Nor is it in Iraq, where Gen. David Petraeus, our new commander, is actively implementing his own get-next-to-the-people strategy. Too late for all that? How would we know such a thing? Oh. We just sort of concluded it, hmm, from reading the blogs?

Up go the wails about our supposedly deteriorating economy. Well. Joblessness in our supposedly deteriorating economy has dropped to 4.4 percent. The market is at an all-time high. Does that make everything wonderful? Not if your health insurance and your subprime mortgage rate just went up. On the other hand, is it not helpful to know that the sinews and veins of the society around us have not for now lost their force or capacity for support?

If optimism is sometimes dumb, blind pessimism may be dumber still. Fear freezes the blood -- it sends, now and then, the strong and able into premature despair and retreat. Run from Iraq?

Nice time for that, you might say, just when Iran is moving to take over the Middle East, nuke Israel and potentially choke off oil exports!

Four decades' experience in the media have not shown me the way of making the media tell the whole truth, give us the real picture. Whatever that might mean.

It would seem an infusion of civic courage is what we need at this moment: something like Churchill and Roosevelt gave the British and American peoples six decades ago. Here were leaders ... leading.

Have we any such now? I don't think we know -- yet. We have to hope so. We have to understand that the presidential race, this year and the next, isn't about who cobbles together the most interest groups. It's about who can most convincingly show Americans what they are made of, and what they can do when their chins finally quit scraping the sidewalk.