Actually Nidra Poller is right about America’s bread and butter. Especially the butter.

That what Jeffery Goldberg, writing in this week’s edition of the New Yorker, thinks is coming. See “Party Unfaithful:The Republican implosion.”

And while he may be right, his sources provide plenty of information for an alternative reading.

Here is what Karl Rove told Goldberg about the 2006 congressional elections:

“Three thousand five hundred and sixty- two votes and we would have had a Republican Senate. That’s the gap in the Montana Senate race. And eighty- five thousand votes are the difference in the fifteen closest House races. There’s no doubt we’ve taken a short- term bit in the face of a very contentious war, but to have Republicans suffer an average defeat for the midterm says something about the underlying strength of conservative attitudes in the country.”

In other words, this was a 50-50 nation before the 2006 elections and still is. Political control is a function of who shows up.

So why didn’t the Republican voters show up? Well, many did. Fifteen house seats were lost by an average of 5,600 votes each. The handful who stayed home changed history. But why did they stay home?

Rove doesn’t believe that the Iraq war kept them home:
“If you look at the exit polling, the No. 1 issue, particularly among swing voters, was corruption and behavior,” he said. “After Foley, people said, ‘It’s just to much.’ After that, spending was the No.2 issue.”

Rove thinks the Bush doctrine will be Bush’s legacy. “You know, the Bush doctrine- ‘Feed a terrorist, arm a terrorist, train a terrorist, fund a terrorist, you’re just as bad as a terrorist,’” he said. “It’s going to remain our national doctrine, and it’s going to be very difficult, I think, if not impossible, to dismiss the doctrine of preemption…” Well, that might be what people in the White House bubble think. But preemption is dead for the foreseeable future, at least until the next attack. And look at Rove’s formulation (”feed a terrorist…). It is a memorable, meaningful summary of the Bush doctrine. Why wasn’t it ever widely used by the Administration?

Which brings us to Newt Gingrich and the idea of Bush’s competence.

“You hire Presidents at a minimum, to run the country well enough that you don’t have to think about it, and, at a maximum, to draw the country together to meet great challenges you can’t avoid thinking about.”

“Let me be clear: twenty-eight-per-cent approval of the President, losing every closely contested Senate seat except one, every one that involved an incumbent- that’s a collapse. I mean, look at the Northeast. You can’t be a governing national party and write off entire regions.”

“The Bush people deliberately could not bring themselves to wage a campaign of choice”- of ideology, Gingrich told Goldberg. Instead of saying that Kerry was “to the left of Ted Kennedy,” the Bush campaign tellingly chose instead to attack Kerry’s war record.

Gingrich thinks that any Republican running for president in 2008 will have to run against Bush.

“What’s fascinating about Sarkozy is that you have an incumbent cabinet member of a very unpopular twelve-year Presidency, who over the last three years became the clear advocate of fundamental change, running against an attractive woman”- the Socialist leader Segolene Royal- “who is the head of opposition,”

“In a country that wanted to say, ‘Not them,’ he managed to switch the identity of ‘them.’ He said, “I’m different from Chirac, and she’s not. If you want more of the same, you should vote for her.’ It was a Lincoln-quality strategic decision.”

Rep. Flake had an interesting conversation with Goldberg. This is worth reading closely.

“The Republican Party has always had three tenets- economic freedom, limited government, and individual responsibility,” he told me not long ago. “If you look at of those three issues lately, you’d be hard-pressed to say that the Republican Party really stands for any of them. Look at the growth of the government. And I’m not just talking about war spending and homeland security. You can put that aside and, and we’ve still grown substantially. Look at that tracking-poll question that’s always asked: ‘Whom do you trust more to manage the public’s finances, Republicans or Democrats?’ Republicans have always had the edge there. And that has narrowed over the years, and now it’s reversed.”

Flake said that he and Representative Mike Pence, an Indiana conservative often joke that they feel like Revolutionary War-era minutemen who arrived five minutes after the battle finished. “You know, it took three runs for Mike to get to Congress. We both got here in 2000, we show up and report for duty, and we’re told, ‘All right, No Child Left Behind is the first mission.’ That’s the first thing we do. We arrived for the revolution, and we’re six years late. And then we thought, Maybe this is an aberration, wait until the next term, and then what is it? Prescription drugs. We were just too late.”

Peter Collier, the former leftist magazine editor who later became famous for his “second thoughts,” has an interesting and important piece in the Wall Street Journal.

This Memorial Day it is a fitting tribute to the troops and to the nation for they stand and sometimes fall.

The late, great senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater, has been enjoying an strange revival of respect–by the liberal Left.

Maybe Goldwater’s new friends should read this essay by Roger Kimball, who edits one of my favorite magazines, the New Criterion.

Kimball reflects on and summarizes Goldwater’s 1961 essay “A Foreign Policy for America,” published in National Review. Kimball’s review is very interesting, but sadly he does not have a link to Goldwater’s essay. (You mean they didn’t have the internet or even Lexis-Nexis in 1961?–Ed. Yup.).

Remember, when you read this, that the 1950s and early 1960s were a time when giants were treated like pygmies and pygmies like giants. Goldwater and Reagan were writing for small magazines and Ted Sorenson had the ear of the president.

This piece in the Guardian, a left-wing British daily, should be required reading in Congress.

This largely reflects what I heard in Iraq, but with fresh details.

Bob Kerrey has been a war hero and a senator, but he is probably serving his country best as the president of the New School, in New York.

The New School was founded to be a left-wing hot house and a refuge for Bauhaus. So far, its founders have no reason to be disappointed. But it has also become a place of sparkling new ideas and has shown itself to be much intellectually freer than its uptown rival, the very p.c. Columbia University. America is lucky to have the New School.

And the New School and the country is lucky to have Kerrey. If you haven’t already, read Kerrey’s article in today’s Wall Street Journal. It is a measured and thoughtful plea to the American left to join in defending Iraq’s embattled democracy. It has some novel arguments. And it is just plain common sense.

May his voice prevail.

UPDATE: FOR an interesting counterpoint from reader who saw Kerrey in action a few years back, see the comments section.

Over at Flopping Aces, a site which mixes humor and insight in strong doses, Scott Malensek has written a fascinating post.

I will have more to say on this soon. In the meantime, check out Malensek’s piece.

Congress has agreed to fund the troops in Iraq without setting a deadline for their withdrawal and without turning the defense appropriations bill into a Christmas tree of unrelated spending measures, according to the Associated Press.

Read the AP story. What’s missing? The obvious, objective analysis that the White House is getting exactly what it has said it wanted for months. This is clear Bush victory–and victory for those of us who still want to safeguard democracy in Iraq.

It seems that the AP has finally answered that classic sophomoric headscratcher: If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?

The AP correspondent seems to hoping that if he doesn’t mention it that no one will notice that Bush just won the biggest political battle of the year.

Being an orphan is not something you ever forget.

My sister’s husband, David Warren, joined Heather and me and Franklin Raff, who produces the G. Gordon Liddy Show, at bar at the Washington marina. Somehow, the conversation quietly slipped from light to dark as the sun dipped.

David, an inventor who has developed a new type of armor, began talking about his recent trip to Iraq. He went out into the red zone and walked the streets, where he saw orphans selling incense. That glimpse haunted him.

It reminded him of day in 1975, when he waited in a Saigon orphanage as the North Vietnamese closed on the city. Shells rained down and bodies bobbed in canals. A courageous American military pilot flew in on a C-5 (or so he remembers) to fly the orphans out. It exploded. The next relief plane exploded overhead.

Then, as he told it, days later, a Canadian pilot and American stewardess with three children at home convinced someone to give them a Boeing 737. Bamboo ladders clattered to the sides. David and the other orphans clambered aboard. Some handed up babies in boxes.

He remembers that pilot shouting that they had to go NOW. The ladders fell away as the plane raced down the runway. Someone closed the doors. “It was the last plane out of Vietnam,” he said.

Why should we wait for the last days to save those orphans in Baghdad? He asked. He said that he has lived in America since age nine and now has a good life: a loving wife, three children, two houses, one boat and more than a dozen patents. “Now it is time to close the circle. I want to give back.”

The conversation shifted to starting a foundation to save the orphans of Iraq and to lobby to change the laws of two countries to rescue them. Anyone want to help?

In my weeks in Iraq and Turkey, I daydreamed about a Sunday like this one. It finally came. One of those accidental afternoons when serendipity favors you with both the turn and the river.

In a few minutes, I will take Heather to Sunday brunch. We will sit by the Potomac, eat eggs benedict and read the papers. I am running late, still in my robe, and no one is hurrying me.

On Turner Classic Movies, the “Glenn Miller Story” is just about to get to the sad part, but it has been a nice ride. I found a bit of African coffee that I forgot about and scooped it into the French press. The robusto, cut and lit, accompanies it perfectly. My dog, Boxer, looks up with alarm as they tell Miller’s wife (played by June Allyson) the news about the missing plane.

Outside, the air carries the Virginia humidity and the wind washes it away,pushing the trees around and leaving slashing shadows on the bricks.

The phone has not rung all day.