Suzanne Pleshette

Her wry smile and throaty voice remain. As Emily Hartley on the 1970s "Bob Newhart Show," she was the quintessential loving but skeptical wife in the kind of gentle comedy that is long gone from network TV.

A perfect partner for Newhart's stammering psychologist, Suzanne Pleshette complemented his confusion with a sardonic sense of reality in a quirky series that evoked more smiles than belly laughs.

Newhart went to another series with another actress playing his wife, but Pleshette was there for the finale in 1990, waking up in bed next to him as Emily listening to Newhart describe his life in the second sitcom as a dream resulting from eating too much Japanese food the night before.

She died yesterday at 70 from respiratory failure after years of struggling against lung cancer, a beautiful woman and accomplished actress leaving behind sweet moments in our collective memory.

"Mine Is Bigger Than Yours" Hits Home

In the words of Mel Brooks' philosopher-producer Max Bialystock, "If you've got it, baby, flaunt it!" That's just what many Americans have been doing with their homes until the credit crunch brought down the curtain with record foreclosures.

Amid bailouts and interest rate freezes to keep the show going, a painfully apt book emerges to underscore that the housing crisis, despite what the politicians are telling us, is not only about greedy bankers, mortgage brokers and hedge funds.

The thesis of "House Lust" by Newsweek reporter Dan McGinn: "Owning a home has long been considered the fulfillment of the American Dream. But in the last decade, as the real estate market boomed, Americans’ fascination with homes turned into a frenzy. Everywhere we turned, people were talking about, scheming over, envying, shopping for, refinancing, or just plain ogling houses—in the process, we’ve transformed shelter from a basic necessity into an all-consuming passion."

For some, huge homes have become what Cadillacs were half a century ago, an emblem of conspicuous consumption, proof to the world that owners have "arrived." In 2005, the average newly built US house measured 2,434 square feet, as opposed to 1,000 feet in Britain, Italy and Sweden and the 750-foot shoeboxes in Levittown after World War II.

"Everyone knows the direct causes of the present housing collapse: low interest rates, lax mortgage lending, rampant speculation," Robert J. Samuelson writes in the Washington Post. "But the larger force lies in Americans' devotion to home ownership. It explains why government officials, politicians and journalists (including this one) overlooked abuses in 'subprime' lending. The home ownership rate was approaching 70 percent in 2005, up from 64 percent in 1990. Great. A good cause shielded bad practices. The same complacency lulled ordinary Americans into paying ever-rising home prices."

The crisis may slow down builders in affluent areas from tearing down adequate houses and replacing them with "MacMansions" that not only require higher costs for upkeep but contribute to global warming with the energy consumed to heat and cool them.

As Congress and the White House push along legislation to head off a recession, a report on economic overreaching may be in order to remind Americans that, even in building their castles, less may be more.

Southern Fried Politicians

Fred Thompson hit his expiration date in South Carolina but may have managed to cook Mike Huckabee's goose in the process as John Edwards, after fizzling in Nevada, is in danger of becoming toast without a strong showing in South Carolina next weekend.

So much for culinary clichés, but the Presidential buffet is definitely losing its down-home flavor--no drawls or twangs in the next White House, if you don't count possible First Spouse Bill Clinton.

The Republicans' well-established Southern strategy has been derailed by the Thompson-Huckabee collision and faces a severe test in November against the appeal of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama to African-American voters.

In the long arc from the Democrats' Solid South more than half a century ago to the GOP's recent coalition of cultural conservatives, there has been a degree of unanimity that looks unlikely this year.

By nominating a McCain, Romney or Giuliani, Republicans will face fallout that won't be papered over by late conversions on abortion, immigration and gay rights or a Southern running mate on the ticket.

This November, red and blue states may form a checkered pattern all across the electoral map.

The Only Numbers That Count

Behind the rise and fall of the polls and the trickle of primary and caucus results is the reality of who will pick next President of the United States.

At the Democratic Convention in late August, there will be over 850 super-delegates--governors, members of Congress and the Democratic National Committee, present and former Senate and House leaders as well as former presidents and vice presidents (Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale get a vote).

Even before Super Tuesday, more than one-third of the 2025 delegates needed to nominate have been chosen and are quietly lining up behind Hillary Clinton (at the latest estimate, 181), Barack Obama (80), John Edwards (29) and Denis Kucinich (2, including himself). More than half, 479, are uncommitted. You can see the list here.

Those behind Hillary Clinton include a considerable number of women and DNC members as well as New York and New Jersey Governors Eliot Spitzer and Jon Corzine. Obama has Sens. Pat Leahy, Tim Johnson, John Kerry, Claire McCaskill, Kent Conrad and Ben Nelson. John Edwards' list includes nine members of Congress and the DNC from North Carolina.

The new rules put in place after the 1972 convention were intended to take the choice out of the hands of party machines and kingmakers, but even so, picking the nominees is not a pure (large or small "d") Democratic process.

Then again, we have today's example of power to the people in Nevada. where as Gail Collins notes in her New York Times column, "the number of people in the state who have ever attended a caucus before is probably smaller than the number of people in the state who make their living as Elvis impersonators."

On to Super Tuesday...

The Two Bill Clintons

Soon after he moved into the White House, Bill Clinton was tagged by Maureen Dowd as the first president who was still social-climbing.

After more than two decades of Republican rule, interrupted only by an ineffectual Jimmy Carter, Democrats were exhilarated in 1993 at the prospect of restoring the momentum toward a Great Society that had come to a dead stop after LBJ was undone by Vietnam. Even the early fiasco over health care reform was a sign that the new man cared.

But there was always another Bill Clinton, a Gennifer Flowers-chasing, low-rent undercurrent to his character that emerged to give Newt Gingrich and his merry men an opening for impeachment that hobbled the last years of the second Clinton term.

Then, for almost seven years of his post-presidency, we saw only the good Bill Clinton again, going all over the world to raise awareness and money to help the wretched of the world.

Now, in his wife's campaign for the nomination, here comes the other guy, trash-talking about Barack Obama and squabbling with reporters like a precinct pol rather than a former President of the United States.

Armchair psychology suggests he may be trying to over-compensate Hillary Clinton for the Lewinsky humiliation, but his behavior is not helping her campaign, only highlighting the difference between what he is doing and the dignified reticence of George H. W. Bush during his son's run in 2000.

What's even worse is that all this may giving voters pause at the prospect of having the two Bill Clintons back in the White House.

Dr. Phil's Bedside Manure

If Hillary Clinton supporters want to attack Oprah for backing Barack Obama, they could question her judgment about people in creating the cultural embarrassment known as Dr. Phil.

The good Dr. McGraw's latest misadventure in poisoning the well of psychology as a profession involves a reported complaint about his hospital visit to Britney Spears this month, which may constitute practicing without a license in California, and promoting his excursion to the pop star, which could be a violation of doctor-patient privilege.

Since advising her in a lawsuit over dissing beef over a decade ago, McGraw has parlayed appearances on Oprah's show into his own syndicated program, frequent appearances on Larry King, a weight-loss business and a number of legal hassles of his own making.

Peddling pious platitudes and pep talks as psychological insight pays well, starting with Dr. Phil's $15 million syndication deal and a new show later this year in which he will be coaching other medical "experts" in how to connect with TV audiences.

Off-camera, however, he is not that popular. In addition to the possible Britney Spears problem, Dr. Phil is being sued by brothers involved in the case of Natalee Holloway, victim of a headline disappearance in Aruba, for "invasion of privacy, fraud, deceit, defamation, emotional distress, and civil conspiracy."

TV's favorite psychologist lost his license to practice in his home state as a result of disciplinary sanctions imposed by the Texas State Board of Examiners of Psychologists in 1989 after a former therapy client filed a complaint, claiming their relationship was inappropriate.

Since then, he has made a brilliant career out of being inappropriate in public. Obama admirers can only hope Dr. Phil doesn't join Oprah in stumping for him and create psychological problems for his campaign.

Governor Huckabee of Dogpatch

Half a century ago, after the Supreme Court desegregation decision, an Arkansas governor named Orval Faubus stood in the doorway of Central High School in Little Rock with National Guard members to keep African American teenagers out. Now Mike Huckabee is doing a Faubus impersonation in South Carolina.

“You don’t like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag,” the former Arkansas governor told a crowd in Myrtle Beach yesterday. “In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we’d tell them what to do with the pole, that’s what we’d do.”

In doing a Faubus to court what remains of the redneck vote, Huckabee might want to recall what happened to his predecessor. President Eisenhower nationalized the Arkansas Guard, ordered them to stand down and sent in troops from the 101st Airborne Division to escort the kids into the school.

As John McCain continues to lead in the polls, Huckabee protesters are dogging his appearances by waving Confederate flags. But McCain refuses to cave in as he did in 2000.

"Probably the worst piece of advice I've ever given to myself," he tells Katie Couric, "was when the Confederate flag was flying over the state capitol in South Carolina, and I decided that I would say it's not an issue I should be involved in, that it should be decided by the people of the state of South Carolina.

"I knew it was a symbol that was offensive to so many people. And afterwards, I went back and apologized. But it was, needless to say, by saying that I wouldn't have anything to do with an issue like that was an act of cowardice."

If Huckabee believes he can win in South Carolina by going back to the past, he should take a look at the later career of Orval Faubus. A decade after the Little Rock standoff, he was managing the Li'l Abner theme park in the "Ozark Mountains, Dogpatch USA."

Flummoxing the Candidates

On the New York Times blog, The Caucus, Matt Bai has a solution to enlivening the Presidential debates, suggesting reverse psychology:

"Instead of making it harder for candidates to lapse into their stump speeches, we should make it easier for them by choosing the world’s most ignorant moderator, thus confusing the candidates and causing them to practically explode from excitement."

The questions he suggests are priceless.

The Jewish Question

With Martin Luther King in the crosshairs, could Jews be far behind? Now identity politics (read hatred and division) is catching up with the Chosen People who are always a target of choice when blood is in the air.

First there is an attempt by Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen to link Barack Obama to his church's year-old award to Louis Farrakhan, conveniently overlooking the fact that the anti-Semite firebrand of yore is dying of cancer and professing "enlightenment," while still denouncing the kind of interracial marriage that spawned Obama as "unnatural."

Obama issued a statement distancing himself from Farrakhan that satisfied Abraham Foxman, president of the Anti-Defamation League, who joined other Jewish leaders in signing an open letter denouncing “hateful e-mails” directed at Obama.

Now here comes Politico with a thumb-sucking, fact-free piece headed "Jewish voters lean toward Hillary," asserting that, after years of courting it, she is "well positioned to win the Jewish vote in Nevada’s Jan. 19 caucuses and in the Jewish centers of New York, New Jersey and California on Feb. 5."

While quoting Rothman as saying about Obama, “Like many other segments of the American community, Jewish Americans see him as a unifying figure with the intellect and skill to make change,” Politico nevertheless finds enough supporters among politicians to conclude that Clinton has won "the trust of the hawkish leadership of New York’s Jewish community."

As someone who can be Googled to reveal decades-old listings as a member of the Jewish media conspiracy against America, perhaps I may be forgiven for wanting to barf at this kind of "journalism."

Joe Lieberman and Jewish Neo-Cons to the contrary, the Protocols of Zion people will have to look elsewhere for group guilt in today's politics. Those whose parents and grandparents came to this country to escape the Holocaust are not lining up to support Bush's war in the Mideast or to choose between Clinton and Obama as the best person to end it.

Enough already.

Et Tu, Barack?

As the campaign reaches fever pitch, the candidates are slipping toward caricatures of themselves--Huckabee's piety, Hillary Clinton's control-freakiness, John Edwards' angry man act, and now Barack Obama gives us too much audacity about hope in praising Ronald Reagan for "clarity...optimism...a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing."

True enough that Reagan rode to the White House on "the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s," but it was Nixon's resentful Silent Majority that propelled him there to express, behind the "Morning in America" façade, a social meanness that cut taxes for the very rich and falsified a "trickle down" effect for everyone else.

After his Iowa victory, Obama said, ""The time has come for a president who will be honest about the choices and the challenges we face...who won't just tell you what you want to hear, but what you need to know."

In this campaign, there has been very little of that, but Obama has showed some signs. Tuesday night, for example, he dared to suggest that one way to cut American dependence on foreign oil is to consume less energy:

"We are going to have to make our buildings more efficient. We're going to have to make our lighting more efficient. We're going to have to make our appliances more efficient. That is actually the low-hanging fruit if we're going to deal with climate change...

"And there's no reason why, with the kind of presidential leadership that I intend to provide, that we can't make drastic cuts in the amount of energy that we consume without any drop in our standard of living."

Not exactly a call for blood, sweat and tears, but amid all the pumped-up promises of no-cost change, Obama has here and there dropped a hint that it will take more than optimism to cure the economy. It's disheartening to hear him praise the false hope of the 1980s in an attempt to "bring us together" and pick up some votes from surviving Reagan Democrats.

Mile-High Club Comes Down to Earth

If the ACLU has its way, the thrill of the forbidden will disappear from air travel. In a brief today supporting Sen. Larry Craig, the freedom-loving organization argues that people who have sex in public rest rooms "have a reasonable expectation of privacy."

Should the Idaho Senator prevail in an effort to withdraw his guilty plea of disorderly conduct during a men's room sting at the Minneapolis airport, the Mile-High Club will have to disband. What would be the point of in-flight lavatory liaisons if they were completely legal, even before takeoff?

In its brief, the ACLU asserts, "The government cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Senator Craig was inviting the undercover officer to engage in anything other than sexual intimacy that would not have called attention to itself in a closed stall in the public restroom."

The defenders of Larry Craig may end up expanding civil liberties but striking a blow at one of the few well-established ways of relieving the tedium of long flights.

Up With Huckabee

Since Iowa, the vote count for the former Arkansas governor has been earthbound, but it hasn't lowered his expectations.

"We really need to take America up and not down," Mike Huckabee said when he moved into the top tier of candidates and now, as he faces a moment of truth in South Carolina that could foreshadow his fate on Super Tuesday, he is still looking in that direction.

Before his third-place finish in Michigan yesterday, he told supporters that "what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards."

It's no surprise that Huckabee is keeping his spirits up but, as his political fortunes fluctuate, his weight seems to be heading in the same direction.

Famous for losing over a hundred pounds and writing a book about it, in recent appearances, Huckabee has been looking more and more like Al Gore.

Last month, he admitted to gaining a dozen pounds on the campaign trail but seemed optimistic that he could trim down for the Boston marathon in April.

Between now and then, his ecclesiastical and dietary resolve will be tested by the political marathon.

An Outbreak of Civility

Everybody got the memo, except Charlie Rangel who was still bashing Barack Obama yesterday afternoon, but by nightfall in Las Vegas, it was all sweetness and light at the Democratic round table (debate would be too harsh a word for what Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards did for two hours).

For this news cycle at least, the politics of personal destruction gave way to earnest discussion of how to repair the Bush damage to America at home and around the world.

Something important must have happened to Sen. Clinton when she was 25 because she kept referring to her 35 years of experience as a qualification for the Presidency, while John Edwards kept reminding us how "personal" all the issues were for him and Barack Obama spoke often about bringing people together.

Compared to the headlines of the past week, it was all touchy-feely and rather restful.

Turning to the writerless Daily Show, the new civility was evident there too as the usually cantankerous John Bolton stopped Jon Stewart in his tracks by agreeing with him about Middle East policy while plugging his new book.

It won't last, but for the time being, it's a nice (forgive the cliché) change.

"Primary Colors II"

In the climactic scene of the movie from the Anonymous Joe Klein novel, John Travolta-Jack Stanton-Bill Clinton importunes a young, idealistic African-American young man, "We can do incredible things. We can change this country. I'm gonna win this thing. Look me in the eye, Henry, and tell me that you don't want to be a part of it."

In the sequel, Henry has morphed into Barack Obama, and he is still in it, this time not as part of the steamroller but as its target.

In an early scene of the original, a politician talking to the candidate asks the aspiring First Lady, "You don't mind us talking business, do you?" and she answers wryly, "No, no. How else could I learn?"

As we play out "Primary Colors II," how much has Emma Thompson-Susan Stanton-Hillary Clinton learned? The moral dilemma of the original--whether or not to destroy the opposition with dirt--has been transmuted into a team operation to smear Barack Obama with mud about drug use, doubts about his opposition to the war in Iraq and accusations of racial opportunism.

The 1998 movie was in theaters during the impeachment and left viewers with mixed feelings about the ruthless charmer who connected with Americans by feeling their pain while inflicting some of his own on them. Now the whole cast is back, and after years of the George Bush horror movie, the audience may be looking for something a little more elevating.

Martin Luther King to Obama

The following was originally posted a year ago today, January 14, 2007.

West Side residents of Chicago now have a U.S. Senator who looks like them and it may be, in more ways than one, due to the man whose birthday we celebrate tomorrow.

Martin Luther King Jr. preached nonviolence to the oppressed. “Our weapon is love,” he told them, and he used it with stunning force.

At the dawn of TV, he brought into American homes images of peaceful Southern protesters beaten, driven with high-pressure hoses and arrested without fighting back. Their body rhetoric exposed racial hatred as never before.

Then, in 1966 Dr. King wrote for me about the apartment he had rented in Chicago’s slums to connect with gang members: “I was shocked at the venom they poured out against the world.”

He asked them to join Freedom Marches in Mississippi and they did in carloads, where “they were to be attacked by tear gas. They were to protect women and children with no other weapons but their own bodies…..

“They learned in Mississippi and returned to teach in Chicago the beautiful lesson of acting against evil by renouncing force...

“And in Chicago the test was sterner. These marchers endured not only the filthiest kind of verbal abuse but also barrages of rocks and sticks and eggs and cherry bombs...

“It was through the Chicago marches that our promise to them—that nonviolence achieves results--was redeemed and their hopes for a better life rekindled, For they saw that a humane police force, in contrast to police in Mississippi, could defend the exercise of Constitutional rights as well as enforce the law in the ghetto.”

It is not hard to believe that some of those young men Martin Luther King helped to grow up and away from their worst selves exercised their rights decades later in voting for Barack Obama.

A Wedding Anniversary

One of those "This Day in History" items recalls that Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio were married on January 14, 1954 and brings back a flood of memories.

I met DiMaggio soon after their divorce the next year, when Marilyn came to New York and Joe, still in love with her as he would always be, confided how happy he was that she was getting away from "that Hollywood crowd."

Five years after Marilyn’s death, the story I wanted as a magazine editor was Joe’s. He had arranged her funeral, kept it private and was still sending flowers to her grave three times a week but had not said a word about her.

He invited me to his New York suite at cocktail time and poured a drink. There were half a dozen men there, and it became clear he wanted me to sit at the edge of his circle, listening to locker—room banter, while he eyed me once in a while, freshened my drink and made up his mind about talking to me.

He was a matador surrounded by his entourage. Two men in business suits came in for a Polaroid picture. With DiMaggio’s arms draped over them, years fell from their middle-aged faces. They were boys in the embrace of their boyhood hero. It recalled Gay Talese’s Esquire piece about Joe’s honeymoon with Marilyn. She went to Korea to entertain American troops. He stayed in Japan, and when she came back, Marilyn told him about her reception by 100,000 servicemen: “Joe, you never heard such cheering.” “Yes, I have,” he said.

The evening ground on, the friends chattered, Joe said little. Finally I asked, “Could we talk?“ “Tomorrow morning,” he said. “Come up about ten.”

When I arrived, he was packing his bags. I talked as he kept putting shirts, socks and underwear into a suitcase. He never looked up.

I told him I didn’t want to intrude, but it was my job to ask if he would ever say anything about Marilyn. If he did, he could trust me to make sure it came out right.

He was still staring into the suitcase, but I could see his eyes clouding. His jaw muscles tightened. For a long minute, he was silent.

“I could never talk about her,” he finally said in a choked voice. “Never.”

He never did.

The McCain Mutiny

Now that he is the Republican front runner again (talk about Comeback Kids!), John McCain has a bull's eye on his back for all manner of Conservatives, and today's Washington Post recites the litany.

"For at least eight years," the Post reports, "official Republican Washington has been dominated by what McCain advocates have called President Bush's 'Death Star'--an array of advocacy groups and lobbyists that backed Bush in 2000 and have remained the city's conservative power brokers.

"Republican politicians with national ambitions genuflect to (David) Keene at his Conservative Political Action Conference. They sign (Grover) Norquist's pledge not to raise taxes and attend the weekly conservative conclaves over which he presides as the head of Americans for Tax Reform. And they curry favor with religious conservatives such as Ralph Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition."

At one time or another, McCain has poked a finger in the eye of these king makers with his position on issues, as the executive director of Gun Owners of America points out. "I can tell you every single immigration activist and organization is terrified by the New Hampshire results," says the executive director of an "immigration reduction" group.

If Huckabee and Thompson fail to keep McCain from taking South Carolina, all these idealists will be put to a severe reality test. At the moment, Sen. Jim DeMint is backing Romney there, but John McCain's Baghdad traveling companion and likely running mate, Lindsey Graham, will be trying to tip the scales in his favor.

In 2000, Karl Rove bushwhacked McCain there, but that kind of ambush is not in the cards this time.

Clinton, Obama and Martin Luther King

In the week before his 79th birthday tomorrow, Martin Luther King was in the news again.

To make a point about the difference between rhetoric and reality, between Barack Obama and herself, Hillary Clinton said, "“Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done.”

That December, after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, Dr. King went to the White House, where President Johnson told him he that, if he tried to pass a voting rights bill, Southerners in Congress would block other measures of his Great Society program, which would benefit his people in important ways.

"The President said nothing could be done," Dr. King recalled. "But we started a movement."

Three months later, in Selma, Alabama, on what became known as Bloody Sunday, police beat peaceful protesters on a bridge, and days afterward Lyndon Johnson made a speech to a joint session of Congress that Martin Luther King called "one of the most eloquent, unequivocal, and passionate pleas for human rights ever made by a President of the United States."

"Our struggle in Selma had brought the whole issue of the right to vote to the attention of the nation," King said. "Selma brought us a voting bill...We had a federal law which could be used, and use it we would. Where it fell short, we had our tradition of struggle and the method of nonviolent direct action, and these too we would use."

On his birthday tomorrow, Americans will not have to choose between Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson in remembering that achievement. Both played their parts, as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are playing theirs in another historic turning point in American life. When voters cast their ballots for either of them, they will be making statements as powerful as Dr. King and President Johnson did back then.

Iraq Mousetrap for the Next President

As Democratic candidates make promises to voters about troop withdrawal, George W. Bush is in the Middle East trying to tie the hands of his successor in office.

In November, he joined Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in a declaration of principles to negotiate an agreement to guarantee US troop presence for years. It would replace the existing Security Council mandate authorizing multinational forces in Iraq and become a sworn obligation for the next president. Yesterday, Bush announced in Kuwait that they are moving ahead with the plan.

According to Michael Hirsh of Newsweek, "The target date for concluding the agreement is July, says Gen. Doug Lute, Bush's Iraq coordinator in the White House--in other words, just in time for the Democratic and Republican national conventions."

The intention is to bypass Congress and commit the next president to Bush's agenda. "We don't anticipate now," Gen. Lute has said, "that these negotiations will lead to the status of a formal treaty which would then bring us to formal negotiations or formal inputs from the Congress."

Last month, Hillary Clinton urged Bush not to sign any such agreement without congressional approval since it would be difficult if not impossible for a future president to breach. White House silence has been deafening.

Touting the Surge's success, Bush said yesterday that "long-term success will require active U.S. engagement that outlasts my presidency."

If the Democratic Congress tries to head him off at the pass with legislation, its legality would be challenged and the Bush years would end where they started--in the Supreme Court.

No Crying Shame

This is starting out as a year for tears.

Days after Hillary Clinton rescued her campaign by welling up in a New Hampshire coffee shop, George W. Bush wept yesterday at a Holocaust memorial in Israel, expressing sorrow over US failure in World War II to bomb Auschwitz and save some of the victims.

Sen. Clinton was clearly crying in response to her own stress, but the President's tears seem more complicated. Faced with visible evidence of more than a million murders, he turned from aerial views of the concentration camp and told Condoleeza Rice, "We should have bombed it." Before leaving, he wrote in the visitor's book, "God Bless Israel, George Bush."

For a man who believes in a world divided into Good and Evil, that is an understandable reaction, but is there something more in him than self-righteous certainty?

Last year, at a ceremony awarding a posthumous Medal of Honor to a Marine who threw himself over a grenade and saved the lives of two men in his unit, Bush wept as he said, “He was the guy who signed on for an extra two months in Iraq so he could stay with his squad...to make sure that everyone makes it home alive."

As we reach for change in American leadership, Bush's tears evoke sadness that his capacity to grieve for that Marine and his family as well as Holocaust victims never led him to join the majority of those he serves who want to put an end to killing as the means of choice to make the world safer.

Now we know that Hillary Clinton can cry over herself, but will she or whoever else succeeds George Bush be truly committed to sparing American families tears in the years ahead?