Here was Senator Edward Kennedy, taking the stage as a two-man band struck up “The Boys of Wexford,” promising comprehensive immigration legislation that would offer “illegals” a path to citizenship.

“I didn’t come here to lose!” Mr. Kennedy boomed, sweat coursing down the side of his face.

Here was Senator Hillary Clinton, declaring that she was “waiting to fall in behind our leader, Senator Kennedy, and the rest of us who are in his army are going to send the message through Congress.”

And here was Senator Charles Schumer, delighting the crowd as he spurred them into an I.R.A.-associated chant of “Tiocfaidh Ar La”—“Our Day Will Come.”

The event, held one week ago under the auspices of the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform, seemed like a testament to the unique leverage on the body politic that Irish-Americans have traditionally enjoyed.

Saturday’s St. Patrick’s Day parades across the nation—the biggest, in New York City, is expected to attract two million marchers and onlookers—will doubtless also be proclaimed as affirmations of Irish America’s vitality.

Beyond the bombast, however, the picture looks very different. The immigration debate, far from demonstrating the enduring strength of Irish America, may in fact represent the Irish lobby’s last hurrah. Even some of Irish America’s most committed advocates already lament the erosion of their community’s power.

“It is declining,” said Niall O’Dowd, publisher of the New York–based Irish Voice newspaper and a founder of the ILIR. “Our heroes are not getting any younger. Ted Kennedy is 75. Where is the next generation of Irish community leaders?”

The core of the problem is that both strands of the so-called Irish lobby—the first comprised of Americans of Irish heritage, the second of recently arrived Irish immigrants—are beginning to fray.

Irish-Americans have, for years, become more integrated with—and indistinguishable from—mainstream American society. As their geographical ties to Irish communities have loosened, so too have their political allegiances.

“Is there really a sense of Irish-American-ness when it comes to voting?” Baruch College political-science professor Doug Muzzio asked rhetorically. “I would imagine that the only time a lot of those people consciously think of themselves as Irish is when they drink to excess” on St. Patrick’s Day.

“The old-style Irish-American politician is not quite a thing of the past,” New York political consultant George Arzt said. “But it’s not like the old days, when a balanced ticket meant someone Irish, someone Italian and someone Jewish.”

Meanwhile, economic boom times in Ireland—the much-vaunted “Celtic Tiger”—and more rigorous immigration enforcement by U.S. authorities since Sept. 11 have stanched the flow of new arrivals.

Though reliable statistics are by their nature difficult to come by, a visit to any of the old Irish redoubts in New York—Woodside, Sunnyside and Maspeth in Queens, or Woodlawn in the Bronx—provides plenty of evidence that their ethnic makeup is changing.

And the anecdotal evidence is stark. New York’s Gaelic Athletic Association, which has long functioned as a community network as much as a sporting organization, is seeing its teams disband and numbers shrink.

“I am absolutely certain that within five years, the G.A.A. to all intents and purposes will be dead in New York, which I think will be a dreadful situation,” Mr. O’Dowd said.

Yet another factor that has affected Irish America in recent years—one amounting to a silver lining containing a cloud—is the end of “the Troubles.” In times past, the armed conflict in the North of Ireland was a potent rallying point for activists, be they Irish nationals or Irish-Americans. Now that peace reigns, however uneasily, on the streets of Belfast, that issue has lost much of its potency.

All of these factors accrete into a straightforward loss of Irish-American political influence.

“It used to be that you’d be lucky if you could throw a stone in New York and not hit an Irish politician,” said Queens Congressman Joseph Crowley, who also spoke at the immigration rally in Washington. “There was Delaney, Murphy, Rooney, Moynihan. Now I am the only Irish-American Democratic Congressman from New York.”

The immigration issue has arguably gotten so much attention recently from Irish-Americans not just on the merits, but for an important tactical reason: It has served to draw together Irish activists of differing hues once more into one cohesive force.

It also self-evidently lends itself to grassroots involvement. Ciaran Staunton, the vice chairman of the immigration-reform group and a Manhattan bar owner, told the Washington meeting that the organization had grown to 28,000 members since its inception in late 2005. The rally was the culmination of a day that saw about 3,000 activists from around the country pound the corridors of Capitol Hill to make their case.

Acknowledging that Irish America can still punch “hugely” above its weight, and that “you just had to be there in that room to see that,” Mr. O’Dowd also noted that “this is probably the first grassroots Irish issue since the North was at its height that Irish-Americans are keenly interested in.”

Estimates of the total number of Irish illegal immigrants in the U.S. vary from 20,000 to over 50,000. Either way, they are a small proportion of the estimated 12 million “illegals” in the nation as a whole.

But, as Mr. Crowley noted, the Irish “bring a history of organizational strength and a sense of community” to the debate. In the process, they have created a template that other ethnicities seem to want to follow.

Mr. Staunton recalled a recent meeting between Irish immigration advocates and representatives of an unnamed Asian-American newspaper.

“They have a readership of 400,000,” he said with some awe. “They have thousands and thousands of undocumented people. And our advice to them was, ‘Get them onto the streets. You have to show that you’re out there.’ We’ve got all these people and they are empowered.”

An old joke holds that the first item on the agenda of any Irish political organization is the inevitable split. While the ILIR has maintained a united front so far, its stance has alienated Peter King, the Long Island Congressman once famous for his supportiveness toward Irish issues in general and Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams in particular.

And the alienation runs both ways: Mr. King’s adamant opposition to any path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, Irish or otherwise, has led accusations of betrayal by his former allies.

“They have short memories,” Mr. King said. “I don’t think there was anybody at more political risk than I was as a result of engagement with Irish issues. I regularly visited with Sinn Fein; I hosted events for them long before it was fashionable. I would have thought that 25 years of work on Irish issues would count for something.”

Aside from disagreeing with the ILIR’s viewpoint, the Congressman expressed skepticism about the organization’s high-profile campaign. He contended that many people in the federal government did not even know that Irish “illegals” existed in any significant number until the lobbying effort began.

Such people were “under the radar,” Mr. King asserted, “until they started running around Capitol Hill in their green T-shirts.”

Though Mr. King insisted that Irish-Americans in his district were no less conservative on immigration than any other group, he also acknowledged that the work of the Irish lobby in general may improve the chances of Congress passing some form of liberalizing legislation.

“They are probably a plus, because it gets it away from the perception that this is just a Muslim and a Hispanic issue,” he said. “The Irish are considered mainstream by most Americans.”

Mr. King said, somewhat wistfully, that his former friends in what remains of the Irish lobby had become, functionally, just another narrowly focused interest group.

“This has become their issue now,” he said. “There is very little organizational effort on the North. All the effort is being put into immigration.”

Mr. Bush’s bad judgment will be manifest to most Americans if, as expected, he insists on dispatching another 20,000 combat troops to Baghdad. Evidently he shares the illusion, fostered by Senator John McCain (R.-Ariz.) and both men’s neoconservative supporters, that a tardy and nominal increase in troops will somehow improve the chances for “victory.”

Bad judgment is the original sin of this war, dating back to the exaggeration and misuse of intelligence data by the President and his advisors. Early in 2001, they foolishly decided to go to war against Iraq and then made sure that “the facts” about weapons of mass destruction and connections to Al Qaeda were “fixed around the policy,” in the words of the famous Downing Street memo. They arrogantly brushed aside the reluctance of our traditional allies. They stupidly rejected the advice of experienced military commanders and civilian experts.

Now they reject the advice of generals both active and retired who say that the proposed “surge” of 20,000 troops will prove useless or worse. And, of course, they refuse to acknowledge the overwhelming popular verdict against the war delivered in last November’s midterm election, as if public support for a foreign military adventure doesn’t matter.

Even the President’s most dedicated supporters have been forced to admit that he and his government made disastrous mistakes in battling the insurgency and running the occupation. But from the beginning, bad faith has exacerbated the effects of bad judgment—and not only in the fabricated case for war.

Before the invasion, Mr. Bush promised that he would take military action only as a “last resort” to disarm Iraq. That was a lie. Since the invasion, he has repeatedly pledged that he would increase our forces in Iraq only if his military commanders told him they needed additional troops. That, too, has turned out to be a lie: For months, the generals have told both the President and Congress that sending more soldiers will only result in more American dead and wounded, without quelling the sectarian violence.

Two months ago, appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Centcom commander Gen. John Abizaid said he saw no reason to send more troops. “I’ve met with every divisional commander—General Casey, the corps commander, General Dempsey—we all talked together,” he testified. “And I said, ‘In your professional opinion, if we were to bring in more American troops now, does it add considerably to our ability to achieve success in Iraq?’ And they all said no.”

More recently, Gen. George Casey, who commands all U.S. forces in Iraq, said that as long as U.S. forces “bear the main burden of Iraq’s security,” the Iraqi government will avoid making “the hard decisions about reconciliation and dealing with the militias.”

Instead of listening to those commanders, the President has replaced them with more agreeable officers who will endorse and implement his escalation.

Even more troubling than the prospect of more Americans returning home dead and wounded is the suspicion that they will be sacrificed to save face for the President, his associates and their neoconservative advisors. Almost nobody in the White House believes that the “surge” will lead to victory, according to informed sources who suggest that the Bush gang merely wants to delay the inevitable withdrawal until the next administration.

That sounds like the kind of criminally insane reasoning once used to send more troops to Vietnam.

Senator Edward Kennedy has announced that he will introduce legislation forbidding the President from sending additional troops to Iraq without Congressional approval, by using the constitutional appropriation power. As he points out, the original Authorization to Use Military Force contemplated the disarming of Saddam Hussein, not the insertion of American forces into an Iraqi civil war, and as such is now “obsolete.” His proposal would not reduce support for the troops already in the field.

The great liberal lion rightly insists that the people’s representatives should obey their will and must not rubber-stamp a deadly Presidential error without debate. The dwindling caucus of Bush supporters in the Senate may well decide to filibuster the Kennedy bill. Like Mr. Bush and his claque in the media, they may also try to blame his policy’s failure on its critics. The public has no more patience for those diversions, as they demonstrated last fall when they rejected the Republican “cut and run” attack rhetoric.

Still, there will be some Congressional Democrats who hesitate to confront the President, fearing the political consequences. But hiding behind that excuse is just as unconscionable as sending thousands more young men and women to their deaths to save face. For anyone who no longer supports this war, or never did, the only moral choice is to say no.

It's an old video of recently conservative presidential candidate Mitt Romney at a debate against Ted Kennedy in 1994 in which he (passionately) defends abortion rights and affirmative action and distances himself from the policies of Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

I'm thinking the McCain people are going to have fun with this one.

-- Josh Benson

At 11 a.m., the City Council's Land Use Committee will vote on whether to build a school on a contaminated site in the Bronx. If approved, it could go to the full council for a vote by 2 p.m.

Also at 11 a.m., the state Senate goes into session.

At 12:30 p.m., Senator Ted Kennedy will speak to the National Press Club in D.C.

And at 2 p.m., the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will hold a hearing on Iraq.

-- Azi Paybarah

In a statement e-mailed to reporters, Mr. Schumer declared it “sad that the President felt he had to pick a nominee likely to divide America,” and warned that “this controversial nominee, who would make the Court less diverse and far more conservative, will get very careful scrutiny.”

Later, as Washington woke up to the nomination, Mr. Schumer was the first Democratic Senator to face the press, his heavy reading glasses riding down his nose as he seemed to echo Senator Edward Kennedy’s famous warning, delivered in 1987, about Robert Bork. In Judge Bork’s America, Senator Kennedy said, “blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters.”

Mr. Schumer said the question of the moment was “whether [Judge Alito] would use that seat to reverse much of what Rosa Parks and so many others fought so hard and for so long to put in place.”

The remark raised another question: How had the combative Brooklyn Senator risen, without fanfare or official recognition, to be “the voice of the Democrats on judges,” in the words of Schumer ally Kate Michelman, a former president of the National Abortion Rights Action League?

On a Senate Judiciary Committee stacked with famous names, Mr. Schumer has emerged as the Democrats’ most prominent voice on what is, right now, the most important battle in Washington. That position allows him to step out of the giant shadow cast by his superstar colleague, Hillary Clinton, the would-be, may-be Presidential candidate. With his staunch opposition to conservative judges, his denunciation of “theocrats” and “economic royalists” in Mr. Bush’s coalition, and his media ubiquity, Mr. Schumer has become an unlikely champion of the Democratic left.

“He’s not going out looking for a fight, but when it’s appropriate that there’s a fight, that’s where the fact that he’s a Brooklyn guy really helps the party,” said Mr. Schumer’s former chief counsel, Jeff Berman.

This is a fight Mr. Schumer has been girding for since soon after Mr. Bush took office in 2001. That June, he wrote an op-ed in The New York Times attacking the “taboo” against “examining the ideologies of judicial nominees.”

“The not-so-dirty little secret of the Senate is that we do consider ideology, but privately,” he wrote, and called for Senators and judicial nominees to lay their ideological cards on the table.

With Judge Alito, Mr. Schumer is getting what he asked for. The judge has 15 years of opinions that include one in favor of a law requiring women to notify their husbands before seeking abortions, along with a broad record of rulings and a consensus about his intellectual qualifications.

So is Mr. Schumer satisfied? Well, not exactly.

“There are two steps here,” Mr. Schumer told The Observer in a telephone interview from his Senate office the evening of Judge Alito’s appointment, pausing occasionally to munch on a take-out Chinese dinner of steamed shrimp and vegetables on rice. “The first one is to get them to sit down and say what their views are. But that’s just a means to an end. Which is to have judges--and I have one criterion--who are mainstream.”

In becoming the Democratic voice on matters judicial, Mr. Schumer started with an edge on some of his colleagues: a Harvard law degree, a relatively safe seat and a proximity to, and affinity for, the cameras. But as with everything else in his career, Mr. Schumer has mostly propelled himself to the center of the action. It started with his status as an extremely junior member of a high-powered Senate committee, and his assignment to one of its least interesting subcommittees: Administrative Oversight and the Courts, which had recently heard testimony on administrative procedures in the Department of Agriculture.

“Nobody wanted it,” Mr. Schumer said of the subcommittee assignment.

Then, on May 9 of 2001, Mr. Bush announced his first round of Appellate Court nominees, a group that made it clear he took seriously his conservative supporters’ wish for a judiciary remade in the model of Justice Antonin Scalia.

The group of 11 included two, Priscilla Owen and Miguel Estrada, who would wind up in the middle of the filibuster fight. It also included the current Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts.

Less than a month later, Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords left the Republican Party, giving the Democrats control of the Senate and making Mr. Schumer the chairman of this dull little subcommittee. Within weeks, it wasn’t so dull.

That July, Mr. Schumer turned his subcommittee into a platform for hashing out the central issue of judicial confirmation: What qualifies a person to be a federal judge? With the other key members of his committee largely focused on their own chairmanships elsewhere, Mr. Schumer devoted himself to the judges.

“Chuck came with one thing that [Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, Senator Kennedy and others] didn’t have as much of, and that’s time,” said Tom Daschle, then the Senate Majority Leader.

His first hearing in a series (“They became a little famous,” Mr. Schumer says; “people still cite them”) was titled “Should Ideology Matter?”

The move surprised the Judiciary Committee’s Republicans.

“The courts subcommittee primarily handled court administration--but it’s the Senate, and your jurisdiction is as broad as you can make your argument to be,” said Makan Delrahim, then the Republican counsel to the full committee.

The hearings proceeded through the summer and resumed in 2002, serving as a kind of a backup document to the Senate Democrats’ filibuster of Judge Estrada and several other nominees.

They drew criticism from Republicans: The ranking member on the subcommittee, Senator Orrin Hatch, labeled Mr. Schumer’s call to return to open evaluations of ideology a “historic misstep.” The next fall, as Mr. Schumer led a hearing about the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals titled “The Importance of Balance on the Nation’s Second-Highest Court,” Mr. Hatch griped that “the premise of this hearing reminds me of a nickname that some clever college freshman gave to one of his required first-year courses: Introduction to the Obvious.”

And after Republicans retook the Senate in the 2002 midterm elections, Mr. Schumer’s seminars came to a halt.

But the damage had been done to the notion that asking nominees about ideology would be an unfair “litmus test.”

“What Chuck is saying is, call it a litmus test or not, the Senate does have an obligation to make sure a new Supreme Court judge is going to respect these fundamental pillars of the constitutional order,” said City Councilman David Yassky, a former law professor who worked for Mr. Schumer in the House. Mr. Schumer argues that attempts to roll back recent precedents--like Roe v. Wade, and the wide use of the commerce clause in the Constitution to justify federal regulation--represent unacceptable “activism.”

Urging Confrontation

In the summer and fall of 2001, as Mr. Schumer led his public hearings, he was conducting another fight in the privacy of the Senate Democrats’ caucus meetings in the L.B.J. room just off the Senate floor. There, Mr. Schumer was making the case that conservative judges were worth fighting.

“He had to persuade a lot of people--it wasn’t easy,” Mr. Daschle recalled.

As Mr. Schumer remembers it, he made his case to his colleagues one by one, and then in a speech to the full caucus.

“I had to work them. I had to sit down with Diane Feinstein and Joe Biden, who were very leery of this,” he said. Then, in caucus, “I got up and I said we should not do this because we’ll win politically--we won’t. We should do this because that’s why we’re Senators. If we don’t, we could be looking in the mirrors 20 years from now, when we’re shaving or putting on our makeup or whatever, and say, ‘How did we let this happen?’”

In the end, just two filibusters held; Judge Estrada withdrew. But Mr. Schumer was right that they wouldn’t help his party politically. Many observers think they contributed to costing Mr. Daschle his job and the Democrats their majority.

Three years after Mr. Schumer’s last hearing, the climactic fights over the Supreme Court are at last underway. Chief Justice Roberts made it through largely unscathed.

“Roberts was quite stealthy, but he was so brilliant he could pull it off,” said Mr. Schumer, who voted against confirming the Chief Justice.

But when it came to Harriet Miers, Mr. Schumer argues that conservatives--concerned that she would tilt left--finally conceded his point that ideology matters.

“Sam Brownback and I sat down, and we agreed” that a nominee’s views should be better known, Mr. Schumer said of the Kansas Republican. “We’ve won that argument now. I don’t think they’ll ever be going back to a stealth nominee.”

And now, as Judge Alito approaches his confirmation hearings, the lines are being drawn more clearly than ever. One protégé of Mr. Schumer, Congressman Anthony Wiener, declared on Nov. 1 that the Alito nomination was an “open-and-shut case,” that the judge’s opinion in the notification case was grounds for disqualification.

Mr. Schumer hasn’t been quite as blunt. Instead, he co-opts the conservative criticism of liberal “judicial activism,” arguing that conservatives now practice what they once condemned.

“I always felt that judges should interpret law, not make law,” he said. “I remember in college and law school in the late 60’s and early 70’s, even though I agreed with the substance of the Warren Court’s decisions, I thought that some of them were making law.”

Not, the Senator quickly added, with civil-rights rulings like the decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which was issued in 1954. But the Warren Court also greatly strengthened defendants’ protections against police searches.

“I think they went too far on criminal law,” Mr. Schumer said. And while the Senator laughs off the running speculation that he aspires to sit on the Supreme Court himself one day, you could almost hear his testimony to the committee.

“I think they went too far on criminal law,” Mr. Schumer said. And while the Senator laughs off the running speculation that he aspires to sit on the Supreme Court himself one day, you could almost hear his testimony to the committee.

Then he must have looked at the polls showing that the Republican base is deserting him—and panicked.

The President’s decision to dispatch 6,000 National Guardsmen to the Mexican border, which he announced in a nationally televised speech on Monday night, gives off a sour smell of desperation. Polls published the following day indicated that overwhelming majorities of voters favor sending troops to the southern boundary. Presumably the White House polled to test its own “solution” as well as the President’s message before scheduling his address.

No matter what the polls told Karl Rove about mobilizing the troops, the sad truth for him and his boss is that the public now regards Mr. Bush with a cynical eye. Conservatives no longer trust him on the issue of immigration, while liberals, moderates and independents no longer trust him at all. It is sad, because he once had the opportunity—and the sincere motivation—to lead the nation to a more enlightened policy toward immigrant workers and their families. His welcoming attitude, dating back to his years in Texas, has long been his most admirable quality as a political leader.

If that attitude attracted Hispanic voters to his party, then at least it represented a refreshing change from the “Southern strategy” of racially coded messages and the polarizing anti-immigrant policies of the recent past. Compared with much of the dubious image-making that has suffused his campaigns and his Presidency, Mr. Bush’s friendliness toward the Latino community seemed authentic and rooted in his own experience.

Unfortunately, he has waited too long to lead on this issue, and he has proved so incompetent as President that he lacks credibility. At this late date, sending thousands of troops southward in an effort to appear tough only underscores his failure.

Prospects for immigration reform along the lines proposed by Senators McCain and Kennedy would not be so dim if Mr. Bush hadn’t neglected border security over the past several years. The voters who now express such resentment and fear might have been mollified if the government had done more to restore control over the borders.

While the President boasts about boosting the number of Border Patrol agents by thousands, the truth is that his last budget only provided enough money to add 200 new agents. In Congress, members of both parties have sought increased spending on border security, only to be rebuffed by the administration.

That neglect has opened space for the ugliest elements in American society to reassert their brutality and prejudice. Extreme nativists imagine cruel mass deportations of Latino families, or worse, in order to preserve “white America.” Those lunatics have branded Mr. Bush a “traitor,” and many of his once-fervent right-wing supporters are attacking him bitterly.

On the far-right Web site WorldNetDaily, a columnist who describes himself as a “Christian libertarian” recently explained why he knew that the President is wrong about mass deportations. “If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of six million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society,” he wrote, “it couldn’t possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don’t speak English and are not integrated into American society.”

Assuming that civilized Americans are not prepared to contemplate a “final solution,” then someday we may realize that massive human migrations require substantial solutions. What we need is a hemispheric development effort to improve wages and social conditions in Mexico and Central America. But there are domestic policies that could also prove effective.

The first step would be to inflict serious penalties on large employers, such as the meatpacking industry, that exploit illegal labor. Make those lawbreakers shoulder the extra fiscal burden of education, health care and law enforcement that falls on cities and towns. The next step would be to break down the barriers to labor organizing in those same industries. Make sure that workers are free and unafraid to join unions, as they are supposed to be in a Western democracy, regardless of their immigration status.

Over time, such measures would change the incentives that currently encourage industry to abuse illegal immigrants and flout the law. Real reform wouldn’t please the lobbyists and corporate political donors, but it might just work.

In the evening, Ted Kennedy will be in town stumping for his new book America Back On Track at Le Parker Meridian Hotel.

And KT McFarland makes two stops tomorrow night, first to stump for the New York Young Republican Club, then at the monthly meeting of the Log Cabin Republicans.

—Nicole Brydson

So it is all the more remarkable that Charles Schumer-a career politician who has never been shy about calling attention to himself-is winning respect from New Yorkers of all political persuasions. Mr. Schumer, New York's senior Senator, seems poised to take his place among the giants who have represented New York through the decades: Robert Wagner, Herbert Lehman, Jacob Javits and Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Not everybody would have predicted that Mr. Schumer would gain so much stature so quickly. When he defeated Alfonse D'Amato in 1998, then-Congressman Schumer was best known for his extraordinary ability to gather the press together for a Sunday news conference announcing a federal grant here, a successful investigation there. There was no questioning his work ethic or intelligence. The question was whether he could transform himself from a bread-and-butter Brooklyn pol to the kind of statesman that New York expects in the U.S. Senate. As he prepares for re-election next year, Mr. Schumer has left little doubt that he is well suited to the role.

One way to judge the Senator's effectiveness is to take stock of his enemies. They include some of the most virulent right-wingers who populate Talk Radio Nation. They have accused Mr. Schumer of all sorts of terrible things, including a bias against Roman Catholics, Latinos and African-Americans. Nonsense, really. But that's what happens in modern politics when you dare to oppose candidates for federal judgeships whose views you regard as abhorrent and unconstitutional.

At a time when political courage is hard to find, Mr. Schumer has urged his fellow Democrats to oppose some of President George W. Bush's egregious choices for federal judicial posts. Of course, taking such a position now, when Mr. Bush's poll ratings have sunk, is not so courageous. But Mr. Schumer was battling the President even when Mr. Bush was breaking records for popularity. That took guts.

Charles Schumer is hardly a wild-eyed, bleeding-heart liberal, although you'd never know it based on the thinly disguised anti-Semitic attacks he has been forced to endure. As a Democratic Senator from New York who happens to be Jewish, he makes for an easy target for the hate-mongers who populate talk radio. It doesn't matter that he supported the war in Iraq, or that Wall Street regards him as a voice of fiscal sanity in the Democratic Party. He is, to his enemies, an arch-liberal and an enemy of the President. In fact, he is simply a superb, effective Senator who fights for New York. No wonder the nuts hate him.

Legacy Admissions: Everyone Benefits

Several Senate Democrats are proposing legislation which, if enacted, could end up dealing a grievous blow to the quality of American higher education. The bill, filed by Senator Edward Kennedy, would require colleges to report admissions data on legacies-those incoming students whose parents or other relatives are alumni of the college. Senator Kennedy, the ranking Democrat on the Senate education committee, argues, with some justification, that by favoring students whose parents attended the school, colleges end up denying admission to some students who have high credentials but no blood ties to alumni. But the Senators are missing the big picture: Most private colleges and universities get close to 90 percent of their funding from alumni gifts. If colleges put an end to favoring the children of alumni, a good portion of that funding will dry up, resulting in decreased quality of education, higher tuition payments and less money available for financial aid. Quite possibly, many private colleges would eventually have to close their doors.

It's no secret that legacies are favored; The Wall Street Journal reports that at most top colleges, legacies are accepted at two to three times the rate of other applicants. Still, they make up only 10 to 20 percent of any given student body. Frankly speaking, an institutional bias toward legacies at admissions time is what makes it possible for the 80 percent of students who are not legacies to get a top-notch education. Without alumni funding, colleges would be unable to hire quality teachers, build modern science labs, modernize libraries, keep up student dormitories, and make any of the investments in personnel and infrastructure which have earned America's private colleges a reputation as the finest in the world.

Senator Kennedy-who was a legacy admission to Harvard, by the way -has been joined in his quest by a group which includes Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards. They make the additional point that a pro-legacy admissions policy tends to favor white applicants at the expense of minority students. But it's hard to see how their solution would help minority students in the long run. If you destroy a college's ability to offer excellence, everyone loses. Moreover, by eliminating the legacy system, Senator Kennedy's bill would have the perverse effect of denying to the increasing number of minority alumni the benefit of having their own children receive a favorable glance at admissions time.

That said, the bill might indeed have some merit-for state schools and other publicly financed institutions, which depend far less on alumni giving.

Alter Kockers Menace City!

A new crime wave has broken out in New York, one which threatens the safety and well-being of all good citizens. We're talking, of course, about the Geezer Gang. You're not familiar with the Geezer Gang? Some history, then: On Oct. 19, four men "of a certain age" were playing dominoes in Joyce Kilmer Park near Yankee Stadium. It wasn't the first time they'd engaged in this nefarious activity: They'd been playing the game for decades, but somehow had managed to avoid the cops. But on this day, the city's finest raided the game and charged the men with disorderly conduct and illegal gambling. "It's just not right," one of the menacing gang members, Anthony Quintero, 82, told the Daily News . "The city shouldn't give good people tickets for having fun."

"We come out here to have fun and not to do anything wrong," said Geraldo Perez, the suspected ringleader. "Playing dominoes helps to keep our minds going."

Clearly these men are hardened, experienced criminals-just listen to those smooth excuses! Mr. Perez even tried that old chestnut, "They should have better things to do, like get the people selling drugs." Tell it to the judge, pops!

Luckily, the police were too clever for this shifty bunch: Though the men said they never play for money, a female undercover cop approached their table and asked if she could place a $10 bet on their game. They told her no-"We said, 'We don't bet, we just play,'" said Mr. Perez-but the brave cops closed in and issued the summons anyway. Like Al Capone's bust for tax evasion, the Geezer Gang never saw it coming.

"I'm sad," said Jose Veras, 73. "I never got a ticket and I played in the park all the time."

New Yorkers will get their first glimpse of the cold-blooded Geezer Gang on Dec. 1, when they're due to appear in court. Meanwhile, the city's taxpayers can sleep soundly, knowing that there are four fewer alter kockers playing dominoes in the park.

Last year. August. The

"family ranch" in rural Crawford, Tex. The Presidential-esque seal behind the

press secretary's platform, "WESTERN WHITE HOUSE" branded across the bottom;

the Rancher in Chief snipping at reporters wondering why the man who promised

to bring a new dignity to Washington was abandoning the capital for a solid

month after hardly half a year in office, saying that "they don't understand

the definition of work … I'm getting a lot of work done." (The more friendly

among the media helped White House Presidential Counsel Karen Hughes revive a

Reagan-era phrase: the "working vacation.")

We wise citizens of the Republic of Media reveled in the sheer

histrionics of it all. The New Republic

reported that George W. bought this "family" homestead way back in 1997-the

property developed alongside the younger Bush's Presidential ambitions,

completed just in time to serve as stage-set for his 2000 campaign video. His

August 2001 command performance there did not disappoint. Ryan Liz of TNR recorded the Great Man's chatter

upon arrival: "It's nice to be home.... This is my home.... It's good to be

home.... This is where you come home... I like my own home"-Texas being a

place, he assured his interlocutors, where "a neighbor means more than just

somebody living next-door to somebody else." Mr. Bush's nearest neighbor in

Crawford, it turned out, was several miles away. New Yorkers made many jokes

about George W. Bush-less a cowboy than the handpicked favorite of Wall Street

Republicans-during his weeks in Texas. As once was their wont.

But if George W. Bush, home on the range, was to many New Yorkers

hilarious, his lingering sojourn in Texas also felt devious: proof positive

that our President would play to the rubes a thousand times before even

deigning to set foot in the nation's largest city. It was a symbolic moment in

the souring of a political relationship that was never too sugary to begin

with. He hated us; everyone knew

that. Even the gnarliest stereotype of the right-wing outer-borough hard-hat

couldn't have been too pleased with the guy.

Then, the apocalypse. Hardly had the first vigil for Sept. 11 hit

the pavement when Mr. Bush showed up at Ground Zero-there had been some

complaining that he hadn't made a first-day Churchillian walk-through-and

mounted those wasted ramparts with that scratchy megaphone in his right hand

and a retired old fireman at his right. "We can't hear you," brayed a bystander

as his speech began; "I can hear you !"

he brayed back. "The rest of the world hears you! And the people who knocked

these buildings down will hear all of us soon!"

"Bush! Bush! Bush!" the New York crowd chanted then; and many are

still prepared to chant it now.

It was as if he had turned his back on his Texas fetish and made

room in his heart for us. George W. Bush had a last laugh of sorts vis-à-vis the snarky Manhattan types,

were anyone inclined to laugh: Not only did this city-perhaps even its

liberals-join the rest of the nation in branding this man a hero; now even his

staged histrionics have been adjudged the mark of a wise and brave statesman.

Since Sept. 11, New York has been loving George W. Bush. But that brings me, in

a roundabout way, to my question: Can this marriage be saved?

Four months and change is a not-untypical length of time for a

passionate romance to burn itself out. We all know how it happens: The besotted

parties wipe the stars out of their eyes, see their partners clear for the

first time-and wonder, "Why did we think we ever had anything in common in the

first place?"

No one doubted that Bush was going to make a Republican speech

last night. The question was whether he would gesture towards anything

resembling a New York Republican kind

of speech last night-a speech a Pataki, or even a Bloomberg, could take home to

mother: one that could help lure, say, the upstate unemployed into the former's

camp in his reelection fight next year with generous doses of truly compassionate

conservatism; or something that could provide some kind of cover for the

latter, the liberal-leaning former Democrat for whom a solid working

relationship with the White House will be so crucial in the year to come to

rebuild downtown. And, in a sense, the speech half-delivered.

Mr. Bush went into the State

of the Union staring down the barrel of some ugly facts. An NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll reported that

two in five Americans already feel the nation is back to normal or nearly

normal. Six of 10 think President Bush's major domestic initiative-the expedited

$1.35 trillion tax cut-shouldn't be delayed (and even Republicans are evenly

split on the issue), and agree with the President, who has declared that will

happen "over my dead body." Karl Rove has declared that Mr. Bush's success in

fighting the war will be enough to sustain the Republicans in the 2002

elections. But 44 percent of Americans-a reasonable number in any election-say

they will judge the success of the war against terrorism on the increasingly

dicey proposition of whether Osama Bin Laden is captured. Crawford's

pieties-the "red-state" priorities-of God and Country and Patriotism seem to be

giving way to the old Democratic priorities of jobs, jobs, jobs.

The surveys show Americans now slightly more concerned with the

economy than with terrorism; and that, perhaps, is why a Fox News poll reported

that "if the election were held today," only 49 percent of Americans would vote

for Bush-despite his wartime approval ratings upwards of 80 percent.

And so, not surprisingly, beyond the expected clarion wartime

calls to patriotism and service, there was something almost Clintonian about

it, or, if you will, Republican moderate. Much of it was the economy,

stupid-with its fervent appeals to Clinton-style national service, to welfarist

appeals to thin the gap between the haves and the have-nots, to "economic

security" over "economic stimulus."

But I fear it was also Clintonian, in the more unwelcome sense of

the term, then any Republican would want to admit. It was not, in a word, a

trustworthy speech. Where once George Bush played Crawford, Texas to the

hilt-traveling incessantly through the "heartland," not even giving the

Northeast, which gave him nothing on election Tuesday, the time of day-he now

plays down the tropes of folksy Southwestern populism. But where Texas was but

empty window dressing back in August, now he plays down the histrionics. Now

"Texas" is in the background. But the things Texas represents more and more

pulls the strings.

There is Enron, for one thing. The Bush family may be relative

newcomers, as things go, to the mythology of the American Southwest. It's too

early to say just how dearly this White House will pay, politically, for its

associations with the now-defunct Houston energy trading company. But it was

not too hard to discern the vulnerability Bush must feel in that scandal's wake

nonetheless. Kenneth Lay's Enron is a state of mind that feels an awful lot

like Texas-a place where legend has it that you can only judge a real man by

the number of times he falls from grace, only to dust himself off and build

himself another empire. And whatever the actual biographical provenance of our

forty-third president-grandson of an Eastern Establishment senator from

Connecticut, son of an Eastern Establishment president that made of his family

a minor American political dynasty, and now a president who came to power with

the blessings of that Eastern Establishment now that he was the scion of one of

the great political dynasties of American history-has invented himself as the

soul of Texas itself. And a politician who wears Texan pride on his sleeve

cannot but tread carefully when Texan booms, as they so often do, go bust.

It is not a Texas boom if you sedulously insure yourself against

bust. For in the self-identity that Southwesterners have inculcated for

themselves-not for nothing is the historical pattern of the American Southwest

we are familiar with called a "mythology"-greatness must be built from

"nothing." It is hard to imagine a Southwestern conservative sincerely

struggling on behalf of an ideal so banal as "economic security." To be

secure-hemmed in by the bureaucratic niceties that protect you from risk-has

seemed nearly, to the greatest of these figures, to suffer a state of

unmanning: you are thereby rendered liberal.  

Of course these desert myths are built (as it were) on sand.

Nothing comes from nothing. Some of the most famous Southwestern fortunes were

originally made in the exploitation of government largesse; Barry Goldwater's

family began its retailing empire in Arizona profiteering off government

projects such as, first, the Indian Wars, and second, the building of the

state's federally funded waterworks, without which no civilization could exist.

That Southwestern protestations of manly independence take on such a

characteristic of high camp is a direct function of their implausibility: a

reaction formation.

"Out here in the West," Barry

Goldwater used to say, "we're not harassed by the fear of what might happen."

Goldwaters "have always taken risks." Certainly more risks, at least, than the

former proprietor of Arbusto. And for converts like Bush-who seems to have

never dared looked back East between the time he left Yale and his White House

ascendancy-the lionization of those who tempt busts by building booms is all

the more zealous. As is the patronization of liberals-deep in the heart, as

they say.

It's getting a little to late to wonder about whether the guy is

really a cowboy because he's a convert and realize all cowboys are converts.

That's the West for you

George W. Bush's Texas habit pops up in odd places and at strange

times, like a stubborn rash. Last week, in a speech in Maine (roundabout the actual Bush family homestead in

Kennebunkport, which, President Bush sheepishly allowed, was "I guess my second

home"), George W. Bush brought up Crawford again. This time the message was more

awkward-he was giving Sen. Edward M. Kennedy his due for helping him pass a

bipartisan education bill (another of those Clintonian touches). "[T] he folks

back home at the coffee shop in Crawford, Texas will be amazed when they see me

standing up there saying nice things about [Ted Kennedy]." The point seemed to

be little more than to signal that where he comes from-his "home"-they still

appreciate the value of a good Ted Kennedy joke. It's that old, base,

Republican reactionary populism again.

I speak impressionistically, of course. But  where is President Bush heading off to

first, today, to sell his new proposals to the nation? He is heading straight

into the welcoming arms of Dixie, Texas's country cousin in reactionary

Republicanism. First stop is a "town-hall meeting," with handpicked questioners,

in Winston-Salem, NC, then Daytona Beach and Atlanta. The symbolism is key.

Bush is an old-style conservative Republican of the Southern and Southwestern;

it is where his deepest sympathies lay; but which show up only fugitively in

his most carefully scripted public orations.

George W. Bush's Northeastern vacation seems soon to be over if

it isn't already, and he's going back home, far from the place his Presidency

was reborn, here; back to the place where he was reborn-south toward home, to

Crawford.