It took this reporter one year, three months and two weeks from that first sun-splashed day on the upstate farm of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, where Mrs. Clinton launched her legendary “Listening Tour,” to come to that conclusion, but it crystallized on Saturday, Oct. 21, during her unremarkable press availability after her unremarkable speech at the Metropolitan After Nine Club in Glen Cove, L.I.

Her essential brilliance was not in the message of the day, in which she used a fabulously topical baseball metaphor to call “strike two” on Representative Rick Lazio for violating their campaigns’ agreement to ban soft money, which he had not done. (Governor George Pataki has been appearing in a series of radio ads that tout the upstate economy but do not tout Mr. Lazio or trash Mrs. Clinton—which latter detail makes it hard to see how the commercials constitute a violation of anything other than the sensibilities of those disturbed by the sound of taxpayer dollars being flushed down the drain in an effort to convince economically distressed people that they are not economically distressed.)

Her essential brilliance was not in how she attacked Mr. Lazio, which she often does while attacking him for attacking her.

“I think that the voters have a right to know that he has essentially stopped fulfilling his responsibilities as a member of Congress,” said the issues-not-insults candidate, who has revived the practice (used in 1998 by then-Senator Alfonse D’Amato against then-Representative Charles Schumer) of whacking one’s opponent for not showing up to cast Congressional votes in the last two months; an attack clearly meant to complement, not cancel out, her attacks on Mr. Lazio for not showing up upstate.

“Do you think that they have a right to know that his overall attendance record is above 95 percent?” asked Bob Hardt of the New York Post.

“They can certainly weigh that however they choose,” said Mrs. Clinton, without the blink of a wide blue eye.

Her essential brilliance was not in her indisputably favorite moment of the press conference, which came in the sort of awestruck question that is often handed to her like the huge bouquets she still receives at the lion’s share of her appearances (in this case, a man from Japanese television asked the First Lady to say a few words of encouragement to the politically marginalized women of his homeland).

No, as befits a woman who has a reputation as the most wizardly of policy wonks, her essential brilliance was in her response to a question about a specific point of the debate about Social Security. But, as befits a candidate who should have a reputation as the most artful of dodgers, the brilliance sprang not from anything she actually said about the actual issue. Indeed, except for one or two specific word choices, she could have been fielding a question about health care, welfare reform, child poverty or the Middle East.

Actually, as in all such cases, the response originated long before it was made, way back on May 19, coincidentally the day that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani exited the Senate race. It was minutes before that news broke that Mrs. Clinton was first asked whether she agreed with Vice President Al Gore, a central theme of whose own campaign had become attacking the very notion—then on offer from the campaign of Governor George W. Bush—of allowing younger workers to invest a portion of their payroll tax in the stock market. Or did she side more with Senator Moynihan, a central theme of whose tenure had become supporting such a proposal, and in fact fairly ridiculing the notion that such a measure would, in and of itself, send the nation to hell in a hand basket? (To be clear, the Senator had also taken the Republicans to task for their failure to spell out how they would fund the investment provision. But the fact remained that Mr. Moynihan’s approach differed from that of Mr. Gore at least as significantly as from that of Mr. Bush.)

At that time, and on many occasions since, Mrs. Clinton had referred reporters to a speech she would soon be making based on numbers she would soon be studying. Just as time heals all wounds, it neutralizes almost all questions, particularly those having to do with substance. For months the speech did not materialize, much in the same way that the anti-poverty program announced in December failed to materialize; but such facts have been easy to miss in the Cuisinart of the campaign. Then, beginning before (but certainly escalating after) the point when Al tapped Joe and tongue-kissed Tipper and thus left George W. Bush eating dust in New York, Mrs. Clinton had sounded the standard Gore theme and then really revved on it. By the time of her recent visit to a group of elderly voters in upper Manhattan, she was pretty much doing William Jennings Bryan, substituting “seniors” for “mankind” and “privatization” for “cross of gold!”

It is, of course, crazy to think that such a question on Social Security would make or break—or even affect—a Senate race. But just for old times’ sake, it seemed worth asking her in Glen Cove: Did she consider Mr. Moynihan’s support of some private investment to be materially different from the Republicans’, or was he, too, being reckless on this issue?

Here comes the brilliance:

“Oh, I think he has a very different position that he is certainly the most eloquent advocate of,” said Mrs. Clinton. “He really wants people to be able to save and have retirement security, and that’s why I support the kind of retirement accounts that the President and the Vice President have proposed in slightly different forms, because I think that we should create means for people to be able to save and add to their Social Security benefits, and I support that.”

No, no, no, the question was sharpened: the Senator is in favor of allowing two points of the payroll tax to be invested; the Vice President—and, lately, you—have been giving out the idea that this is, in and of itself, an evil; what gives?

“Well, I think if you look at some of his more recent statements, he has been very careful to say that he doesn’t want to do anything that would undo the good work that he did when he was the chair of the finance committee,” Mrs. Clinton said. “So I think that some of his concerns are ones that I share.”

Needless to say, it’s not the content here that’s brilliant. Indeed, the content here is sufficiently bland, muddled and altogether “lite” to be spooned into plastic snack containers as found in the grocer’s freezer, labeled “George W. Bush’s Own Pudding” and sold at a premium to the undecided voters who seem to crave such stuff. The brilliance lies in the diamond-quality facets of the deflection; in the full sound of its emptiness, the diplomacy of its duplicity. Think of what that answer achieves. It publicly kisses the derrière of the potentially disgruntled dignitary. (Which, by the way, is quite a contrast from what has been going on in private. Though Mr. Moynihan has reportedly cut one commercial for the First Lady and will be doing some campaigning for her, the Senator and his staff have been virtually absent from the Clinton effort pretty much from the moment the cameras left the farm. As a matter of fact, word has it that Moynihan chief of staff Tony Bullock has just taken a leave of absence, as government staffers frequently do before an election, to go work on a campaign: the Vice President’s. In Pennsylvania.) The answer states support for a value that no one opposes (old people having savings, hey!). It conjures a nonexistent harmony between two diametrically opposed ideas (the Vice President’s concept of Social Security and Mr. Moynihan’s). It sidesteps even the faintest breath of controversy (the sentence “I love Pat Moynihan, but I disagree with him on this one point” might not seem to be a statement of excessive boldness or candor, but Mrs. Clinton would never go there). It implies that Mr. Moynihan has, in recent comments, somehow changed his position on this issue when in fact he has not. And, most importantly, it does all of the above in such cool, complete, un-Lazio-like English that it sounds like a real answer.

Last week, this reporter attributed Mrs. Clinton’s success to the act of simply showing up everywhere, all the time. But really her success is more of a two-parter. It’s showing up and saying nothing—while seeming to say a ton. If this is an art, then the First Lady is Picasso, Rembrandt and Monet rolled into one. It is true, what Mrs. Clinton claims: From Brooklyn to Buffalo, in porches and backyards and at dinner tables all over the state, she has addressed major public issue after major public issue. But with the exception of those issues (or aspects of issues) that come safely packed in Styrofoam peanuts of polling and shipped, as if by U.P.S., from the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee in huge, damage-proof boxes marked “100 Percent Political No-Brainer,” she has given one contorted yet content-free answer after another. Far more remarkably, she has done it without touching a hair on the head of her image as the ultimate woman of substance.

Yet, to a truly dumbfounding degree, none of this has mattered one whit—even in the quarters where it usually matters the most.

“Hey,” you can practically hear them saying in her war room on Seventh Avenue, “she got the Times endorsement.”

So she did, on Sunday, Oct. 22. Granted, given that Mr. Lazio seems to be running on a platform of radiant mediocrity, it is hard to fault the paper of record on its choice. Moreover, the tenor of the endorsement seemed to be one of hope rather than experience: The Times called Mrs. Clinton “an unusually promising talent” and said that she is “capable of”—not in the process of, or already meriting praise for—“following the pattern, established by the likes of [Robert F.] Kennedy, Mr. Moynihan and Jacob Javits, that finds New York senators playing a role on the national and world stages even as they defend local interests.”

So that’s fair enough. If and when she makes it to the Senate, Mrs. Clinton may very well prove to be a Kennedy, a Javits, a Moynihan. But at the same time, it must be said: On her way to the Senate, she has definitely been much more of a Lipinski.

For those of you who did not see her spinning, leaping and preening her way to Olympic gold in Nagano, Tara Lipinski is a skater. But for those of you who have not seen the First Lady spinning, leaping and preening her way to a very possible victory in New York, no one is a better skater than Mrs. Clinton.

Brilliant.

“I think people know everything there is to know about me,” the confidence-flushed First Lady laughed on the afternoon of Sunday, Nov. 5. Mrs. Clinton was meeting reporters on the sidewalk outside the Love Fellowship Tabernacle in East New York, the fifth of seven African-American churches where she was slated to worship that day. Mrs. Clinton was responding to the kind of wrap-up question that was becoming necessary as the campaign finally, mercifully, drew to a close and victory looked more and more apparent: What, if anything, did she feel New Yorkers knew about her now that they did not know about her the day she first presented herself to them as a possible Senate candidate? (One immediate answer might involve the degree to which she would be willing to melt down and fire up in church: “So the next time any of us hear somebody sayin’ that they’re unhappy with so-and-so doin’ this or they wouldn’t have done that,” the First Lady said, strutting her stuff to one congregation, “I want you to say: ‘Wait a minute, before Ah listen, Ah got a question for you: Did you vote?’”) But she went with her standard answer, to the effect that, given the amount of newsprint she has spent eight years swimming in and the horde of press that has tracked her for 16 months, she is an open book.

In a campaign replete with brilliant feints, this was perhaps the most brilliant of all. Mrs. Clinton has come to seem as familiar to New Yorkers as corn flakes on the kitchen table, all the while remaining, in every compelling sense, as obscure as the sun at night.

It doesn’t matter now, though. Hillary Rodham Clinton will be the next United States Senator from New York.

Like it or loathe it, the sentence itself does soar with significance. Historically, of course, this marks a great American milestone. Narratively, it marks the symmetrical payoff, if not quite the happy ending. (“At last,” the cosmos itself rejoices, “she gets something out of this deal.”) In other senses, though, the ramifications are not so readily clear. For all these years, Mrs. Clinton has served as a human prism, her every component--her cookie-baking quotient, her coiffure, her pantsuit, her power-wielding--refracted to reveal some deeper insight into the meaning of American womanhood. Now, perhaps, it is worth probing her candidacy for some deeper insight into the mode of American politicking.

When, in the 1970’s, white-suited comedian Steve Martin told the world “Let’s get small,” he probably did not intend it as a suggestion for the future of political discourse in America. But small it is. Safety has been Mrs. Clinton’s strategy, and very purposely so: From the beginning, what voices there were urging Mrs. Clinton to step out on any limb were drowned out by the voices of caution (actually, the voices of pollster and message-meister Mark Penn and media consultant Mandy Grunwald). A stranger in a strange land, nervous and mistrustful of her own instincts, she started out on the path of least resistance. She has stayed on it.

And it has led her to victory. Hillary Rodham Clinton is the next United States Senator from New York.

Her campaign has been the vindication of caution. It is the glorification of confusion. (“Words mean something,” Mrs. Clinton told reporters at a press conference. This actually struck the Hillary-trained ear as startling.)

She was asked, as her campaign bus rolled upstate, to cite a political risk that she had taken in the course of her campaign--one instance when she went against her advisers, or spoke out in an impolitic way, or ignored the polls. “There’ll be time for retrospection after it’s over,” she said.

But you can’t argue with success: Hillary Rodham Clinton is the next United States Senator from New York.

In the beginning, it seemed that, as a candidate, she would have to overcome the dread of disclosure that she had been able to nurse as First Lady, and find a tolerable way to bypass personal questions while engaging questions that ought to be the concern of everyone.

In the end, she didn’t. On that same bus ride, Mrs. Clinton finally addressed her history on the issue of welfare reform. For two minutes. What she said was intelligent, as far as it went--but that was 120 seconds out of 16 months on an issue that she placed at the center of her candidacy.

In the beginning, it seemed that she would have to draw some boundaries between her role as a resident power in the White House and her role as the aspiring gentlewoman from Chappaqua.

In the end, she didn’t. “It doesn’t matter where you are, in what capacity--all gifts go back to the White House gift unit,” Mrs. Clinton told reporters at the proverbial hastily called press conference. It was Friday, Nov. 3, and she had just addressed a gathering of the Anti-Defamation League at the Waldorf-Astoria. But a nasty little development had necessitated a second encounter with the press in one day: After denying any knowledge that the American Muslim Alliance had hosted a June event that netted $50,000 for her campaign, White House storage served up an August letter signed by Mrs. Clinton, thanking them for having her to their event. Mrs. Clinton described the anonymous unit that had auto-penned her signature as “a permanent civil-service entity within the White House.” That is completely unremarkable--except as one of the only times that the campaign has chosen to elucidate anything about the nuts and bolts of who does what when her dual positions rub against one another. (By the way, would it interest you to know how much money all that official White House acknowledging and thanking saved Mrs. Clinton’s campaign? Hopefully not, because you never will.)

In the end, she never did any of it, for the excellent reason that she never had to. The fact that she never had to could be put down to the fact that she, being a Clinton, was extremely fortunate in her adversary; or, to borrow from the oft-cited language of that adversary’s fundraising letter, the reason that Mrs. Clinton never had to sharpen her own attacks could be stated in six words: She was running against Rick Lazio.

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani would never have let her get away with this.

If that sounds like the bitter bile of a reporter still angry to have been deprived of the clash of the titans, it is. To be sure, Mr. Giuliani might have self-destructed; might have scared upstaters to death; might have delayed campaigning until the conclusion of the World Series. It is, however, hard to believe that he would not at least have given Mrs. Clinton an argument. For her arguments against him, which she later levied against Mr. Lazio, made no sense. And it is in the lack of argument--real, solid, vigorous, worthy argument--that, regardless of how one feels about either candidate, this supposedly great race has failed those who truly care about politics.

So, to consider what could have been is not just to lament the lost theatrics, but to bemoan the unrealized conversation.

Against Rudy, the conversation might have gone like this:

Hillary: “He may seem like a moderate, but he’s really just a lackey to the Republican leadership.”

Rudy: “Oh really? Would that be when I was going to bat for the Brady Bill, signing the domestic-partnership law, or suing your administration over its anti–New York use of the line-item veto?”

Hillary: “He’s not spending enough time upstate.”

Rudy: “Sorry I haven’t been able to get in a van and visit Erie County 900,000 times, but I have a job.”

And a job, like it or not, that most swing voters thought he did exceedingly well: On the Mayor’s worst day, with cancer, with the separation from the missus, with the very close female friend, with an apparent aversion to campaigning while Mrs. Clinton was doing nothing but--he was routing her in the suburbs.

In Mr. Giuliani, she would have faced an opponent whose record on choice--once he made the leap from way over on the pro-life side of the fence in the late 1980’s--was both more liberal and more substantial than her own; and his penchant for ethnic pandering made hers look like needlepoint (“My only regret is that I had but one Lincoln Center out of which to throw Yasir Arafat!”).

Alas, that race was not to be. Instead, in Mr. Lazio, Mrs. Clinton ended up running against a figure of whom no one had heard, and about whose campaign none seemed eager to speak. Infamously aggressive on the stage of their first debate, Mr. Lazio seemed terrified of the First Lady everywhere else. Before the average New Yorker was convinced of anything about Mr. Lazio, his own campaign made clear that it was convinced he was no match for her on the merits. For reasons that will always baffle anyone who paid attention to the content of the First Lady’s message, Team Lazio bought the Clinton spin that she was the smart, strong, scary one, and he was the dim, weak, nice one; and that, to whatever degree that contrast left him lacking, it would have to suffice to eviscerate her character and origin.

In the end, of course, it didn’t suffice.

Apart from his more-than-respectable performance in the three debates, Mr. Lazio’s engagement of Mrs. Clinton “on the issues” was the political equivalent of taking the argument, wrapping it in tissue, putting it in a light blue box with a fat white ribbon, handing it to her and saying, “This is from Tiffany.”

Therefore, it was not really the Clinton campaign’s fault that--to paraphrase the fellow she is replacing--her campaign has represented the defining of discourse down.

But let’s blame them anyway--at least a little, at least for a moment. Let’s just entertain the thought that one reason New Yorkers feel so sick and tired of this race is not only because it has been so long and so loud, but because it has been so lame and so ludicrous. Politics is not physics; a criticism of Mrs. Clinton emphatically does not imply an equal and opposite compliment to Mr. Lazio. On the contrary. That said, to contemplate a partial, random list of the tactics employed by this most erudite of candidates, in this most historic of elections, is to force oneself to think about how we punish politicians for exhibiting any sort of depth, honesty or clarity, and reward them for resorting to shallowness, disingenuousness and dullness.

Here is that partial, random list: Mrs. Clinton was able to pound Mr. Lazio for votes to abolish the Department of Education without ever having to articulate what, precisely, it is that the nation would lose with the abolition of a bureaucracy that does not exactly date back to the Founding Fathers, and many of whose functions were previously performed elsewhere.

She repeatedly bemoaned the apocalyptically dire consequences for reproductive rights of electing Mr. Lazio, who was on record as an admirer of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia--not even stubbing her toe on the fact that the Senate confirmed Mr. Scalia 98-0; that one of those 98 was none other than Vice President Al Gore, and that Sandra Day O’Connor, frequently touted as a bulwark against a pro-life court, was appointed by President Ronald Reagan.

She rammed him for a low recent-Congressional-attendance record, thus doing her part to render it a political necessity for even the most conscientious lawmakers to neglect their constituencies, real legislative priorities and personal lives in order to show up for every last ceremonial, procedural and overwhelmingly lopsided vote.

She ran a commercial in which Mr. Lazio got the grainy-accusatory-graphics treatment for stating, on Meet the Press, that he considered former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to be “an important historical figure.” Now, does anybody think that Mr. Gingrich was not an important historical figure? And on and on.

Again, Mrs. Clinton did not initiate the dumbing-down, gumming-up, glossing-over style of American politicking, but throughout her campaign she absolutely, positively epitomized it. Likewise, Mrs. Clinton did not invent the evil-schoolboy ventriloquism by which politicians, when pelted with an attack by the opponent, peel it off, wad it up with spit, chewing gum, lighter fluid and razor blades and throw it back on their opponent, all the while blasting their opponent for attacking them. But in the matter of “Who’s exploiting the U.S.S. Cole?”, she may very well have perfected it. As the reading public now knows, the State Republican Committee made calls to voters that accused Mrs. Clinton of associating with terrorists such as those who had attacked the U.S.S. Cole. (“Cavorting” was Mr. Lazio’s own term of choice.) Very fairly and forcefully, Mrs. Clinton responded to that accusation, demanding that the calls cease and that Mr. Lazio apologize to the families involved. (She was, by the way, positively glowing. It’s true: Mrs. Clinton never looks happier than when she is shocked, outraged, appalled and disappointed.) So far: Hillary 1, Rick less than 0. But she kept responding, even after the calls ceased. At a press availability that she held during an upstate campaign swing with Senator Charles Schumer, Mrs. Clinton echoed the sentiment expressed by Mr. Schumer, that the Republicans, despite their claim to owe no one an apology, were “embarrassed” by the calls. (By the way, the whole matter brought up two points of dubious probability: that Mrs. Clinton is capable of “cavorting” with anyone, and that the State Republican Committee is capable of embarrassment.) She invoked the Cole as a reason for students at the Rochester Institute of Technology to vote, and she described her attendance at the funeral for the Anti-Defamation League. When her campaign ultimately issued three advertisements on the subject (including a television commercial featuring the vessel in mid-explosion), there were even those who questioned her hesitation to exploit the tragedy. (On Saturday, Nov. 4, at Manhattanville, Mrs. Clinton bemoaned the fact that this was overshadowing the important issues. At the same time, her campaign was releasing an ad featuring former Mayor Ed Koch displaying a photograph of Mr. Lazio shaking hands with Mr. Arafat. When a reporter at the Manhattanville event asked why she would issue such a commercial if she was trying to focus on issues such as choice, Mrs. Clinton pointed out, accurately, that the ad did mention choice--albeit as an afterthought. When pressed as to what else was in the commercial, she refused to say.)

It doesn’t matter now, though. Hillary Rodham Clinton is the next United States Senator from New York.

Or maybe it does matter. After all, as the saying goes, how they govern is how they run.

Based on how she ran, this is what we know of Senator Clinton: She is ambitious, energetic, persistent, articulate and smart, albeit selectively so. She can speak without cards, shake a thousand hands without stopping and lie without blinking.

She has made history. She remains a mystery. It is up to New York to solve her now.

This is partly because I spend almost as much time gazing in shop windows at the thin clothes I’m going to wear one glorious postpartum day, as I do mooning over the gorgeous little alien on the sonogram images. It is partly because sometimes, when I am not marveling at the child inside me, I am pining for the life behind me. It is partly because if I could forfeit the mere epidural and deliver a happy, healthy baby while in some sort of harmless temporary coma, I would do it in a heartbeat. But mostly, my manifest unworthiness as a woman, a person and a mother-to-be can be captured in five simple words: I don’t want to breast-feed.

What? Don’t I read? Don’t I consult with health-care professionals? Am I somehow blind to the miraculous properties of colostrum, the Postnatal Fluid That Could? Don’t I know the facts?

Do I ever. In books, in magazines and all over the Internet, I have beheld the child of the breast, in all its wondrous immunity. Study after study shows that he or she will not only be less prone to allergies, asthma, diarrhea and childhood obesity, but also more highly developed, finely adjusted and closely bonded with yours truly. The creature of formula, on the other hand, is literally a crying shame. Fairly teeming with bacteria, he or she is doomed to wheeze, waddle and wind-expel his or her way through life as an innocent victim of corporate American processed-food peddling—and of his ignorant and/or uncaring mother.

All things considered, I’m leaning toward the latter.

Not that I have any remotely valid reasons for doing so. I have no basis on which to refute the consistent, insistent collective medical wisdom, propagated for years now by august bodies from the American Academy of Pediatrics on down, that “breast is best.” Nor do I have any moral or social objection to breast-feeding on the grounds that it is somehow dirty or unseemly. On the contrary, I fully accept that if I were a good person, I would do it. In fact, my “reasons,” such as they are, are the least valid imaginable for anyone who would fancy herself a mother: They’re all about me.

Maybe the experience of childbirth will transform me, as some mother-friends have told me it might, from a pretty good gal who will hopefully make a pretty good mom into a tigress who would eat her own limbs before her young would go without cello lessons. But so far, I’m still me, and I still aim to undergo motherhood with as little discomfort as possible. After a gestational period encompassing the perpetually exhausted throwing-up phase, followed by the perpetually ravenous odd-little-rashes phase, followed by the enormously-fat-and-getting-enormously-fatter phase, I don’t want to deal with the painful-engorgement/awkward-sucking phase, even if, for most women, it lasts only a short while. After nine months of abstaining from alcohol and cutting down on caffeine, tuna fish, peanuts, soft cheese and rare meat, I want to eat or drink something without a moment’s thought about what it might do to the baby. After cheerfully signing up to have a human being either pulled or cut out of me and then getting over all the sewing-up, I don’t want to get into any situation where I may have to reassure myself that the foreign discharge, if and when it comes out of my nipple, is perfectly natural, or that the painfully clogged duct will soon clear up, provided I keep the feedings frequent.

Even if I could be guaranteed the kindest, gentlest lactational experience in La Leche League history, I still don’t want to wake up every two to three hours every single day and night for the first few months. (Sure, I’ll have to do that a huge amount of the time anyway—but if, on occasion, some merciful relative or friend or husband or caregiver should offer me a few hours during a given night or day, I don’t want to say, “Thank you, no, I and only I am the giver of milk.” I want to kiss their feet in gratitude and pass out.) Given that I’m already looking at non-negotiable transitional baby traumas from teething to toilet training to getting-him-to-sleep-through-the-night-ing, I don’t want to throw in the optional weaning. And while I heartily embrace any woman’s right to open her bra next to me on an airplane or a park bench or at a restaurant so that she can feed her child, I’m sorry: I just don’t want to open mine. Last but not least, I don’t want to leak.

I do want to go out, at least every once in a while, for more than a few hours at a stretch in the first year of my child’s life—and I don’t want to have to pay at the pump every time. And I do want—or think I want—to have another child or two before I turn into a reproductive pumpkin in a very few years at most, and I don’t want to be pregnant or pumping straight through 2010.

Don’t tell me, I know: I ought to be ashamed, both for having these feelings and for expressing them. If I insist on sacrificing my own child’s health and well-being to my petty desires for rest and sanity, then I should at least keep it to myself. And anyway, even I can’t stand how I sound, which is like one of those people who offers Uncle Joe—the octogenarian who smokes three packs a day yet still jogs and chops his own firewood—as proof that the Surgeon General is full of hooey. Every time it strikes me that the bottle-fed people I know—myself, my six siblings, my 15 nieces and nephews, and the children of about half my friends—seem to be in no sense more sickly than the breast-fed people I know (who actually include the only severely asthmatic and allergic specimens of the sample, but never mind), I become a little bit more of a moron in my own estimation.

Then again, it turns out that, statistically speaking, I am a moron, or at least severely enlightenment-challenged. Yet another thing that breast-feeding study after breast-feeding study shows is that there is a definite link between being well educated and affluent and choosing to breast-feed. In other words, the dumber and poorer a woman is, the more likely she is to give her baby a bottle.

Just when I was getting ready to put my Yale degree in the trash over this, it occurred to me that that link might, at least in part, be forged the other way. Maybe, just maybe, some of the benefits flowing to some breast-fed children aren’t coming from the milk, but from the mom. I’ll bet if a study were to follow the lives of a group of children who leave the hospital in the best, safest, most-state-of-the-art car seat versus children who do not, the results would show the former group to be hugely advantaged in a miraculous variety of ways. These children would be found not only to be apt to suffer fewer injuries in actual car accidents, but also to be in fewer accidents at all. Fewer of them would show up in the emergency room with childhood respiratory ailments, and more of them would get into Harvard. All these findings would be perfectly true. Yet many of them would clearly not be chalked up to the car seat, but to the parents who purchased the car seat. On average, these parents might also be assumed to drive more carefully with baby on board; keep the child’s diet high in fresh fruits and vegetables and low in secondary smoke; find the money for tutoring; and so forth.

So it just may be with many a nursing mother—at least if she’s a mother whose decision to nurse reflects not her own instincts and preferences, but her desire to get motherhood right and her dread of getting it wrong. Even before she conceives, this woman would rather eat her laundry than stand rightfully accused of failing to do anything that experts consider to be best for her child. The minute she goes off the pill, she starts popping folic acid. The minute she gets pregnant, she gladly gets with the program of vitamins, ultrasounds and long pillow talks with her mate about what birthing plan to make, stroller to buy, child care to sign on for or forfeit in favor of do-it-yourself parenting. Throughout her pregnancy, she diligently reads copious expert advice exhorting her to breast-feed for at least three, six or 12 months—which she does. She can and will get the child to the doctor before the sniffle turns serious, keep the baby generally warm and dry, and nip socialization problems in the bud.

Again, none of this is to deny that breast milk itself is a net benefit—but mightn’t it at least take some of the gleam off it as a sole-source sliver bullet?

Having myself been bottle-fed from the get-go, I am not too perceptive. Still, I can’t help but notice: Between 1920 and 1970, most American children went from breast to bottle. During those years, rates of infant mortality and childhood illness did not skyrocket; they plummeted. Obviously, this suggests the introduction of other factors—improved vaccines, birthing techniques, sanitation—that, in terms of children’s health, more than made up for whatever was lost in the triumph of formula. In other words, it seems quite clear that once one arrives in the developed world and at a reasonable standard of care, the breast-versus-bottle debate becomes not a matter of life or death, but a question of good versus better. So why must the discussion of the matter be cast, as I am shocked to find it to be, in such bitter tones of black and white?

Dumb question. Obviously, it’s because, wherever and whenever she has a choice, the perfect mother will always go for what is better for her child. And while no woman is openly expected to be the perfect mother, every woman is quite frankly expected to kill herself trying to be. The moment I hit the bottle, I will have turned in my perfect-mother badge before I get to wear it even once. Therefore, I am Satan.

“You’re not Satan, honey,” the father of my fetus reassures me. “You just don’t want to breast-feed, so you’re distorting all the reliable data as a way to rationalize your way out of it.”

You know something? He’s absolutely right. That’s why, after all these mental gymnastics, I have finally landed at a decision that feels just right: All fathers should be strongly encouraged to breast-feed their babies for as long as possible. One year at the very least.

This is partly because I spend almost as much time gazing in shop windows at the thin clothes I’m going to wear one glorious postpartum day, as I do mooning over the gorgeous little alien on the sonogram images. It is partly because sometimes, when I am not marveling at the child inside me, I am pining for the life behind me. It is partly because if I could forfeit the mere epidural and deliver a happy, healthy baby while in some sort of harmless temporary coma, I would do it in a heartbeat. But mostly, my manifest unworthiness as a woman, a person and a mother-to-be can be captured in five simple words: I don’t want to breast-feed.

What? Don’t I read? Don’t I consult with health-care professionals? Am I somehow blind to the miraculous properties of colostrum, the Postnatal Fluid That Could? Don’t I know the facts?

Do I ever. In books, in magazines and all over the Internet, I have beheld the child of the breast, in all its wondrous immunity. Study after study shows that he or she will not only be less prone to allergies, asthma, diarrhea and childhood obesity, but also more highly developed, finely adjusted and closely bonded with yours truly. The creature of formula, on the other hand, is literally a crying shame. Fairly teeming with bacteria, he or she is doomed to wheeze, waddle and wind-expel his or her way through life as an innocent victim of corporate American processed-food peddling—and of his ignorant and/or uncaring mother.

All things considered, I’m leaning toward the latter.

Not that I have any remotely valid reasons for doing so. I have no basis on which to refute the consistent, insistent collective medical wisdom, propagated for years now by august bodies from the American Academy of Pediatrics on down, that “breast is best.” Nor do I have any moral or social objection to breast-feeding on the grounds that it is somehow dirty or unseemly. On the contrary, I fully accept that if I were a good person, I would do it. In fact, my “reasons,” such as they are, are the least valid imaginable for anyone who would fancy herself a mother: They’re all about me.

Maybe the experience of childbirth will transform me, as some mother-friends have told me it might, from a pretty good gal who will hopefully make a pretty good mom into a tigress who would eat her own limbs before her young would go without cello lessons. But so far, I’m still me, and I still aim to undergo motherhood with as little discomfort as possible. After a gestational period encompassing the perpetually exhausted throwing-up phase, followed by the perpetually ravenous odd-little-rashes phase, followed by the enormously-fat-and-getting-enormously-fatter phase, I don’t want to deal with the painful-engorgement/awkward-sucking phase, even if, for most women, it lasts only a short while. After nine months of abstaining from alcohol and cutting down on caffeine, tuna fish, peanuts, soft cheese and rare meat, I want to eat or drink something without a moment’s thought about what it might do to the baby. After cheerfully signing up to have a human being either pulled or cut out of me and then getting over all the sewing-up, I don’t want to get into any situation where I may have to reassure myself that the foreign discharge, if and when it comes out of my nipple, is perfectly natural, or that the painfully clogged duct will soon clear up, provided I keep the feedings frequent.

Even if I could be guaranteed the kindest, gentlest lactational experience in La Leche League history, I still don’t want to wake up every two to three hours every single day and night for the first few months. (Sure, I’ll have to do that a huge amount of the time anyway—but if, on occasion, some merciful relative or friend or husband or caregiver should offer me a few hours during a given night or day, I don’t want to say, “Thank you, no, I and only I am the giver of milk.” I want to kiss their feet in gratitude and pass out.) Given that I’m already looking at non-negotiable transitional baby traumas from teething to toilet training to getting-him-to-sleep-through-the-night-ing, I don’t want to throw in the optional weaning. And while I heartily embrace any woman’s right to open her bra next to me on an airplane or a park bench or at a restaurant so that she can feed her child, I’m sorry: I just don’t want to open mine. Last but not least, I don’t want to leak.

I do want to go out, at least every once in a while, for more than a few hours at a stretch in the first year of my child’s life—and I don’t want to have to pay at the pump every time. And I do want—or think I want—to have another child or two before I turn into a reproductive pumpkin in a very few years at most, and I don’t want to be pregnant or pumping straight through 2010.

Don’t tell me, I know: I ought to be ashamed, both for having these feelings and for expressing them. If I insist on sacrificing my own child’s health and well-being to my petty desires for rest and sanity, then I should at least keep it to myself. And anyway, even I can’t stand how I sound, which is like one of those people who offers Uncle Joe—the octogenarian who smokes three packs a day yet still jogs and chops his own firewood—as proof that the Surgeon General is full of hooey. Every time it strikes me that the bottle-fed people I know—myself, my six siblings, my 15 nieces and nephews, and the children of about half my friends—seem to be in no sense more sickly than the breast-fed people I know (who actually include the only severely asthmatic and allergic specimens of the sample, but never mind), I become a little bit more of a moron in my own estimation.

Then again, it turns out that, statistically speaking, I am a moron, or at least severely enlightenment-challenged. Yet another thing that breast-feeding study after breast-feeding study shows is that there is a definite link between being well educated and affluent and choosing to breast-feed. In other words, the dumber and poorer a woman is, the more likely she is to give her baby a bottle.

Just when I was getting ready to put my Yale degree in the trash over this, it occurred to me that that link might, at least in part, be forged the other way. Maybe, just maybe, some of the benefits flowing to some breast-fed children aren’t coming from the milk, but from the mom. I’ll bet if a study were to follow the lives of a group of children who leave the hospital in the best, safest, most-state-of-the-art car seat versus children who do not, the results would show the former group to be hugely advantaged in a miraculous variety of ways. These children would be found not only to be apt to suffer fewer injuries in actual car accidents, but also to be in fewer accidents at all. Fewer of them would show up in the emergency room with childhood respiratory ailments, and more of them would get into Harvard. All these findings would be perfectly true. Yet many of them would clearly not be chalked up to the car seat, but to the parents who purchased the car seat. On average, these parents might also be assumed to drive more carefully with baby on board; keep the child’s diet high in fresh fruits and vegetables and low in secondary smoke; find the money for tutoring; and so forth.

So it just may be with many a nursing mother—at least if she’s a mother whose decision to nurse reflects not her own instincts and preferences, but her desire to get motherhood right and her dread of getting it wrong. Even before she conceives, this woman would rather eat her laundry than stand rightfully accused of failing to do anything that experts consider to be best for her child. The minute she goes off the pill, she starts popping folic acid. The minute she gets pregnant, she gladly gets with the program of vitamins, ultrasounds and long pillow talks with her mate about what birthing plan to make, stroller to buy, child care to sign on for or forfeit in favor of do-it-yourself parenting. Throughout her pregnancy, she diligently reads copious expert advice exhorting her to breast-feed for at least three, six or 12 months—which she does. She can and will get the child to the doctor before the sniffle turns serious, keep the baby generally warm and dry, and nip socialization problems in the bud.

Again, none of this is to deny that breast milk itself is a net benefit—but mightn’t it at least take some of the gleam off it as a sole-source sliver bullet?

Having myself been bottle-fed from the get-go, I am not too perceptive. Still, I can’t help but notice: Between 1920 and 1970, most American children went from breast to bottle. During those years, rates of infant mortality and childhood illness did not skyrocket; they plummeted. Obviously, this suggests the introduction of other factors—improved vaccines, birthing techniques, sanitation—that, in terms of children’s health, more than made up for whatever was lost in the triumph of formula. In other words, it seems quite clear that once one arrives in the developed world and at a reasonable standard of care, the breast-versus-bottle debate becomes not a matter of life or death, but a question of good versus better. So why must the discussion of the matter be cast, as I am shocked to find it to be, in such bitter tones of black and white?

Dumb question. Obviously, it’s because, wherever and whenever she has a choice, the perfect mother will always go for what is better for her child. And while no woman is openly expected to be the perfect mother, every woman is quite frankly expected to kill herself trying to be. The moment I hit the bottle, I will have turned in my perfect-mother badge before I get to wear it even once. Therefore, I am Satan.

“You’re not Satan, honey,” the father of my fetus reassures me. “You just don’t want to breast-feed, so you’re distorting all the reliable data as a way to rationalize your way out of it.”

You know something? He’s absolutely right. That’s why, after all these mental gymnastics, I have finally landed at a decision that feels just right: All fathers should be strongly encouraged to breast-feed their babies for as long as possible. One year at the very least.

Everything real about the 2008 race is, as Donald Rumsfeld would say, unknowable at this point-but hey, my knowables are at least as good as anybody's. I could raise a fortune, exactly $0 of which I'd have to spend on name recognition. Granted, my name is mud among many voters, but three years from now, the Republicans may have made such a spectacular disaster of everything that their nominee's name will be fertilizer. I have personally walked the obstacle course of two successful Presidential races, a practical advantage that is not to be underestimated. Sure, there will be currently unimaginable gaffes and mortifications, screw-ups and scandals along the way-but nobody, nobody, has one-eightieth of the practice at turning those into white noise, sympathy magnets or live ammunition that I do. As for those who go on and on about what a "polarizing figure" I am, they should be put to bed with milk, cookies and a storybook in which the main character "brings people together," for they have clearly not noticed who's been winning lately, and how. By virtue of becoming a plausible contender for the White House, Mister Rogers would be a polarizing figure. Thus, the job of the candidate is to draw more people to his or her pole-or at least away from the other guy's.

Come to think of it, my reputation in some parts as Pure Evil in a Pantsuit may do me nothing but good: If the American heartland is anything like upstate New York-or, please God, the national-level Republicans in 2008 are anything like the New York State ones in 2000, and limit their entire message to the premise that I am one scary bitch-I will get major points just for not spitting fire. And anyway, if I don't run, what will I do? Stew in the tepid juices of junior minority membership in the Senate? (Which, safely assuming my re-election in '06, I'll be perfectly free to do if I run for the White House and lose.)

So I'd do it, and I'd be surprised if she didn't. Given most of the alternative Democratic political stories to be chased down out there ("Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid Flatly Denies Total Irrelevance"), I'd be even more surprised if she didn't get ridiculously early, outlandishly anticipatory press coverage as she went about doing it.

But hang on a second. It is one thing to view Hillary Clinton as a plausible candidate. It is quite another to hail her as Our Lady of Democratic Redemption. Lately, some of the analysis she has inspired has been so ecstatic and so fuzzy, it seems only a matter of time before those offering it start giggling and getting the munchies.

Not to kill everyone's buzz or anything, but before we get any more stoned on speculation as to what might be true of her next historic run for office, it might be worth pointing out a few sobering-not disqualifying, but sobering-things that were true of her first historic run for office.

She didn't have a primary. There were no ideologically similar candidates who had a motive to do her any damage before the Republicans got to her. This will not be true in 2008. Somebody might notice that there are major, substantive and unexplained gaps in her positions on issues from health care to welfare reform to abortion access to Israel-and unlike the one and only candidate she has ever run against, that somebody will probably not be vulnerable to instant nuking as a right-wing, choice-hating minion of Newt Gingrich. (That somebody will also probably be unable to make anything about her views on policy matter to the public as much as, say, her views on Botox, but ya never know.)

This point is closely related to, and therefore perhaps indistinguishable from, the second point: She had a husband named POTUS. No question, in 2000 Mrs. Clinton's dual role as First Lady and Senate candidate obliged her to walk a tightrope that she can, in many respects, be glad to have behind her. As a tool of pre-emptive party unification, however, that Oval Office sure did come in handy. During the long march to her Senate candidacy, there were plenty of Democratic players in New York who disliked or even despised the whole idea. Not a one was dumb enough to speak-let alone act upon-such sentiments in public. This time, things will be different. The Clintons remain a major force in the party, but they are no longer the party itself. There are no White House invitations to be issued to wavering kingmakers, no great and guaranteed political rewards or punishments to be implied in exchange for helping or hurting her efforts. Clearly, no matter who else is in the field, Mrs. Clinton's presence will be a strong one, and thus it will be tempting for folks to support her early and often. But it won't be suicidal for them not to.

She ran against nobody. Always fortunate in her enemies, the then First Lady ultimately faced off against Rick Lazio, a little-known and little-tested Long Island Congressman who was brought in to pinch hit on the odd chance that he'd whack the ball out of the park. This was after her original opponent, Rudolph Giuliani, countered her months of upstate travels by pretty much refusing to venture north of the Bronx; then got cancer, scandalously left his second wife for his third one, and dropped out of the race. It was, however, before Mr. Lazio-whose initial potential lay largely in his clean-cut, well-spoken, what-a-nice-young-mannishness-went counterproductively postal: Before he shoved a campaign-finance agreement in the First Lady's face during their first debate, thereby introducing himself to the electorate as a bully; before the state Republicans launched a telephone-calling effort linking Hillary's behavior to the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole; before the Lazio campaign ran an ad bragging that Mrs. Lazio cleaned their house herself; and so on.

Her husband was an unmitigated asset. Here, of course, is the heart of the matter. No offense to Gloria Steinem, but let's face it: Nationally as in New York, whatever her own strengths and weaknesses, Hillary will be running as a partner and proxy of Bill. And as far as true believers are concerned, that's terrific: smooth syntax, international respect, deficits that sink rather than spiral …. What about the Clinton Presidency was not to like? Oh yes, that … but Hillary doesn't have that. She's Bill without the party in his pants. What could be better?

In 2000, she ran in a state that would have re-elected Bill to a third term in a heartbeat. No matter how much their supporters want to believe that this is true of the entire country, and no matter how many dazzled members of the press are willing to buy it, there's a fair bit of evidence that this is simply not true. This is not a judgment on any aspect of Bill Clinton as a President or as a person. This is a simple look at the score. In 1994, when Congress went Republican and the President adopted a strategy of "triangulation," whereby he made himself the voice of reason between the crazy partisans on both sides, many Democrats were appalled at what they saw as their President's decision to sacrifice the party to save himself. In retrospect, that seems to be a fairly decent description of what had occurred.

Mr. Clinton himself was, of course, re-elected. Otherwise, since his ascension, the Democrats have lost two Presidential races; lost control of the House of Representatives; lost control of the United States Senate; lost, on balance, more state legislatures and governorships than they have gained.

Granted, given all the variables-national trends, local idiosyncrasies, the giant sea change that was Sept. 11-it would be ridiculous to lay all this rubble entirely at the feet of the former President. But it is much more ridiculous to sculpt it, somehow, into an argument that America is longing for more of him.

Yet this is precisely the argument that whole swaths of Democrats will make. It's fascinating, and almost poignant-like talking to a veteran who can't bring himself to acknowledge that the war wasn't worth it. Similarly, it's as if they'd be heretics if they not only recognized that Mr. Clinton is brilliant, but contemplated how he is brilliant. As if they can't bring themselves to entertain what has become a fairly obvious possibility: that, in some respects, this is simply the latest manifestation of Camelust-the tendency (known in both parties, but more pronounced among the Democrats) to mistake political star power for political power, when the two should be related, not equated. This is why, no matter how many times Kennedys lose, Democrats are always charmed by the idea of one running, to the point of occasional rumblings about drafting Caroline.

In other respects, it is plain old Bushbile: embarrassment over the Presidency of George W. Bush, conviction that the things that Bill Clinton lied about as President were nowhere near as grave or as duty-related as the things that George W. Bush has lied about, and confidence that if only America would wake up and put its brain back in its head, this whole stupid, arrogant, violent era would end. Many Americans believe this-and they all voted for John Kerry.

If the Democrats are to retake the White House-and start retaking the country-it's not enough for the nominee to be a star. It's not enough for the nominee to galvanize those who already hate Mr. Bush. If the Democrats want to remake their party into something of nerve and heft and intellect, they need to call for a full and fair investigation that is not of the Whitewater kind. They have to delve, really delve, into what has gone wrong: why, apart from Ohio chicanery and inexplicable voter insanity, all these votes have been lost. That means questioning everything, including (heavens!) the gospel according to Terry McAuliffe. It means entertaining what has become a fairly obvious possibility: that Bill Clinton's survival strategy-co-opting the Republican agenda while vilifying Republicans-may have been brilliant in the short run for him, but was not so brilliant in the long run for his party.

In those terms, the most disturbing potential of a successful Hillary Clinton candidacy isn't that it might become mired in Whitewater or Monica or Vince Foster or any of the rest of it; they'll have that stuff sorted. It's that, at a time when the party needs to go on offense-intellectual offense, against its own torpor-she will dig in her heels and play what she plays best: defense.

In which case, whatever the fate of Hillary '08, the Democrats-yet again-will lose.

Clearly, your most frequently stated option is not a realistic possibility. If you were really going to kill yourself in the event that President George W. Bush got re-elected, you would have done so by now. This leaves you, like every other loser, with two things: a bitter taste in your mouth, and a choice. You can sit around and keep telling each other how stupid and scary the winners are. Or you can put down the hemlock and the Häagen-Dazs, splash some cold water on your face, look in the mirror and tell yourself some awful truths.

Read your lips:

Bush is not an idiot. Kofi Annan is not an oracle. Michael Moore is not Everyman. Women are not ovaries with feet. And to be an American is not an embarrassment.

Lest this sound like gloating, I confess to having a pronoun problem here, and will hereby switch from "you" to "we." I voted for John Kerry. As a liberal separation-of-church-and-state type, I don't like the idea of a President who owes his political life to a conservative religious base. I can't fathom George Bush's policies on the economy and the environment. As for Iraq, while I find nothing of genius in the Democrats' prescriptions at this point, I find astonishing the idea that the administration's performance there is, on balance, something to reward rather than something to punish.

Curiously, then, it is not the party I voted against that is driving me nuts right now. It is the party I voted for. It's the same feeling that I got about the Democrats after 2000: I agree with them, but I can't stand them, in the exact same way I can't stand anyone who would rather whine than shine.

Now as then, Democratic partisans seem to be more interested in coming off as wronged rather than defeated. We have lost an election-and so far, we are acting as if we have lost a contact lens, crawling around the red parts of the map in search of the speck of strategy that would have turned it blue. We are all set to keep on ridiculing the President's syntax, when it is our message that no one can make sense of. The party of F.D.R. and J.F.K. has turned itself into the political equivalent of the woman who responds to her husband's leaving her by living in her bathrobe for years: It's O.K. for her to be miserable, so long as enough people around her know that he's the bad guy.

In short, the Democratic Party is losing the American people-and so far, we aren't even looking for them.

To get started, we should go with the five rules of reality-checking:

Reality check No. 1: Bush is not an idiot-and even if he were, saying so, over and over again, would not be a strategy. It would be an insult to the 59 million Americans who voted for him; a gift to anyone and everyone who wants to paint the Democratic Party as a coven of elitists-and a slap in our own face. For a group of people who pride ourselves on intellectual superiority, we seem remarkably capable of ignoring the most basic questions. Here is one: If Bush is an idiot and he has beaten us twice, what does that make us?

To hear many of this week's wound-lickers tell it, it makes us the poor, put-upon souls who are simply too intelligent to live in this country with the moron majority. And anyway, the beef goes on, George Bush didn't win twice. O.K., he won this once, but barely; if a few precincts in a few states had gone the other way, Democrats would be reaching for the Champagne rather than the cyanide. And his first election, of course, he stole from Al Gore.

Such is the Democratic stuff of which Republican dreams are made. Once the drama of 2000 subsided, the question that would have obsessed a vital political party was not whether the Supreme Court ought to have decided on Florida as it did. The question would have been: In a time of peace and prosperity, why was it anywhere near that close? Similarly, the real question now is not what could have been done here or there at the margins to put John Kerry over the top. The question is: If the economy is a mess and the war is a disaster, why isn't the President a lame duck? If, as the Democrats would have it, it is so obvious that Republican policies are harmful to so many Americans on so many fronts, foreign and domestic, how is it that more than half of the Americans who voted have been solidly convinced otherwise?

If one is serious about finding answers to such questions, one can look in two places. Either their side is at least partially right on some fairly major points, or our side cannot articulate its way out of a paper bag. In neither one of those areas is the stupidity of the opponent a fruitful field of analysis.

Reality check number No. 2: Kofi Annan is not an oracle. Whenever an incumbent has a mess on his hands, it is natural for the challenger to reach for the easiest possible alternative. In the case of Mr. Bush and Iraq, the alternative put forth by Mr. Kerry was the specter of some wider, broader, happier international coalition which would allegedly make a great deal of difference on the ground.

Far be it from me to suggest that international co-operation does not have its uses, or to argue that the Bush administration has done anything other than deprive itself unnecessarily of those uses. That said, the most perfect coalition is a thing of serious imperfection. To take a quick case in point: Of all the things that makes Iraqis distrust and despise Americans, none is more pressing than the fact that after the first Gulf War, the first President Bush urged the Shia majority to rise up, then failed to support them, thereby sending countless rebels-and non-rebels-to their slaughter. Right or wrong, his decision to hold back was a function of the constraints placed upon him by the broad international coalition that he had assembled. That doesn't mean he shouldn't have assembled the coalition and then kept his word to it. It simply serves to remind that just as a coalition can buoy an effort up, it can also bog it down.

Second, it is worth bearing in mind that one of the most salient and disturbing features of the situation in Iraq is that of paralysis, and therefore it is worth entertaining the possibility that a broader and more active coalition might make that problem worse. Exhibit A is Falluja. Sickening though it is to say in light of the many innocent people who live there, it is simply a fact that that city is a home base for terrorists who are, in effect, more anti-Shia than anti-American, and whom local sheiks have proven, over a very long period of time, unwilling or unable to expel by peaceful means. As Prime Minister Ayad Allawi has long grasped, unless and until these killers are killed, Iraq will remain a bloodbath. This week Mr. Annan, for his part, advocated against the taking of any action against Falluja, without offering any viable alternative-probably because there isn't one. Now if Mr. Annan were an oracle, he would know that inaction would lead to greater peace and stability. But since he isn't one, it is at least as possible that a U.N.-backed approach would cause the situation to deteriorate even further.

Finally, in order to assess an argument for a greater international coalition, one has to consider what that beefed-up coalition would be expected to accomplish. No question, the arrival of more countries on board would mean a welcome sharing of the burdens of occupation. Not so clear is the link between the presence of more countries and the mitigation of horror. After all, the violent chaos in which Iraq finds itself is, in large part, the work of foreign jihadis coming in from neighboring countries, both feeding and feeding on the forces within Iraq. Thus, in order for an international coalition to have an effect on that, it would have to include nations like Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia. Good luck.

Reality check No. 3: Michael Moore is a filmmaker of talent and a self-marketer of genius. He should never have been appointed Democratic ambassador to the working man. I bring up Mr. Moore not because I think that he played some role in Mr. Bush's re-election, or that he doesn't have his base-stirring uses. It's because he so strikes me as the personification of the Democratic Party, in that he so robustly refuses to hear or see so many of the people he purports to champion. What is missing from his films is precisely what is missing from the Democratic approach to the electorate: the quality of searching. Never, in the course of viewing a Moore film, does one get the feeling that he is putting his own worldview through the paces, finding out something that he didn't already know. Like the Democrats, he also seems to have missed American political life since 1980. He doesn't seem to entertain the possibility that an honest-to-God, respectable, working-class American might also be a true-blue conservative, and even have reasons for being such … not reasons that a liberal has to embrace, but reasons that a non-losing liberal would have to take seriously in some way. Just so, the Democrats are on God knows what cycle of fighting a class war that is of no interest to the class on whose behalf it is supposedly being fought. The tax cut benefits the rich, so we are going to spend yet another election blasting the tax cut for benefiting the rich, never to delve into the issue of why so many non-rich Americans so manifestly could care less.

That doesn't mean that such Americans aren't downright wrong; one can, of course, argue that those traditionally Democratic constituencies who have defected to the G.O.P. have done nothing but hurt themselves in the process. But the task is to get those people back. Ridiculing their recent taste in candidates is an interesting way to go about this. This isn't rocket science: If you were a blue-collar Democrat who had voted Republican for the past several elections-whether out of national pride, or social values, or a belief that the tax cut was good for you-and then somebody came along to lampoon you and all your candidates, how would you react? Would you hit yourself on the head and say, "Hey, they're right! What have I been thinking?" Or would you say, "These arrogant windbags have no idea who I am," and go out and get a Bush-Cheney sign to stab smack in the middle of your front lawn?

Reality check No. 4: American women come in all shapes and colors. Three of those colors are conservative, very conservative and extremely conservative. Thus, it is time to shed the notion that politicians who are 100 percent for abortion rights are good for women, regardless of what else they favor. Long treated as the price of admission to viability as a big-time Democrat, this is, in fact, the flip side of the right-wing fanaticism which says that any politician who is against all forms of abortion is morally superior, regardless of what other positions he holds. Democrats would argue that Republicans are bad for women on a host of non-ovarian quality-of-life issues, too-but they sure don't spend much time spelling that out in a way that could appeal to a woman who does not necessarily view Roe v. Wade as a gift from God.

And finally, reality check No. 5: Democrats cannot lay claim to leading a country when so many of them speak so frequently about leaving the country. The United States just had a hugely contentious, hyper-democratic election in which many people voted, nobody got killed, and the day happened to be carried by the other side. And what is the chic line for Democrats to take as a result?

"I'm moving to France."

Now that's the way to get America back!

"We’re now 90 percent of the casualties in Iraq," said Senator John Kerry for the first of three times, "and 90 percent of the costs."

"No, Senator," I said back to my television set, "Iraqis are way over 90 percent of the casualties. And Iraqis are paying more than anyone."

What Mr. Kerry was saying—and President George W. Bush kept saying it, too—was that, for purposes of Iraq as an issue in this debate and in this election, Iraqis could not matter less.

As post-game analysts were quick to point out, Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry are offering the American people two very clear, very opposed visions of Iraq. For Mr. Bush, Iraq is the tree of liberty that can only grow in blood, and everything that’s happened so far is just all in a day’s "hard work" of transforming a country from a dictatorship to a free society. Provided that Iraq does that hard work, it will reap the rewards of becoming a functional, America-loving democracy in a region of dysfunctional, America-hating dictatorships.

For Mr. Kerry, Iraq is—or should be—an international potluck supper, with many countries bringing their best offerings to the table and everyone sharing the experience, splitting the costs and helping to clean up.

For Iraqis, to borrow the single word that comes up most frequently in conversation, Iraq is a prison in the purest sense: Almost everyone would leave if they possibly could. And why not? Even without the Al Qaeda–type terrorism, the place has become terrifying. Kidnappings have become a commonplace. Murder is committed with impunity. Corruption is rampant. Looting is a leading industry. Civil war is a serious possibility.

Incredibly, thanks to three decades of tireless effort on the part of Saddam Hussein, all of this does not necessarily rule out the possibility that for most Iraqis, most of the time, life is better after the American invasion than it was before. Even so, it is by no means possible at this point to care about the Iraqi people and crow about the American achievement.

Fortunately for Mr. Bush, he does not care about the Iraqi people. In fact, as he made clear in the debate, they are not even a variable in his thinking about Iraq. For anyone who sees Iraq as something other than a figment of the American political imagination, it wasn’t the smirking and the syntax-mangling that made a disgrace of his performance. It was the clinging. The President clung not merely to the rightness of his overall decision to invade Iraq, which he cannot avoid politically and perhaps even should not avoid morally. He clung, like a dying man to dear life, to every follicle on every hair on the head of the policy that has resulted from that decision—and boasted that he would keep on clinging, no matter how many Iraqis suffer for it. "The way to win this is to be steadfast and resolved and to follow through on the plan that I’ve just outlined," said the President, who had just outlined—well, hinted at—a plan of doing the same thing, in the same way, in hopes of getting a different result.

So practiced at embodying the compassionate conservative, Mr. Bush could at least have taken a stab at playing the humble hawk: resolute, perhaps, but also clear in his understanding of what the Iraqis have been going through, and in his communication that this knowledge both pained and informed him. Instead, he seemed weirdly intent on selling himself as the Superglue President: a man who will stick to anything.

Judging from the polls taken in the days after the debate, only his base was buying. Among most other voters, Mr. Kerry emerged as the winner. Fair enough—but it is worth bearing in mind that Mr. Kerry was getting major points for being on this planet. While definitely a plus, this should not be confused with articulating an Iraq policy—at least not an Iraq policy that would be substantially different going forward than the policy that is careening along there now.

Actually, for purposes of the campaign, this should be O.K. with Mr. Kerry. After all, he is the challenger. If he sees no clear way out of the situation in Iraq, he is perfectly well within his rights to eviscerate the incumbent for having brought us there. That is what is so odd about Mr. Kerry’s rendering of his position. There is such a strong, clear argument with which he could damage the President on Iraq without damaging himself—but he refuses to make it, at least until after he has made the weak, murky argument that comes back to kick him every time.

Consider, for instance, what Mr. Kerry could say when his opponent, quite rightfully, forces him to face the fact that he voted for the resolution authorizing the President to use force against Iraq. He could say: "Yes, Mr. President, as you never tire of pointing out, I did vote for you to have that authority. But I didn’t vote for you to toss Iraq into such chaos that if there were weapons of mass destruction, or records of weapons of mass destruction, they could very well have been stolen or destroyed any day of the last 80-odd weeks. I didn’t vote for you to make great big sieves of Iraq’s borders with Iran and Syria. I didn’t vote for you to send troops to guard almost nothing but the oil ministry. I didn’t vote for you to sponsor a commercial shut-out of countries that opposed the invasion so that they’d have no more stake in the peace than they had in the war. I didn’t vote for you to go into a country in which almost everyone with a job was a member of the Baath Party and adopt a policy of ‘fire Baathist first, ask questions later’—thus destroying what civil institutions the Iraqis had and replacing them with nothing … not to mention stripping those institutions of experience and exposing them to the red-hot wrath of those cut loose. I didn’t vote for you to stack the late, not-so-great Coalition Provisional Authority with political employees chosen—with some seriously talented exceptions—more for their ideological obeisance than for their expertise. I didn’t vote for you to lay siege to Falluja, then un-lay it, then sort of lay siege again, then un-lay it … all the while congratulating yourself for never wavering. I could go on, but to sum up: In all honesty, in your shoes, reading the same intelligence that was available to us both, I may or may not have ended up invading Iraq at some point in the general time frame that you did. But mark my words: I would not have made the mess that you have."

Mr. Kerry did make some of these assertions, in bits and pieces here and there. But he could fashion them all into one smooth, sharp blade and use it to cut clean through the tie that binds his position on the war to Mr. Bush’s. Instead, he keeps reaching for the boomerang.

"We also have to be smart, Jim," said Mr. Kerry to moderator Jim Lehrer, leading one to expect him to launch into a foolproof attack on the gobsmackingly unsmart aspects of the occupation. But no: "And ‘smart’ means not diverting your attention from the real war on terror in Afghanistan against Osama bin Laden and taking it off to Iraq."

Say again?

In that case, "smart" should have meant that Mr. Kerry voted against Mr. Bush in the Senate, and railed against him in public. He did not do that. Mr. Kerry’s supporters like to believe that the Republicans are unfair and oversimplistic to whack the Senator on this, and that any voter who studies Mr. Kerry’s position in its entirety will get it. Well, I have studied his position in its entirety, and I don’t get it.

I also don’t get how, given where we now find ourselves, his solutions for Iraq will make any real difference in Iraq. Granted, the simple fact of not being Bush should give him some mileage in some quarters. And a change in leadership could encourage rather than discourage a general freshness of approach, which could be a good thing. On a policy level, though, there isn’t much there in the way of ideas that ain’t already there.

At the debate, it broke down to what Mr. Bush would call a multipronged strategy: be nice to other countries; buy more armored vehicles; and train the Iraqis to defend themselves.

To take the last one first: Oh, dear. Asserting that the key is to get Iraqis to defend their own country has become this race’s rhetorical equivalent of asserting that children are America’s future. The President kept mentioning that some 100,000 new security-force members had been trained and that some 200,000 would be trained by such-and-such a point. I didn’t pay much attention to the numbers, because the numbers don’t matter nearly as much as what they are supposed to be comprised of—and I’m not even talking about the fact that these numbers are comprised, in part, by police officers, some of them barely trained, as well as actual soldiers. But does that 100,000 include or exclude the Iraqi police in the south who defected en masse during the Muktada al-Sadr uprising last April? Does it include or exclude the police in Falluja, who were, as of July, taking orders from the resistance; or those in Baghdad, who were quite openly bargaining to investigate or not investigate their loved ones’ kidnappings? Does it include or exclude the policeman I interviewed over the summer, who told me that he was collecting his salary but, in light of the warning sprays of bullets at his house night after night, had no intention of doing his job?

Such questions are not meant to denigrate those Iraqi recruits who are doing their best and doing it bravely, nor to put down the people who are trying to train them. But both Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry are asking the American people to put a lot of stock in the idea that in just a few short months, these guys will have everything under control so that we can get outta there. That idea is dubious at best.

As for Mr. Kerry’s observation that some 10,000 of the military’s 12,000 Humvees are not even armored, it was just a quick, relatively unobjectionable couple of lines in a long debate. But it is the kind of thing that sounds simple, but isn’t, and therefore is the kind of thing that one wishes a candidate of substance would avoid. That armor would be expensive—expensive enough, perhaps, to divert some dollars from those American schools and firehouses the Senator was talking about. Yet that armor wouldn’t protect against improvised explosive devices or rocket-propelled grenades, and it certainly wouldn’t contribute anything in the way of rebuilding Iraq. Moreover, of all the things that can be said about the Bush administration’s handling of the occupation, inadequate attention to force protection is not in the top 300.

This leaves Mr. Kerry’s pièce de résistance, which is really a trompe l’oeil: internationalize the problem. Certainly there is nothing wrong with Mr. Kerry’s arguing that the Bush administration’s predeliction for antagonizing other countries on the Iraq question, as on myriad others, should be counted as a mark against the President. Nor is he wrong to argue that a bungled war is a firing offense, period. That said, however, nothing that has happened since the invasion should be allowed to change the perception of what was happening in the war debate before the invasion. There is very little reason to believe that with a few more inspections, or a greater show of deference from the Americans, the nations who stayed out ever would have gotten in. There are those, like Howard Dean, for whom that would have meant no war—but given his vote, Mr. Kerry cannot be counted among them.

Mr. Kerry is dead right to criticize the administration for missing post-invasion opportunity after post-invasion opportunity to share the wealth and the burden of the new Iraq. In the privacy of his own intellect, however, he has got to be dead stumped as to what he might do about it upon taking office in January 2005. What would he have to say to get any leader not currently entrenched to get himself entrenched? "Hey, Jacques, give me a thousand troops, I’ll give you Hawaii"?

At this point, short of bringing the troops home, there is not very much that Mr. Kerry could do that Mr. Bush is not trying to do already. He is willing to admit that every day, in every way, things are not getting better and better. And he is willing to try and get some help, although he’ll probably fail. So far, that’s all.

Then again, if reality is the yardstick here, what more can he do? There was another point that the debate made clear, and that the candidates had in common: It was the idea that the next American President, whomever he turns out to be, will have an enormous, defining impact on what happens next in Iraq. The more time I spent there, the less I could believe that. The next American President will have an enormous impact on the American occupation, but that doesn’t tell the half of it. For good and ill, the American-led invasion unleashed a host of political, social and cultural forces in and around Iraq. Those forces are not waiting until Nov. 3 to see whether or not they should play out.

That’s the politically tricky thing about real places full of real people: They tend to have a life of their own.

It was early June, and Mr. Al-Safey was early for an appointment at the headquarters of the radical Shiacleric Moqtada al-Sadr in the Kadhimiya district of Baghdad. Back in May, Mr. Al-Safey had left Baghdad to join Mr. al-Sadr's militia in its armed rebellion against the forces of the U.S.-led coalition in the holy city of Najaf-a rebellion that had been sparked, in part, by the decision of the U.S.-led coalition to close down Al Hawza , a newspaper published by partisans of Mr. al-Sadr. His comrades, however, sent him right back to the Iraqi capital, where, they told him, he was needed more. Mr. Al-Safey proudly handed over his contribution to the cause: the latest copy of a new weekly newspaper called Al Salaam ("Peace"), of which he was the editor in chief. Asked whether Al Salaam had been founded in response to the closing of Al Hawza , Mr. Al-Safey allowed a flicker of mischief to play on his face. "You can say that," he replied.

At the time of that conversation, Mr. Al-Safey's goal was to puncture a myth that he also viewed as an insult: the myth that Mr. al-Sadr's following derived entirely from the ranks of the dirt poor and the plug ignorant, which he clearly was not. But in light of this week's big news that Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has approved the reopening of Al Hawza , Mr. Al-Safey-simply by virtue of his job description-proved another important point: Practically from the moment that Al Hawza ceased to operate, publications that are as supportive of Mr. al-Sadr and as critical of the U.S.-led coalition's presence in Iraq have been up and running.

Not that the decision to reopen the newspaper has no significance. It does expose the decision to close it in the first place as the needless, hypocritical provocation it was. It seems to indicate some awareness on the part of the new Iraqi government that some nemeses are better killed with co-optation. And insofar as it returns Mr. al-Sadr briefly, and somewhat respectably, to the headlines, it highlights America's Slim Fast strategy for telling its story in Iraq.

For purposes of public consumption, the coalition approaches stubbornly problematic figures and situations in Iraq exactly the way a diet-product manufacturer approaches a persistently fat celebrity spokesmodel. If the problem (flab, insurgency) actually disappears, great: take the real photos and tell the real, triumphant tale. If not, ad lib: crop it (the still-prominent derrière, the ongoing, underlying conditions of the insurgency) or swap it (a Fergie for a Whoopi for a Lewinsky; a Shia firebrand for a Sunni one). The key is, make the problem appear to disappear.

Moqtada's before-and-after is just one example of this application, but it is an instructive one. As of April, as portrayed by the coalition, Mr. al-Sadr was both a threat and a joke. On the one hand, he was the prince of darkness and king of thugs; an accused murderer whose arrest, in connection with the death of a pro-American Shia leader, was so urgent that it was worth forcing urban warfare to make good on a year-old warrant; a source of propaganda so deadly that it had to be stopped, even if the act of stopping it had the clear effect of spawning much more of it.

On the other hand, he was the self-declared, semi-educated, mysteriously funded "cleric" who commanded the allegiance only of the aforementioned rabble, and merited the disdain of most Iraqi Shia. Now, however, he has publicly called upon his militia to disarm, stopped making noise about killing Americans, and started making noise about joining the political process. Presto, he's no worry at all.

The truth is much different. No question, Mr. al-Sadr has diminished as a factor in recent months-but this is not only, or even mainly, because many of the supporters who did battle with the Americans ended up dead; if this were a question of sheer volume, there would always be plenty of fighters to replace, and avenge, the fallen. Casualties aside, the Moqtada problem has not been solved. Rather, the Moqtada problem has merely been submerged in another, much larger problem. Right now, the central political fact of life in Iraq is the fact that the resistance movement based in and around Falluja has served increasingly to isolate that area and to set it up in opposition to the rest of the country. The springtime show of Sunni-Shia militant unity, motivated by coincident anti-American antagonism and evidenced by the flow of aid from Shia areas of Baghdad to a Falluja then under American siege and by the concurrent flow of mujahadeen from Falluja to the Shia bastion of Sadr City, has already revealed itself to have been just that: a show. Never trusted by those Sunnis who benefited under the Saddam Hussein regime, always despised by the Salafi and Wahhabi fanatics who are now driving the resistance, the Shia are now being treated as enemies by those two groups. They are responding in kind. This backs them into a position of cooperation with the Americans.

To be sure, this position is by default and temporary. But so long as it is the position, the bulk of Shia will view Sunni extremists, Iraqi and not, as their primary enemy, and their enemy in common with the Americans. The fact of Mr. al-Sadr's recent alliance with Falluja has not won him any friends lately, but it hasn't lost him many, either. The dynamic is, a few months ago, there was hay to be made in railing against the Americans, and Moqtada-never aligned with the invader in the first place-was the guy to make it. Now, the only percentage a Shia leader can gain vis-à-vis the Americans is in getting them to root out the insurgency in Falluja. But that is a very long parade of Shia leaders, and Moqtada is, at best, just bringing up the rear.

Otherwise, the forces that shaped him are all still in place. His newspapers are no more or less incendiary than they ever were, and in terms of impact, they don't matter any more or less than they ever did. And in one key particular, the Mehdi Army is as big a threat as it ever was.

The Mehdi Army has ceased to appear in American rhetoric and more or less ceased to be a threat to American lives. This apparently leaves the less scrupulous of its ranks plenty of time to terrorize Iraqis.

"Ninety percent of this neighborhood is against Moqtada and 10 percent is for," said Sahar Hani, 22. She was at home in Sadr City with her 5-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter. On the wall were photos of one famous Iraqi cleric and one not so famous: the late Ayatollah Khomeini, of Iran, and 35-year-old Faez Al Mutawey, a supporter of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and therefore an antagonist of Moqtada al-Sadr.

Sahar's ratio was undoubtedly lopsided, but her point was well taken. For months elsewhere in Baghad, I had been meeting and hearing about Shia who lived in Sadr City but hated Moqtada al-Sadr. Whether or not such people constituted a majority, they were undoubtedly silent: afraid to take Moqtada's picture down or fail to put it up; afraid to say a word against him or in favor of one of his rivals; afraid, in short, of retribution from the Mehdi Army.

By the time I met Sahar, I had just passed funeral tents for fallen Mehdi Army fighters. It was a fairly creepy scene. Inside the tents were people mourning militants who were dead. Outside the tents were militants who were, as yet, alive; young men were standing around in clusters, AK's hanging casually at their sides, making no attempt to pretend that they were not looking at the car. In the car with me was my fixer, Salaam, and a young Shia scholar named Jameel. Jameel lived here and hated Moqtada and wanted me to speak with some neighbors who hated him, too. It had taken some arranging, but three families had agreed to meet me. However, as we approached each of the first two houses where we had appointments, Jameel noticed that our host was standing in front. Then he noted that our host had seen him, but was choosing to look right through him-a way of asking us not to stop the car.

Sahar's house was the third house.

About two weeks before, some guys from the Mehdi Army had come to her door at 4 o'clock in the morning. They knocked down the door and woke up the neighbors. Their faces were masked, and they had guns. They asked the whereabouts of her brother, a truck driver who, she said, regularly made the run to Tehran. According to Sahar, "They said, 'If he comes in the future, we will kill him and send you his head.'"

I believed it. For at least one Iraqi family I know, there is no before and after when it comes to Moqtada al-Sadr.

On May 13, when it was still at the height of its prominence, the Mehdi Army assassinated 29-year-old Riyadh Jassim Hussein Al-Badali, a translator for the U.S. Army. Riyadh was a native son of Sadr City, an Agatha Christie aficionado, a devout believer in the future of a free Iraq and a beloved friend of mine. A few months after the war, using money he had saved from the Army work and other translating gigs, Riyadh had been thrilled to purchase a used car in fair condition. I still don't know whether he was in that car or that of his fellow translator, Ali, when he drove to work on the last day of his life. I do know that both men were ambushed.

A week or two ago, long after it had ceased and desisted from garnering major international publicity, the Mehdi Army kidnapped Riyadh's 26-year-old nephew, Saddik, and subjected him to torture by electric shock. He was released after two days, but upon his release he was told that if he cooperated with the Americans he would be murdered and dumped in the street, just like his uncle.

I heard about this when I received a call from Riyadh's eldest brother, Nsaif. He had also worked as a translator for the Army, as well as for a humanitarian organization that was monitoring the restoration of Sadr City's schools. When Riyadh was killed, he had quit both jobs. Now that Saddik had been abducted, though, he did not feel safe.

He needed my help, Nsaif said. Could I please help him get a bunch of passports? Since the war, he elaborated accurately, his entire family had dedicated their lives to helping the Americans. Now, one life had been lost and all their lives were in danger, and all he wanted was for the Americans to help him escape the new Iraq. Could I please help him get political asylum in the United States?

The office being that of an important Shia official, its walls featured gentle, virile images of Shia martyrs Ali and Husayn. In fact, its walls featured so many images on so many posters of such florid presentation that the overall effect was that of an army of Alis and Husayns gazing softly down on the proceedings.

The proceedings were momentous. Three Shia-a thirtysomething veiled woman waving a palm-shaped fan close to her face; an older, gray-bearded man fingering a set of prayer beads; and a younger, black-bearded man in a flat-topped maroon hat that Americans would call a fez, albeit one with a swirl of emerald-green felt around it-were having an intense, and sometimes tense, exchange.

Even for those who know ahead of time exactly what goes on in this office, coming face to face with it is quite a shock.

The conversation was not about jihad , or occupation, or the radical Islamic cleric Moktada al-Sadr, or any other radical Islamic cleric. It was not about the pros and cons of supporting or thwarting the incoming interim government, or the tensions that had long since arisen between the Shia who lived in this area and the Shia pilgrims (and smugglers, and terrorists) now flooding in from Iran.

The conversation was about marriage; specifically, whether the marriage of this man and this woman could be saved.

On the eve of Iraq's transition from occupation to sovereignty, the man in the fez was arbitrating one transfer of power after another. His name was Rafid Kadhim Al-Ruthaway, 35, and it was his job to grant and deny permission to Shia couples who wished to marry and divorce. Rafid sat behind a desk, and on the desk sat a loose-leaf pad. Each sheet amounted to a quickie prenuptial agreement form, with blank spaces left for the couple's names, and the amount of money or gold to be given to the bride's family upon marriage and in the event of a divorce. Rafid's task was, in short, to fill in the blanks.

A few days later, on June 28, Iraq administrator Paul Bremer, after filling out some quickie forms of his own, eloped: In one of the only unambiguously intelligent acts of its tenure here, the Coalition Provisional Authority officially ceded authority to the Iraqi interim government two days ahead of schedule. Although it was clearly motivated by security concerns, the sleight-of-handover served as a reminder of an entirely different, and equally essential, reality of life about Iraq. Oddly enough, it was the same reality called to mind by the sight of Rafid at work: It was all just a photo op. June 30 was just a date. Bureaucratically, the American presence here has been winding down for months. Militarily, in many ways, it's only gearing up. Realistically, it is just one fact of the whole of life here-and not, for everyone all the time, the most urgent fact by a very long shot.

The gray-bearded man and the thirtysomething woman had been married for 20 years. In the present drama, the man had clearly cast himself as the soul of reason; he was willing to stay home and work things out, or to move out, leaving his wife in the house with the children, during a trial separation. She, on the other hand, just wanted out.

"Once I hate you, I hate you," she explained, with no particular venom.

Then again, she had her reasons.

"The wife says he has taken another wife," Salaam, my fixer, murmured in translation. "The husband swears he has not. The wife says she does not believe him."

When Salaam and I had entered the office a few minutes before, the conversation had already been in full swing. At the sight of two total strangers intruding on their private crisis, both parties simply moved down two seats from the host's desk, as if being joined by later guests on Letterman , and kept right on talking. An older man entered with a tray of glasses and frosty cans of 7-Up.

"Wait, please!" interjected Rafid. "God hates divorce!"

And Iraq, it seemed, refused to exist on only one level at a time. Outside, assassinations and explosions had taken on the steady but uneven rhythm of an erratic bus schedule: One never knew exactly where or when to expect the next one, but sooner or later it would be coming. Iraq's competing interests seemed engaged in a terrible, coincidental cartography, with every group drawing its own map to civil war. Ordinary criminals were emboldened to commit more and more extraordinary crimes. In here, though, all that just seemed like so much white noise.

"She says he's lost his power," Salaam narrated.

"Huh?"

"He does not sleep with her."

Paul Wolfowitz would have gotten a lot out of this meeting. So would Michael Moore. If those who sell the Bush administration's Iraq policy have anything in common with those who castigate it, it is their inability to conceive of Iraq as a habitat for humanity. Not everything that happens here happens as an intended or unintended consequence of what America decides. Many things happen here that cannot be counted as a point for or against Team W. With their insistence on shoehorning this place into their fight, such advocates dehumanize Iraqis and obscure Iraq. At no moment more than the moment of transition is it crucial to bear in mind: Many of the most important changes that have come over Iraq in the past year and a half have not come at the stroke of a pen, or even the blast of a bomb. Other changes are coming, all the time in the form of ripples, and trends, and tectonic plates that shift, imperceptibly but importantly, beneath the surface of life.

"Now, more than before the war, men are marrying more than one wife because they have freedom," Rafid told me, dragging on one of his many Gauloises. Under Saddam Hussein, many Shiite men were so poor and locked into their lives as Iraqi Army conscripts that they could not marry at all, let alone marry in multiples. Before the war, Rafid estimated, he considered fewer than 10 marriage proposals per week. Now that number runs between 25 and 45.

This crowds Rafid's schedule, and should complicate the optimistic thinking of those Americans-not all of them Kool-Aid-drinking Bushies-who are confident about the future of Iraq because of its comparatively secular, progressive, well-educated Arab society. That's because many of those well-educated, secularized Iraqis bitterly resent the war and all that has come with it, and hope to use their money and education not to rebuild Iraq, but to leave Iraq as soon as possible. As for ultra-oppressed Iraqis-those who are indeed grateful to be liberated from the shackles of enforced poverty and ignorance that they wore under Saddam Hussein-the first right that many of them wish to exercise is the right to cast the new Iraq in very old shades of Islam.

"I check on the woman more than the man," said Rafid, who wore an ivory dishdasha , gold-rimmed glasses and an Omega wristwatch. "I ask about her age, I ask, 'Are you a virgin or no?' If I feel she is not a virgin, I make her swear on the Koran."

Some of the brides that Rafid green-lights for marriage are as young as 12 years old. The average age, he estimated, is about 15. The men are often 18-although lately, as never-married men try to make up for lost time, he is also seeing a lot of teenage brides with grooms in their mid-40's. Sometimes the woman who comes to vouch for the bride's virginity is not really her mother. If in doubt about their relationship, Rafid puts one in a room above the office while keeping the other in the office, and questions the mother closely about the information on the girl's identity card. If, for instance, the older woman is not entirely certain of the name of the younger woman's father, Rafid knows that the pair of them are frauds, and out they go. The man, too, faces issues of suitability, but these tend to be financial.

"Sometimes they come and he offers 100,000 dinars [$70] for now, 100,000 for later," he said. "I ask her, 'What do you think? For 100,000, he can't buy even the ring.' I am not happy from that."

Even more accelerated than the rise in conventional marriage among the Shia has been the rise in a form of limited marriage called mutah . Such marriages can be as short as the couple likes.

"The girl says, 'I marry myself to you for one month,'" explained Rafid. "He says, 'I agree.'"

No real contract is executed, and the fact of the mutah is often kept secret from anyone other than the couple.

"They get married in the mosque, in the street," said Rafid. "He invites her for lunch or dinner."

The word mutah comes from the verb meaning "to enjoy."

You get the idea.

These marriages, which Sunni Muslims reject as haram , or forbidden, were illegal under Saddam and punishable by seven years in jail. (Shia accept them on the grounds that the Prophet Muhammad, in the context of constant warring, allowed them.) Likewise, under Saddam, a man could only take a second wife if the first wife agreed. If she did not agree, she had grounds for divorce. These days, for many people, a decree from a civil court carries far less weight than a word from the likes of Rafid. Thus, a first wife who is not happy at the appearance of a second wife has grounds only for displeasure. And no matter what the Prophet Muhammad said on the subject, even Rafid has to admit: First wives are almost never happy to countenance a second wife.

Rafid's own second wife, a pretty young woman, was sitting at a chair by his desk. So soundlessly and seamlessly had she introduced her presence that one couldn't say when she had come in, only that she must, at some point, have done so.

For Rafid's first wife, this woman's appearance was not quite so unobtrusive.

"Yes, she made a problem for me," said Rafid of his first wife when he took his second. "After, I made an agreement with her. She likes me now."

In fact, for Rafid, angry first wives are nothing short of an occupational hazard. Many is the time, he said, that a wife has suspected that her husband has gotten approval from him to marry again, found Rafid's business card among his things, and shown up at this office with a piece of her mind.

I presumed that Rafid's response in such cases would be a no-brainer: exhort such women with Koranic provisions for a man to take up to four wives, provided that they are treated equally. As it happened, however, Rafid favored a more pragmatic, less veracity-challenged approach.

"I tell her, 'He's not married,'" he said, adding that he explains away the presence of his business card in her husband's wallet with the claim that he and her husband are friends.

Divorce, rarely a bed of roses in any country, can have some particularly prickly thorns around here. "Sometimes the husband hears that the sister of his wife is a whore or a prostitute," Rafid explained. "He's not divorcing her so much as the family."

Other complications can come from the female side. Sometimes, for instance, a previously married woman produces a document from the civil court saying that she is divorced, but there is no evidence that her husband is aware of the divorce. In many cases, her husband will have been lost in the shuffle of war or of political killings by the old regime-but not in all cases. To be sure, she is referred to a local ayatollah.

In another place, at another time, it might be depressing to contemplate the idea of child brides, polygamy and open-air virginity verification. But not here, not now. With so many forms of death everywhere, it was nothing but a relief to come across people grappling with life.

Iraqis are doing that. No matter what happens on any given day, the world must bear that in mind: Iraqis are grappling with life.

Last week, no question, a new government got sworn in, and Baghdad braced itself for bloodshed. But every afternoon, the Saj Al Reef restaurant was packed with engineering students from the nearby branch of Baghdad University, chattering away with their mouths full of wrap sandwiches and deep-dish pizza. At the Farah beauty salon, half a dozen women sat in all stages of wash, cut and color, with glossy magazines in their laps; the only source of male energy was a fat baby boy, sound asleep on a plush sofa, happily oblivious to the hair-spray fumes he was inhaling. And in his office across from the shrine, Rafid was bringing order to marital chaos.

At one point, Rafid and the husband disappeared up the stairs, to the little room above the office. Some time later, he bounded back down again, with a spring of certainty in his step. Civil war might break out. The government might crumble. Al Qaeda might strike again at any time. But whether any or all of those things ever come to pass, Islamic law will still dictate the requisite number of days from sex to severance, so as to pre-empt a child's being born as a child of divorce.

"I can't give you a divorce now, because he said you slept with him 10 days ago," he pronounced to the wife. "Come back when your period starts."

Soon Hadel's eyes will melt again, and freeze again, and keep on doing so all through a long conversation, like a pair of trick ice cubes.

With words like these, it was clear, Hadel had made herself a little nest of self-delusion. Everybody in Iraq builds these, so as to prolong as long as possible the idea that no matter what happens in other places to other people, nothing-well, probably nothing-is going to happen to oneself.

It is a hot morning in the middle of June, and Hadel is sitting in the living room of her tidy house, which itself sits on a tidy side street in the tidy neighborhood of Harthia. Neither gleamingly rich nor grindingly poor, Harthia is one of those places where the sense of nothing ever happening is so palpable that the possibility of anything ever happening seems not to exist. But on May 31, Hadel's nest, and Harthia's, had been blown to bits. Shortly after 1 o'clock in the afternoon, a bone-shaking explosion sounded on Al Kindi Street, the main drag. Within minutes, the sky was smoke, the storefronts were trash heaps and several pieces of charred Mercedes-here the body, there the seats, way down there the engine-lay in the street, like an absurdist exhibit in a sculpture garden. A nice-sized patch of pavement had split into a crater, and the Iraqi police were going around with plastic bags for the collection of scattered human body parts.

"Look, the stomach of someone," my friend Mohemen murmured, warning me not to put my foot wrong.

We were only here to look for a place for lunch, and the U.S. military was closing in and shooing everyone away, so we left.

A few days later, I went back to make a small protest. This was a protest against Iraq's relentless way of turning crushing human tragedy into Muzak. Bombings, especially relatively modest ones like Harthia's, have long since become a blur. A week or so before, a short walk down the street from the blast Mohemen and I had happened on, there had been the assassination of Ezzedine Salim, temporary president of the since-dissolved Iraqi Governing Council. A day or two later, the headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan there had been targeted with a blast of such intensity that the palm trees outside appeared to have been barbecued.

Actually, this was just a headquarters; all the political parties here have claimed plenty of extra buildings. Some days later, another P.U.K. headquarters was bombed, too.

Some bombings, though, are worse than others, and the death count is only one criterion. By that criterion, the recent blast at an Iraqi Army recruiting center, which killed more than 30 people and injured many others, was much worse than the one in Harthia, which reportedly killed two people. When a politician or a political party or a supposedly pro-occupation institution, such as the Iraqi Army, gets it, plenty of totally random people get it, too; and, of course, considering that most of those who "collaborate" in coalition-related endeavors are just Iraqis in need of work, "legitimate target" is not the phrase that springs to mind.

But hey, at least there was a target. Legitimate or not, a target at least gives a person the delusion of options: stay away from the American soldiers, accelerate past the party headquarters; if the prominent Iraqi politician offers you a ride, don't take it.

In Harthia and places like it, no one knows exactly who did it or why they did it, and no one feels that there is any way to protect themselves.

On the other hand, everybody knows who's to blame.

"We think it is rockets, because the land is open more than one and a half meters," says Abu Ahmed, who owns what was a restaurant very near the Mercedes. Above the doorway to the restaurant there is a surreal, yet very real, tread mark from a flying tire.

This didn't matter. Nor did it matter that the Mercedes-made crater was, to any objective eye, your average car-bomb crater. In fact, it looked just like the crater around the corner from my apartment. (That bombing, which took place toward the end of May, was another one that seemed mysteriously aimless; the only person it killed was the 11-year-old Iraqi boy who sold cigarettes on the corner. Some people took this as a warning to the foreigners living in nearby, relatively fortified hotels; or as a quixotic attempt on the Australian Embassy; but who knows?)

What matters is that Abu Ahmed truly believes that American helicopters circled low, surveyed the neighborhood and then purposely opened fire, shattering his business.

In a way, of course, Abu Ahmed is insulting the Americans. But at the same time, he is paying them an implacable compliment. In fact, if the Bush administration is looking for people who still think that they are brilliant, they should look here. No matter how much the U.S.-led coalition bumbles and stumbles, no matter how fatally or fantastically it screws up for the next decade, millions of Iraqis will still know, deep down, that America is a genius.

Almost no one here believes that the United States is ever just plain old stupid. Almost no one believes that America does anything by mistake, or as a result of good intentions carried out badly, or because a few rogue individuals chose to violate a generally sterling system. In many Iraqi eyes, there is no madness here that does not conceal a very deliberate American method. The West can clamor all it wants to the conclusion that the coalition went into Iraq embarrassingly half-cocked and plan-free; meanwhile, more and more Iraqis are becoming crystal clear on what the plan is.

"The Americans do not like security and stability in Iraq," explained Abu Ahmed, owner of the shattered restaurant. "They will stay a long time in Iraq because we do not have security and stability."

Right in the middle of this conversation, four U.S. troops wandered into view, and 23-year-old Lt. Jeremy Holman of Illinois sidled up to Abu Ahmed.

"It's very warm today," he said, in the expansive, telegraphic way that people use with kindergartners and foreigners. "You have nice shade."

"I'm sorry I cannot offer you tea," said Abu Ahmed, indicating the restaurant and bursting into a regretful but lovely smile.

"Thank you, my friend," said Lieutenant Holman.

At least after the bombing there came a cleaning crew, which did a refreshingly prompt job of filling in the crater and sweeping away the debris.

"Their trucks were from the C.I.A.," Hadel Adnan said. In her view, the trucks came to remove evidence of the rocket attack. The charred Mercedes, she claimed, was brought in later, for show.

Perhaps the prevalence of such perceptions in such neighborhoods will give a reason-apart from the freedom-of-the-press thing-for the American military to reassess its practice of not only closing streets after bombings, but keeping them closed and making the scenes difficult for anyone to document.

"They were photographing bodies," a soldier explained when asked why some journalists' credentials had been confiscated. At a bomb scene? Imagine!

A moment of context: Iraq has become a veritable carnage factory. There are so many ways in which to get murdered here right now, violent death in Iraq could use its own card catalog. One big category would be for American-related deaths. There are Iraqis killed purposely by Americans because they are, in fact, doing something wrong; Iraqis killed accidentally by Americans even though they are doing nothing wrong; Iraqis killed because they work for the Americans; Iraqis killed because they are mistakenly believed to be working for the Americans. There are Iraqis killed because they happen to be someplace where there are Americans, or where there would be Americans if the bombers had gotten the timing right.

An ever bigger category would be for Iraqis who die with no Americans to be seen, not even in the minds of the murderers. There are Iraqis being killed by other Iraqis because their religious radical is not the killers' preferred religious radical (see Moktada al-Sadr, Mahdi Army; supposedly disarming, emphasis on "supposedly"). There are Iraqis being killed by other Iraqis who want their car. There are Iraqis being killed by other Iraqis because they have been kidnapped, and their families have failed to pay sufficient ransom with sufficient haste.

The biggest category of all would belong to Iraqis who are being killed for no apparent reason, or for one or more possible reasons which are not, in the logic of murder in most places, reasons at all.

Today, I walked into a house that I believed to be the house of a murder victim whose family, it was rumored, had received a message from the perpetrators to the effect that if they wanted the body back for burial, they would have to pay; in the other words, they were ransoming a corpse. There had been a mix-up, however, and this was the wrong family altogether-but as it happened, they were in mourning, too. The previous Friday, the brother of the lady of the house had had his head blasted off by the side of the road between Al Kaim and Falluja, and his body had been buried in a hole. The only reason he had been found reasonably quickly was because an entirely different family, in search of its own missing loved one, had found him and taken him, too late, to the hospital.

Now, while the dead man's sister wailed uncontrollably in a corner, his uncle and nephew and friend, who asked that no names be printed, sat around debating what had done him in. There were several factors, and they were discussed sadly but calmly, as if the deceased had been both a smoker and a croissant addict who had finally keeled over from a heart attack. He had been an engineer, and engineers, as reconstruction types, can be marked men these days. He had worked for Al Iraqiya television, and therefore could have been construed as working with the Americans-even though, some time before, he had given a television interview in which he blamed the Americans for killing a colleague some time before (oops, there's another death). Most ominously in terms of a possible civil war, he had been a Shia in a Sunni-indeed, Salafi and Wahhabi-area, and these days that is well known to be enough to get a fellow kidnapped or killed, and sometimes mutilated, too.

In any event, he had been a 45-year-old father of four who had been killed on his way home from work, and no one in the room believed that anyone with any power would ever do anything to find out who did it and why.

There is, however, no mystery whatsoever as to why the powers that be-i.e., the Americans-are not doing more to curtail the murder and mayhem. This is because, many Iraqis believe, the Americans are bankrolling it. And not just chaos-stirring murders like the car bomb in Harthia: high-profile, targeted killings of their friends.

"The Americans, the Jews and Saddam killed Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim because he was a strong leader," Sheik Faeza al-Moussawi, a 35-year-old imam of some influence told me about the assassination of the former head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, who was seen as a leading Shiite supporter of the U.S.-led coalition.

As an Hakim follower, the sheik despised the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr. But contrary to the assumptions sometimes seemingly made up in the Hearts and Minds Department, this had absolutely no effect upon his ability to despise the Americans fighting Moktada as well-or are they?

The Americans, he believes, have Moktada on retainer to keep stirring up things so that the Americans can kill as many Shiites as possible. "The Iraqi people lose a lot of people," he said of fighting such as that which occurred between American forces and Mr. al-Sadr's militia in Najaf in May. "They die from this fighting, not the Americans."

If you think the sheik is unusually given to conspiracy theory, trust me: The average Iraqi could make mincemeat of Oliver Stone.

Such were the thoughts already on many Iraqi brains when the May 31 blast struck Harthia and sent Hadel Adnan running out her door and down the block to Al Kindi Street. It is also the address of the grander house that her family has owned since 1966 and where her widowed mother, among others, still lived. The sky was black with smoke, several cars were bright with flames, and many bodies were strewn on the ground. But all Hadel could think of was getting to her mother and her niece, who were at home, only about one door over and one driveway-length back, it turned out, from where the explosion had gone off. In the end, they suffered only minor injuries, but the bombing was reported to have killed two Iraqis and injured 20 more.

As far as Hadel is concerned, if you believe those figures, there's a soon-to-be-demolished prison she can sell you.

"On TV, they don't tell the truth about how many people are dead," Hadel said. "All the neighborhood, everyone says, 'This house, they found a finger,' 'This house, they found a leg,' 'This house, they found a hand,' 'This house, they found the head.'"

Perhaps because there are white polka dots on her black head scarf and some kind of paisley print on her long abaya , Hadel projects both the qualities of standing out and blending in. Perhaps because her father was a prominent jurist, she is, during litanies like this one, both passionate and dispassionate. Her eyes remain ice throughout, and she waves around a pink tissue as if it is a rebel flag at a rally.

It is when she runs out of elements to enumerate that she falters, and her eyes melt, and she uses the tissue to mop up the tears that dribble out.

All they found of her brother, Mohammed, a 42-year-old car-rental agent who should have been at work at the time of the blast, was the torso. For all the hours Hadel was running around to the hospital to have her mother checked out, she had no idea he was dead.

Hearing such stories, conspiracy theories make sense. Such people are going through such agony, it is hard to imagine anyone speaking a coherent sentence, let alone drawing neat, straight lines from cause to effect.

Another neighbor, who had come to the hospital to be treated for his own injuries, told her about Mohammed. He said that he had seen her brother get hit, then take to the air-"flying," she says in English, dropping that word gingerly into the flow of translation like a broken doll into the trash.

Then the eyes again turn hard and very cold.