, January 29, 2008 when the Floridian GOP considers that a) the first- and second-place candidates are unsatisfying, b) they don't have to be, and that c) Rudy is still in the race. If such a day is conjectural and unreachable, at least Giuliani will be taking away some consolation.

Even better, if Rudy is nominated, conventional wisdom might then hold that it's best for a candidate to limit public displays and confine himself to a favored, few states. We — the civic enthusiasts, party members, citizens pestered by the media — may not start hearing about the next bunch until late, late 2011.

The press is impatient. Cause would be an early sequence of presidential primaries without swells or peripety — no humiliations, no scandals, zero dramatics. Even though most candidates between the two major parties have had articles written about the vitality of one or another state win, succession from contest to contest remains orderly while decisively favorable for no one. The only man bowing out so far, a Democrat, surprised by running earnestly for so long: poor, old, gubernatorial secretary-diplomat Bill Richardson.

Reportage seems to have a quicker pulse, more published per day, hour and event than 2004. The majority of it is from primary sources, factual and concrete. Somebody is on the stump, or his staff is distributing literature, responding to claims made by an opponent two hours before. Who is in which state; what corner of it, which town? A headline from fifteen minutes ago informs. Coverage invests in discrete detail as essentially as does sportscasting. Knowing where all candidates are and what they are up to at the same time is a novelty, useful if one is keeping records or writing tickers. But the risk to living from one moment to the next is that analysis narrows into straight-line projections from a tiny sample of data.

Rudy Giuliani, for example, is supposed to be in straits. Three reasons, according to commentary: attention is being paid elsewhere, polls have shifted and the former mayor has not performed well in the primaries in which he wasn't expected to perform well. On the last point: Giuliani employs strategists, literal ones, not just the sober operators best known for temporizing and talking loudly on television. Strategy aligns local and anticipated resources precisely as means to achievement over the long term. Patience, planning and indirection support it. As a strategist is scrupulous he eschews opportunity and develops contingencies for chance.

Contrast with Mike Huckabee, who won the Iowa caucuses through the immediate use of what was available (curious electors, flattering press) in lieu of what was absent (money, order). Tactics gathered the victory, and Huckabee's ad-lib couldn't unsettle the fortified New Hampshire campaigns of Mitt Romney and John McCain. No gain in the Granite State for Huckabee, no gain in Michigan for McCain, probably no gain in South Carolina for Romney. This is a season so far without any drives, in spite of the words "surge" and "momentum" as an editorial extravagance. Polls are indicators, not determinants, of elections. It might be that the direct primaries went to the man in the greatest position to take them from the start — and movement in voter loyalty amounts to a lot of statistical legerdemain.

John McCain won the New Hampshire primary when he ran for president in 2000. He is in political rapprochement with the state's party; the senator spent much of his time up there, and his visits were both noticed and appreciated. His final stay was met by a robust campaign apparatus. The Romney patriarch, George, once governed Michigan. Son Mitt successfully appealed to state Republicans, who gave to his presidential bid their money and then their votes, shepherded to ballots by a trim and effective organization.

South Carolina is trickier, a state that four in-theater candidates managed to split into shares. John McCain intended it to be a soft landing at the end-point of an arc from New Hampshire, and situated himself early; Fred Thompson, activated, presented a logical southern choice; and Mitt Romney's arguable standing as the rightward-most, viable candidate lifted him through the latter months of last year. John McCain leads and may win, but if he does on grounds of establishment back then — and not enthusiasm of now — South Carolina is a property of competence rather than narrative. The race, then, won't be McCain's; Florida, New York and California will remain Giuliani's, and we face another fortnight of no easy predictions.

There is a lot being said right now about the billingsgate tumbling off the pages of a newsletter that, for at least a couple of decades, bore in some variation the name of congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul. The foulness of the periodical's messages isn't in question, and the association between man and eponym has been interrupted along every investigative line by cutouts, don't-you-know. But even before one ponders all of this, Paul's repeated answers to typical policy questions organize to disqualify him from Republican nomination.

Appearing on Monday's Tonight Show with Jay Leno — which is these days a waypoint between primaries — Paul was invited by the host to explain an opinion that, simplified and passed along, became construed as "we were to blame" for terrorist attacks on September 11th and before. True, asked Leno, or Not true? Not true, replied Paul, but "Our policies have a lot to do with it." The congressman set up a figuration between murderers and Islamist terror groups. He used "insane" as an ascription to terrorists, but focused more on "motives," and finished with a clear but invalid argument: a) people acting reasonably have articulated motives, and b) some terrorists have articulated motives, so c) some terrorists are people acting reasonably.

The anti-modernism of Islamism's early twentieth-century underwriters, according to Paul, actually "can't motivate a people" to commit terrorism. The same mechanistic logic churned this out: a people? Members or abettors of terrorist groups number in the thousands, Muslims in the billions — even with polls showing radical sympathies, the overwhelming factor of non-participation means terrorism is not representative.

So what is the motive? Paul volunteered: "the motives are related to the fact that we occupy their countries." Then, through his introspective calculation that equates apples to oranges inasmuch as both fruits are round, he compared monarchical Iran and Communist China to the United States. "[W]e used our CIA to install the shah in Iran. If somebody did that to us, we'd be pretty annoyed. Or if the Chinese had military bases on our land or said that they came here to protect their oil, the American people would be pretty outraged. The Republicans and Democrats would be joined together. They would be really very annoyed."

It takes some acrobatism to juggle it all. First, the assumption that an individual, when "annoyed," conspires, for years, to target civilians in mass-casualty attacks. Here is the power of specious talk: resolved, when people get mad they repeatedly kill. Do they? — or just a certain, rare, dangerous sort? Second, whatever the Cold War wisdom of returning the shah to power in a 1953 coup, a constitutional monarchy is leaps and bounds from the world's oldest democratic republic. And as Michael Ledeen once quipped, "I cannot for a moment believe that the fanatical clerics in Tehran," the Khomeinists responsible for Iran's position as the signal terror-sponsoring state, "are enraged by the removal of a progressive liberal."

Third, Paul used his bizarre — and favorite — analogy with China. Beijing is to Washington as, say, London is to Paris? Not by any factual measure. What about military bases and the protection of oil? Who does Paul mean? Kuwaitis are openly grateful for American armor chasing out Saddam Hussein's army in 1991. The Saudi autocrats requested military assistance after Hussein's 1990 blitzkrieg; George W. Bush emptied the Prince Sultan Air Base in 2003. Al Qaeda has been anathematized by citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan — who are at worst ambivalent about American and multinational troops. Removed from the amenities of conjecture, Paul's A-to-B theory is comprised of unidentified actors without a grievance.

This same week, Rudy Giuliani's biggest statement on the Near East and Southwest Asian regions concerned the same increase in troops and intense counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan as yielding successes in Iraq. John McCain, speaking to the same Pajamas Media reporters as his competitor, brought up nuclear proliferation from North Korea, China's complicity in Sudanese genocide, the unsatisfactory state of American intelligence services — and the need to address each. Neither attempted a unifying concept of non-intervention. Poll standings or no, one is tempted by impure thoughts; that implications of The Ron Paul Newsletter are as dispositive as evidence would be to shorten the list of White House contenders who remain notional on foreign affairs.

The volume of Republican presidential candidates and the length of the campaign run before this year's primaries has led journalists to assign each contestant an identifying characteristic. One or two words, often cited in variation, the descriptors have remained pretty much the same over the months. In reports from the hustings, you read that Mitt Romney is "polished," Fred Thompson is "tired," Rudy Giuliani is "tough."

The shorthand spares efforts in reintroduction but is so abbreviatory that it fails to match what is obvious on film. Romney is instead vigorous and exacting; Thompson is quiet and succinct, not somnolent; Giuliani, voluble and enthusiastic. The same evidence best serves judgment of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, regarded as affable and politically moderate. It is one thing to consider the headline "Huckabee Pulls Attack Ad," another to watch how Iowa's caucus victor actually conducted himself.

Huckabee, just before the New Year, filled a room with several dozen reporters expecting to watch a videotaped retort to Mitt Romney. Interior decorations were by the Huckabee campaign and followed one theme: Romney's tergiversation on abortion, gun laws and health insurance. The Arkansan stepped behind a podium. "Conventional political wisdom," he said, in a four-minute exposition, "is that when you are hit and it's beginning to do damage, the smart play is to hit back." An ad was made and delivered to television stations. And then, at the last minute, Huckabee reversed his staff's orders: "I told them that I do not want it to be run."

Renouncing political derogation, Huckabee promised only advertisements for "why I should be president," and not, the caucus-goer might otherwise expect, "why Mitt Romney should not." Huckabee continued. "I know that some of you are saying, that, well, it can't be that bad." He shrugged his shoulders, looked directly at reporters and insisted, "I'm going to show you the ad. You'll get a chance to find out." The audience capsized in laughter.

What amused the attendant press was Huckabee's use of preterition, or raising a matter by claiming not to raise it. What should disquiet the observer is the man's undertaking such a familiar rhetorical maneuver straight-faced — then answering frank, skeptical questions with a homiletic air.

The advertisement played from a laptop to a projection screen, and kept rolling without any volume. Huckabee, annoyed, urged "We need sound," and before his aides sorted out the audio problem, the video had played several times over two minutes. Next apprised of (but, of course, not openly offered) a stack of documents in support of the ad, reporters were incredulous. The first one called on asked as much: Governor, you said you weren't going to run an ad, and you ran it to the media who will ensure its publication, so what gives? Huckabee replied with a terrific paralogism: the press would have demanded to see what wasn't going to be aired. "You'd say, 'Where's the ad?'" Huckabee explained, as if a political campaign produces unfavorable charges any less innately than a silkworm emits silk.

The room got louder in crosstalk. "Governor, why not just not run the ad?" someone shouted. Two questions in a row: Why were the posters, the tracts, still up? Because "The tipping point was this morning," there hadn't been time to remove them. What about the campaign website? from a fourth reporter. "It's never too late to do the right thing," assured Huckabee. Two more: the former governor had spent the week condemning Mitt Romney as "dishonest." Huckabee? "I've said what I've said."

Interviewed by Jay Leno two days later, Mike Huckabee was ribbed by the host over his justification for the event. "I hope I have a conscience," the former governor said, "which would be very unusual for politics, to have a conscience." The apothegm "all politicians are liars" is a dangerous misdirection, since it devalues those in office with integrity and condones wrongdoing of others. In the discrimination of personality is a distinction of each of the men running. But all character being equal — that is, zero — preferences turn on choice statements and then, failing that, the tactics of charm.

Caucuses took place yesterday, whereas the balance of states will hold direct primaries. Iowa's exalting of Mike Huckabee could turn out to have been the decision of a tiny electorate caught in a particular moment of ardor. If not, the Republican Party will act on sentiment, not reason, by endeavoring to replace a tongue-tied man with a pietistic one.

The archival value of the internet was redeemed when a search led me to the precise video clip of a segment from the old comedy improv television show, Whose Line Is It, Anyway? Steven Colbert, of all people, was the straight man in an event called "Party Quirks," described by host Drew Carey as a guessing-game in which Colbert's three colleagues would act out whatever unlikely person or thing had been printed on a slip in a sealed envelope. The first two comedians were funny; the third, Ryan Stiles, was uproarious. Remaining unknown to Colbert, the directive was flashed on the screen for the pleasure of the audience, remaining there as Stiles stiffened into a driver's posture and crept forward: FOOTAGE OF CRASH TEST DUMMIES. The vacant expression, the whiplash in Stiles' careful imitation of slow-motion; it was great comic pantomime.

From the same site providing this popular bit — YouTube — I found a lot of authentic crash test footage. My reactions were typical. First, solemnity in realization of what the test is meant to recreate. Next, awe at progressive engineering. Then, finally, the muse that visitors from a faraway world might be puzzled by the apparent obliteration of motorists in effigy — sent at a canonical 35 mph toward pylons designed to bury themselves between the automatons' legs, or locked to a targeted site and broadsided by rolling pile-drivers, all captured by high-speed camera in a thoroughgoing appeal to malice.

Of course, this would require an observer totally alien to the simple context in which these rituals are performed: consumer safety, held in high regard by the public and codified by the state. An automobile compromised by unintended use becomes a combination of lacerative and blunt instruments. Customers don't want to be killed or injured in an accident, carmakers want customers instead of victims and litigants, insurers want to keep their shirts. Crash tests stretch nearly all the way back to cars' prevalence on the road, and today General Motors provides a line of simulacra — the Hybrid III — deployed by rightfully interested agencies.

After viewing a few tests of American or European cars, I considered that the tradition in oversight was a cultural exponent — that maybe one could get a glimpse of a society through its crash tests. China, with its growing indictments for negligence in manufacturing, swiftly came to mind. They do run them over there, don't they? I ran another search.

I had no idea that the Chinese crash test entry is the auto world's lurid running joke. Since June the punchline has been a prospective import sedan called the Brilliance BS6, whose visit with a stationary obstacle owned by Germany's Allgemeiner Deutscher Automobil-Club is on film. Impact at about 30 mph caused the Brilliance to telescope, its front end snapping left and back, the driver's door torquing upwards to lock with the forward-buckling rear of the car as the dummy chauffeur was clotheslined by the steering column and dash. A remedial test three months later, in Spain, saw a little less carnage. In the image of the first wreck is the bid of the Chinese Communist Party for status as a superpower: made to look like what they have in the West, cheaply and in vain.

The World Bank revised one its assessments of China's GDP in terms of Purchasing Power Parity — down, and by two-fifths. Three times as many citizens as thought before live on exiguous wages, the Bank's threshold for "poverty." Back in November, Albert Keidel wrote in the Financial Times that a halving came because "China had never participated in the careful price surveys needed to convert accurately its gross domestic product into PPP dollars." However many ways economic standing can be interpreted, here is no challenger, no dynamo. Some conspicuously positive responses are drawn from this, one the inference that Beijing hasn't the military capacity or potential suspected, another that the embarrassment is a chance for neighborly help with market management.

How one responds in turn depends on what he has thought of China making headlines these last years. Walter Russell Mead, writing in the Los Angeles Times on the subject: "Don't pop the champagne corks." Who is about to do that? Not a classical liberal. There shouldn't have been revulsion at China's apparent economic successes, produced a couple of decades after chief Deng Xiaoping intercalated free market structures; nor celebration at the disclosure that Chinese capitalism is really a frontispiece on the same, incompetent totalitarian state. What bothered before was the relegation, in claims of China's approaching preeminence, of liberty to auxiliary importance. Personal and property rights don't merely supplement individual prosperity, they lay its foundation — and here, for nearly a decade, we heard of China's other way.

A poorer, slower, shoddier, less stable China benefits no one. But the fantasy of illiberal wealth-creation has again been dispelled. Policymakers — trading partners, the world's financial institutions, the Politburo, though necessarily not the Chinese people themselves — are granted another chance to act and govern otherwise. The Olympics are hoped in Beijing to be vindication, and granting normalcy to the country ruled by the Party will be foolish.

On a citizen's advisory committee, I was not long ago in the company of educators. As those meetings go, after the settling of business, conversation turns to whomever has the balance of chairs. So one is audience to the passion, the professional ambivalence, of a public administrator — excitement over possibilities, distress from inspiration's material constraints.

That morning we visitors were told of Two Million Minutes, a documentary chronicling the high school tenures of six teenagers, a pair each from the United States, India, and China. By the solemnity, one could figure that, whether or not they had seen the movie, school officials present agreed with its premise. It is that the three countries "are preparing their students for the future" dissimilarly, perhaps inequitably. Executive Producer Robert Compton underwrote Two Million Minutes to proclaim "the universal importance of education today, and address what many are calling a crisis for US schools regarding chronically low scores in math and science indicators."

Since Compton isn't claiming perspicacity, but rather that the crisis is obvious, a skeptic may proceed before watching the film. Alarm at America's educational inferiority began over twenty-five years ago. Attendant to Japan's conspicuous rise were longer school calendars and humbling comparisons between test batteries. George H.W. Bush, drenched in the light of a new world order, spake: "by the year 2000 US students must be the first in the world in math and science achievement." The edict went unanswered, and it could stand that classes do graduate in India and China under more rigor. Compton, however, wants Two Million Minutes to be about "a battle being fought around the world for the global economy," and that is a non sequitur.

The work and its academic subscription appear the product of seeing only nails when limited to a hammer. Should one prefer a degree in math and science or financial security, even professional aptness? Assessing the "battle" in frames of two million minutes: the American formula, in 2002, was nearly eight times China's GDP at per-capita purchasing power parity and beat India's by over tenfold. Last year, China's billion managed to pare the US lead to a quintupling; India remained at its denominator from one high school class prior. The bachelor's degree today earns on average, according to the Census Bureau, about 6 percent less than it did four years ago. Disappointing for the American undergrad, but respectively constituting fifty and thirty times Indian and Chinese median household incomes.

A fact adduced in favor of the movie is the mastodonic size of school systems in China and India. All right. If the Indians produce enough scientists to populate California, good on them — theirs is a teething democracy, and exchanges between it and the United States, cooperative or competitive, already benefit both countries. China? Insouciance over the Communist Party's totalitarian presence has allowed a paralogism to be made. Robert Compton notes that Two Million Minutes is the "first introduction to high school in India and China" for its viewers. He might consider Princeton student Chris Xu who, growing up in a "first-generation Chinese immigrant family," wrote in a business periodical that he doubts Beijing's successful market reforms will "lead to a reversal of the US-China brain drain." Immigrants, Xu argues, "have built new lives in America, achieving economic success as engineers, scientists, doctors, and businessmen," and that "as for replacing America in its traditional role as the beacon for immigrants seeking a better way of life, China still has a long way to go."

Must knowledge be got only through formal instruction — can it? Compton has held screenings at several colleges, including Harvard University at the beginning of last month. "I was surprised," he recorded of his visit with graduate students, "by the passion with which many defended the status quo." Compton's feathers had been ruffled, and easily, judging by a review of the trip a few days later. In an open letter, Compton wrote, "Candidly, I don't think I've met a more close-minded and dogmatic bunch of people — except maybe in a religious cult." He concluded with apostrophe: "Where are America's inquisitive, thoughtful, open-minded graduate students — eager to learn how other countries educate their students?"

Well, then. Two Million Minutes is something to see, though its creators can't begrudge its quality as supplemental. Preoccupied with erudition, Compton may have forgotten — despite his own career as an investor — the importance of being astute. There are tens of thousands of mathematicians, engineers and scientists who would be without their present and gainful employment, were it not for the most famous Harvard dropout of all.

"How did your husband do last night?"

Mika Brzezinski interviewed Michelle Obama for the November 13th morning show on MSNBC. The transcript belongs in the case history of leftism as a mental block for couples like the Obamas — intelligent, successful, attractive and yet in disbelief as to how they got where they are. Dispensation of trials is not, in life, equal but it is pretty varied and wide. People who write memoirs or offer advice have first forborne, and second overcome; the implication being that as disadvantage inheres (step one) it has never killed ambition, and if it is hereditary (step two) can't prevent an escape from caste.

Asked about her education, Mrs. Obama ratiocinated. Painfully, one sees that she almost correctly answered her questions. Aside from her casting of the 1980s as the 1950s, in Brzezinski's words, when "your father worked a blue-collar job...Yet he was able to put two kids through Princeton" — the two women missing the forty-year rise in degreed Americans as a redress of the blue collar's loss in value — Obama found her way on track. If "kids are now looking at whether they should go to college," she wondered, "are they going to come out with so much loan debt?" Well? "This was the situation that Barack and I saw ourselves in." And, and — "And the only reason that we're not in debt today is that Barack wrote two bestselling novels."

So? "But that paid off unexpectedly." No! Mrs. Obama, such is the essence of calculated risk. Barack made an investment in his talent as a writer; what he reaped wasn't guaranteed and, were it worthwhile, couldn't possibly have been. This is the experience for those earning in every licit way other than confiscation. When did higher education become other than a down payment for greater means to wealth? When the diploma was reprinted as a ticket to eudaemonia, an impossible transaction Michelle Obama suggests in spite of her and her husband, wisely, never attempting it.

Later in the interview, Brzezinski lured Obama into a discussion of the electorate as paint-by-numbers. A pollster found Hillary Clinton leading Barack among blacks: "What is going on?" Obama started as would any candidate's spouse — "First of all, I think that that's not gonna hold" — and then veered. "What we're dealing with in the black community is just the natural fear of possibility, OK," she said, and the inquiry follows: a) is Team Obama relying on this demographic to vote along racial lines; b) what is different about Illinois, where Barack was elected to the Senate in 2004 by 70 percent of voters; c) if Illinois is no anomaly, could the senator's separate appeal as president maybe play a part?

One exchange further, Obama gave a half-sentence of lucidity. "It's one of the horrible legacies of racism and discrimination and depression," she warned, and "you know it keeps people down." But she didn't quite mean a subcultural inferiority complex, and then went back into the muddle. Seventy-five, fifty years ago, this would have validity. Today, there are too many examples of the aforementioned two-step solution.

"Barack has been told in every race that he's ever run that he shouldn't do it," his wife recounted, that "he couldn't raise the money, that his name was too funny, his background too exotic." Michelle Obama, meet Bobby Jindal, first-generation Punjabi Indian, birth name "Piyush"; a name thrown around by opponents like a dysphemism because to local ears it sounds funny. Jindal is the Republican governor-elect of Louisiana, until now de facto property of the Democratic Party. He is archetypically self-made. Proposed in this space is an experiment in contrast, namely the Senator from Illinois henceforth introduce himself as "Barry."

It would draw a sharper parallel. That may help Michelle Obama, who protests that "we've desperately tried to do is not to allow our political lives to change who we are fundamentally," and who doesn't "want Barack to be anyone other than who he is, because we certainly don't want to spend the next 4 or 8 years in the White House trying to live up to a persona that isn't true" — when the merits and achievements of Barack Obama stand at odds with Obama and his wife's design for genuine politics.

Two men were guests of the November 21, 1999 episode of Firing Line, "The Conservative Search for a Foreign Policy." The host of the program respectively introduced one accredited as "sovereign," a strategist, diplomat and emissary beginning his third decade of retirement from public service; and a scholastic debutant, a "looming young presence in the coming years." Nine years before that, Firing Line's host, William F. Buckley Jr., explained the reason for worldwide solidarity against Saddam Hussein's takeover of Kuwait by way of adage: "When a nation becomes nuclear, one calls it Sir."

The contemporary debate over a belligerent's atomic incipience returns the 1999 pair of invitees to front and center. In time for Thanksgiving last year, the first man, Henry Kissinger, regarded the subject country of Iran as determined for the bomb; and though he innately prescribed negotiations, they would be, under his direction, to impose on Iran a realization that "makes imperialist policies unattractive" or "if matters are pushed too far, America might yet strike." The second man, Fareed Zakaria, gave through his publisher a depreciation of any threats Iran has made or may make against American interests or allies, and doubts of the country's evident pursuit of nuclear technologies that are offensive. In the October 29, 2007 issue of Newsweek Zakaria will have none of it, not even Kissinger's preventatives, his piece titled "Hysteria over Iran."

President Bush, he begins, was caught mumbling lines reserved for those whom Zakaria thinks to be lunatics. Granted, Norman Podhoretz sets himself up when he prefaces with "I call this new war World War IV," but his message — that Iranian leadership, the Khomeinist patrimony and current government, is messianic, expansionist and eschatological all at once — can be traced to Tehran on most days of the week. Do you want to hear Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, executive appointee, dismiss Israel as a non-entity and glibly recite Holocaust denial in the same sentence as his own version of shipping Jews to Madagascar? Or presage, like those before him, a world without the United States? Why are Iran's agents, weapons and cohorts in Iraq, the Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Syria — its ambassadors in Beijing, Moscow and Caracas?

But that isn't "reality," writes Zakaria, and states that Iran is either benign or impotent because its comparison of economic and military power with the United States can only be expressed in decimal fractions. Immediate thought: Zakaria has to rest impregnable from the word "asymmetrical." That Iran "has not invaded a country since the late 18th century" comes not from restraint but comprehension of the world since the last decade of the Cold War. Two of the last dictatorships to try annexation, Argentina with the Falklands and Iraq with Kuwait, were expelled and humiliated within six months. Tehran has since 1979 worked insidiously, though obviously to anyone willing to pay attention, its proxies killing Americans and allies in numbers large (the 1983 Beirut bombing) and steady (Iranian-made roadside bombs in Iraq today).

Where on the scale does measuring danger by contrasting national resources with geopolitical significance place, say, North Korea? Had Zakaria looked, he would have found that one can in fact be a destitute menace. Instead, he chooses to characterize Pyongyang's nuclear and inhumane blackmail — threatening to efface Seoul and Tokyo, hinting at letting millions of people in North Korea starve — not as an example of disruptive potential for Tehran but as divergent "international relief efforts." Even if Ahmadinejad's death-cult language is forever as subjunctive as the loony grandiloquence from Kim Jong Il's office, why is it OK to have another despot winning yearly concessions with its tantrums? And yet, since Tehran isn't in Pyongyang's straits, why should we assume that it will be content to simply survive through harassment?

Zakaria is somewhat accurate in labeling Western knowledge of Iran as "a black hole to us — just as Iraq had become in 2003." He blames this on obtuseness, whereas Ba'athist Iraq was and Iran is a totalitarian state. Allowing sporadic democratic resistance and the presence of a public transportation union reminiscent of Poland's Solidarity, Tehran is not as bloodily efficient as Baghdad was. But there is enough smuggled footage of the repression and execution of dissidents, homosexuals and women who defy Iran's theocratic chauvinism to wonder if when Zakaria refers to a "vibrant civil society" he is finally taking Ahmadinejad at his word.

Kissinger is best known for the equivocation of detente, and still he observed a year ago that "So long as Iran views itself as a crusade rather than a nation, a common interest will not emerge from negotiations." Zakaria scoffs at Bernard Lewis' exegesis of the radical Shiite vision of world's end. All is not unanimous among those who aren't democratists. Maybe not on William F. Buckley's old stage, but can these two men be sat across from one another once more?