Nixon and Bush Come Into a Bar...

A decade and a half after he died, the ghost of Bad Presidents Past keeps reappearing, rattling his chains to remind us that, as George W. Bush leaves, he did not invent bad behavior in the White House.

The latest batch of released Nixon tapes provokes a headline: "Ruthless, Cynical, Profane."

In contrast to the President Present, Nixon was never someone you would want to have a beer with, more like the weird guy who comes into the bar and inspires everyone to move to the other end.

With Nixon we are beyond politics, deep into the personal pathology of a man who saw himself surrounded by a world of enemies yet hungered for their approval even while hatching plots against them and, throughout it all, secretly recording every word in the Oval Office that would come back to destroy his presidency and, beyond that, haunt and puzzle generations to come.

By contrast, in his farewell media tour, starting this week with Charlie Gibson, we get a genial, somewhat befuddled Bush, prompting us to speculate about when he is lying to himself as well as us.

In one of the new Nixon revelations, he orders an aide to make sure that pictures of all previous presidents are removed from White House Offices, only to discover that an employee of 41 years still has a signed photo of JFK on her wall.

The episode has a happy ending when the Leader of the Free World receives a memo: "On January 14th, the project was completed and all 35 offices displayed only your photograph."

Mission Accomplished.

Forces of Nature

With a Katrina-sized hurricane bearing down on Texas amid whirlwind parsing of Sarah Palin's interview by Charlie Gibson, this looks like a weekend of hunkering down and hoping--a time for looking inward and wishing for the best.

As rational creatures, we want an explanation for everything so we can figure out how to cope. But especially on the day after 9/11, we know that some events are unforeseeable and leave us feeling helpless.

Weather forecasters predict "certain death" for those who stay in the Galveston area, and Peggy Noonan tells Obama supporters about Palin, "You can never kill her now. Forget it. She can hurt herself, but in terms of Democratic attacks she is bulletproof."

The hurricane is an immediate threat to life and limb, so it may be insensitive and unfair to compare its force to the potential destructiveness of a political figure who may or may not devastate our national life in the future.

But both are reminders that, much as we think of ourselves as knowledgeable, competent and evolved human beings, there are things in life we can't control. We just have to wait them out until things get back to normal.

Obama, McCain: TV Anchors Away

The candidates are opting out of the "let's you and him fight" format of the TV networks for presidential debates.

In rejecting a "town hall" proposed by ABC News and New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, they must be thinking of the April Democratic debate that ended up with the audience booing moderators Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos followed by widespread criticism for inciting an hour of nasty trivia. (Tom Shales of the Washington Post pasted the ABC anchors for "shoddy, despicable performances.")

Obama's spokesman said, “Both campaigns indicate that any additional appearances will be open to all networks for broadcast on TV or Internet like the presidential commission debates, rather than sponsored by a single network or news organization.”

McCain's spokesman said, "Both campaigns agree the town hall meetings will be open to press but not sponsored or moderated by the press."

The candidates are invoking the Lincoln-Douglas debates as a model but are not likely to embrace that format of a half-hour of oratory for one side, followed by an hour for the other and another half-hour of rebuttal.

That may have worked out for the single subject of slavery, but there are too many domestic and foreign-policy issues this year for such a formal approach.

What voters can hope for is a setting in which they ask the questions and the candidates respond to them and each other with substantive civility rather than the gotcha sound bites the TV networks want.

If the campaigns mean what they say, this year's presidential debates won't be an extension of "American Idol" and the survival tests of reality TV.