In the January Commentary, Gabriel Schoenfeld returns to his theme, Jewish powerlessness, when he argues that the U.S. government has always supported Israel for its own (goyische) reasons, not through any Jewish prodding. By this analysis, AIPAC should fold up its tent tomorrow, it's wasting a lot of hardworking people's money. And the ailing British chemist Chaim Weizmann should never have rushed to the White House to extract a commitment from Harry Truman to a Jewish state in 1948, again, a waste of time, Truman was planning to defy his own State Department and oppose a binational state.

Israeli scholar Benny Morris was the point man for the New Republic in its attack on Walt/Mearsheimer last year. Outraged that the authors had cited his (honorable) investigation of the expulsions of '48, Morris was shrill, his piece filled with meaningless discussions of his favorite subject, troop strengths in battles long ago. (What is it with these writers who fetishize combat?)

But in his 2001 book Righteous Victims, Morris several times refers to the Zionist and Israel lobby. He says, quite accurately, that Zionist pressure tactics were used on the Truman Administration to bring about American support for partition in '47 (in defiance of the State Department and the recommendations of the Anglo-American Inquiry Commission, the equivalent of the Iraq Study Group of that time). And Morris honestly describes the Israel lobby as a potent force in U.S. politics when he cites the secretary of state's threat to cut off "all public and private aid to Israel" to punish Israeli belligerence in the Suez crisis of '56:

It just goes to show: Everyone knows there's an Israel lobby. The journalistic challenge is, what are its dimensions? The New Republic and Commentary have chosen to react angrily to the non-Jewish authors' statements rather than doing what they should do, telling us how the lobby works. By responding so defensively, these journals have damaged themselves, and the discourse; American readers deserve better.

P.S. Morris's point re Suez reveals the poverty of Dennis Ross's analysis of the lobby in the debate at Cooper Union last September. Ross basically said, Sure, AIPAC has the Congress in a half-nelson, but no one controls the presidency. Morris (and Abba Eban) contradict this claim.

Jews feel that they can claim this exclusivity as a (historically) persecuted people. In the same way it is O.K. for blacks to use the n-word, but Michael Richards ended his career by using the word.

The law came to mind after I got a small book published by the American Jewish Historical Society, called "Essays on American Zionism." (1980). There is an essay in this book by Abba Eban, the famously eloquent Israeli Ambassador to the U.N.

Eban's essay is about Jewish influence on the White House. "Influence" is his word, so is "pressure." In fact Eban describes as absolutely key to Israel's emergence the very thing that the Times recently dismissed as an antisemitic delusion—Jewish influence on Harry Truman.

Some statements from Eban:

—"Public influence" by the American Zionist movement leader Rabbi Abba Silver "would have failed if other avenues of pressure and influence had not been brought to bear on presidential decisions."

—Before the 1944 Democratic Convention, Jewish leaders were told that Senator Harry Truman needed $25,000 for publicity so that he might replace FDR's then-VP Henry Wallace. "I told Boyle that I didn't know Senator Truman,' [Zionist and manufacturer Dewey] Stone later recalled, 'but... if he wanted me to take a gamble I would make the $25,000 available'... When President Roosevelt died in 1945 Harry S. Truman succeeded him and Dewey Stone was among the few to whom he owed a political debt."

—In '48, Truman feared losing, and Stone raised crucial funds, along with his friend Abe Feinberg, another leading Zionist; and they "thereafter had fairly free access to Truman in times of crisis."

—Also in '48, when Truman complained of pressure from Zionists, Jewish leaders arranged for the visit to the White House by Truman's former haberdashery partner Eddie Jacobson in order that Jacobson might become "a lever of influence in the central international predicament of the age."

—The "need for Israel's friends to have a permanent link with the White House arose again" in the case of JFK. Stone and other friends of Israel did not trust JFK because of his father's equivocal views of Nazi Germany. In Aug. 1960, Kennedy came to Feinberg's apartment at the Hotel Pierre and met with "a group of influential Jewish leaders [who] interrogated Kennedy stringently on matters affecting Jews and Israel." As a result, Stone had a "close, personal relationship" with Kennedy till he died.

—Indeed, "without the support of American Jewry" Israel would not have been able to emerge from "vulnerability and weakness into sovereignty." This "extraordinary solidarity and kinship... enlarged Israel's power beyond the limited dimensions of its space and size."

God bless him, Eban is merely describing the workings of part of the Israel lobby. For statements less emphatic than Eban's, Walt and Mearsheimer have been described in the press as antisemites. Keep in mind that one of the key things these influencers were trying to influence was Truman's decision to support the formation of a Jewish state in '47 and recognize Israel in '48. If he hadn't done so, English control of Mandatory Palestine would have gone over to a United Nations trusteeship of the territory. You have to wonder if a more deliberate process might not have worked out better.

The Times is under a ton of pressure. Bloggers can say just about anything they want without that much consequence (though yes, talking about Palestine is what they call a CLM at Goldman Sachs: "career limiting move;" you won't get a lot of mainstream assignments). But the Times gets a thousand angry letters on a story like Erlanger's; and then people organize against the Times. It isn't what you see that matters, it's the back channel: Influential friends call Times editors. I know this because an editor friend once complained to me how little freedom the Times had.

If you want a glimpse of that pressure, read Steve Erlanger's letter to Partners for Peace (responding to Michael Brown) a year or so back, defending a piece. It includes such gems as "I'm not an international lawyer, I'm glad to say, but I should have broadened the point..." Reading between the lines, I think Erlanger is saying, If you only understood how much I'm trying to do to get the word out on your side; you should see how much flak I get from the other side. Pressure. Speaking for myself, if I had his job, I think I'd throw myself in the Dead Sea.

The pressure on the Times supports Tolstoy's theory of history. In War and Peace, Tolstoy said that the more power you got, the less choice you got about what you were going to do. All the forces of history descended on you as soon as you had power to make real choices. Napoleon's decision to invade Russia in 1812 was one of the great disasters of history, and any moron knew it was a disaster—but how much actual freedom did Napoleon have? The pressures forcing him in were monumental. I think it's the same point Orwell makes in Shooting an Elephant. He doesn't want to kill the elephant, it is wrong and pointless to shoot the elephant, but as a colonial official, he's under tremendous pressure from the population and from the British Empire to represent it. He kills the elephant.

I'd extend the lesson to two American situations. Bush's decision to invade Iraq, and Harry Truman's decision to recognize the Israeli state in 1948.

I don't think we'll ever know just why George Bush made the most calamitous decision a president has ever made. I assume there was a lot of pressure though, it wasn't a free and easy decision. He was surrounded by ideologues, notably Cheney and Rumsfeld, who had been pushing this endlessly. He gave in. The administrative lesson of the Bush presidency seems to be, Be careful of who you listen to. He's learned it: today all the neoconservatives are exiled to beyond shouting distance. (You can tell because they're all shouting.)

Truman's decision to recognize Israel went against his own best instincts (and now Richard Cohen in the Washington Post says bravely that the idea was well-intentioned but "a mistake."). Truman was for a binational state. The Anglo-American Inquiry commission had seconded this view, share the land. But he came under tremendous pressure to support partition, and then when Israel declared itself a state, to recognize it. What is pressure? Chaim Weizmann was visiting him at the White House. Eddie Jacobson, his old haberdashery partner, was coming in from Kansas City to talk about a Jewish homeland. His own administration had three or four key Jewish aides in it who were in touch with the Zionist movement. And they were constantly learning the latest actions of the State Department and running circles around them. The Zionist lobby was camped in D.C. Meanwhile, Truman was being threatened that if he didn't recognize Israel, he would lose the election the following November because of the Jewish vote in New York and Pennsylvania, and also Jewish money. (None of this is an antisemitic canard, by the way; it is all from former New York Times reporter Peter Grose's great book, Israel in the American Mind). Truman had little choice at all. His presidential papers are filled with complaints about Zionist pressure tactics. Because, pressure works.

Erlanger has little choice either. He and the Times showed boldness last week. Let's applaud them—and now turn up the pressure.

"I want to give Palestinian people a human face," Doi said by way of introduction. "You see that Palestinians are human beings like you. They have a family. They love each other. Each person has a name. That is my message."

The film is nearly an hour long, and is cinema verite, compressed from hundreds of hours of shooting, and without commentary. It was shot chiefly inside the cinderblock rooms of the family of a man called Abu Bassam, and its focus is on father and sons, with only occasional intrusions of the outside world. Some heavily-armed Israeli soldiers, for instance, swing by on anonymous patrols.

The film is utterly desolating. You see a large family having to live almost its entire life within a few square meters. Many times there are a dozen people in a small room, eating or talking, paying cards, watching television. The family's income is meager, their opportunities almost nil. The oldest son was arrested for his participation in a demonstration and spent two years in an Israeli prison, and now cannot get employment. "I feel like I am slowly wasting away, day by day." The second son has lately lost his job as a butcher in Israel because he cannot renew papers that were arbitrarily seized at a crowded checkpoint, and the process of renewing the papers involves days of waiting outside, and arbitrary refusals. The third son dreamed of being a doctor. "I wanted to make a contribution to society." There was no way for him to become a doctor, he became a teacher, and he is unemployed.

Two statements by the aging Abu Bassam frame the film. Early on he describes his own family's flight from a town called Braer in 1948, during the Israeli War of Independence. He was then a boy of 6; he says that Israelis surrounded their town and began firing on it and shelling it at night. "Those who stayed died." The family escaped at night.

At the end of the film the Palestinian Authority has begun policing Gaza as part of the Oslo Accords—and corruption is about to be a problem—but Abu Bassam states that all he wants is his family's land back, in Braer, 30 dunams (about 7.5 acres). "Genuine peace is grounded on justice," he says, from the heart, scripted by no one. And then he says, he will settle for 20 dunams.

After the film Doi asked the audience of 30 what he should do with the film—which is one of only many parts. Should he shorten it, expand it, what? I said he should do nothing to the film, only try and get it shown as far and wide as he can in the United States. His email is doitoshi@fine.ocn.ne.jp

Later I had a few reflections on the film's message.

1. Debate rages among Israel's critics and apologists over the creation of the refugee problem. In 1948, somewhere around 700,000 Palestinian refugees left the newly created Israeli state. The "new historians" (a tremendous credit to Israeli democracy) say the Arabs were by and large expelled from Israel due to the determination by Israel's founders to rule a state composed almost entirely of Jews. The former Israeli Defense Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami says so in his recent book Scars of War, Wounds of Peace. For his part, Alan Dershowitz, who lives in Cambridge, says in The Case For Israel that the Arabs chose to leave in a calculated strategy to destroy the Israeli state.

The simple answer this film offers, evading all the academic arguments, is that this one family of Palestinians was forced off their land out of a real fear of massacre.

2. Dershowitz also argues that neighboring Arab countries bear the blame for failing to absorb the racially "homogeneous" refugees; they should have done so long ago but have allowed the problem to fester, as a way to undermine the Israeli state. Again, this film moves past such ideological argument toward a simple truth: these people are suffering, they are living an inhuman existence, and if Arab states bear some responsibility, the chief agency of their misery would seem to be the occupier, Israel. "The occupation is choking them, they are losing hope," Doi said.

When the world dithered over whether to establish an Israeli state at all, in 1946 and 47, one of the main arguments for it were the Displaced Persons camps in Central Europe, more than 100,000 desperate and destitute Jews who had survived the Holocaust and were now subject to pogroms in their places of origin. Zionist spokesmen held up the plight of these refugees. They were an important factor in Harry Truman's decision, under pressure from American Zionists, to defy his own State Department and support the U.N. partition of Palestine in 1947, paving the way for a Jewish state. (Here I rely on Peter Grose's fine book, Israel in the Mind of America). And in doing so, Truman urged Jews to deal fairly with their Arab neighbors.

Well a year on, in 1948, many of these desperate Palestinian camps were created by the Palestinian expulsion. They have existed under different authority for nearly 60 years: mostly Israeli authority. But these displaced persons have had little effect on world opinion, in good part because Israel's supporters in this country have denied Palestinian claims to determine their own lives—by insisting that Palestinians are incapable of managing their affairs, or there is no such thing as a Palestinian, or they are terrorists. Americans too bear responsibility for the dehumanization of these people.

Though, rest assured, the Times is careful to dismiss Walt and Mearsheimer's paper on "The Israel Lobby" as an antisemitic canard:

Wait—why stop at Truman? Pro-Israel forces in the U.S. have played a crucial role in the life of the settlement and state, going back to the Wilson administration. Saying so doesn't make you an Israel critic. It might even make you a dispassionate scholar:

1.Albert Lindemann (of UC Santa Barbara) in his book on antisemitism, Esau's Tears:

2. Melvin Urofsky and David W. Levy [of Virginia Commonwealth U. and Oklahoma U], in The Family Letters of Louis D. Brandeis:

The fascination here is the extent to which the Balfour declaration of 1917 in England, granting a homeland to Jews in Palestine, and Wilson's affirmation of it a year later, grew out of the only thing Jews had going for them then: access to power of highly-successful men of wealth or learning. In England it was the great chemist Chaim Weizmann. Here it was men like Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter (later to be appointed the third Jewish Supreme Court Justice) and Jacob Schiff, the N.Y. banker.

As for Truman, in 1948, C.L. Sulzberger of the Times met with David Ben-Gurion in Tel Aviv, and the P.M. stated the need for an Israel lobby: The purpose of Israel is to "bring here all those Jews in the world who wish to come. That calls for a partnership between Israel and outside organizations, and all the Jews of the world must help."

Call it a good thing or a bad thing, call it influence, help, a back-channel, requests, or a lobby. Call it anything you like; just don't pretend that it is a fantasy.

That is the inner Rudy, parading himself at an Inner Circle dinner; please, give us the outer one. Inside, in the cover story (“But Will It Play in Peoria? The Drag on Rudy Giuliani’s Presidential Prospects”), my colleague Kate O’Beirne examines the paradoxes of Mr. Giuliani’s run for the White House.

For the last two years, poll after poll—McLaughlin and Associates, NBC News/Wall Street Journal, Gallup—has found Mr. Giuliani either leading the field among Republican voters, at around 30 percent, or a close second to John McCain. And yet when one considers his positions on a number of issues dear to Republican voters, Mr. Giuliani is defiantly out of the loop. “When it comes to winning over GOP primary voters,” Ms. O’Beirne says, “if you can make it in New York, you can’t make it anywhere else.”

In fact, Kate soft-pedals the story. The case against Mr. Giuliani is even stronger than she makes out, as is the case for him. Mr. Giuliani’s candidacy is simultaneously impossible, and necessary.

Take the difficulties. Mr. Giuliani has been enjoying superstardom and speaker’s fees, and so has not had to cast defining votes in a while, unlike his office-holding rivals. Yet during this artificial grace period, several issues have actually gotten worse for him. Mayor Giuliani was for abortion, including by partial birth. Yet, as the Catholic and evangelical Chicken Littles warned, the politics of life and death has moved on. The committed will now want to know if Mr. Giuliani is in favor of unplugging the immobilized, or breeding embryos for experiments.

Mr. Giuliani earned the affection of the Log Cabin Republicans by supporting gay rights. Now supporters of marriage are trying to stop the courts from imposing gay marriage via a few vanguard states and the contract clause of the Constitution. Will he be Leonidas in that pass? Mayor Giuliani’s rhetoric on immigration was Emma Lazarus, updated by the Manhattan Institute: Open House! BYOC (bring your own cousins). Now the flood of illegal immigrants, combined with President Bush’s 10-thumbed handling of the problem, has made this issue a third third rail for Mr. Giuliani.

Finally, there is that G.O.P. primary perennial, guns. It is hard for New Yorkers to take this seriously, but they should. Recently, as I was about to give a talk in Concord, N.H., a gentleman who had come to listen asked where I was from. When I answered, he commiserated. “Your gun laws are terrible. Ours are good, and we fight to keep them that way.” He lifted the tail of his shirt to show me the (very large) pistol he was packing. The New York cops’ attitude—if we grant a right to bear arms, only criminals will bear them—will not serve Mr. Giuliani well.

Some issues find Mr. Giuliani in an uncertain middle. In 1993 candidate Giuliani promised to cut some of the city’s taxes, and as Mayor he delivered. But he is not a passionate tax cutter, like Steve Forbes or Jack Kemp, so that issue is a wash. Mayor Giuliani faced down the city’s racial hustlers, refusing to meet with defamer Al Sharpton. It is hard to know how that once-hot local lightning rod would look to the nation.

Mr. Giuliani crossed party lines to endorse Mario Cuomo in his last run for Governor in 1994, though this act of electoral treason looks better and better, since Mr. Cuomo’s successful opponent was George Pataki. Add the personal to the political—three marriages, the taste for drag—and the Giuliani campaign is listing like the Norwegian Dawn.

Mr. Giuliani did one thing right for the right in the normal course of politics, and it was huge: He took on the problem of big-city crime, from muggers to mobsters, and solved it. New New Yorkers who have moved here in the last 10 years can’t know how intractable this problem once seemed. Responses ranged from resignation to an impotent fury that was the practical equivalent.

I remember the crime position of my friend George Marlin, who was Mr. Giuliani’s Conservative Party opponent in 1993: lock ’em all up, on barges if necessary. But it took creative, proactive policing to bring the perps within the net of the law. As Heather MacDonald notes in the latest issue of City Journal, the post-Giuliani NYPD is still keeping crime down, even though numbers are creeping up nationally.

One issue, even a big one, would not a President make, were it not for Showtime! What is that?

Every aficionado knows that politics is a show, and we laugh at its minstrelsy, but the wise know its uses: F.D.R. triumphing over his withered limbs with his million-dollar smile; Lincoln knowing that Matthew Brady’s photographs made his busted-sod face haunting; Washington carefully designing all his uniforms. The ordinary show of national conventions is as venerable as the iconography of donkeys and elephants: for Democrats, passionate aggrieved black folk; for Republicans, benedictions by ministers with 5,000-strong congregations and suits the color of blue Curaçao.

The show of politics is choreographed and predictable. But sometimes, and you never know what time, it’s Showtime! Lights, action. When was it Showtime! any time recently? Pearl Harbor; newly-sworn-in Harry Truman, learning of the existence of the A-bomb; on a personal level, Ronald Reagan strolling out of the Washington Hilton to his rendezvous with John Hinckley. And our own Showtime!, downtown.

No need to recite what everyone knows. Of course there were stumbles. There must be. But when it’s Showtime! you press on. For example, Mr. Giuliani’s emergency command center was in the very buildings the terrorists had targeted. No buildings, no command center. Showtime! I remember a letter to the editor of this publication, harping on the disastrous irony. I forget the name of the letter writer, and even the sex, but I remember the tone: a gray gabble, yarf-snarf: Well, anyone would know not to put a command center in the World Trade Center.

That’s right, anyone would, during the postgame analysis or even the replay. But when Holy Shit Hell walks through the door and beats your head with a bat right now, and it’s Showtime!—what do you do in that case?

We know what Mr. Giuliani did, again and again, through that endless fall as it morphed from shock to anthrax. Who can tell when it will be Showtime! once more? It is an article of our democratic faith that ordinary men may rise to the occasion. Washington had a track record before he became President; Lincoln, F.D.R., Truman, Reagan didn’t really. So perhaps we can trust to God. But if we feel we need such a person again, and we need to know him ahead of time, there’s no other choice.

That is the inner Rudy, parading himself at an Inner Circle dinner; please, give us the outer one. Inside, in the cover story (“But Will It Play in Peoria? The Drag on Rudy Giuliani’s Presidential Prospects”), my colleague Kate O’Beirne examines the paradoxes of Mr. Giuliani’s run for the White House.

For the last two years, poll after poll—McLaughlin and Associates, NBC News/ Wall Street Journal, Gallup—has found Mr. Giuliani either leading the field among Republican voters, at around 30 percent, or a close second to John McCain. And yet when one considers his positions on a number of issues dear to Republican voters, Mr. Giuliani is defiantly out of the loop. “When it comes to winning over GOP primary voters,” Ms. O’Beirne says, “if you can make it in New York, you can’t make it anywhere else.”

In fact, Kate soft-pedals the story. The case against Mr. Giuliani is even stronger than she makes out, as is the case for him. Mr. Giuliani’s candidacy is simultaneously impossible, and necessary.

Take the difficulties. Mr. Giuliani has been enjoying superstardom and speaker’s fees, and so has not had to cast defining votes in a while, unlike his office-holding rivals. Yet during this artificial grace period, several issues have actually gotten worse for him. Mayor Giuliani was for abortion, including by partial birth. Yet, as the Catholic and evangelical Chicken Littles warned, the politics of life and death has moved on. The committed will now want to know if Mr. Giuliani is in favor of unplugging the immobilized, or breeding embryos for experiments.

Mr. Giuliani earned the affection of the Log Cabin Republicans by supporting gay rights. Now supporters of marriage are trying to stop the courts from imposing gay marriage via a few vanguard states and the contract clause of the Constitution. Will he be Leonidas in that pass? Mayor Giuliani’s rhetoric on immigration was Emma Lazarus, updated by the Manhattan Institute: Open House! BYOC (bring your own cousins). Now the flood of illegal immigrants, combined with President Bush’s 10-thumbed handling of the problem, has made this issue a third third rail for Mr. Giuliani.

Finally, there is that G.O.P. primary perennial, guns. It is hard for New Yorkers to take this seriously, but they should. Recently, as I was about to give a talk in Concord, N.H., a gentleman who had come to listen asked where I was from. When I answered, he commiserated. “Your gun laws are terrible. Ours are good, and we fight to keep them that way.” He lifted the tail of his shirt to show me the (very large) pistol he was packing. The New York cops’ attitude—if we grant a right to bear arms, only criminals will bear them—will not serve Mr. Giuliani well.

Some issues find Mr. Giuliani in an uncertain middle. In 1993 candidate Giuliani promised to cut some of the city’s taxes, and as Mayor he delivered. But he is not a passionate tax cutter, like Steve Forbes or Jack Kemp, so that issue is a wash. Mayor Giuliani faced down the city’s racial hustlers, refusing to meet with defamer Al Sharpton. It is hard to know how that once-hot local lightning rod would look to the nation.

Mr. Giuliani crossed party lines to endorse Mario Cuomo in his last run for Governor in 1994, though this act of electoral treason looks better and better, since Mr. Cuomo’s successful opponent was George Pataki. Add the personal to the political—three marriages, the taste for drag—and the Giuliani campaign is listing like the Norwegian Dawn.

Mr. Giuliani did one thing right for the right in the normal course of politics, and it was huge: He took on the problem of big-city crime, from muggers to mobsters, and solved it. New New Yorkers who have moved here in the last 10 years can’t know how intractable this problem once seemed. Responses ranged from resignation to an impotent fury that was the practical equivalent.

I remember the crime position of my friend George Marlin, who was Mr. Giuliani’s Conservative Party opponent in 1993: lock ’em all up, on barges if necessary. But it took creative, proactive policing to bring the perps within the net of the law. As Heather MacDonald notes in the latest issue of City Journal, the post-Giuliani NYPD is still keeping crime down, even though numbers are creeping up nationally.

One issue, even a big one, would not a President make, were it not for Showtime! What is that?

Every aficionado knows that politics is a show, and we laugh at its minstrelsy, but the wise know its uses: F.D.R. triumphing over his withered limbs with his million-dollar smile; Lincoln knowing that Matthew Brady’s photographs made his busted-sod face haunting; Washington carefully designing all his uniforms. The ordinary show of national conventions is as venerable as the iconography of donkeys and elephants: for Democrats, passionate aggrieved black folk; for Republicans, benedictions by ministers with 5,000-strong congregations and suits the color of blue Curaçao.

The show of politics is choreographed and predictable. But sometimes, and you never know what time, it’s Showtime! Lights, action. When was it Showtime! any time recently? Pearl Harbor; newly-sworn-in Harry Truman, learning of the existence of the A-bomb; on a personal level, Ronald Reagan strolling out of the Washington Hilton to his rendezvous with John Hinckley. And our own Showtime!, downtown.

No need to recite what everyone knows. Of course there were stumbles. There must be. But when it’s Showtime! you press on. For example, Mr. Giuliani’s emergency command center was in the very buildings the terrorists had targeted. No buildings, no command center. Showtime! I remember a letter to the editor of this publication, harping on the disastrous irony. I forget the name of the letter writer, and even the sex, but I remember the tone: a gray gabble, yarf-snarf: Well, anyone would know not to put a command center in the World Trade Center.

That’s right, anyone would, during the postgame analysis or even the replay. But when Holy Shit Hell walks through the door and beats your head with a bat right now, and it’s Showtime!—what do you do in that case?

We know what Mr. Giuliani did, again and again, through that endless fall as it morphed from shock to anthrax. Who can tell when it will be Showtime! once more? It is an article of our democratic faith that ordinary men may rise to the occasion. Washington had a track record before he became President; Lincoln, F.D.R., Truman, Reagan didn’t really. So perhaps we can trust to God. But if we feel we need such a person again, and we need to know him ahead of time, there’s no other choice.

The Wall Street Journal reports that “dozens of faux downtowns [are] popping up across the country, from Kansas City to Washington, D.C., spurred by a demand for urban living scrubbed of the reality of city life. A careful mix of retail, residential and office space built with traditional materials such as stone and brick, Legacy looks like a city but has neither panhandlers nor potholes.” In Legacy Town Center, the faux downtown outside of Dallas, the paper says that “Many residents rarely venture even to downtown Dallas, which has been trying to turn itself into a place to live for almost a decade …. ‘There’s too much riffraff down there,’ says Ron Pettit, a 36-year-old contractor, as he snacks on brie and grapes at a table outside.”

These places are better than simple gated communities; these are gated communities of the mind and imagination, the final step out of the 21st century into timelessness, into never-never land, a sweet and safe place which did not exist in any of the wonderful back-thens but have become such a large part of the American here and now. What a strange situation: a backward-peddling nation, unable to look at its present, much less deal with contemporary problems, physically constructing a series of back-lot movie sets for itself to live in.

An inside-out, upside-down picture of life by which one lies to one’s self about the present by lying to one’s self about the past. So complicated, so screwy! They’ve even been doing it with the new baseball parks designed to bring us back to the era of Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio and Babe Ruth.

So here we all are, in our luxurious, slap-happy retro dream, while away, away, away out there across the world, our reveries are jostled—but only ever so slightly—by tardy reports from places like Haditha and Guantánamo. The reactions to these bits of information read as though they came from inside a gated, retro community enclosing an opium den.

Here is Mr. Peter Beinart in The New Republic, as quoted by Mr. William Kristol in The Weekly Standard: “Americans can be as barbaric as anyone. What makes us an exceptional nation with the capacity to lead and inspire the world is our very recognition of that fact. We are capable of Hadithas and My Lais, so is everyone. But few societies are capable of acknowledging what happened, bringing the killers to justice, and instituting changes that make it less likely to happen again. That’s how we show we are different from the jihadists. We don’t just assert it. We prove it. That’s the liberal version of American exceptionalism, and it’s what we need right now in response to this horror.”

To which Mr. Kristol answers: “No, it isn’t. The last thing we need in response to Haditha is hand-wringing liberalism.”

They’re both on the pipe, strolling through some developer-inspired political Xanadu. You’ve got to be holed up in a Green Zone of the mind to kid yourself into thinking that the world is going to kiss our bottoms in admiration because, after having been caught in the headlights by Time magazine, we are belatedly hanging the Marines who did the killings by their ears. Court-martialing the Marines doesn’t prove to anybody but ourselves that we are different from jihadists. To the rest of the world, punishing the Marines is an automatic propaganda gesture that even such outstanding liberals as Vladimir Putin or Hu Jintao would carry out. Mr. Beinart’s words are but one more example of the kind of self-flattery which flourishes like the green sward of our gated communities.

From the safety of his own faux city, Mr. Kristol goes on to say: “The war against the jihadists, a war Beinart supports, is not a metaphorical one. Liberals may want to win a war on terror without fighting, and are shocked that in a war, crimes and abuses occur. But here’s the hard, Trumanesque truth: In war, terrible things happen, including crimes and abuses and cover-ups.”

In truth, Mr. Kristol, the reactionary with the alligator smile, confuses fighting with talking tough. Politicians of his stripe think that invoking Harry Truman is an effective anti-liberal put-down. Once you mention Truman, the he-man’s liberal and, puzzlingly enough, the modern right-winger’s political hero, they expect those who disagree to shrivel and skulk away into the cowardly night.

When you make up the past as you go along, it need not conform to any known set of facts, but, for the record, were Harry Truman alive now, Mr. Kristol would abominate him as a vote-stealing machine politician, a pro-union, pro-socialized-medicine, pro-price-control ineffectual wartime President who failed to lead the country to victory by refusing to do what needed to be done to win the war in Korea. Oh, well ….

But by Mr. Kristol’s lights, President George W. Bush is a wartime leader able to make changes when things aren’t exactly going to plan. So he writes: “It is heartening that he [Mr. Bush] met last week, in private, with a group of diverse experts on Iraq, in order to get fresh points of view about the situation there.”

Lest you still entertain a lingering doubt or two over how Iraq may turn out, Mr. Kristol goes on to say: “The president understands that this war isn’t going to be won unless he ensures that it gets won. It won’t get won if the president doesn’t aggressively defend the honor of our soldiers and Marines. And it won’t get won if we succumb to liberal hand-wringing, or indulge in conservative happy talk. But it must get won. Winning the wars this nation commits to is also the way we keep our honor clean.”

In Retro City, our choice is between liberal hand-wringing and right-wing blab about honor and “winning wars our nation commits to,” the old staying-the-course line. In the Williamsburg of the mind in which these sterling fellows live, there’s not so much as a hint about the practicalities.

What might they be? To find out, we need to take a second look at the Haditha massacre. The men involved are doomed to long terms of hard labor at Leavenworth, so there’s no need for more dumping on them, poor bastards that they are. If Mr. Kristol’s Harry Truman were around now, he might say, “Follow the buck—and when you do, it will take you to Donald Rumsfeld’s office and President Bush’s desk. Haditha happened because there were not enough soldiers in Iraq.”

These men were on their second tour of duty in a land that apparently has about six wars going at the same time. They cannot speak the language, and at this point, one wonders what good it would do if they did. They are in a foreign land fighting God knows who for God knows why for God knows how long and how many times. In fear, anger and confusion, they killed a bunch of people—murdered them even—but at the bottom, it happened because there are not enough troops in Iraq and the troops that are there are increasingly badgered, bewildered and bedeviled by murderous enemies who cannot be seen or identified most of the time. The number of enemies increases daily even as the population in which our troops must operate becomes more hostile and unforgiving. Iraq has become an anarchic bloodbath. Our natural allies, the professional and business classes, are fleeing the place before they are all assassinated.

Regardless of how well disciplined they are, how much firepower they have, 150,000 troops cannot contain this situation, much less dominate it and extinguish the killings. To continue with the present force levels is to contribute to a disgusting and indefensible slaughter of human beings. Going on as we are is madness, and it’s criminal. There were not enough troops in Iraq three years ago, and there still are not enough troops.

Moreover, at the rate the situation is deteriorating, by the time the United States has “stayed the course,” it may be physically forced to withdraw. At the 150,000-troop level, day by day, month by month and year by year, the situation grows more difficult, and some day it may have gotten so bad that we are unable to leave without taking significant losses.

The part of the world that does not live in faux cities and kitchy-kitchy-koo-restored communities understands that at the 150,000-troop level, there is no exit strategy, nor is one possible: We only have the strength to hold on.

Mr. Beinart and Mr. Kristol, the two of them, must understand that the price of staying in Iraq is not oratory on the theme of sacred honor or blabology about tough-guy liberalism or tricking the world into thinking we are what Mr. Beinart imagines we are. The price is raising an army.

The United States must send an army to Iraq that is large enough to pacify the country. That’s a half-million men and a few women standing on every street corner in every city and village, not a few desperate and harried Marines rushing to and fro to smother (with decreasing success) the newest and worst outbreaks.

An army of such size in today’s America would have to be conscripted. The name of every 18- and 19-year-old man and every woman capable of bench-pressing over a certain number of pounds gets put in a draft lottery. The scheme is simple; the politics are horrendous, because all of a sudden it’s no longer telling a public waxing fat on war that they are heroes. In the blink of an eye, the speechmaking about sacrifice will have been made real.

Is that going to happen? Is hardship supposed to come to carefully planned gated communities where the nostalgia is three-dimensional? There are no hard choices in the faux cities, nor is there any parallel in history of a people which similarly built sand castles and then inhabited them—unless it was the peasant village constructed for Marie Antoinette on the grounds of Versailles. There, she and her intimates played at being simple people until the real simple people came and chopped off her head.

Mr. Klein’s subject this time out are the “marketing professionals, consultants, and pollsters” who have so utterly changed the way politics works in the last 30-odd years: who they are, what they have done, and how we have all been harmed by their rise from curios to chieftains. Books about the hidden forces in American life are inherently interesting, and political consultancy, as the strategic intersection of culture, commerce and politics, could do with a good stiff muckraking. The nation needs a guide to the forces and assumptions and bad ideas that shape what we see on our TV sets and what goes on in Congress.

But this is not it. Politics Lost has a few brilliant descriptions and is written with the scoffing attitude of a muckraker, but it shows no genuine curiosity about the forces behind the scenes or the larger cultural patterns that make politics what they are. After a promising start detailing the career of the first Promethean consultant, the book descends into a confusing jumble of names and malign intentions, skipping backwards and forwards chronologically with only a hint of a narrative: Things got bad, then they got worse, and now they’re plumb awful.

Eventually, though, a discernible order emerges. But it’s less a coherent thesis about consultancy than a handful of prejudices that, for Mr. Klein and certain other writers still enthralled by the creaking swingerisms of the 60’s, stand solid amid the swirling oceans of history. The first of these is authenticity, or, I should say, the transcendent aesthetic and philosophical value of authenticity. This is something of a theme in Mr. Klein’s oeuvre: Years ago, he wrote a biography of Woody Guthrie, the Dust Bowl songwriter who came to personify proletarian trueness for the 60’s, so surely Mr. Klein knows the authentic when he sees it. And he claims that people used to see it often enough in the political realm.

When Harry Truman accepted the Democratic nomination in 1948, for example, he spoke without a prepared text (“Harry Truman was riffing!” writes Mr. Klein) and announced plans to call Congress back into session on July 26, which was known in his home state of Missouri as “Turnip Day.” This peculiar term strikes Mr. Klein as the ne plus ultra of political authenticity, and he uses the phrase “Turnip Day” throughout the book as a symbol of the “spontaneity” that has disappeared from politics. Today, as we all know, the consultants, with their focus groups and marketing know-how, have drained such flights of funkiness from politics, for evidence of which we need look no further than the robotic, impotent John Kerry campaign of 2004, with its phalanx of quarreling consultants. On the flip side is Ronald Reagan, who lost when he did what his consultants told him to do, and who won when he stayed true to his unique self (a hackneyed idea Mr. Klein expresses in the inevitable cliché: “let Reagan be Reagan”).

This aesthetic quality, then, is what politics is all about. It’s authenticity that separates winners from losers, good politics from bad, and he-man leader types from consultant-directed puppet boys. Real politicians say honest and heartfelt and down-home things like “Turnip Day”; candidates who listen to consultants mouth shameful clichés and “banana-peel words.” (Of course, if authenticity is what’s required to win, and if what consultants do is strip away authenticity, then one wonders why anyone hires consultants in the first place, a mystery that the book never really resolves.)

The second fixed idea in Mr. Klein’s mental universe is a persistent disdain for the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. This, too, is common sense for certain self-designated spokesmen of the 60’s generation (remember the annoying “rebel capitalist” meme of the late 90’s, in which the libertarian New Economy was supposed to be the final flowering of the counterculture?), and Mr. Klein duly assails “the mopey left” with their “down-on-America pessimism.” He laughs off “state-run health care” as a “vegetarian notion” and, as he has done in his other books, heaps contempt on traditional liberalism—on the economic issues like education, wages and Social Security that once linked the Democratic Party to its working-class base. Economic liberalism, Mr. Klein yawns, is boring stuff—“jobs, health-care, and blah-blah-blah,” is how he summarizes it at one point—pure boilerplate platitude that only a consultant could love. It smells of “nativism, isolationism, protectionism, paranoia.” Besides, it flies in the face of nature and historical inevitability, seeks to “preserve the past by ‘fighting’ to protect the manufacturing jobs that were skedaddling to countries with lower labor costs.” And, of course, it almost never wins elections.

Liberalism sucks, authenticity rocks: All else in Politics Lost (and, indeed, in all the Klein works I have read) can be extrapolated from these two fixed points. So: If someone strikes Mr. Klein as authentic, you can be fairly sure he’s not a liberal. And conversely: If someone is the “New” kind of Democrat who pooh-poohs economic liberalism, you can be similarly confident that within a few paragraphs, ol’ Joe will pronounce him to be a one-of-a-kind Turnip Day American, brimming with leadership and humanity.

This makes for a truly bizarre series of conclusions, the first and most important of which is the courageousness of centrism. Up until now, you have probably thought that when you saw Democrats dumping their traditional principles in order to run pallid, market-tested campaigns appealing to swing voters with rhetoric borrowed from the G.O.P., they were doing so because they had been listening to consultants, pollsters, focus groups and so on. Well—according to Mr. Klein, you have it precisely backwards. In Joe’s world, the consultants and the pollsters and even the money are all on the other side, forever driving the cowardly politicians to the partisan extremes. Consultants on the Democratic side seem always to turn out to be liberals in Mr. Klein’s telling, and liberalism itself is usually the sad result of a candidate listening to consultants. What the Democratic Party is in need of is what Mr. Klein calls a “radical middle” that talks truth rather than liberal platitude.

In a 1995 Newsweek story on this “radical middle,” Mr. Klein was specific about what it entailed: “government needs to be replaced,” he wrote then. “It needs to be privatized and voucherized.” (In Politics Lost, it’s worth noting, Mr. Klein puts the word privatize in quotation marks, as though it was another irrational fear of those crazy libs.) And this, presumably, is what Democrats will do when they learn how to be strong and defiant. It’s only when Democrats are most like Republicans on the economic issues—when they offer voters the least amount of choice—that they’re being most radical, most funky, most true to themselves.

You’re probably thinking that a book dedicated to the proposition that campaign consultants have ruined politics would reserve its harshest invective for Bill Clinton, the inventor of “triangulation” and a man who seemed to have no principle he wouldn’t ditch if the polls appeared to be headed the other way. Wrong again! A second persistent theme of Politics Lost is, in fact, the mystical greatness of Bill Clinton, whose appearance in the text is always accompanied by a sudden elevation of the prose style. He wanders by, exaltation commences: Mr. Clinton is a “public genius”; his “innate political sense was better than any poll”; he’s so suffused with funkiness and authenticity as to be a “human Turnip Day”; when consultants work for him, their “efforts” are “inspired” rather than hackneyed; even his 1992 campaign bus tour is said to have been “spectacular,” a tour superior to other tours, a tour that more earthbound, consultant-dazzled Dems try to match but cannot. Mr. Klein does acknowledge a few of the infamous poll-driven stunts in which Mr. Clinton engaged during the Dick Morris period, but gets his hero off the hook by pointing out that Mr. Clinton was always the one in charge—a truism that, were Mr. Klein to apply it consistently to all his subjects, would completely destroy the premise of the book.

The only episodes for which Mr. Klein criticizes Mr. Clinton, of course, are the episodes in which he acted like a liberal—specifically, his first two years as President, when it’s said he tried to “govern from the left” and thereby made possible the Republican triumph of 1994. (After this disaster, the story goes, a wiser Bill Clinton turned away from “class warfare,” moved nobly back to the center, to victory and to the eternal gratitude of his countrymen.)

This brings us to Mr. Klein’s third great theme: When Democrats lose elections, it’s nearly always the fault of boring old liberalism. When they win, on the other hand, it’s nearly always thanks to their centrism. Mr. Klein sticks with this interpretative schema through the most unlikely circumstances. Thus the hapless Kerry campaign of 2004, which seemed at the time to be the very definition of spineless, toothless centrism, was in fact—and unbeknownst to the whole world—dedicated to class-warring “populism” (Mr. Klein’s term for economic liberalism).

Al Gore’s campaign furnishes another unlikely example. Mr. Gore’s entire career in politics may have been that of a consummate “New Democrat”—defending NAFTA on TV, running the “Reinventing Government” initiative, helping found the Democratic Leadership Council, even—but a canny observer like Mr. Klein remembers that for a period in 2000, Mr. Gore’s Presidential campaign adopted the slogan “The People Versus the Powerful” (his consultants “seduced” him into using it), and so the reader is forced to conclude, again, that “populism” had some role in his defeat—along with the related disadvantage of never seeming “like a credible human being.” So important is it, apparently, to answer evidence contradicting this thesis that Mr. Klein dredges up forgotten electoral minutiae like the fact that Mr. Gore actually got a big bounce in the polls after he unveiled the “People Versus the Powerful” slogan in his convention speech: “But it wasn’t so much the words that made it work.” Of course not. What the public was really excited about was the way Al Gore kissed his wife after his convention speech—that, and his choice of the super-centrist Joe Lieberman to be Veep. Everyone loves that guy.

But all this is complicated and difficult to follow. As it happens, there’s a much simpler way to make sense of Politics Lost. It’s this: The Democratic Leadership Council is always right. This is the real master narrative behind this confusing collection of anecdotes. When figures associated with the centrist D.L.C. show up in Mr. Klein’s text, you can be certain they’re going to turn out to be helpful or insightful. They will get the last word in revealing the screw-ups of rival consultants; they will be hailed for their wisdom; they will be greeted as the author’s “best friends in politics.” And to guess how Joe Klein is going to interpret a particular campaign or historical incident, you need only know what the D.L.C. has said about it in the council’s various publications or the op-eds of its leaders. Read deeply enough in the D.L.C.’s works and you will find it all: the straying, chastisement, redemption and eventual sainthood of Bill Clinton; the departure of Al Gore from the path of centrist righteousness and his resulting destruction; the dangerous wrongness of Howard Dean; and even Mr. Klein’s use of the word “populism” to signify economic liberalism of the New Deal/Great Society variety, which is a D.L.C. trademark. Joe Klein loves to gripe about the horrors of partisanship, but he’s the only prominent American journalist I know of who actually follows a political faction’s line in this slavish manner.

The lesser contradictions in Politics Lost probably run into the dozens. There’s only one that deserves mention here. As we have seen, one of the book’s central aims is to demolish the notion that economic liberalism is somehow attractive to voters. In Mr. Klein’s telling, the “populist” appeal to “class warfare” has a track record of failure approaching 100 percent. In fact, he asserts, the only time it ever works is “during tough times, like the Great Depression,” and then only because Franklin Roosevelt was “sweet” and “non-angry.” Today, economic liberalism only continues to show up because of the toxic influence of consultants, who steer good Democrats into the swamp of falseness and away from the example of authenticity set by Harry Truman when he so colorfully invoked “Turnip Day.”

Now, I know it’s customary in D.C. journalism to understand Harry Truman the way Joe Klein does: as a symbol, as a lovable, plain-spoken guy from the “heartland” largely unconnected to actual politics (sort of the way the folkies regarded Woody Guthrie, come to think of it). So maybe it’s a little unfair of me to call attention to what Truman actually said. But Mr. Klein’s repetitive invocation of Truman, plus a little regional pride in the man, compelled me to look up the Turnip Day speech. Having listened to a recording of it, I think Mr. Klein is right in insisting that it be regarded as a model for Democratic candidates. I can also report that what Truman said in the speech is in almost every particular the precise opposite of what Joe Klein advises contemporary Democrats to say.

Harry Truman was no centrist, and neither was he a radical. Still, listening to his ferocious ad-libs back in 1948 (which was, incidentally, not during the Great Depression), his audience could have had few doubts about what the Democratic Party stood for. Truman was explicit: “[T]he Democratic Party is the people’s party, and the Republican Party is the party of special interest, and it always has been and always will be.” He reveled in what Mr. Klein would call “class war,” calling a Republican tax cut a “rich man’s tax bill” that “helps the rich and sticks a knife into the back of the poor” and describing politics as a contest between the “common everyday man” and the “favored classes,” the “privileged few.” Even more astonishingly, Truman went on to talk policy in some detail, with special emphasis on Mr. Klein’s hated “jobs, health-care, and blah-blah-blah”: He called for the construction of public housing, an increase in the minimum wage, expansion of Social Security, a national health-care program and the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act. And this sort of high-octane oratory propelled Truman on to win the election in a historic upset.

Joe Klein is not the only one to moan about the polarized age in which we are supposedly living these days, with all the power having gravitated to “the extremes of both left and right,” to use the standard deploring formula. Everyone in pundit-land moans this way, and they can be fairly confident that their buddy the CNN host won’t contradict them when they so moan. But someone needs to rub their faces in the fact that, compared to today’s “polarized” Democratic Party, their lovable old Harry Truman sounds like a fire-breathing anarchist, defending positions so far to the left that we have forgotten that one of the two major parties ever held them. Maybe what ails us isn’t a deficit of authenticity or the pull of the poles; maybe it’s something Truman would have grasped in a Kansas City minute: the power of money, the push of the right. Maybe squishy centrism is the problem, not the solution. And maybe we could use a little more polarization of the Turnip Day variety.

Thomas Frank’s most recent book is What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (Owl Books).

Mr. Klein’s subject this time out are the “marketing professionals, consultants, and pollsters” who have so utterly changed the way politics works in the last 30-odd years: who they are, what they have done, and how we have all been harmed by their rise from curios to chieftains. Books about the hidden forces in American life are inherently interesting, and political consultancy, as the strategic intersection of culture, commerce and politics, could do with a good stiff muckraking. The nation needs a guide to the forces and assumptions and bad ideas that shape what we see on our TV sets and what goes on in Congress.

But this is not it. Politics Lost has a few brilliant descriptions and is written with the scoffing attitude of a muckraker, but it shows no genuine curiosity about the forces behind the scenes or the larger cultural patterns that make politics what they are. After a promising start detailing the career of the first Promethean consultant, the book descends into a confusing jumble of names and malign intentions, skipping backwards and forwards chronologically with only a hint of a narrative: Things got bad, then they got worse, and now they’re plumb awful.

Eventually, though, a discernible order emerges. But it’s less a coherent thesis about consultancy than a handful of prejudices that, for Mr. Klein and certain other writers still enthralled by the creaking swingerisms of the 60’s, stand solid amid the swirling oceans of history. The first of these is authenticity, or, I should say, the transcendent aesthetic and philosophical value of authenticity. This is something of a theme in Mr. Klein’s oeuvre: Years ago, he wrote a biography of Woody Guthrie, the Dust Bowl songwriter who came to personify proletarian trueness for the 60’s, so surely Mr. Klein knows the authentic when he sees it. And he claims that people used to see it often enough in the political realm.

When Harry Truman accepted the Democratic nomination in 1948, for example, he spoke without a prepared text (“Harry Truman was riffing!” writes Mr. Klein) and announced plans to call Congress back into session on July 26, which was known in his home state of Missouri as “Turnip Day.” This peculiar term strikes Mr. Klein as the ne plus ultra of political authenticity, and he uses the phrase “Turnip Day” throughout the book as a symbol of the “spontaneity” that has disappeared from politics. Today, as we all know, the consultants, with their focus groups and marketing know-how, have drained such flights of funkiness from politics, for evidence of which we need look no further than the robotic, impotent John Kerry campaign of 2004, with its phalanx of quarreling consultants. On the flip side is Ronald Reagan, who lost when he did what his consultants told him to do, and who won when he stayed true to his unique self (a hackneyed idea Mr. Klein expresses in the inevitable cliché: “let Reagan be Reagan”).

This aesthetic quality, then, is what politics is all about. It’s authenticity that separates winners from losers, good politics from bad, and he-man leader types from consultant-directed puppet boys. Real politicians say honest and heartfelt and down-home things like “Turnip Day”; candidates who listen to consultants mouth shameful clichés and “banana-peel words.” (Of course, if authenticity is what’s required to win, and if what consultants do is strip away authenticity, then one wonders why anyone hires consultants in the first place, a mystery that the book never really resolves.)

The second fixed idea in Mr. Klein’s mental universe is a persistent disdain for the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. This, too, is common sense for certain self-designated spokesmen of the 60’s generation (remember the annoying “rebel capitalist” meme of the late 90’s, in which the libertarian New Economy was supposed to be the final flowering of the counterculture?), and Mr. Klein duly assails “the mopey left” with their “down-on-America pessimism.” He laughs off “state-run health care” as a “vegetarian notion” and, as he has done in his other books, heaps contempt on traditional liberalism—on the economic issues like education, wages and Social Security that once linked the Democratic Party to its working-class base. Economic liberalism, Mr. Klein yawns, is boring stuff—“jobs, health-care, and blah-blah-blah,” is how he summarizes it at one point—pure boilerplate platitude that only a consultant could love. It smells of “nativism, isolationism, protectionism, paranoia.” Besides, it flies in the face of nature and historical inevitability, seeks to “preserve the past by ‘fighting’ to protect the manufacturing jobs that were skedaddling to countries with lower labor costs.” And, of course, it almost never wins elections.

Liberalism sucks, authenticity rocks: All else in Politics Lost (and, indeed, in all the Klein works I have read) can be extrapolated from these two fixed points. So: If someone strikes Mr. Klein as authentic, you can be fairly sure he’s not a liberal. And conversely: If someone is the “New” kind of Democrat who pooh-poohs economic liberalism, you can be similarly confident that within a few paragraphs, ol’ Joe will pronounce him to be a one-of-a-kind Turnip Day American, brimming with leadership and humanity.

This makes for a truly bizarre series of conclusions, the first and most important of which is the courageousness of centrism. Up until now, you have probably thought that when you saw Democrats dumping their traditional principles in order to run pallid, market-tested campaigns appealing to swing voters with rhetoric borrowed from the G.O.P., they were doing so because they had been listening to consultants, pollsters, focus groups and so on. Well—according to Mr. Klein, you have it precisely backwards. In Joe’s world, the consultants and the pollsters and even the money are all on the other side, forever driving the cowardly politicians to the partisan extremes. Consultants on the Democratic side seem always to turn out to be liberals in Mr. Klein’s telling, and liberalism itself is usually the sad result of a candidate listening to consultants. What the Democratic Party is in need of is what Mr. Klein calls a “radical middle” that talks truth rather than liberal platitude.

In a 1995 Newsweek story on this “radical middle,” Mr. Klein was specific about what it entailed: “government needs to be replaced,” he wrote then. “It needs to be privatized and voucherized.” (In Politics Lost, it’s worth noting, Mr. Klein puts the word privatize in quotation marks, as though it was another irrational fear of those crazy libs.) And this, presumably, is what Democrats will do when they learn how to be strong and defiant. It’s only when Democrats are most like Republicans on the economic issues—when they offer voters the least amount of choice—that they’re being most radical, most funky, most true to themselves.

You’re probably thinking that a book dedicated to the proposition that campaign consultants have ruined politics would reserve its harshest invective for Bill Clinton, the inventor of “triangulation” and a man who seemed to have no principle he wouldn’t ditch if the polls appeared to be headed the other way. Wrong again! A second persistent theme of Politics Lost is, in fact, the mystical greatness of Bill Clinton, whose appearance in the text is always accompanied by a sudden elevation of the prose style. He wanders by, exaltation commences: Mr. Clinton is a “public genius”; his “innate political sense was better than any poll”; he’s so suffused with funkiness and authenticity as to be a “human Turnip Day”; when consultants work for him, their “efforts” are “inspired” rather than hackneyed; even his 1992 campaign bus tour is said to have been “spectacular,” a tour superior to other tours, a tour that more earthbound, consultant-dazzled Dems try to match but cannot. Mr. Klein does acknowledge a few of the infamous poll-driven stunts in which Mr. Clinton engaged during the Dick Morris period, but gets his hero off the hook by pointing out that Mr. Clinton was always the one in charge—a truism that, were Mr. Klein to apply it consistently to all his subjects, would completely destroy the premise of the book.

The only episodes for which Mr. Klein criticizes Mr. Clinton, of course, are the episodes in which he acted like a liberal—specifically, his first two years as President, when it’s said he tried to “govern from the left” and thereby made possible the Republican triumph of 1994. (After this disaster, the story goes, a wiser Bill Clinton turned away from “class warfare,” moved nobly back to the center, to victory and to the eternal gratitude of his countrymen.)

This brings us to Mr. Klein’s third great theme: When Democrats lose elections, it’s nearly always the fault of boring old liberalism. When they win, on the other hand, it’s nearly always thanks to their centrism. Mr. Klein sticks with this interpretative schema through the most unlikely circumstances. Thus the hapless Kerry campaign of 2004, which seemed at the time to be the very definition of spineless, toothless centrism, was in fact—and unbeknownst to the whole world—dedicated to class-warring “populism” (Mr. Klein’s term for economic liberalism).

Al Gore’s campaign furnishes another unlikely example. Mr. Gore’s entire career in politics may have been that of a consummate “New Democrat”—defending NAFTA on TV, running the “Reinventing Government” initiative, helping found the Democratic Leadership Council, even—but a canny observer like Mr. Klein remembers that for a period in 2000, Mr. Gore’s Presidential campaign adopted the slogan “The People Versus the Powerful” (his consultants “seduced” him into using it), and so the reader is forced to conclude, again, that “populism” had some role in his defeat—along with the related disadvantage of never seeming “like a credible human being.” So important is it, apparently, to answer evidence contradicting this thesis that Mr. Klein dredges up forgotten electoral minutiae like the fact that Mr. Gore actually got a big bounce in the polls after he unveiled the “People Versus the Powerful” slogan in his convention speech: “But it wasn’t so much the words that made it work.” Of course not. What the public was really excited about was the way Al Gore kissed his wife after his convention speech—that, and his choice of the super-centrist Joe Lieberman to be Veep. Everyone loves that guy.

But all this is complicated and difficult to follow. As it happens, there’s a much simpler way to make sense of Politics Lost. It’s this: The Democratic Leadership Council is always right. This is the real master narrative behind this confusing collection of anecdotes. When figures associated with the centrist D.L.C. show up in Mr. Klein’s text, you can be certain they’re going to turn out to be helpful or insightful. They will get the last word in revealing the screw-ups of rival consultants; they will be hailed for their wisdom; they will be greeted as the author’s “best friends in politics.” And to guess how Joe Klein is going to interpret a particular campaign or historical incident, you need only know what the D.L.C. has said about it in the council’s various publications or the op-eds of its leaders. Read deeply enough in the D.L.C.’s works and you will find it all: the straying, chastisement, redemption and eventual sainthood of Bill Clinton; the departure of Al Gore from the path of centrist righteousness and his resulting destruction; the dangerous wrongness of Howard Dean; and even Mr. Klein’s use of the word “populism” to signify economic liberalism of the New Deal/Great Society variety, which is a D.L.C. trademark. Joe Klein loves to gripe about the horrors of partisanship, but he’s the only prominent American journalist I know of who actually follows a political faction’s line in this slavish manner.

The lesser contradictions in Politics Lost probably run into the dozens. There’s only one that deserves mention here. As we have seen, one of the book’s central aims is to demolish the notion that economic liberalism is somehow attractive to voters. In Mr. Klein’s telling, the “populist” appeal to “class warfare” has a track record of failure approaching 100 percent. In fact, he asserts, the only time it ever works is “during tough times, like the Great Depression,” and then only because Franklin Roosevelt was “sweet” and “non-angry.” Today, economic liberalism only continues to show up because of the toxic influence of consultants, who steer good Democrats into the swamp of falseness and away from the example of authenticity set by Harry Truman when he so colorfully invoked “Turnip Day.”

Now, I know it’s customary in D.C. journalism to understand Harry Truman the way Joe Klein does: as a symbol, as a lovable, plain-spoken guy from the “heartland” largely unconnected to actual politics (sort of the way the folkies regarded Woody Guthrie, come to think of it). So maybe it’s a little unfair of me to call attention to what Truman actually said. But Mr. Klein’s repetitive invocation of Truman, plus a little regional pride in the man, compelled me to look up the Turnip Day speech. Having listened to a recording of it, I think Mr. Klein is right in insisting that it be regarded as a model for Democratic candidates. I can also report that what Truman said in the speech is in almost every particular the precise opposite of what Joe Klein advises contemporary Democrats to say.

Harry Truman was no centrist, and neither was he a radical. Still, listening to his ferocious ad-libs back in 1948 (which was, incidentally, not during the Great Depression), his audience could have had few doubts about what the Democratic Party stood for. Truman was explicit: “[T]he Democratic Party is the people’s party, and the Republican Party is the party of special interest, and it always has been and always will be.” He reveled in what Mr. Klein would call “class war,” calling a Republican tax cut a “rich man’s tax bill” that “helps the rich and sticks a knife into the back of the poor” and describing politics as a contest between the “common everyday man” and the “favored classes,” the “privileged few.” Even more astonishingly, Truman went on to talk policy in some detail, with special emphasis on Mr. Klein’s hated “jobs, health-care, and blah-blah-blah”: He called for the construction of public housing, an increase in the minimum wage, expansion of Social Security, a national health-care program and the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act. And this sort of high-octane oratory propelled Truman on to win the election in a historic upset.

Joe Klein is not the only one to moan about the polarized age in which we are supposedly living these days, with all the power having gravitated to “the extremes of both left and right,” to use the standard deploring formula. Everyone in pundit-land moans this way, and they can be fairly confident that their buddy the CNN host won’t contradict them when they so moan. But someone needs to rub their faces in the fact that, compared to today’s “polarized” Democratic Party, their lovable old Harry Truman sounds like a fire-breathing anarchist, defending positions so far to the left that we have forgotten that one of the two major parties ever held them. Maybe what ails us isn’t a deficit of authenticity or the pull of the poles; maybe it’s something Truman would have grasped in a Kansas City minute: the power of money, the push of the right. Maybe squishy centrism is the problem, not the solution. And maybe we could use a little more polarization of the Turnip Day variety.

Thomas Frank’s most recent book is What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (Owl Books).