A number of people are afraid that the ugly tactics of the McCain-Palin campaign are going to incite violence, maybe assassination. Joe Klein, Andrew Sullivan, McCain’s former adviser John Weaver—even the ultimate sober-sided moderate David Gergen last night on CNN. I hope they’re wrong. It’s a big leap from hateful talking points and shouted epithets to vigilantism and the lone gunman. What’s undeniably true is that Republican rallies and the incendiary language of party leaders are stirring up the darker, destructive mob passions that have a long history in American politics. At the very least, the Republican ticket is making sure that, if Obama wins, he’ll be regarded as an illegitimate and dangerous President by thirty or forty per cent of the country.

Palin is too shallow to understand the weapon she’s playing with; she’s just thrilled to be the birthday girl and the object of so much semi-erotic devotion. But McCain knows better. His manner in debates and at rallies tells me that he’s conflicted about the forces his campaign is unleashing. Win or lose, he’s already damaged his cherished reputation beyond repair. But there’s still time for him to show leadership and do what’s necessary. The responsibility lies with him. In his speeches and at the final debate next week, McCain should say: “Barack Obama is a decent man and a good American. I deplore his policies, I doubt his judgment, I don’t think he has the experience to lead the country. But no one who supports me should question my opponent’s patriotism or his right to stand alongside me in this race. I would rather lose than win with the votes of fear-mongers or bigots.”

I understand that saying this would make a mockery of the past three months of the McCain campaign. Still, if McCain did the right thing I’d be the first to salute him. And if he’s sunk too low to recover a piece of his honor, what about his friend Joe Lieberman, who likes to think he’s the last bipartisan statesman? Does Lieberman want these smears and incitements on his record forever?

When this is all over, certain half-dead words will need to be put out of their misery with a quick bullet to the back of the head. My candidates for a mercy verbicide: pivot, tank, cave, pushback, gravitas, message, game-changer, challenges, the entire litany of Palinesque nouns, attack dog, battleground, pork-barrel, earmark, impacting, and impactful. Other words that are too important to be executed will need to undergo a long and painful rehabilitation before they can be safely used again: change, experience, straight, truth, lie, victory, character, judgment, populist, and élite.

It was Orwell, of course, who first explained the relation between decadent language and corrupt politics. “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible,” he wrote in “Politics and the English Language.” “Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness.” In our time, the corruption takes a different form. Instead of defending the Soviet purges with Latinate words like “liquidate,” politicians and journalists use clichés mainly borrowed from sports, war, and rural life in order to seem to be saying something tough-minded when in fact they’re saying nothing. Instead of Orwell’s intellectuals and bureaucrats clouding their true, sinister meaning “like a cuttlefish squirting out ink,” we have television personalities disguising the emptiness of their thoughts with a set of pre-baked homespun idioms, or else with a technical campaign vocabulary that gives a false impression of privileged knowledge. It’s almost enough to make me nostalgic for the days of the commissar (which is why I often turn the channel from CNN to Fox—the latter gets much closer to the truly Orwellian).

It’s a shame that “Politics and the English Language” is the only Orwell essay many readers know. The essays are the essential Orwell, where his voice is at its strongest and the working of his mind at its clearest. There are too many great ones to put between the covers of a book—which is why a new, two-volume edition of Orwell’s essays, edited by yours truly, has just been published by Harcourt: “Facing Unpleasant Facts,” which gathers the narrative essays, such as “Shooting an Elephant,” and “All Art Is Propaganda,” which compiles the critical essays, like the studies of Dickens and Dalí. I made sure to include lesser-known gems alongside the more famous essays: you’ll find Orwell’s wartime diary from 1940, his dismal recollection of working in a bookshop, his review of Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator,” his brilliant takedown of Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” and a truly obscure piece called “Dear Doktor Goebbels—Your British Friends Are Feeding Fine!”

On November 5th, you’ll need to clear your head of a great deal of accumulated nonsense. I would suggest a long, deep, surprising drink of Orwell.

I wrote this short reminiscence of Bill Ayers six months ago, when his name came up in the campaign for the first time. Now it looks as if he’s the key to the McCain-Palin strategy down the home stretch. Other than rousing the uglier impulses of the Republican base, I don’t think the Kristol Plan is going to make much difference. It’s the wrong year. Like Palin herself, the use of Ayers is a sign of ill-health in the Republican Party and a symptom of an ideology in an advanced state of decay. The smarter conservatives, like Frum and Douthat, know this.

Sometime around 1984, political journalism began to take its cues from sportscasting, entertainment-beat reporting, and TV criticism, and the trend has continued for the past two decades. This year hasn’t been the worst I can remember—there’s more fact-checking and less mindless balance. Reporters are a little less likely to become the mouthpieces of a campaign’s latest talking point than four or eight years ago, and when candidates flat-out lie, that unmentionable word might now get used. Still, the replacement of facts and ideas by imagery and opinion is so complete that you’ve probably forgotten campaigns could be covered any other way. Have a look at Garry Wills’s “Nixon Agonistes” or Norman Mailer’s “Miami and the Siege of Chicago” and you’ll see how drastically things have changed, far more than in war or finance reporting.

Having watched dangerous amounts of cable news in 2008, I noticed early on one of the casualties of politics as inside baseball: the American voter. Reporters ask analysts what other reporters and analysts are saying about what campaign advisers and media strategists are saying about what the voters are thinking. That’s the cotton candy of political journalism. I eat this stuff up as hungrily as the next junkie, but I don’t imagine that I’m learning what voters are really thinking.

I finally ate myself sick and decided to go to the Midwest. It was, for me, a revelatory trip. The results are in this week’s Politics issue, in “The Hardest Vote: The Disaffection of Ohio’s Working Class.”

“One thing that Americans do at this time, also, though, is let’s commit ourselves just every day American people, Joe Six Pack, hockey moms across the nation, I think we need to band together and say never again.”

“If we can be that beacon of light and hope for others who seek freedom and democracy and can live in a country that would allow intolerance in the equal rights that again our military men and women fight for and die for for all of us.”

Don’t try to scan Sarah Palin’s syntax; don’t even bother making fun of it. By now we all know that she can’t think and talk at the same time on the national stage. What interests me more is what her particular kind of incoherence reveals about her as a political figure. Palin’s sentences quickly clot up with nouns, but you can wait a long time before you’ll hear a verb. Sometimes most of a paragraph can go by without one. Gerunds and participles abound—a tic she might have picked up when she was a sports newscaster (“Beckett waving off the sign, really taking his time out there—the breaking ball not there for him tonight”). But she can fill up a lot of her ninety seconds without ever getting to the main action of the sentence. (Read James Wood on the broader Republican problem with language.)

Palin’s candidacy is pure identity politics—a play for Christian conservatives, women, and anyone who resents the coastal big-city know-it-alls. The only verb that matters in identity politics is “to be.” What does Palin offer these voters? Herself. String along a chain of nouns in the form of politically symbolic platitudes—“Hockey Mom Pitbull Joe Six Pack Wasilla Main Street Reform Soccer Mom Every Day American People Maverick”—and you have practically the whole of her program, her policies, her world view. Palin’s self-infatuation is staggering: asked any question, she describes herself, again and again. It’s the opposite of empathy and identification with others. No one with a sharp, clear image in her head of a hard-pressed American would use a term like “Joe Six Pack,” an insulting cliché on the order of “the little people.”

If Sarah Palin had more than Sarah Palin to offer—if she wanted to do something for ordinary Americans besides invoke them—she would have to start using more verbs. And because this is a year when nouns aren’t enough, her popularity has begun to collapse.

The “surprisingly wonky” Palin “exceeded expectations,” though she “relied heavily on talking points” and “repeatedly failed to answer questions.” Viewers found her “feisty,” “cloying,” “bemused,” and “manic.” She was faulted for her “aversion to verbs,” but her black jacket and skirt won “ecstatic style kudos.” The “mistake-prone” Biden, faced with a “tricky balancing act,” “exceeded expectations.” He sounded “authoritative,” “fluid,” and “surprisingly poignant on his son,” though one viewer faulted him for talking about “Joe Biden” and another complained about his “blinding teeth.” Moderator Ifill was criticized for “letting the rules run the debate” and “never following up” when one candidate “stuck her tongue out” at a question. This “much-anticipated” debate, though it “made Palin less of an issue in the campaign” and might “stop the Republican bleeding,” was “not a game-changer,” which means the “hockey mom from Wasilla” “didn’t do what McCain needed.” Reactions showed that “the voters aren’t stupid,” “folksiness and fear aren’t enough,” and “this year is different.”

I’ll always think of September 29, 2008, as the day the conservative movement brought down the institutions. The morning began with Bill Kristol’s victory plan for the McCain-Palin campaign, which goes like this:

1. Have McCain take credit for the imminent bailout legislation and promise more tough, decisive leadership.

2. Liberate Sarah Palin to be herself: a conservative attack dog. “As one shrewd McCain supporter told me, ‘Every minute she spends not telling the American people something that makes them less well disposed to Obama is a minute wasted.’”

3. Accuse Obama of being too liberal. Again and again. And bring Rev. Wright back into the mix.

In other words: claim McCain played a role he didn’t in securing a bill that failed to pass. Then write a new script for Palin and say you freed her to be herself so that people will stop noticing that her real, unscripted candidacy is preposterous. Then go back to the old playbook one more time. It would be hard to invent a more dishonest political strategy. When a party, a movement, and its shills unravel, the panic leaves behind a pretty bad smell. Kristol, born with an impressive pedigree, long ago sacrificed his intellectual independence to the Republican Party. His career is a cautionary tale of the mental corruption that comes with political power, and it has degenerated alongside the conservative movement for which he’s been a tireless publicist.

Today that degeneracy produced the rotten fruit of a failed bailout. Some Democrats voted against the bill, but in far fewer numbers than Republicans. Does anyone doubt that it would have passed overwhelmingly if House conservatives hadn’t rebelled? Whatever the flaws of the plan, it or something like it was absolutely necessary, and the work done to craft it had been genuinely bipartisan, with the give-and-take that’s the heart of legislative work and that we haven’t seen in Congress in years. Of course taxpayers are outraged. There’s no reason to respect the authority of any institutions involved in this disaster. But the bill sank under the phony populism and long-discarded principles of legislators who have spent their entire careers leaving taxpayers and workers exposed to the ruthlessness of the deregulated market, and who would now rather see the market drag the country under than display the political courage to clean up their mess.

Watch Kristol forget that he just told McCain to take credit for getting the bill passed; watch McCain and Palin claim to have killed it on behalf of the outraged taxpayers. However low you bend, you won’t find a standard of truthfulness with this ticket and its backers. The Kristol Plan is the triumph of tactics over everything. It takes years and years spent writing propaganda to achieve that kind of purity.

Meanwhile, it’s left to a relatively young black man, charged by his opponents with being a radical, a liberal, a community organizer, a Muslim, and the anti-Christ, to save the establishment on Wall Street and in Washington.

By chance, three accounts of how the surge became White House policy have appeared over the past few weeks: Michael Gordon’s in the Times, Steve Coll’s in The New Yorker, and Bob Woodward’s in the Post (part of the usual rollout of his latest bestseller, “The War Within”). Together they paint a picture of a President who finally did the right thing after presiding over years of failure and calling it success. To give him credit feels like praising a man for calling 911 well after his carelessness started a fire that had killed half his neighbors by the time he picked up the phone. And yet, for making an improbable decision against the advice of most of his Administration and in the face of all the political winds blowing through the country, Bush deserves credit.

So, according to these accounts, do some of the very officials whose arrogance, dishonesty, and negligence contributed mightily to the destruction of Iraq between 2003 and 2007: Dick Cheney, who finally snapped his unbroken streak of wrong calls on everything from W.M.D.s to Chalabi to the insurgency; Cheney’s aide John Hannah, a key purveyor of false prewar information about Iraq and Al Qaeda; William Luti, who bore heavy responsibility for the failure of postwar planning under Douglas Feith, at the Pentagon; Meghan O’Sullivan, one of Bremer’s top aides during the disastrous first year of occupation in Iraq, who went on to oversee the management of two losing wars at the White House; Stephen Hadley, O’Sullivan’s boss at the National Security Council, who sat at the nerve center of White House decision-making throughout the war; retired General Jack Keane, who had served as a Rumsfeld rubber stamp when he was acting Army chief of staff early in the war; scholars at the American Enterprise Institute, which had predicted an easy occupation, blocked postwar planning, and insisted that there were enough troops in Iraq well after their insufficiency was clear. All of these people were wrong for longer than seems humanly possible.

And then, in late 2006, at the rock bottom of the war, when everyone from Nancy Pelosi to James Baker was pushing for withdrawal, they got behind a new strategy that most of them had resisted for years. I was in Baghdad when Bush announced the surge. An Iraqi friend expressed a forlorn hope that the new security plan would work, and though I told him that I shared the sentiment, inwardly I felt embarrassed that he still had any faith left in the U.S. government, which no longer deserved it. I had already lost mine and doubted that the surge—which I supported in the absence of anything other than the ongoing apocalypse—could succeed. My friend had no choice; he was Iraqi.

This time, the “Kool-Aid drinkers”—the true believers—finally got it right. How to explain it? Most of them had spent so long on Iraq that they were willing to gamble everything when other, less heavily invested public figures had essentially given up. Some were ideologues who never lost their blind assurance in their own views, even after years of being wrong. A few had begun to learn the hard way.

The Woodward excerpts make it clear that for months, if not years, the Administration lied to the public in its assessment of the war. The fear of straying from an upbeat script was pervasive in the Bush White House, and it contributed directly to the doomed strategy of handing control over to the Iraqi army in the middle of a civil war. I’ve written before about the folly of “strategic communications”—treating war like a political campaign in which the key to victory is “message discipline.” A war has its own reality, beyond the reach of media strategists and focus groups, and eventually it will blow up even the best talking points. You can’t go on lying to others without corrupting your own grasp of the truth; you can’t spend all day every day saying red is green, then somehow regain your perceptual sharpness when you’re alone at night. I discussed Iraq with two of the people in Woodward’s new book at a time when Woodward describes them as squarely facing the debacle, and when I tried to get them to acknowledge that the Administration’s strategy was failing, they still clung to the fantasy of progress. Maybe they felt it necessary to dissemble even in an off-the-record conversation. But at some point, it no longer matters whether you’re lying to yourself or others; at some point, you no longer know the difference.

Which brings up politics. A lot has been written lately about the dishonest tactics of the two tickets, especially McCain-Palin. The problem with a campaign based on relentless message discipline, repeated falsehoods, and the habitual perversion of language is that none of it stops after election day. You can’t be indifferent to truth for months on end and then suddenly return to straight talk. If McCain should win, Steve Schmidt won’t be in charge of the new Administration, but his spirit will. Prostitutes hardly ever go straight: the mental atmosphere of a campaign becomes the mental atmosphere of a government. And the results aren’t pretty—ask any Iraqi.

I wasn’t in St. Paul, but through the filter of the endless chatter on cable news, here’s how the Republican Convention looked: John McCain became a P.O.W. this week, at the hands of his own Party. It was Sarah Palin’s Convention, not McCain’s. His speech last night was so out of sync with the vituperative tone and stale, hard-right cultural populism of the Convention’s other headliners—above all, Palin—that he sounded less like a Presidential nominee than one of those token speakers given a spot on the program just to prove that the Party welcomes diversity. McCain stood before an arena full of stoked conventioneers, who seemed bored or turned-off as often as they seemed pleased by his remarks, and acquitted himself with the decency and honor that he summoned during the ordeal that defines his life.

This time, though, McCain is collaborating with his captors. By picking Palin he knowingly guided his campaign well over hostile territory and then aimed its nose straight down. Once taken hostage, he refused to speak his captors’ propaganda, but he allowed everyone else to shout it to the rafters. He gambled, all right, but it was in the direction of orthodoxy—for Palin is a creature and an icon of the Republicans’ evangelical base, which came into full possession of the Party this week and completed the G.O.P.’s conversion to identity politics. (See my last post for more on this transformation.) No wonder Pat Buchanan was so fired up on MSNBC, while Mike Huckabee wore the look of a man who missed his train because he was given the wrong departure time.

In yesterday’s Times profile, several observers suggested that McCain’s whole adult life has been a series of tests, and his shortcomings have been just as decisive as his victories. “He takes a past failing, hangs it around his neck, and wears it like a medal,” said a former Romney adviser. The psychological pattern with which McCain seems most comfortable holds him initially suspended in perfect tension between principle and ambition; the tension slackens, he slides into a betrayal of his ideals, and then he undergoes a searing period of repentance that ends in a renewed commitment to do what is right regardless of the consequences. It’s almost as if he deliberately sets out to fail himself in order to experience the joy of self-recovery at its fullest. No one would hold against him the fact that he broke, as he said last night, under North Vietnamese torture. His capitulation to the latest group of hard-liners to take him prisoner is a lot harder to justify. But his speech already hinted at the penitent President McCain would be if his current ordeal at the hands of his party’s base takes him to the White House.

Last night in Denver, and today in Dayton, confirm a sneaking feeling I’ve had throughout this political year: the parties have traded places. The Democrats just choreographed the most impressive nomination pageant since 1980, when the Osmonds sang “Together a New Beginning” and Reagan painted his word-picture of “a shining city on a hill.” Reagan was the first President to invite obscure heroes to appear at his major speeches. I’ve seen very little mention in the press of the half-dozen citizens who told their stories immediately before Obama was introduced, but from where I sat (in the end-zone seats, to the right as you faced the stage), Barney Smith and Pam from North Carolina and the others were more effective than any high-profile speaker all week in arguing that Obama is on the ordinary American’s side. Before eighty thousand people in a packed football stadium, and thirty-eight million more on TV (beating the Academy Awards, the Olympics opening ceremonies, and even the final night of “American Idol”), the ordinariness of their voices and the unremarkable details of their lives rose to a level of high dignity.

Obama gave the best political speech I’ve heard from him. Not the most powerful—that would be his 2004 convention speech, followed by the one I
heard just before primary day in Lebanon, New Hampshire, and described here. Not the most thoughtful—that was in Philadelphia in March, on race and Jeremiah Wright. Obama’s task last night was more complicated, and he accomplished it by dividing his remarks into three parts. He had to introduce himself to the country, especially to those just tuning in. For skeptics who think he’s all talk, he had to say what he would do as President. And then he had to invoke a new theme, going beyond “hope” and “change.” His title was “The American promise”—not a particularly sharp or surprising idea, compounded of a vague longing for togetherness and a sense of historical destiny. But it did the rhetorical trick of leaving his audience with a larger feeling than parts one and two could do. And along the way he delivered some rather tough jabs and counterpunches. Reagan did very much the same in Detroit in the summer of 1980.

John Lewis’s invocation of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech on its forty-fifth anniversary was appropriate, but more moving to me was the
truly unconscious way in which the races celebrated things that matter more than race. The older white ladies in the Ohio delegation down on the field got up and boogied when Stevie Wonder sang “Signed, Sealed, and Delivered.” This was no patronizing display of rainbow multiculturalism—the flags waved all across the stadium were red, white, and blue. It was an expression of the fullness of American life. The final tableau of streamers, flags, and fireworks exploding in the evening sky above the Obamas and the Bidens and the rest of us was impeccable. And utterly Reaganesque.

As the crowd poured out of Invesco Field, I finally realized what had been so extraordinary about the evening. All these people—not media stars or paid campaign workers or even dedicated volunteers, but the entirely normal-looking masses who happened to be Democrats—came together for a political event, and were moved. Whatever happens in November, I will never see anything quite like last night again.

Back in my hotel room miles to the west, Republican talking heads were already hitting back: Obama is just a mean-spirited Chicago pol. Obama answered McCain’s attacks—that means McCain is winning the argument. Obama is all nice words and images—where’s the substance? They sounded a little desperate. To me they sounded like Democrats around 1984.

Mid-flight back to New York this morning, the pilot announced McCain’s Vice-Presidential choice, mispronouncing “Palin.” The pundits are puzzled, even stunned. I’m not. McCain had to do something to make his campaign a little more exciting and fresh, for although the race is close, it’s a referendum on his opponent and McCain is there by default. Romney would have ossified the ticket. Even Pawlenty wouldn’t have added much. But McCain couldn’t afford to alienate the conservative base even more, so Lieberman was out. I figured he’d pick a woman, or else Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, who is young and Indian. Palin combines everything McCain needs: a Christian conservative, a new young face, a woman. The last above all, because of those Hillary supporters who are still holding out (and who were far more scarce in Denver than the coverage would lead you to believe). In other words, the Republicans surveyed their weaknesses, played the identity-politics card, and came up with a preposterous candidate. Just what Democrats used to do. (Dept. of Irony: McCain and Palin spoke today at a podium emblazoned with the slogan “Country First.”)

I’ve begun to believe that the best analogy for 2008 is 1980. The country desperately wants to get rid of a failed Presidency and the failed policies of the party in power; but a lot of people still don’t trust the new guy. If true, then the debates will decide this election. After Reagan appeared with Carter on October 28, 1980, and more than held his own, a close race turned into a landslide.