She needed to, because she had a difficult message to deliver and an even more difficult rationale to sell.

Few were surprised to hear that the 2008 Republican nominee for vice president (and likely contender for president in 2012) had decided not to seek re-election as governor in 2010. But the blockbuster came a few seconds later, with the second part of her announcement.

With what appeared to be a smile of delight, she began explaining why she would not "go with the flow" and complete her term in office. It would be the easy way out to serve as a "lame duck," she said, and she was not that sort of person. She wasn't a quitter. And so, she said, she had decided to ... quit.

This leaves two paths ahead for Palin, who will leave office in three weeks.

Choice One: She can go home to Wasilla and try to remake the life she had there before politics (or at least statewide and national politics) blew it up. This might have the much-to-be-desired effect of removing her from the late-night comedians' hit list, the incessant tabloid chatter and the endless round of recriminations with John McCain's 2008 campaign team. Just this week, Palin had won the dubious distinction of being named "Sitting Duck" of the year by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

Choice Two: She can stop worrying about the intricacies of the Alaska budget and the internal squabblings of the Legislature in Juneau and concentrate on putting together a campaign for 2012. After all, she is one of the three Republicans mentioned most often as her party's preferred candidates for Next Time (along with Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, who both ran in 2008). Among Republican primary voters, she had the highest personal approval rating of any 2012 Republican prospect in a recent Pew Research Center poll, and it was over 70 percent.

So Sarah Palin is a player for 2012. And when that is true, a politician nearly always views all other elements of Creation through that presidential lens. When viewed through that lens, being governor of Alaska has done Palin as much good as it's likely to do. The governorship has already proven far more difficult in her third year than it was in her first two, when she gathered in the low-hanging fruit. This year, her star power turned against her and engendered resentment.

In recent months she has battled legislators, including those in her own party, preferring to vilify them rather than negotiate with them on the budget and other challenges. Her once stratospheric approval rating in statewide polls has slipped, and re-election in 2010, while still likely, would not have been a waltz. Needless to say, even a hard-won re-election victory in 2010 would have weakened her momentum in terms of the Republican presidential sweepstakes in 2012.

So it was widely expected she would find a time to bow out as a candidate in 2010. There's no sin in leaving a governorship after one term; in fact, the Commonwealth of Virginia only allows one term.

But Palin has raised a world of new questions by deciding to limit herself to far less than one term. She will have 17 months to go on her contract when she resigns. Some may be satisfied with the explanation she offered on Friday, that finishing her term would be "politics as usual" and a self-indulgence. She said it was time to "pass the ball so the team can win." Maybe that's all there is to it.

Others will suspect the governor is so focused now on 2012 that she believes she must devote herself to it whole-heartedly, even at the cost of her mission in Alaska and her implicit pledge to serve Alaskans.

What is so pressing? She needs time to build a staff that is loyal to her alone, as we can see from the endless replays of the internal wars of the McCain-Palin campaign in 2008 in Vanity Fair and Politico this past week. She must show she can raise tens of millions of dollars before the primaries, and hundreds of millions after that. And most desperately, she has to develop a more resilient media sensibility that can turn both fawning and savaging attention to her purpose.

Assuming the soon-to-be-former governor wants all this, and has prepared herself for the sacrifices ahead, she is making a hard-headed decision to reach for the brass ring and to do it now.

It is not unusual for one party or the other to have a grip on the first two of these levers, but it has been nearly 30 years since either party had the third. Those three decades have given rise to the Myth of 60.

Senate rules require a three-fifths majority to cut off debate and vote on an issue of significance. That means a filibuster by a handful -- or even a single senator -- can freeze the institution in place. Without the 60 votes it needs for cloture, the majority can set the agenda, but it cannot necessarily bring any element of it to fruition.

And that, in turn, allows whichever party is nominally in charge to blame its frustrations largely on its lack of 60 votes in the Senate.

That myth is about to busted.

The Minnesota Supreme Court has ruled that Al Franken won the disputed Senate election in that state last November. It has taken eight months, several recounts and two court cases to reach this point, but Franken will be sworn in next week.

Combining Franken's win with the seven other seats Democrats wrested from the GOP in November 2008, and tossing in party-switcher Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, Majority Leader Harry Reid now finds himself with 58 card-carrying members of his caucus. And when you tack on the two independents, Bernard Sanders of Vermont and Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, as the Democrats usually do when there's a party-line roll call vote, you have 60 on one side.

That means Nirvana for Reid, right? No. It might just make his life miserable.

Just because 60 people put their feet under Harry's table at the weekly Democratic policy luncheon does not guarantee him that many votes on the floor. Even if Sanders and Lieberman prove relatively reliable, you cannot say the same for all the official Democrats.

In two cases, there are issues of health. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts is suffering from cancer and has not been seen on the Senate floor in weeks. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia has been in and out of the hospital and at 91 is a question mark on any given day.

Let's assume for the moment that on a major issue, both Byrd and Kennedy (the two longest-serving Democrats in Senate history) will find a way to weigh in. The real problem may come from those Democrats who are physically hale but whose political position is delicate.

Reid's most immediate problem may be the last vestiges of the Southern Democrats, a rump caucus that once dominated the chamber. Jimmy Carter had to worry about 18 Southern Democrats in the Senate in 1979, a power bloc that still considered itself the fulcrum for the institution. President Obama, by contrast, needs to tend to just seven, all of whom are very much products of the New South.

That means Reid and his Senate majority will find their consensus point somewhere well to the left of where it was in Carter's day.

But that fact alone raises the prospect of breakaway Democrats spoiling the perfection of 60. Even if all seven Southern Democrats do go along, Reid must keep an eye on Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Jon Tester of Montana and Mark Begich of Alaska -- just to name a few.

But if having 60 votes on paper is not a guarantee of success, it is only a guarantee that expectations will escalate. And in that sense it is more a burden than a boon.

That is the real downside to the new Democratic domination. What will the party do when shorn of the time-tested excuse of the filibuster?

Think about the House side of the equation. The chairmen of House committees have long been told they had to bend to the Senate version of legislation because of the filibuster and the challenges of life in the Senate. They are weary of watering down their bills so as to serve the peculiar prerogatives of "the other body."

Given the new math, everyone from David Obey at Appropriations to Charlie Rangel at Ways and Means and John Conyers at Judiciary is going to wonder why he still has to knuckle under.

Isn't it time, they will ask, for Reid to get his Democrats in line and vote these big Barack Obama initiatives and systemic overhauls into law?

And if Reid responds by doing precisely that, won't he make the Senate circus all the more partisan?

It may appear that attaining 60 votes is achieving the Holy Grail. But in fact, it is a distraction and even a temptation.

The true path to greater achievement in the Senate does not depend on a three-fifths majority oppressing a two-fifths minority. It relies on skillful leaders to craft compromises that allow supermajorities to form on big issues, supermajorities that include members from both parties.

That is how the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted, and in those days it took a far more daunting two-thirds majority (67) to shut off debate. Bipartisan deals also passed the tax cuts of the early 1980s and the Tax Reform Act of 1986 and the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003.

There were similar moments in nearly every presidency since. And there may be more in the months to come.

The key is to bust the Myth of 60 as a magic wand for passing one-party bills. It may be useful as a threat or a fallback strategy, but reliance on a party-line vote to 60 will not bring Senate passage of health care, energy or financial regulation bills that truly matter.

For that, the president and his party will have to make law the old-fashioned Senate way, by bringing votes across the aisle one at a time.

This year, the numbers are gaudier than ever. The state must close a $24 billion gap between revenues and expenditures by July 1 or run short on operating cash. The gap to be closed is bigger than most states' budgets in their entirety. And while last-minute maneuvering has averted disaster in the past, this year's negotiations are proving fruitless.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed selling the L.A. Memorial Coliseum and San Quentin prison, releasing thousands of prison inmates, closing more than 200 state parks, wiping out welfare for a half-million families and terminating health care coverage for nearly a million children in low-income households. But even all that is not enough when tens of billions of dollars must be found.

There's only one place where people fling such numbers about routinely without irony or awe. And that one place is Washington, D.C. That's why lots of Californians, cool as ever, shrug their well-tanned shoulders and say the feds will bail them out. Just like GM and AIG. Just like the banks.

Well, yes and no.

Yes, California is important to the health of the broader economy and body politic. Yes, California contributes 14 percent of the total national economy. If it were a separate country, its economy would be among the eight largest in the world.

And yes, the bankruptcy of its state government may well throw thousands of state and local government employees out of work, prompting more layoffs in the private sector. Staggered by such dislocation, California could slow or even abort the nation's nascent recovery from recession.

If that's not enough pressure on the president, consider the politics. All by itself, California supplies one-fifth of the Electoral College votes a candidate needs to become president, and in 2008 it cast its vote overwhelmingly for Barack Obama. Any strategy for his re-election begins here.

Moreover, the speaker of the House and the chairmen of a half-dozen major congressional committees all hail from California, which also happens to be by far the richest trove of campaign funds for all candidates for federal office.

And yet, and yet ... no.

No, the federal government is not about to bail out the state government of California. The cavalry is not riding to the rescue.

President Obama has expressed alarm, of course, but if you listen closely to what he says, you'll hear the federal Treasury door slamming shut. The White House has made it clear: Budget bailouts for individual state governments are not happening.

That's a source of frustration and anger for Californians, inclined as they are to believe that Washington is as much to blame for their predicament as Sacramento. They see little to admire in the budget shenanigans of other states and still less to emulate in the budgetary practices of Capitol Hill.

From the coastal perspective, putting California in the penalty box seems a pious show of parsimony and the height of Washington hypocrisy. Who can argue that California has been more profligate than, say, New York or Illinois? Or that its decisions have been more reckless than those of GM?

The difference, of course, is fairly simple. When the Obama administration decided to bail out GM, it did not have 49 other car companies standing in line behind it. A bailout for California would establish a profound precedent. If Washington decided to underwrite Sacramento this year, it would be on the hook to do it every year. And how could the White House or Congress say no to any other state that couldn't bring itself to balance its own books?

Wait now, the Californians say, it's not that simple. It's not that they don't want to be provident. The economy is down and unemployment is up, higher in California than anywhere but Michigan. State income tax revenue, the lifeblood of the budget, has fallen off by more than 30 percent. How can you blame California for its own suffering?

It's a decent argument. But four other states have experienced income tax declines equally steep or steeper. And none of them is a basket case as bad as California. That's because they all have a political mechanism for dealing with a budget crisis, even one so severe as this.

California, sadly, does not. That's why its current crisis is not really economic; it's governmental. California's political model has failed at the basic tasks of negotiation and compromise by which public sector budgets are built.

A century ago, progressive Californians such as Gov. Hiram Johnson installed populist inventions such as the initiative and referendum process. They did it to wrest control of the Legislature from the Southern Pacific Railroad and other monopolies.
In recent decades, these populist mechanisms have become increasingly popular as means to subvert the normal (and often gridlocked) legislative process. They have been used to commit the state to big spending programs for popular items like early education, but their main effect has been to limit revenue options severely.

Beginning with the watershed Proposition 13 in 1978, the state has hamstrung itself by walling off property values of longtime owners from tax inflation. Politically, it's hugely popular. In terms of fairness, economics and government policy, it's disastrous.

If that were not enough, the state Constitution also requires the budget to pass by two-thirds vote, the same vote required to raise taxes. Needless to say, doing either one has become impossible for all practical purposes.

Some elements of the state power structure have tried this year to regain control over the budget with new ballot measures designed to break the stalemate. But the April voting drew only a trickle of turnout, and the result was a lopsided refusal to pay any more or do with any less.

At this point, all sides seem resolved to remain at impasse and let someone else blink first.

After all, you can't just let California go.

Or can you?

So it is for Judge Sonia Sotomayor, whose nomination to the Supreme Court is pending in the Senate. She may be hobbled for a few weeks, but her confirmation is now definitely on wheels.

Boarding a shuttle flight in New York for her appointments in Washington this week, the appellate judge suffered a small fracture of her right ankle. But she immediately announced she would keep up her schedule of schmoozing the U.S. senators who will vote on her nomination.

That means for the next few weeks we will see the New Yorker efforting through Senate hallways with a plucky grin or a look of determination.

It's perfect.

Like it or not, getting Senate confirmation to a high-profile post has a lot to do with public acceptance, which depends largely on the human factor. Of course the approval ratings of the nominating president matter, as do the qualifications and views of the nominee. But you can't overlook that personal impression.

That is why current Chief Justice John Roberts was easily confirmed and Robert Bork was rejected -- even though their views may be hard to tell apart. Roberts appealed to the popular imagination as Mr. Perfect and Mr. Perfectly Humble. Bork came across as an arrogant, overbearing professor who wanted to be on the court to sample the "intellectual feast."

Consider too the last addition to the court, Justice Samuel Alito, who was chosen late in 2005 by President George W. Bush. Alito was the president's second choice after Harriet Miers, who had withdrawn after stirring controversy among conservatives. He was a man replacing a woman on the court (Sandra Day O'Connor) and a doctrinaire conservative replacing a moderate swing voter. But he had another problem. Call it judicial temperament if you like, but he came across as a bit of a cold fish.

No surprise, then, that initial reaction to the Alito nomination was tepid. An Ipsos survey in USA Today found only 38 percent of Americans backing him shortly after he was named. Among Republicans and evangelical Christians, his support was higher, but not nearly as high as Roberts had enjoyed earlier in the same year.

The Fox News poll had his backing at just 45 percent when the hearings began, and Alito's confirmation was by no means a done deal. Democrats, sensing a fresh wind at their back, were talking about a filibuster.

The hearings featured a monotonic Alito giving noncommittal answers to an array of Democratic inquisitors. The atmosphere grew increasingly tense until, on the second day, a Republican senator supporting Alito recited a long litany of the attacks against him. Suddenly, Alito's wife, Martha-Ann, broke down sobbing in her front row seat. She left the hearing room in tears.

The moment was captured and replayed endlessly on video that day and night and featured on the nation's front pages the next day. From then on, the anxiety that had hung in the room seemed to dissipate. At week's end, polls showed the public preferred Alito's performance to that of the committee. The die was cast: The ultimate Senate vote to confirm was 58 to 42.

Sotomayor's poll numbers have been better than Alito's from the start. A Quinnipiac University poll of more than 3,400 people nationwide in the first week of June found 55 percent supporting her confirmation. Her numbers held up among all races and religious groups except white evangelical Christians, who opposed her nomination 41 percent to 35 percent.

The very same Quinnipiac poll also found clear majorities in all categories disagreeing with Sotomayor on her most famous ruling. That would be the case in which she upheld the city of New Haven's decision to throw out a firefighters promotion exam on which minority applicants did poorly. Quinnipiac found more than 70 percent disagreed with that ruling, and 55 percent thought affirmative action should be abolished.

But at the same time, people didn't seem to hold the New Haven ruling against Sotomayor personally. That may be because her human characteristics, lifelong struggle and exemplary success still resonate with people of all kinds and views. Her personal story (diagnosed with diabetes at 8, losing her father at 9) has been a hit since the day President Obama stood with her at the White House and she saluted her mother, weeping in the front row.

In recent days, some of the early resistance to her nomination has weakened. Some of her most outspoken detractors have retracted their most quoted comments (Newt Gingrich said he shouldn't have called her a racist). Former first lady Laura Bush went on ABC saying Sotomayor's nomination made her feel proud as a woman.

In other words, being on Sotomayor's side seems the better place to be. In the end, the broken ankle may be just one more apparent disadvantage that ultimately makes this woman stronger, and harder to resist.

Those who heard the speech, or who will hear of it, cannot fail to note the change of regime. For the Muslim world, and others disenchanted with the previous American president, nothing could be more welcome.

But from this point forward, the great virtue of being someone other than George W. Bush will pay diminishing returns. And while the speech foresaw a far better world for Muslims everywhere, it did not include a clear path or plan for getting there.

Unquestionably a visionary, the new American president is still working on being an architect and an engineer.

Perhaps it is too soon, even premature, for the new president to offer much in the way of concrete steps. He did grasp the nettle of Israel, at least briefly, acknowledging its right to exist alongside that of Palestine. He did scold the Israelis over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the expanding settlements in occupied territory, saying: "It is time for these settlements to stop."

But he did not go beyond what has been said on that subject before, notably in the early months of the administration of George W. Bush. On Nov. 16, 2001, Bush's secretary of state, Colin Powell, said this about the settlements in occupied territory:

"Israeli settlement activity has severely undermined Palestinian trust and hope. It pre-empts and prejudges the outcome of negotiations and, in doing so, cripples chances for real peace and security. The United States has long opposed settlement activity. ... Settlement activity must stop. For the sake of Palestinians and Israelis alike, the occupation must end."

In restraining himself on this as well as other subjects of extreme sensitivity, Obama was again using the combination of caution and candor we came to know over two years of presidential campaigning.

Once again, as in that campaign, the most resonant themes sounded by the new president were largely personal. Such as his name, his race and his personal story. The presence of Islam in his cultural DNA. All these elements are unique in the history of American presidents and can scarcely fail to impress.

Beyond that, this man, this new symbol of a different America, stands in contrast to his immediate predecessor in his fundamental worldview. Where the former president said terrorists simply "hate freedom," the new president finds the roots of resentment against the U.S. in centuries of Western colonialism.

And while he repeated the standard presidential vow to defend Americans against global threats, he described quite a different understanding of the threats. There was no reference, for example, to the word "evil." And when he spoke of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he called it "a war of choice," as opposed to a war of necessity.

These shifts on issues combine with his unique identity to inform the Obama appeal to Muslims, as well as to the international community in general. The combination has been enormously effective, and it may in time change the course of world events.

But the new president can rely on the newness and the contrast for only so long. Starting on a high note of expectation sets him up for dramatic downturns. As he acts to defend and represent American interests, as he inevitably must, he will seem less different. He will seem more American.

Touring the Great Pyramid at Giza after making his speech, the president was shown a hieroglyphic he found familiar. "It looks like me," he said, pointing to the prominent ears. His guide said the figure represented a man who had been a judge, a scholar and a priest. The president smiled.

A priest, a judge and a scholar. In his speech, Obama seemed to be reaching for a bit of all three. But as his presidency continues, he realizes he must expand his resume of careers. He will need to be a builder. Imagining the world as it could be is not enough.

From the day he took office, he has been a blur of executive orders and challenges to Congress, almost manic in reacting to economic upheaval at home and threats abroad — all the while pushing for new national systems for health care, energy use and education.

So it seemed a dramatic contrast this week to see him cooped up in a small space deep within the White House, sitting for a joint interview by NPR hosts Michele Norris and Steve Inskeep.

Was that really the national symbol, the focus of so much global excitement, folded into a modest chair in the ground-level library? Amid this rather casual collection of books, the man's legendary aura and energy seemed almost caged — temporarily under house arrest.

Those in the room saw Inskeep and Norris bore in on Middle East policy, the president engaging with his typical seriousness but less than his usual buoyancy. The problems discussed are vexing, and the vexation shows.

Check the presidential costume: black suit, white shirt, stylish silk tie (solid cerulean blue), preternatural calm. Check, double-check. He is fully himself, and yet not so. A note of weariness creeps into an answer. A sense of late afternoon hangs in the room.

The impression may have come from the day the president had already logged. In the morning, he had announced the bankruptcy filing of General Motors. Once the greatest private manufacturing concern in the world, the jewel of American capitalism, GM was becoming a ward of the state.

After that sobering event, the president paid a visit to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland, where he met with more than 50 patients wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. He awarded Purple Hearts. Both wars continue under his regime, and the fighting in Afghanistan is escalating.

It was also a day of news dominated by an airliner lost at sea and an abortion doctor shot dead at his church on Sunday morning. But beyond the downbeat tone of the day's affairs, the presidential attitude seemed to anticipate the week ahead — and the weeks to come.

This week takes Obama abroad, pursuing U.S. aims in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Europe. The centerpiece of the trip is a speech at Cairo University billed as an address to the Muslim world.

It is not often that one national leader is able to address hundreds of millions of people in foreign lands, let alone to do so with the intent of changing their minds about his country. But the unique circumstances of this one man's birth and upbringing, his name and phenomenal rise, have made such a moment possible.

The president is clearly mindful of the Cairo moment — its enormous potential to alter the pattern of decades and generations of hostility and misunderstanding. Even for a president, this is a weighty assignment. And this president is a man who writes his most important speeches largely by himself, sacrificing sleep for the splendid concentration of the wee hours.

Whatever may happen with the speech and world reaction, the president will return from his trip facing critical tests on Capitol Hill between now and the August recess. The main one is House consideration of a bill overhauling the health care delivery system. The president said this week that these two months will be "the make-or-break period ... the time where we've got to get this done."

All other issues, even the energy bill and the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, will be distractions. This president in his first year will be judged on how he handles health care no less than on his stewardship of the economy. And health care is not a hurdle he can clear with a speech, no matter how eloquent or visionary.

Contemplating all this might make anyone's demeanor somber.

So how might this bullet train to the high court be derailed? That is the question for conservatives who oppose her (or may eventually do so), as well as for supporters who want to see her nomination confirmed as swiftly as possible.

Sotomayor will attract opposition for her views on abortion, gay marriage and other cultural issues. An unpopular ruling on affirmative action that she joined may soon be overturned by the current Supreme Court, with attendant publicity. And she has made several ill-advised remarks regarding policymaking from the bench and the advantages of judgment some Latinas may have over certain white males.

But these are the predictable squabbles over ideology and judicial philosophy and personal expression that one might expect from any judge likely to be appointed by a Democratic president in our time. The damaging quotations from speeches may well be handled in a few deft lines when Sotomayor settles in for a session with the Senate Judiciary Committee in July.

A potentially greater source of vulnerability may be implied by a term that President Obama and others have been using lately. The term is empathy. In the parlance of their party, Democrats use this word to mean sensitivity to the plight of the poor, the disadvantaged and the downtrodden. Why shouldn't a judge, exercising the great power the Constitution has reserved for the judiciary, show compassion for the consequences?

Republicans, for their part, regard empathy as a code word for emotion. They imply that emotion, in the context of jurisprudence, is tantamount to irrationality. Lately, Republicans have made frequent reference to "feelings," as in "the court should apply the law as written, irrespective of the feelings of the individual justices." Getting in touch with one's feelings might be good therapy, the conservatives say, but it's a lousy way to decide big cases.

An emphasis on feelings also plays to prejudices about Sotomayor's sex (the word hysteria is rooted in a Greek word for women) and ethnicity (the Latin character is almost synonymous with emotionality). But these subtexts function as undercurrents. The direct attack is on the notion that a judge who empathizes with people is a bad judge.

This is one way to read the frequent references being made to the symbolic statue of Justice, holding aloft the scales while wearing a blindfold. To be truly impartial, the implication would have it, one needs to be oblivious.

One can wonder whether any such concept of justice stands up to scrutiny. Is it really a superior intellectual system that seeks to apply only a dispassionate reading of laws written generations or even centuries earlier? Or is that a mental construct that glorifies the status quo, justifying economic and political arrangements as they are?

Empathy also implies a sharing -- whether of values or circumstances or experience. It may be obvious to some that any such identification constitutes a conflict of interest for a judge, especially a Supreme Court justice. But if the presence of such connections implies partiality, what does the absence of such connections imply?

Ultimately, Sotomayor has more going for her than any one nominee has any right to expect. In addition to her qualifications and attributes, she has the potent advantage of representing a group that is now the largest political minority in the U.S. and the fastest-growing. Hispanics are increasingly able to vote, and increasingly likely to vote Democratic. The last thing minority Republicans need right now is to deny a Hispanic a seat on a court that has never had one.

It is also dangerous for Republicans to go too far in seeking a dehumanized rationality on the high court. The public wants sensible and evenhanded judges. But there is little evidence that the public wants automotons.

When the last new justice, Samuel Alito, was appointed in 2005, he began his confirmation process as an unknown and a bit of a cold fish. The public did not fall in line behind his nomination until after his wife had fled the hearing room one afternoon in tears, distraught at the way her husband was being caricatured.

After that emotional moment, featured endlessly in the media, the polarity switch was thrown and the energy flowed in the nominee's favor. In the end, concerted Democratic opposition was unable to threaten his confirmation.

Sotomayor begins her confirmation battle with the emotional polarity already in her favor. So long as she maintains that advantage, and so long as the facts of her case remain as they are today, resisting her will cost opponents more than it gains them.

Lately, they have in common the issue of torture, and the burden of things they knew about it, did about it or said about it in the difficult months of late 2002 and early 2003.

Few periods in our history raise as many searching questions as that anxious year and a half between the September 2001 terrorist attacks and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. And the Republican Cheney and Democrat Pelosi bear the weight of those months as it falls on their respective parties.

Cheney defends the use of "extreme techniques" while refusing to call waterboarding torture. Pelosi insists she did not know about waterboarding despite claims to the contrary, and she accuses the CIA of lying to her and to Congress.

Both have been cast as scapegoats by forces both within and beyond their control. They have chosen to speak out, but they were also compelled to do so by their histories.

Both these partisan leaders are products of the political struggles they have seen and sought over the past generation. They come to the events of our time as embodiments of the electoral and ideological combat of decades past.

It sometimes surprises people to realize that this man and woman represent the same political vintage. Cheney has long cultivated an image of seniority and experience, personifying the grumpy grandpa. For her part, Pelosi is just as well-known for a glamor and a spitfire style that belie her age.

Yet Pelosi, at 69, is actually 10 months older than Cheney, who is still 68.

So why does Cheney come across as her uncle? Possibly because he has been in Washington politics for four decades. Pelosi was still serving on the San Francisco Library Commission when Cheney moved up to chief of staff in the White House of President Gerald Ford. That was in 1975.

In the later 1970s, Cheney was elected to Congress from his native Wyoming and Pelosi became the Democratic Party chair for Northern California. In the 1980s, Cheney moved up into the inner circle of GOP leadership in the House. Pelosi became the party chair for California and a member of the Democratic National Committee, jobs that would accommodate the five children she still had at home.

When her youngest entered high school, Pelosi ran in a special election for a vacant seat and joined Cheney in Congress. That was in 1987.

The two were members of Congress together for less than two years. Early in 1989, Cheney left to become secretary of defense for President George H.W. Bush. Pelosi stayed in the House, got on the Appropriations and Select Intelligence committees. Cheney flirted with a presidential run in the mid-'90s before settling into a corporate role at Halliburton.

Throughout the decades of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, the two could be found on opposite sides of the issues that divided Americans most profoundly: Vietnam, Panama, Nicaragua, nuclear weapons, taxes and defense spending, abortion, gun rights and gay rights, Supreme Court justices and the balance between energy and the environment.

Their careers were steeped in the conflicts of their time. And, in a sense, they are bound together today by their lifelong investment in those conflicts. For 30 years, they have each raised millions of dollars and logged countless air miles for congressional candidates, from safe incumbents to long-shot challengers.

Such labor in the field makes a difference, but it also takes a toll. It can wear even the happiest warrior down until little but warrior remains.

President Obama has said he wants to open a new epoch in American politics. Throughout his campaign, and in the weeks that followed his election, Obama said he saw nothing to be gained by dwelling on the past. It was remarkable that he said this, in part because his own candidacy was based on opposition to the war in Iraq and other salient elements of the administration of George W. Bush. But he sensed that looking backward would be a distraction from his ambitious plans for the future.

Since his inauguration, of course, President Obama has found it increasingly difficult to maintain this focus. The past rises up on all sides, not just distracting but overwhelming. The torture conundrum, the photos of prisoner abuse, the fate of internees at Guantanamo, the next moves to be made in Iraq and Afghanistan -- all these persist, but the most perplexing is torture.

To some degree, Obama brought the torture issue to a boil himself by releasing in April the legal memos the Bush administration relied on to legitimize its interrogation methods. But his decision to do so reflected a realization that some issues from the past cannot be forgotten.

That is especially true when actors from the past remain so visibly onstage. In Pelosi's case, her role as senior House Democrat on Intelligence in 2002 clings to her. But more important, any culpability she has for what she may have known about torture at the time is magnified by her current elevation. The speaker, as everyone should know by now, stands next in the White House succession after the vice president.

Cheney's prominence is more voluntary. He might have left the capital and kept his own counsel. That's what his former bosses, both Presidents Bush, chose to do. But Cheney, the veteran of all these wars over all these years, cannot bring himself to leave the field.

Judging by recent polls, neither Cheney nor Pelosi has gained much popularity with their efforts to justify their performance in 2002 and 2003. Partisans on either side will defend their own, but watching these two war horses makes the rest of us wonder: What will it take to shake our preoccupation with the past?

The man whom many consider the most powerful veep in history had already been far more vocal and visible than most of his predecessors in retirement. This week in particular, the former No. 2 has been out there almost daily, doing talk shows and giving a formal address to the American Enterprise Institute on the importance of interrogation techniques widely considered to be torture.

Along the way, he is also unburdening himself of opinions on everything else, from tax policy to the fate of the GOP to the choice of a commanding general in Afghanistan. Once known for his reticence and low profile, the man from Wyoming is suddenly his party's most prominent national figure and audible voice. He is having his catharsis, and having it abundantly.

The change is less in Cheney than in the surrounding circumstances. He stands out now in large part because no one else so senior and salient in the Bush administration has come forward to defend the extreme interrogations. And Cheney has come out swinging. He denies waterboarding is torture, denies breaking any laws in using it and insists plenty of high-placed Democrats knew about it. And when he says the Obama regime is making America less safe, he says it in the short, sharp, simple way that makes for a good crawl line on cable TV news.

Once he has your attention, Cheney insists the rough stuff was used to reveal new plots like the Sept. 11 attacks, not to get suspects to provide links between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein. He sidesteps the complex debate about whether torture yields unique results, reinforces what other techniques reveal or produces false leads. He also elides the equally challenging problem of torture's blowback effect: How much terrorism do we engender in our future by using these tactics today?

Grasping these nettles would not be useful to the vice president's point, which is that torture (by any name) works. In pushing this idea, he relies less on evidence than on the common, intuitive notion that torturing people until they talk makes people tell you things. Otherwise, why has torture been so common through the ages?

All the expert testimony in the world has a hard time counterbalancing that inexpert and rhetorical question. For many, no evidence ever will.

But that does not speak to Cheney's own motivation in his current media blitz. To understand his current drive to change the national conversation, we have to consider multiple motives.

First, Cheney is not a hired apologist or a campaign strategist but a true believer. He sees the Obama administration's rejection of waterboarding and other harsh tactics as weakening the overall U.S. defense against another massive attack. By questioning that policy, Cheney hopes to reverse it. He is defending his own anti-terrorism policy because he still believes in it.

Second, Cheney is a political scientist and amateur historian who can see the consensus emerging all around him with regard to the Bush administration. For the moment, at least, the consensus judges harshly the decision to invade Iraq and the eagerness to subject individual terrorism suspects to waterboarding -- in some cases scores of times. Cheney feels it necessary to get out there and defend what is left of the Bush-Cheney legacy, before the drumbeat of condemnation grows deafening.

Third, Cheney is exercising some of his personal First Amendment rights. He is a man of strong views, and it has been some time since he could express them freely. He endured eight years of a tight leash in a White House that listened to him (maybe too much) but thought others should not. When Cheney spoke in public in the later Bush years, it was nearly always to Rush Limbaugh or Fox News or to smaller audiences in the most loyal Republican states.

Cheney had tremendous, perhaps unprecedented influence in and around the Oval Office itself. But his public image, quite positive during his time as secretary of defense in the early 1990s, deteriorated badly. He became associated with an unpopular war, an unpopular oil industry and, of course, an unpopular Donald Rumsfeld. Cheney was largely responsible for Rumsfeld's role as secretary of defense in George W. Bush's administration, as Rumsfeld had been responsible for Cheney's rise in the Gerald Ford administration 25 years earlier.

And all that came before the hunting accident in Texas cast the shotgun-toting vice president as buffoon.

So the political side of the White House saw Cheney as a problem factor in the swing states and among the swing voters who decide national elections. The flip side is on display these days, as the Obama White House gleefully pounces on whatever Cheney says and gloats over his low personal approval ratings in polls.

Cheney knows all this. But in 2009, he no longer needs to care. If he finds himself exasperated by what he sees around him, he can jolly well answer his telephone, book himself a broadcast opportunity or two and fire back. How many other people who have lost their jobs in recent months can do the same?

Kemp held forth for the better part of an hour on something he called "supply-side economics." The audience of traditional, Midwestern conservatives looked skeptical.

They were fine with Kemp's drive to cut taxes, especially the taxes investors pay on capital gains and dividends. They had no problem with the notion that these tax cuts would unleash freshets of capital and refresh economic growth.

But when Kemp talked about cutting the income tax rate by 10 percent each year for three years, some in the room asked how federal spending could be cut commensurately. Kemp said that didn't matter; deficits would not be a problem and growth would restore the budget to balance in time.

This last proposition did not sit so well with the Pachyderms, who began to drift away after getting their coffee. When the congressman paused for breath, I asked whether his deep tax cut and deficit owed something to the stimulative strategies John Maynard Keynes pushed during the Great Depression. Kemp's eyes got wide. "No, no it's not Keynes," he said, his face contorted in horror. "Stick around; I want to talk to you."

And so I stuck around to confront the persona of Jack Kemp. Having grown up in an American Football League town, I knew him as the charismatic quarterback who led the Buffalo Bills to two AFL titles in the 1960s. I knew he had moved on to politics, working for Gov. Ronald Reagan in California and then winning a seat in Congress in a Buffalo district. By the late 1970s, while still in his early 40s, Kemp was being promoted as a national figure, a good-looking ex-jock who liked to talk about ideas.

And did he ever. Once all the club members and other guests had disappeared, the congressman opened up his briefcase and poured out his program with all the passion he once brought to football. He waxed rhapsodic about the "Laffer curve," then regarded as a crackpot notion from a rather obscure academic. It purported to predict how lower tax rates would improve federal tax revenues and wipe out the budget deficit.

Of course, Arthur Laffer and his curve were to become much better known in 1981, when Reagan moved from California to Washington as president and pushed a modified version of the Kemp tax cut through Congress in his first months in office.

The early 1980s were a good time to be Jack Kemp. A new generation of like-minded youthful conservatives had begun to arrive and rise in the chamber — including Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, David Stockman and Dick Cheney.

But more important to Kemp was the rise of his ideas. The Reagan program looked radical at first, and the country took a while to climb out of the worst recession it had seen since the Great Depression. But when the economy turned up, Reagan's stock rose dramatically — and Kemp's did likewise.

He was a prophet of the positive. The GOP had to talk about expanding wealth and giving people a chance to do better. It had to stop being "the party of root canal," stop carping about the federal debt and deficits because those issues mattered only to those who would be voting Republican in any case. Kemp was all about reaching out to people who had never voted Republican, or at least not in decades.

Kemp moved the ball a long way for his party, and he got a fair share of attention for it. But he never got to wield much of the power his party won. He served nine terms in the House with his party mired deep in the minority, giving up his seat to run for president in 1988. That presidential campaign never quite got off the ground, and Kemp quit the race before the end of March.

The man elected president that year, George H.W. Bush, gave his former rival a Cabinet job as secretary of housing and urban development. It was a chance for Kemp to try out some of his ideas, such as "urban enterprise zones." Kemp stuck it out as a team player, but it was far from the role he had been preparing for all his life.

When the first Bush administration ended in 1993, Kemp headed for the private sector. The following year, he watched from the sidelines as one of his junior colleagues from his House days, Newt Gingrich, led a successful assault on Capitol Hill and became the first Republican speaker in 40 years.

In the summer and fall of 1996, Kemp had one last hurrah as the Republican candidate for vice president. He and top-of-the-ticket partner Bob Dole had never been close, and the strain showed at times during their losing campaign. Kemp had often said the one position he cared to play on a football team was quarterback, and it showed.

Kemp declined to mount another presidential bid of his own in 2000 and did not join the new Republican administration organized that year by the second President Bush. He had not been in the public eye often in recent years. His story always seemed unfinished, his potential unfulfilled.

So it was sad this weekend to learn of his death, to reflect on what he brought to the party and the Congress, and to mourn what has been lost since he left the national political stage. He embodied much of the spirit that lifted Reagan at his zenith, including Reagan's ability to make conservative economics appealing to the working class.

Kemp never figured out how to finesse the conflict between his party's economic and social agendas. He preferred to focus on the essentially egalitarian notion that any and all individuals should be allowed to go as far as their talent and work would take them. He was the original big-tent Republican, all about outreach and welcome, as eager to expand the party as he was to expand the economy.

He always had the sunny, eternally upbeat manner so many saw in Reagan in the White House. With Kemp's passing, those days suddenly seem distant indeed.

You would get this impression from the way the news media jumped the gun with intense coverage of this imaginary watershed. For the record: April 29 is the 100th day of the new presidency. For those who might care, we should add that Obama will not actually complete 100 days in office until 1 p.m. on April 30, which would be 2,400 hours after he took the oath of office at noon on Jan. 20 (note one hour of adjustment for Daylight Saving Time).

What difference does any of this make? None, really. Unless you happen to be in the news business, or the business of getting your point of view into the news. For all who are part of this constant conversation, the 100-days milestone has been a preoccupation for weeks. No one waits for the calendar on these things, as that would allow our competitors in reporting and advocating to steal a march on us. To be behind the news curve is worse than death.

As a result, this traditional occasion for taking an early analytical look at a nascent presidency comes earlier and earlier, and what would have been a preliminary judgment at best becomes less meaningful than ever.

Truth be told, the 100th day has no significance whatever in terms of the Constitution, the executive calendar or the congressional calendar. It means not a thing to any legal or legislative process. Yet that has never restrained those who see a purpose in sizing up each new president after a few months in office, using the poetic interval of 100 days (much as Abraham Lincoln spoke of "four score and seven years" and not "eighty-seven").

Even the White House has given up and joined the parade. After calling it a "Hallmark holiday" akin to Grandparents Day or Secretaries Week, the Obama team scrambled to mount a "100 days town hall meeting" and a prime-time news conference to mark the date.

The previous reluctance might have reflected some uneasiness in the White House about the tone and tenor of all the appraisals being made. But now that the returns are in, and generally positive, the president's team is eager to tout them.

It turns out to be a good time to strike up the band, if only because a spate of polls shows the president to be cruising up around 70 percent approval in the personal category and winning a solid majority for his program as well.

The 100-day assessment is generally attributed to the early achievements of Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency, from March of 1933 (Inauguration Day was later then) through mid-June. Roosevelt used a "bank holiday" (spin talk for "temporary bank closings") to quell the panic runs and usher in an era of federal regulation. He also launched many new programs he hoped might stimulate economic activity and put people back to work. Congress, heavily Democratic and thoroughly frightened, gave FDR pretty much everything he asked for in record time.

There has not been a comparable period of achievement for a new president since, although President Ronald Reagan was able to cut taxes and reprioritize defense in the early months of 1981, aided again by a cowed Congress and a national mood of readiness for change.

But the current 100-day frenzy may have less to do with real history than with the current needs of contemporary news organizations. Given a media environment in which urgent dispatches detail the romps of a new White House dog, it's no surprise that even an artificial mini-milestone causes palpitations.

The daily fascination with all things Barack Obama absorbs the cable TV news competitors like no other subject. Even the peregrinations of the Dow and a steady stream of horrific crimes are not as constant a source of material.

That is in large part because the Obama phenomenon made the last presidential cycle the best-watched election in history. News organizations old and new saw tremendous audience interest in the Obama story and capitalized on it.

It was, and it remains, the one ray of hope for many in an industry mired deep in an advertising recession. Some of journalism's grand institutions teeter on the brink of bankruptcy, while insouciant online outlets are still struggling to convert their popularity and promise into cash.

So yes, the news media obsession with Obama has to do with the fate of the nation in parlous times; but it is also about the survival of the news business itself in a season of mortal peril.

"Where from?" he asked me.

"America," I said.

"Obama!" he shouted, suddenly beaming and nodding.

It might have been startling, except that something similar happened every day of the dozen I was there.

It's a commonplace that President Obama has altered the perception of the United States around the world. But meeting people in an Arabic-speaking country brings that statement to life in compelling ways.

Shopkeepers and cabbies, students and business people, young and old are eager to signal their interest and approval. America, an old and well-known actor on the world stage, has undergone a character transformation overnight.

As one American woman said to me: "I don't have to pretend to be Canadian any more."

It is impossible to escape the sense of something opening all around you. If it is not a new era, it is at least a new window of possibilities. Perhaps the "clash of civilizations" paradigm that dominated after Sept. 11 will not prevail indefinitely.

Yet, alongside that glimpse of hope there are shadows of caveat and doubt. For one thing, the impressions Americans receive in foreign countries are often formed inside a tourism bubble, where people have a strong interest in courting our friendship.

Beyond that, the sheer intensity of the Obama phenomenon suggests impermanence. Having dazzled his way from London to Istanbul to Baghdad, the American president is a starburst over the global consciousness -- much as he was on the U.S. political scene late in 2007. He maintained altitude well enough in 2008 to be elected, and he remains popular after three months in office. But staying aloft this well as a world figure will be more difficult.

The international version of the Obama Moment is unlikely to survive the first international crisis in which the Obama administration must defend the U.S. interest. And sooner or later, that crisis and choice will come, forced by the complexities of world problems and the simplicities of domestic politics.

For now, the Obama administration is doing all it can to postpone the day of reckoning. The White House maintains that the national interest can be redefined to harmonize with the global good. It's an inspiring vision, but it contends with powerful impulses deep in our political nature.

In an era of economic distress, it is natural for our country and all countries to put blame on foreign competitors and to fear international exposure. And in the age of terrorism, it is natural for any people to insist on having every weapon available to protect themselves.

The Obama administration is asking us to transcend these basic instincts. On the economic front, it argues that a retreat from trade would deepen the recession for everyone, as it did in the 1930s. On the security front, the president says we must not use torture as a means of interrogation -- even if we believe it might expose a plot or a terrorist in the short term. To do so, he says, suborns the principles the nation was founded to uphold while yielding comparatively little of value.

That view has been vigorously challenged by conservatives, chief among them former Vice President Dick Cheney, who is closely associated with the aggressive techniques. The argument is that in a brutal world, we must have all potential tools and weapons available.

As the debate goes forward, experts will disagree about the usefulness of waterboarding and other means most regard as torture (or tantamount to it). Cheney and others argue the extreme methods bore fruit, and they say classified information would prove it.

Ultimately, the Obama case rests on the idea that Americans are safest in a world where people see the United States as a beacon of principle and hope. Whatever dividends torture may yield must come at enormous cost.

Attorney General Eric Holder says the U.S. can "reclaim its standing in the world" only by making a clean break with torturous techniques. That view is popular in public opinion polls, at least in part because of the lingering unpopularity of the last administration.

But the old anger and resentment may fade with time. And the Obama White House can chart its new course toward world approval only so long as no new terrorist attack strikes the homeland. If one does, Cheney's attitude will be back with a vengeance.

One year ago this month, Barack Obama's presidential campaign was in mortal danger following the eruption of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his former pastor. Wright's incendiary sermons about race and America burst on the world via videotape, threatening to derail the candidate at the moment he had gained real momentum.

One year later, the candidate who survived that crisis is in the White House, facing his first big test as president. This time, there's far more than a campaign to lose; there is an entire presidential agenda at stake. And that's not to mention the health of the banks, the credit system and the entire economy.

In the days of the Wright furor, the still-little-known senator from Illinois faced a choice: Would he disavow the man who had baptized his daughters and helped him make his way in Chicago's black political community? Or would he give up on being a New Age prophet, a man of mixed race and hybrid ideology, breaking away from the racial political snares of the past?

A similar choice now confronts the still-unproven President Obama. Will he play the torchbearing populist of the left, the scourge of greed-heads on Wall Street? Or will he be the double-Ivy sophisticate, hip to high finance and the way that the world works and aware of how much he depends on it?

Here, as in the Wright matter, Obama is reaching not so much a fork in the road as a place where two parallel tracks suddenly converge. Until now, on the bank bailouts, his competing personalities have progressed quite nicely down their respective tracks. Now, the moment of collision has arrived.

The proximate cause of this collision is the revelation that big bonuses were paid this month to some of the very executives who brought the insurance giant AIG to its knees last fall. Big bonuses financed with taxpayer bailout money. The president said he was "stunned" and showed a flash of choler. He went after those unnamed malefactors who gambled billions on "highflying schemes."

But then, after the House of Representatives put teeth in its own snarl with a 90 percent tax on the bonuses, the chief executive seemed to recoil. The constitutional scholar re-emerged, and he changed his emphasis, questioning the use of the tax code to punish people.

The president did not go so far as to threaten a veto -- the Senate is highly unlikely to pass the 90 percent tax, anyway -- but he made it clear he knew Wall Street had its back up about its bonuses.

All this took place even as Treasury officials were leaking word of Secretary Timothy Geithner's new plan for buying up toxic mortgage assets to help the banks break the ice on lending. Would the Obama administration be willing to overlook some big payouts to big-time investors who help in this process? Well, yes, the president himself strongly implied, it would.

This shifting from one foot to the other is what politicians do. But it is not what great leaders do. And so far, at least, the president's handling of the various bailouts has been far from the man at his best.

Candidate Obama stepped up to the Wright crisis with a moving and memorable address on the issues of loyalty and race. He used the occasion to address an underlying tension in his candidacy and in the national consciousness. Almost instantly, that tension eased and that particular controversy faded.

Only now has he come upon another challenge equally perilous. Once again, he must walk a fine line in the midst of a firestorm. Every day, keen eyes in the markets will search the administration's every move for threats to their way of life, the corporate compensation system with its fabulous bonuses.

Yet if this president becomes an apologist for that bonus culture, it could destroy the fragile new voting coalition that carried him in November. He needs that movement behind him if he is to enact any elements of his ambitious program -- let alone all of them.

To his credit, the president seems to understand these competing demands.

"People want a lot of contradictory things," he said on 60 Minutes Sunday. "The banks would love a lot of taxpayer money with no strings attached. Folks in Congress, as well as the American people, would love to fix the banks without spending any money."

A year ago, candidate Obama was willing to take on race and its history in our national life. His deft handling of all that enhanced his renown, not only as a speechmaker but as a leader -- someone who could address even the most vexing political conflict head-on and emerge stronger than ever.

Maybe now it's time for President Obama to talk in personal and meaningful terms about another historic division in our national life: the way we distribute the rewards in our economy.

It is a topic as toxic as race, in its own way. And confronting it at the same level of seriousness may be the only way for this president to find his way out of his current dilemma.

Here's another sure sign we're in an era of change in Washington: People are taking the filibuster seriously again.

The Senate itself was created 220 years ago to resist and temper change, and it has evolved an arsenal it can deploy to that end. But no weapon has been more colorful -- or more effective -- than simply talking change to death.

Whenever there is a strong tide of political sentiment running, be it conservative or liberal, the party feeling pressured falls back on its last line of defense: the Senate filibuster. The current climate in Washington is no exception.

Needless to say, the party repairing to the ramparts these days is the GOP. In the past two election cycles, Republicans have lost the White House and majority control of both chambers of Congress. Their last chance to slow or stop the making of new laws -- lots of new laws -- is to threaten a filibuster in the Senate, forcing a three-fifths majority of 60 to cut off debate and proceed to a final vote.

Note the emphasis on the word "threaten" here. Contemporary filibusters are not actual but virtual. The resisting senators simply indicate an inclination to extend debate, and the signal is lost on no one. They do not even make this threat against the measure itself (a bill, a nomination, whatever). They make it against the all-important "motion to proceed" that precedes formal consideration.

This fine point of procedure allows a Senate rear guard to prevent a given measure from reaching the floor. The point may once have been to air out the issues. Today the filibuster may be entirely silent. Its intent is merely to wear down the sponsors until they withdraw the measure in frustration or Congress adjourns (whichever comes first).

Notified of a looming filibuster threat, the Senate majority leader files a petition for cloture, meaning a vote on cutting off debate. If the leader has 60 votes to support that motion, a time limit is set on debate and the measure itself eventually comes to the floor for formal consideration and a vote. At that point, the final vote holds no suspense. If you've got 60 votes for cloture, you've surely got a bare majority of 51 for passage.

So the real vote is the vote for cloture, whenever the threat of a filibuster is invoked.

In the old days, such threats were rare. Members understood that a filibuster meant holding the floor for hours at a time -- sometimes around the clock -- to prevent a vote. The idealization was Jimmy Stewart talking himself hoarse in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a 1939 movie about a fantasy character in a fantasy Washington. The reality was more like Strom Thurmond, battling a civil rights bill in 1957, dehydrating in the Senate gym so he could hold the floor for 20 hours without a potty break.

For most of our history, the rules of the filibuster required practitioners to perform the act in public. This meant reaping the appropriate degree of public opprobrium. But in the age of C-SPAN the indignities of the filibuster moved Senate leaders to take it offstage. It is now cloaked in procedural jargon and passed off as business as usual.

The bygone era of all-night speeches and members sleeping on cots in the hallways has been all but forgotten. And in that process, something of the risk of the filibuster as a tactic has been lost.

In the real world, it has always been understood that any filibuster was a power struggle in which the force of the majority could be neutralized by a determined minority. Senators reserved it for use on a single issue or two of paramount importance to their state. The classic example was the phalanx of Southern senators like Thurmond who lined up in the 1950s and 1960s to filibuster against civil rights for African-Americans in their home states.

Those battles in particular gave the "F"-word a bad connotation. So in the post-Watergate reform era of the mid-1970s, the Senate lowered the threshold for cloture from two-thirds (67) to three-fifths (60). This was a reform intended to weaken the filibuster as a weapon, but in the end it has had unintended consequences that in some ways made the filibuster more pervasive than ever.

That is because, in the years that followed, senators stopped relating to the filibuster as a nuclear weapon to be used only in extreme circumstances. Instead, the threat of a filibuster became a kind of personal sidearm, worn at all times and brandished at the slightest provocation.

Moreover, the controversy over the filibuster itself was muted. The practitioners of the filibuster were no longer required to perform the act in public and reap the appropriate degree of public scorn. That meant it could be used in comparative obscurity, with relative impunity. It was just another technique, another tradition. Making it virtual made it easier to defend it as virtuous.

So, what if the Senate were to rescind the "silent filibuster" and simply require those who wish to have "extended debate" to have it? Why not make them do it for real?

What the public would see, under the unblinking eye of C-SPAN, would be the true spectacle of a handful of senators defying the will of the majority.

What effect would that have had on the struggle over a stimulus package? What effect would it have on the next showdown, be it over health care or the seating of Al Franken as winner of the Senate race (and recount) in Minnesota?

The Senate GOP under leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has indicated it is willing to enforce the 60-vote threshold for virtually any issue that any of its members deem worthy. That could be quite a list, potentially including every important fiscal and nonfiscal piece of legislation this year and next.

That may be an enormously effective GOP firewall against an Obama-led makeover of the national economy (and the federal power structure that regulates it). It may also be a prescription for another GOP disaster in 2010 -- the kind of disastrous mispositioning that doomed the party to decades of minority status 75 years ago.

Conservatives in the 1930s always assumed the country was with them, outraged whenever Franklin D. Roosevelt overreached. But they had to keep ordering successive helpings of crow as their losses continued through four straight election cycles (from 1930 through 1936).

Conservatives are betting it will be different this time. And one reason they may be right is that their opposition to the will of the majority can be brought to bear effectively in threatened filibusters they never have to act out for real.

If they did, they might be far less willing to do it.

One day earlier, he unveiled a massive new widget designed to manage all the contracts the U.S. government signs with businesses. Projected savings: $40 billion. How well will it do? No way to know until you fire it up.

In the previous week, Obama held a "fiscal responsibility" summit, wowed a joint session of Congress with tales of dire straits and high hopes, and wheeled out a new federal budget one-third larger than any before it. And to round out the week, he set a date for ending the six-year-old U.S. combat mission in Iraq (getting major ups from an audience of Marines).

In its earliest days, the fledgling Obama administration had tackled the banking crisis and the home mortgage structure and served notice it was prepared to go to great lengths to save the auto industry and bring the financial markets back under regulatory control.

Few can doubt that the weeks ahead will bring still more summits -- on energy and the environment, for example, and other topics -- closely followed by major makeover plans for federal policy in both arenas.

Have mercy! We're still not even halfway to that First 100 Days milestone that's so dear to us in the media.

Not that the Oval Office dynamo shows any signs of slowing down. He has not yet begun to fight on many fronts, and these days nearly every front seems to be spoiling for a fight.

As a result, the man and his minions seem afflicted at times with AADD: adult attention deficit disorder. At a minimum, the new crew would seem well advised to pace itself. Even those who admire the energy and ambition of the new administration have to stop and ask whether this is all too much, too soon.

For those who reflect further, the question soon becomes one of cost. Can all these rescues be done as the economy weakens dramatically? Are we burdening ourselves and future generations with debts that will come back to beggar us?

And for the more immediate present, is this any way to accomplish such a historically ambitious agenda?

Most of us would lean toward a more conventional approach. Tackle the most pressing problems first -- the credit system, the banks and the home mortgages that dragged them both down. Then perhaps more time could be devoted to a tax-cutting, job-creating stimulus plan and a budget that propped up demand while the consumer took a breather.

Beyond that, there could be time to devise new regulatory schemes, new methods of federal procurement, a new war policy and a plan for Middle East peace. You could study the health care system, and the energy-environment conundrum, and learn a lot about both over the course of a year or two. Blue-ribbon commissions could convene, organize, hire staff and issue reports.

One thing at a time, all in good time. Regular order. Slow and steady wins the race.

But that would not be the Obama Way, or more precisely the New Obama Way.

During the campaign we called him "No Drama Obama" -- the picture of cool, running on his own timetable and refusing to be rushed or thrown off stride. He often seemed to have all the time in the world.

But once the election was over, and especially since Inauguration Day, the same 47-year-old has been moving at the political equivalent of the speed of light. Now he seems to have not a moment to lose. Deadlines close in from all directions. It is as though he can solve no problem unless he moves to solve them all at once.

Solve the economy first? No, says Peter Orszag, the new budget director and another of the Obama wunderkinder. The single biggest obstacle to restarting the economy is the cost of health care, says he, and that means you can't do the one without the other.

The crises cohere, like sections of a Rubik's cube, interlocking and defying solution. Except that ultimately the solution depends on ingenious coordination of all the sections -- none of which can be neglected.

No, you cannot spend the same dollars more than once. But the dollars you spend on saving energy and improving the environment can also create jobs and contribute to lower health costs -- all at the same time.

That kind of synergy may still be more a dream than a formula, but it is a dream the Obama administration is counting on. And it may be our best national hope for the years ahead.

There is an old adage that if you want a job done you should give it to the busiest person available. Busy people tend to be more task-oriented, more efficient and effective. They invite responsibility because they respond to it. People with little to do and time on their hands may in fact have all they can handle.

Right now this country has committed itself to testing the wisdom of that adage. And a great deal rides on the outcome.