Barack Obama, who might be mercifully closing the Clinton parenthesis in presidential history, is refreshingly cerebral amid this recrudescence of the paranoid style in American politics. He is the un-Edwards and un-Huckabee - an adult aiming to reform the real world rather than an adolescent fantasizing mock-heroic 'fights' against fictitious villains in a left-wing cartoon version of this country.

The greatest threat to civility - and ultimately civilization - is an excess of certitude. The world is much menaced just now by people who think that the world and their duties in it are clear and simple. They are certain that they know what - who - created the universe and what this creator wants them to do to make our little speck in the universe perfect, even if extreme measures - even violence - are required.

Few things are as stimulating as other people's calamities observed from a safe distance.

Leadership is, among other things, the ability to inflict pain and get away with it - short-term pain for long-term gain.

Actually, there is only one first question of government, and it is How should we live? or What kind of people do we want our citizens to be?

The theory is that election to Congress is tantamount to being dispatched to Washington on a looting raid for the enrichment of your state or district, and no other ethic need inhibit the feeding frenzy.

The euro pleases dispirited people for whom European history is not Chartres and Shakespeare but the Holocaust and the Somme. The euro expresses cultural despair.